Zuckerkandl, Victor
Zuckerkandl, Victor
Zuckerkandl, Victor, Austrian musicologist and aesthetician; b. Vienna, July 2,1896; d. Locarno, April 25, 1965. He studied at the Univ. of Vienna (Ph.D., 1927). He conducted in Vienna and in other cities; also was a music critic for Berlin newspapers (1927-33) and taught theory and appreciation courses in Vienna (1934-38). He went to the U.S. to teach at Wellesley Coll. (1940-2); during World War II, he worked as a machinist in a Boston defense plant (1942-44). He then taught theory at the New School for Social Research in N.Y. (1946-48). A grant from the American Philosophical Soc. enabled him to develop a course for non-musicians on the nature and significance of tonal music; after he joined the faculty of St. John’s Coll. in 1948, this course was adopted as a general requirement. He retired to Ascona in 1964, lecturing at the Jung Inst. and the Éranos Conference in Zürich before his death. His books represent a synthesis of theory (mostly following Schenk-er’s analytic theories; music cognition; and intellectual metaphysics); they include Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (1956), The Sense of Music (1959), and Man the Musician (1973).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire