(b Alzey, Rheinhessen, Germany, Dec 14, 1834; d Deal Beach, NJ, July 30, 1907). American pianist, teacher, conductor, and composer of German origin. He studied with Aloys Schmitt in Frankfurt, making his début there in 1848. Later he studied with Vincenz Lachner and toured Bavaria. After a two-year stay in London, he moved to the United States in 1854, settling in Philadelphia. A scholarly performer, for the next twenty years he gave annual series of chamber music concerts and piano recitals, introducing many classical works to American audiences. He gave recitals devoted entirely to the piano music of Chopin and Schumann, a rare feat at the time. In 1866–7 he performed the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven in a series of matinées in New York. In 1873 he moved to Chicago, where he gave momentum to the musical life of the city and founded the Beethoven Society choir. His goal being education through the works of the masters, he gave several “historical” recitals with programs designed chronologically, from Couperin to Brahms. Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler was one of his pupils....
Francisco J. Albo
Thomas S. Grey
(b Potsdam, Nov 13, 1848; d Bayreuth, June 2, 1938). German writer on music . His mother was the daughter of the Berlin architect and artist Karl Friedrich Schinkel; his father, Alfred von Wolzogen (1823–83), was for a time director of the Schwerin court theatre. Following his mother's death in 1850, Hans was brought up by Schinkel relatives at the Berlin Bauakademie, founded and built by his grandfather. He had no formal musical training, though both parents had studied singing with F.W. Jähns (the biographer of Weber). After being parted from his father in infancy, he rejoined him at the age of 14 in Breslau, where he began to develop a passion for theatre and opera. A performance of Tannhäuser there in 1864 made little impression, but two years later he heard it again in Berlin, along with Lohengrin; these experiences marked the beginning of what was to become a lifelong dedication to Wagner's works and ideology. As a student in Berlin (...
revised by Rosemary Williamson
(b Winchester, March 28, 1845; d London, Feb 13, 1917). English musical scholar . He was Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford (1895–1904) and a man of practical ability in several arts, especially painting. His revised edition of Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time with the title Old English Popular Music (1893/R) marked a significant advance over Chappell's standards, distinguishing editorial material and providing new piano harmonizations in an attempt at 16th-century English style. He collaborated with G.E.P. Arkwright in his researches for the Purcell Society (The Works of Henry Purcell, xiv, xvii; 1904, 1907), and with his friend the poet laureate Robert Bridges on The Yattendon Hymnal (1899). Wooldridge’s chief contribution to historical knowledge was his work on the polyphonic period which formed the first two volumes of the Oxford History of Music and traced the developments of such music from organum to the end of the 16th century....
(b Lobbes, Hainault, Jan 25, 1867; d Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes, Sept 25, 1939). Belgian music bibliographer . He came from a family of musicians, and studied the piano with Brassin, the organ with Mailly (first prize, 1888), and theory with Dupont and Gevaert at the Brussels Conservatory. He was appointed deputy secretary and librarian there (1894) and later secretary and inspector of studies (1896). During his tenure as librarian (until 1918) the collections were systematically reorganized and catalogued. Important works were acquired, both original manuscripts and prints, and manuscript copies (many of them in Wotquenne’s own hand) of rare items in other libraries. An example of his diligence is the copy he made of the 13 volumes of chansons published in Antwerp by Tylman Susato between 1543 and 1550. The most significant accessions during his librarianship included the acquisition in 1902 of an important portion of the large collection left by Professor Wagener of Marburg (a number of the most valuable books and manuscripts in the Wagener collection, acquired by Wotquenne personally, were among the 624 items he disposed of by auction in Leipzig in ...
(b Kalusik, Sept 12, 1862; d Paris, April 15, 1917). French musicologist and writer of Polish descent and Russian birth . He went to France with his family in 1869 and was educated at Beauvais, Paris, and the University of Nancy, where he took the licence ès lettres (1882), before settling in Paris. There he founded the Revue wagnérienne (1884–8) with Edouard Dujardin, and the Société Mozart (1901) with Adolphe Boschot and Georges de Saint-Foix. He began his career as a journalist with articles on the socialist movement outside France for Le Figaro and was later its music critic. In 1890 he became a contributor (mostly on music, contemporary literature and philosophy) for the Revue des deux mondes and Le temps; he also wrote for Art moderne, Echo de Paris, Le correspondant, Gazette des beaux-arts, Revue bleue, Revue indépendante and Mercure de France...
revised by Lyudmila Korabel′nikova
(b Kiev, 8/Nov 21, 1905; d Moscow, Sept 20, 1976). Russian musicologist, violinist and teacher . Son of the cellist Mark Il′ich Yampol′sky (1879–1951), he studied at the Moscow Conservatory and in 1930 graduated from the violin class of his uncle, Abram Il′ich Yampol′sky. He took the kandidat degree in 1940 with a dissertation on violin fingering. He taught the violin at the Music Academy (1931–58), the Central Secondary Music School (1931–46), and at the Moscow Conservatory (1934–49), where from 1939 he also lectured on the history and theory of the violin. He was appointed a senior lecturer at the conservatory in 1940. He held several important editorial posts and in 1953 became a music critic for the Soviet Information Bureau. Yampol′sky contributed more than 1000 articles to Russian and foreign journals. He was known particularly for his book on the history of violin playing in Russia, ...
Israel J. Katz
(b Łódź, April 16, 1893; d New York, Sept 6, 1981). American musicologist of Polish birth . After studying the piano with Jacob Weinberg in Moscow, he attended the Imperial School of Commerce (graduating in 1912) and the Moscow Conservatory (MA 1917), where he studied the piano with Alexander Goedicke, organ with Leonid Sabaneyev and theory with M. Morozov. While directing the conservatory's organ department (1918–20), he served as organist for the Bol′shoy and occasionally performed at the Moscow Art Theatre; he then worked as a lecturer for the Siberian Board of Education (1920–21) and music director of the Shanghai Songsters’ Choral Society (1921–2). He emigrated to the USA in 1923 and, following a concert tour, he settled in New York, working as organist at the Free Synagogue (1927–8), Temple Emanu-El (1928–9) and as organist and choirmaster at Temple Rodeph Sholem (...
Tat′yana S. Kyuregyan
(b Kharkov, 10/June 22, 1877; d Saratov, Nov 26, 1942). Russian musicologist, music educator and pianist of Polish descent . He graduated from the Kiev College of Music, having specialized in the piano with Pukhal′sky (1894–8); he also studied mathematics at Kiev University, 1897–8. He then attended the Moscow Conservatory (1898–1903), studying the piano (with N.Ya. Shishkin) and composition (with Ippolitov-Ivanov and Taneyev) and attending Smolensky's course in the history of Russian church music. From 1921 to 1931 he was a member of the State Academy of Artistic Studies (later the State Academy of Arts), and in 1941 he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
Yavorsky's career embraced an extremely wide variety of activities. From 1903 onwards he took an active role in the Music-Ethnography Commission, which promoted the collection, study and teaching of folksong. He took a special interest in music education: he was a founder of the Moscow (...
(b Eschenbach in der Oberpfalz, Aug 1, 1817; d Neudettelslau, Feb 17, 1895). German music scholar . He attended the Gymnasium in Nuremberg from 1832 to 1837 and then studied theology at the University of Erlangen until 1841. He was stimulated by Carl von Winterfeld to revive the singing of old Lutheran chorales, and received much encouragement from Gottlieb von Tucher in Munich. The general church council, which had commissioned Zahn to prepare a hymnbook for the Lutheran Church in Bavaria, accepted a sample volume containing 12 four-part hymns, but rejected the first edition of his Revidiertes vierstimmiges Kirchenmelodienbuch (1852). Together with Tucher and Immanuel Faisst, he revised this work, giving due consideration to the new Bavarian hymnbook which had appeared in 1854. This joint effort, published the following year, was accepted for ecclesiastical use and was adopted as a model by many regional churches. Zahn also collected unknown religious songs and strived to make them better known. His most important work was the six-volume ...
(b Erfurt, Germany, Jan 20, 1845; d Chicago, Sept 8, 1912). German-American music theorist . After settling in 1868 in Chicago, he taught mathematics, German and music at the German Lutheran School (1868–71) before establishing himself as a private music teacher. His independent and original views were greatly admired by Hans von Bülow, Hugo Kaun, Leopold Godowsky, Ferruccio Busoni, George P. Upton and others. Ziehn’s critical essays are mostly polemic, whether championing (Theodore Thomas, Anton Bruckner) or condemning (Hugo Riemann, Eduard Hanslick, Philipp Spitta). His system of exercises for pianists led him to the realization that passages beginning on D or A♭ yield upward and downward an exact symmetry of tones and of fingering – a principle of ‘symmetric inversion’ he subsequently applied to music theory. His textbooks on harmony and composition are distinguished by a minimum of rules and explanations and a wealth of music examples (from Schütz and Rameau to Bruckner and Boito). While still structuring chords by 3rds, he strongly rejected Riemann’s functional harmony and proceeded from accepting and interpreting literally the equally tempered division of the octave. The result is a chromatic and enharmonic system, occasionally complicated in its terminology, but pointing to the later language of Skryabin and Schoenberg. His ‘enharmonic law’ affirms that ‘every chord tone may become the fundamental’....
Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht
(b Frankfurt an der Oder, Nov 21, 1904; d Cologne, Nov 16, 1978). German harpist and musicologist . He was the son of Rudolf Ewald Zingel (1876–1944), an organist, choral conductor and composer in Greifswald. From 1923 to 1927 he studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin with harp (under Max Saal) as his main subject. He then studied musicology under Max Schneider, with German literature and aesthetics as secondary subjects, at the universities of Berlin, Breslau (1927–8) and Halle (1928–30). He took the doctorate in Halle in 1930 with a dissertation on harp playing from the 16th century to the 18th. Harpist in the Städtische Orchester of Lübeck from 1932, he joined the Städtische Orchester of Halle in 1934 and the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne in 1938, where he remained until his retirement in 1969; he also played in the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra (...
(b Waldbröl, April 12, 1803; d Nachrodt, March 23, 1869). German music scholar, critic and poet of Italian and Dutch extraction. He was educated in Mülheim am Rhein and at the Carmelite Gymnasium in Cologne. After three years’ military service he entered the University of Heidelberg in 1826 to study civics and law. There he joined a circle around Thibaut which concerned itself with early church music and the preservation of folksong repertories, and with friends he founded a literary student club. He also interested himself at this time with the German language and its dialects, mythology, archaeology, history, astronomy and natural science. In 1829 he published with E. Baumstark his first folksong collection, Bardale, and in the same year ceased studying for financial reasons. After living in Cologne, Mülheim and Bouzonville, he became tutor to the only son of Prince Gorchakov of Warsaw in 1833. In Warsaw he met Ernemann, Elsner, Vieuxtemps and Henselt and wrote for periodicals, among them Schumann’s ...