Gossett, Philip
Gossett, Philip
Gossett, Philip, esteemed American musicologist;b. N.Y., Sept. 27, 1941. He was educated at Amherst Coll. (B.A., 1963), Columbia Univ. (1961-62), and Princeton Univ. (M.F.A., 1965; Ph.D., 1970, with the diss. The Operas of Rossini: Problems of Textual Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Opera); held a Fulbright fellowship (1965-66) and a Guggenheim fellowship (1971-72). He joined the faculty at the Univ. of Chicago in 1968, where he was a prof, (from 1977) and chairman of the music dept. (1978-84). From 1995 to 1996 he was president of the American Musicological Soc. He ed. and tr. Rameau’s Traite de I’harmonie as Treatise on Harmony by Jean-Philippe Rameau (N.Y., 1971); with C. Rosen, he ed. Early Romantic Opera (44 vols., N.Y., 1977-83); also ed. Italian Opera 1810-1840 (58 vols., N.Y., 1984- ); also served as general ed. of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. He publ. The Tragic Finale of Tancredi (Pesaro, 1977), Le Sinfonie di Rossini (Pesaro, 1981), and Anna Bolena and the Artistic Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti (Oxford, 1985), for which he received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1986.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire