Palisca, Claude V(ictor)
Palisca, Claude V(ictor)
Palisca, Claude V(ictor), esteemed American musicologist; b. Fiume, Yugoslavia, Nov. 24, 1921. He was taken to the U.S. as a child and in 1929 he became a naturalized American citizen. He was a student of Rathaus (composition) at Queens Coll. of the City Univ. of N.Y. (B.A., 1943), and of Piston and Thompson (composition) and Kinkeldey, Gombosi, and Davison (musicology) at Harvard Univ. (M.A., 1948; Ph.D., 1954, with the diss. The Beginnings of Baroque Music: Its Roots in Sixteenth-century Theory and Polemics). In 1949–50 he held a John Knowles Paine Traveling fellowship, and then studied in Italy on a Fulbright grant (1950–52). From 1953 to 1959 he taught at the Univ. of 111. in Urbana. He was assoc. prof. (1959–64) and prof. (1964–80) of the history of music at Yale Univ., where he then was the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Prof, of Music from 1980 until being made a prof, emeritus in 1992. He also served as chairman of the music dept. (1969–75), and later as director of its graduate studies (1987–92). From 1966 he was ed. of the Yale Music Theory Translation Series. In 1971–72 he was president of the American Musicological Soc. In 1960–61 and 1981–82 he held Guggenheim fellowships. In 1972–73 he was a senior fellow of the NEH. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986 and of the Accademia filarmonica of Bologna in 1987. In 1991 he was made an honorary member of the American Musicological Soc.
Writings
Girolamo Mei: Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi (Rome, 1960; 2nd ed., 1977); with others, Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts (Princeton, N.J., 1961); with others, Musicology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963); Baroque Music (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968; 3rd ed., 1991); Music in Our Schools: A Search for Improvement (Washington, D.C., 1964); with D. Grout, A History of Western Music (3rd ed., N.Y., 1980; 5th ed., 1995); ed. Norton Anthology of Western Music (2 vols., N.Y., 1980; 3rd ed., 1995); Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985); The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven, 1989); Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994).
Bibliography
N. Baker and B. Harming, Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of C. V. P. (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1992).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire