Meyer, Leonard B. 1918-2007 (Leonard Bunce Meyer)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 12, 1918, in New York, NY; died of lung cancer, December 30, 2007, in New York, NY. Musicologist, educator, and author. Meyer was often described simply as a musicologist, but his interdisciplinary approach to exploring music spread beyond that description in many directions. He was also a psychologist, philosopher, historian of culture, and student of the humanities, as he demonstrated in his books Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns in Predictions in 20th-Century Culture (1967) and (the book for which he is best known) Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956). Meyer was reportedly one of the first academics to explore the relationships between musical patterns and emotional responses, and to compare a music listener's satisfaction to the complexity of the work presented. He concluded that the greatest satisfaction came to the listener when the music met some, but not all, of the listener's expectations. Above all, he believed that music is one of the most basic, deep-seated, and far-reaching elements of human culture. Meyer was trained in philosophy and music (and briefly in musical composition) at Columbia University. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1946 to earn a doctorate and remained there as a professor of music and humanities until 1975; he also served as chair of the music department and a board member of the Institute for Cultural Development. From 1975 until retirement in 1988, he was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Music and Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Meyer's scholarship was recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. His other writings include ExplainingMusic: Essays and Explorations (1973), Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (1989), and The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Lorraine, Renée Cox, Music, Tendencies, and Inhibitions: Reflections on a Theory of Leonard Meyer, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 2001.

Narmour, Eugene, and Ruth A. Solie, editors, Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, Pendragon Press (Stuyvesant, NY), 1988.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, January 2, 2008, sec. 3, p. 5.

New York Times, January 2, 2008, p. C14.