J. Peter Burkholder

Last updated
J. Peter Burkholder
BornJune 17, 1954
EducationPhD, University of Chicago, 1983

MA, University of Chicago, 1980

AB, Earlham College, 1975
Occupation Musicologist

J. Peter Burkholder (born June 17, 1954) is an American musicologist and author. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He has written numerous monographs, essays, and journal articles on twentieth-century music, Charles Ives, musical borrowing, American music, musical meaning, analysis, and music history pedagogy. [1] [2] He is the principal author of A History of Western Music, 10th Edition, published by W. W. Norton & Company.

Contents

Career

Burkholder attended Earlham College and The University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in Musicology in 1983. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Indiana University Bloomington, where he taught from 1988 to 2019 and served as Associate Dean of the Faculties (1995–2000) and Musicology Department Chair (2009–2013). [1] [3] Burkholder has served as president, vice-president, and director-at-large for the American Musicological Society. [4] He has also served as president of the Charles Ives Society (1992–2010) [5] and board member of the College Music Society.

Burkholder has contributed to four main areas. Several articles argue for a view of modernism in music that stresses not only its innovations but also its engagement with the past. Five books and numerous articles on Charles Ives revised the earlier view of the composer as American iconoclast, showing his knowledge of European traditions and his gradual evolution from shared conventions to radical modernism. Burkholder’s works on musical borrowing in Ives, in Renaissance music, and elsewhere led him to argue that borrowing is a constant current of Western music (both classical and popular) from Gregorian chant to sampling, rather than a special problem in certain repertories as it was previously regarded. He outlined the first broad history of borrowing as a practice and developed an extensive online bibliography on the subject, and his work on borrowing is featured in the graphic novel Theft!: A History of Music. [6] He has also written extensively on music history pedagogy and historical narratives. His publications have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, Italian, and Arabic and are known worldwide. [3]

Since 2001, he has written and revised A History of Western Music and the corresponding Norton Anthology of Western Music after the deaths of the previous authors, Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music is an English-language general survey of music history used at colleges and universities around the world. Burkholder thoroughly revised the narrative to emphasize the people who made and heard the music and what they valued in it and to include more music from the Americas, more by women and African Americans, and more popular music and jazz. [7]

Awards

In 1986, Burkholder was awarded the Alfred Einstein Award for excellence of a musicological article by the American Musicological Society. [8] Additional honors include two Irving Lowens Awards from the Society for American Music, and two Deems Taylor Awards from ASCAP. In 2010, he was named an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, the youngest person ever granted this award for lifetime achievement. [9]

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Ives</span> American modernist composer (1874–1954)

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer, actuary and businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guido of Arezzo</span> Italian music theorist and pedagogue (c. 991/2–1033)

Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of High medieval music. A Benedictine monk, he is regarded as the inventor—or by some, developer—of the modern staff notation that had a massive influence on the development of Western musical notation and practice. Perhaps the most significant European writer on music between Boethius and Johannes Tinctoris, after the former's De institutione musica, Guido's Micrologus was the most widely distributed medieval treatise on music.

Susan Kaye McClary is an American musicologist associated with "new musicology". Noted for her work combining musicology with feminist music criticism, McClary is professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christoph Wolff</span> German-born musicologist

Christoph Wolff is a German musicologist. He is best known for his works on the music, life, and period of Johann Sebastian Bach. Christoph Wolff is an emeritus professor of Harvard University, and was part of the faculty since 1976, and former director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig from 2001 to 2014.

<i>Ars subtilior</i> Musical style of the late middle ages

Ars subtilior is a musical style characterized by rhythmic and notational complexity, centered on Paris, Avignon in southern France, and also in northern Spain at the end of the fourteenth century. The style also is found in the French Cypriot repertory. Often the term is used in contrast with ars nova, which applies to the musical style of the preceding period from about 1310 to about 1370; though some scholars prefer to consider ars subtilior a subcategory of the earlier style. Primary sources for ars subtilior are the Chantilly Codex, the Modena Codex, and the Turin Manuscript.

Joseph Haydn completed his Symphony No. 92 in G major, Hoboken I/92, popularly known as the Oxford Symphony, in 1789 as one of a set of three symphonies commissioned by the French Count d'Ogny. Instrumentation for the symphony is: flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Musicological Society</span> American music research organization

The American Musicological Society (AMS) is a musicological organization which researches, promotes and produces publications on music. Founded in 1934, the AMS was begun by leading American musicologists of the time, and was crucial in legitimizing musicology as a scholarly discipline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Taruskin</span> American musicologist and critic (1945–2022)

Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis. He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. His awards include the first Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in 1978 and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2017.

String Quartet No. 1 is a musical composition by Charles Ives. Music historian and theorist Robert P. Morgan wrote that the quartet "was Ives's first mature composition of extended length, and its extraordinary fluency gives ample evidence of his solid control of traditional musical techniques. Moreover, the work is considerably more than a facile exercise based on classical models; there are already indications of the Ives to come, in the extensive quotations and, above all, in the composer's ability to bend the form to suit the idiosyncrasies of his own musical inclinations."

Joseph Wilfred Kerman was an American musicologist and music critic. Among the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field". He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jonathan Bellman is a musicologist and pianist currently employed at the University of Northern Colorado. He is noted for his research on exoticism and music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claude V. Palisca</span> American musicologist (1921–2001)

Claude Victor Palisca was an American musicologist. An internationally recognized authority on early music, especially opera of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, he was the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University. Palisca is best known for co-writing the standard textbook A History of Western Music, as well as for his substantial body of work on the history of music theory in the Renaissance, reflected in his editorship of the Yale Music Theory in Translation series and in the book Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (1985). In particular, he was the leading expert on the Florentine Camerata. His 1968 book Baroque Music in the Prentice Hall history of music series ran to three editions.

Donald Jay Grout was an American musicologist. He is best known as the author of A Short History of Opera, first published in 1947. The fourth edition was published by Columbia University Press in 2003.

Gary Alfred Tomlinson is an American musicologist and Sterling Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University. He was formerly the Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D., in 1979 with thesis titled Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi, and the humanist heritage of opera.

Barbara Russano Hanning is an American musicologist who specializes in 16th- and 17th-century Italian music. She has also written works on the music of 18th-century France and on musical iconography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Kirkpatrick (pianist)</span> American classical pianist and music scholar

John Kirkpatrick was an American classical pianist and music scholar, best known for championing the works of Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Carl Ruggles, and Roy Harris. He gave the first complete public performance of Ives's Concord Sonata in 1939, which became a turning point in the composer's public recognition. Kirkpatrick played an important role in Ives scholarship, and he was leader in the Charles Ives Society. One important example is his role in the editing of Memos, which is a collection of Ives's autobiographical writings. At the time of his death Kirkpatrick was a professor emeritus at Yale University, where he had also been the curator of the Charles Ives archives.

Stephen Blum is an American scholar and musician, whose research has primarily been in ethnomusicology. He has lent a multidisciplinary approach to the writing and publication of numerous articles discussing a wide range of musical topics and ideas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivian Perlis</span> American musicologist (1928–2019)

Vivian Perlis was an American musicologist and the founder and former director of Yale University's Oral History of American Music.

References

  1. 1 2 ORCID. "J. Peter Burkholder (0000-0003-3665-9299)". orcid.org. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
  2. ↑ "Burkholder, J. Peter". worldcat.org. Retrieved August 22, 2016.
  3. 1 2 "J. Peter Burkholder: Current: Faculty: Jacobs School of Music: Indiana University Bloomington". Jacobs School of Music. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  4. ↑ "AMS Administration" . Retrieved January 19, 2021.
  5. ↑ "About the Society | charlesives.org". charlesives.org. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
  6. ↑ "Theft! A History of Music". web.law.duke.edu. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  7. ↑ Burkholder, J. Peter. "Changing the Stories We Tell: Repertoires, Narratives, Materials, Goals, and Strategies in Teaching Music History - College Music Symposium". symposium.music.org. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
  8. ↑ "Einstein Award Winners – American Musicological Society" . Retrieved January 19, 2021.
  9. ↑ "IU Distinguished Professor Burkholder honored by American Musicological Society: IU News Room: Indiana University". newsinfo.iu.edu. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.