Heinitz, Wilhelm
Heinitz, Wilhelm
Heinitz, Wilhelm, German musicologist; b. Hamburg-Altona, Dec. 9, 1883; d. Hamburg, March 31, 1963. He studied the bassoon, and played in various orchs. He then became interested in phonetics and studied primitive music and the languages of Africa and Polynesia. He took a Ph.D. in psychology at the Univ. of Kiel (1920), and completed his Habilitation at the Univ. of Hamburg (1931) with his Strukturprobleme in primitiver Musik (publ. in Hamburg, 1931). In 1915 he became an assistant in the phonetics laboratory at the Univ. of Hamburg; was founder-director of its dept. of research for comparative musicology (1931–49). He wrote a number of valuable papers on the structural problems of speech, which he publ, in specialized journals; also the books Klangprobleme im Rundfunk (Berlin, 1926), Instrumentenkunde (Potsdam, 1929), Neue Wege der Volksmusikforschung (Hamburg, 1937), Erforschung rassischer Merkmale aus der Volksmusik (Hamburg, 1938), and Physiologische Reaktion und Pulsationsmessung (Hamburg, 1958).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire