The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music

Front Cover
Don Michael Randel
Harvard University Press, 1996 - Biography & Autobiography - 1013 pages
A long-awaited companion to The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, and compiled with the same meticulous scholarship and delight in detail, this biographical dictionary emphasizes classical and art music, but also gives ample attention to jazz and blues, rock and pop, and hymns and showtunes across the ages - with unusual care devoted to coverage of the twentieth century. That the Belgian composer Jean Absil was professor of fugue at the Brussels Conservatory is a little-known fact. And few are aware that Roy Acuff began his country-and-western career in medicine shows. The writings of the eighteenth-century organist Jakob Adlung may be obscure, while Theodor Adorno is widely read and studied. But they can all be found in the A's, along with 218 more entries, from Carl Friedrich Abel to Emanuel Ax. And this is only the beginning. Here then is the information you need about 5,500 figures in the world of music - the major, the minor, the famous, the nearly forgotten, from Bach and Beethoven to Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman, and Bruce Springsteen - capsule summaries of the lives and careers behind the music enjoyed in every era. The volume is enlivened with illustrations, some revelations in themselves.
 

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
34
Section 3
79
Section 4
103
Section 5
126
Section 6
192
Section 7
237
Section 8
256
Section 18
627
Section 19
659
Section 20
719
Section 21
721
Section 22
729
Section 23
776
Section 24
854
Section 25
886

Section 9
289
Section 10
303
Section 11
343
Section 12
412
Section 13
433
Section 14
475
Section 15
508
Section 16
529
Section 17
582
Section 26
897
Section 27
932
Section 28
936
Section 29
958
Section 30
1000
Section 31
1004
Section 32
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Don Michael Randel, former Professor of Music at Cornell University and Professor of Music and President of the University of Chicago, is President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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