Glareanus, Henricus or Heinrich Glarean (real name, Heinrich Loris; Latinized: Henricus Loritus)

Glareanus, Henricus or Heinrich Glarean (real name, Heinrich Loris; Latinized: Henricus Loritus), Swiss music theorist; b. Mollis, Glarus canton, June 1488; d. Freiburg, March 28, 1563. He studied with Rubellus at Bern, and later with Cochlaus at Cologne, where he was crowned poet laureate by Emperor Maximilian I in 1512, as the result of a poem he composed and sang to the Emperor. He first taught mathematics at Basel (1514). From 1517 to 1522 he was in Paris, where he taught philosophy. In 1522 he returned to Basel, where he stayed until 1529, and then he settled in Freiburg, where he was a prof. of poetry, then of theology. His first important work, Isagoge in musicen, publ. at Basel in 1516 (Eng. tr. in the Journal of Music Theory, III, 1959), dealt with solmization, intervals, modes, and tones. A still more important vol., the Dodecachordon, was publ. in 1547. In it, Glareanus advanced the theory that there are 12 church modes, corresponding to the ancient Greek modes, instead of the commonly accepted 8 modes. The 3rd part of the Dodecachordon contains many works by 15th- and 16th-century musicians. A copy of the Dodecachordon, with corrections in Glareanus’s own handwriting, is in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. A German tr., with the musical examples in modern notation, was publ. by P. Bohn in vol. 16 of Publikationen der Gesellschaftfiir Musikforschung (Leipzig, 1888) and an Eng. tr. and commentary by C. Miller was publ. in Musicological Studies and Documents, 6 (1965); facsimile ed. in Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, 2/65 (N.Y., 1967). A complete index of Glareanus’s works is contained in P. Lichtenthal’s Dizionario e bibliografia della musica, IV, pp. 274-76 (Milan, 1826). J. Wonegger publ. Musicae epitome ex Glareani Dodekachordo (1557; 2nd ed., 1559; in Ger. as Uss Glareani Musik ein Usszug, 1557).

Bibliography

O. Fritzsche, Glarean, Sein Leben und seine Schriften (Frauenfeld, 1890).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire