Abraham, Gerald (Ernest Heal)

Abraham, Gerald (Ernest Heal), eminent English musicologist; b. Newport, Isle of Wight, March 9, 1904; d. Midhurst, March 18, 1988. A man of many and varied interests, he studied philology and mastered the Russian language. He was active with the BBC (1935^17) and served as ed. of the Monthly Musical Record (1945–60); after being the first prof. of music at the Univ. of Liverpool (1947–62), he returned to the BBC as asst. controller of music (1962–74). In 1974 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He publ. Borodin: The Composer and His Music (1927; 2^nd ed., 1935); This Modern Stuff (1933; 2^nd ed., rev., 1952, as This Modern Music, 3^rd ed., 1955); Studies in Russian Music (1935; 2^nd ed., 1969); Masters of Russian Music (with M. Calvocoressi, 1936; 2^nd ed., rev., 1958); A Hundred Years of Music (1938; 4^th ed., rev., 1974); Chopin’s Musical Style (1939); On Russian Music (1939); Beethoven’s Second-period Quartets (1942); Eight Soviet Composers (1943); Tchaikovsky (1944); Rimsky-Korsakov: A Short Biography (1945); Design in Music (1949); Slavonic and Romantic Music (1968); The Tradition of Western Music (1974); The Concise Oxford History of Music (1979); Essays on Russian and East European Music (1985). He also ed. Calvocoressi’s Mussorgsky (1946; 2^nd ed., rev., 1974) and symposiums on Tchaikovsky (1945), Schubert (1946; 2^nded., 1952), Sibelius (1947; 2^nd ed., 1952), Grieg (1948; 2^nd ed., 1952), Schumann (1952), and Handel (1954). For The New Oxford History of Music, he ed. vol. III, Ars Nova and the Renaissance 1300-1540 (with A. Hughes, 1960), vol. IV, The Age of Humanism 1540-1630 (1968), vol. VIII, The Age of Beethoven (1982), and vol. IX, Romanticism 1830-1890 (1990).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire