The Musicological Elite

Tamara Levitz

Musicologists have been gripped by the desire to democratize, diversify,

decolonize, and popularize their discipline. Driven by a growing moral
demand to challenge the Eurocentric, heteronormative, exclusionary,
colonial, settler colonial, non-diverse, and white supremacist legacies of
a discipline plagued by its rootedness in European classical musical tradi-
tions, they have recently accelerated their efforts to expand the traditional
canon, reform curriculum, and explore new mediums for the dissemina-
tion of ideas (for example, “popular” internet blogs over expensive aca-
demic monographs). In spring 2017, the Department of Music at Harvard
University symbolically led the charge in this effort by announcing they
would no longer require music theory and other courses, but rather ask
students to pick “no more than two” of each type of course in their pro-
gram, design their study plan with the Director of Undergraduate Studies,
and include a rationale that outlines their path through the major. The only
requirements left are the “Concentration Tutorials” that include courses
on “Thinking about Music” and “Critical Listening.”1 Harvard Professors
stressed that this change would create more “flexible pathways” through
their program, eliminate the class-based implicit requirements to enter it,
and, most importantly, allow for a greater diversity of students and student
interests.2 Reactions to these plans on social media have been vehement
and fiercely divided.3
That the standard curriculum in musicology programs has become
an open wound or festering reminder of the labor injustice, class division,
exclusions, structures of white supremacy, and inequality in the discipline
became apparent again in October 2017, when an acrimonious debate,
this time about eliminating the language requirements in musicology
programs, erupted on the listserv of the American Musicological Society.
A small, selective group of vocal subscribers posted a range of reasons
to keep the language requirements. They argued that learning languages
(primarily German and French) was crucial to being able to read primary
and secondary musicological sources, useful on the job market, generally
worthwhile, and necessary to being able to translate. They thought language
exams should remain required because they always had been. Opponents
stressed that it no longer made sense to learn primarily German or French
and that there were problems of access to language courses. The language
requirements raised labor issues, they wrote. Some argued that the exams
Current Musicology 102 (Spring 2018)
© 2018 Levitz. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the 9
Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND).
 Current Musicology

themselves failed to assure competency and fluency anyway. We are living

in an age critical of the neoliberal individual’s need to master all tools of the
trade, one contributor wrote, and today we can ask colleagues to help us.
Finally, some felt more flexibility was needed to meet students with diverse
needs. For days the AMS musicological community was held hostage to
an excruciating chat marked by bouts of cynicism, obstinacy, the numb-
ness of unacknowledged privilege, self-righteousness, heartfelt confession,
careful analysis, and cogent critique, as well as momentary celebrations of
self-experience, a lack of appreciation for each other’s views, and a practice
of talking past each other that created a cocktail so explosive it precipitated
the closure of that listserv.4 Related discussions about changing the tradi-
tional music history survey in departments around the country have been
characterized by similar ideological disagreement and intransigence.
In contrast to the tension that marks discussions of curriculum and
language debates online, a much more optimistic attitude and sense of ac-
complishment has tended to accompany recent efforts to democratize mu-
sicology by utilizing alternative media, circumstances, and writing modes
to reach out to new and more diverse publics. “Public musicology” appears
a less disputed solution than curriculum change to the problem of musicol-
ogy’s exclusionary elitism, the move outward seemingly smoother than any
attempt at internal change. This may be because public musicology has
taken on the allure of a social justice project. More departments across
the country are now offering courses in public musicology, the American
Musicological Society maintains a lively, dedicated blog, and conference
presentations on the subject abound.5 Westminster Choir College has also
become the first school in North America to offer a Master of Music pro-
gram in “American and Public Musicology.”
Yet recent efforts to expand the canon, reform curriculum, and make
musicology public fall short in the project of decolonizing the discipline, in
spite of their many obvious merits. One reason is that such actions address
only one of the three core elements of the “coloniality of power” as theorized
by Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, and others.6 Whereas musicolo-
gists have gradually begun working toward decentering what Grosfoguel
(2002) calls the “hegemonic Eurocentric epistemologies in the modern/
colonial world-system” (205), they have tended to neglect systemic racial-
ized power relations and the capitalist distribution of labor. Their impulse
to bracket out material circumstances stems in part from their tendency
to envision their discipline within the context of the “history of ideas,” or
as dedicated to investigating the formal properties of music alone, rather
than in terms of its institutional history as an academic profession. This
situation is exacerbated by the fact that there is still very little research

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on the US history of musicology—a blind spot that weakens attempts to

decolonize the discipline in that country.
In this article, I seek to rectify this situation by describing in detail
how a small group of music scholars initiated the professionalization of
musicology in the United States in the 1930s (or, more specifically, from
1929–1939). I choose to begin my story in the year in which the American
Council of Learned Societies first took an interest in establishing musicol-
ogy as a profession in the United States, and to end it in the year in which
the AMS organized its first international conference—an event I consider
something of a turning point. I have developed my historiographic ap-
proach in this article in response to Jo Guldi’s and David Armitage’s The
History Manifesto (2014), which rejects microhistory (to which I have been
partial in my work) in favor of a return to the Annales school’s notion of the
longue durée. Guldi and Armitage suggest making long-term arguments—
or telling stories of longer duration—by building upon microhistorical
studies “of particular turning-points and watersheds in history, moments
of revolution that destabilized institutions, climates, and societies” (2014,
36).7 Enticed by this possibility, I am currently envisioning a history of the
AMS based on microhistories of turning points, which will include the
birth of the society (that I address in this article), the first international
conference in 1939, the founding of JAMS in 1947, the annual meeting in
1961, the student revolutions in 1968, and the New Musicology.
I have structured this article to reflect how professions are formed, bas-
ing my approach on classic sociological texts. In 1964, Harold L. Wilensky
argued that the job of the professional was based on 1) “systematic knowl-
edge or doctrine acquired only through long prescribed training” (what
he called its “technical” aspect, with its emphasis on the aura of mystery
around knowledge); and 2) a set of “professional norms,” which include
service ideals and codes of ethics (138). Professionalization occurred,
Wilensky claimed, when people started doing full-time something that
needed doing, leading to the establishment of training and professional
associations. Those developments were generally accompanied by a “cam-
paign to separate the competent from the incompetent” that included the
self-conscious definition of tasks, the “contest between home guard” and
“newcomers,” competition with neighboring occupations, political agita-
tion to gain the support of the law, and so on (144–45). In her presidential
address to the North Central Sociological Association in 1975, Marie R.
Haug juxtaposed Wilensky’s view with that of Philip Elliot (1972), who
argued from a historic perspective that status had preceded other profes-
sional attributes in Great Britain, leading to what he called the “status pro-
fessional.” If status and autonomy came before the acquisition of esoteric

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knowledge, Haug concluded, then “exclusive knowledge and humanitarian

claims can be conceptualized as rationalizations developed to preserve
antecedent privileges and powers” (1975, 199).
By clarifying the foundations of US musicology as a profession, I will
expose how the contemporary musicological elite wields its power to domi-
nate and exclude. I will consider in this article how and in what geopolitical
context early US musicologists determined their object of study and profes-
sional norms, established the rules that distinguished them from the public
as an intellectual elite, carved out their territory in competition with other
subdisciplines, negotiated with the patrons and institutions that financially
supported their labor, and promoted their status and prestige.8 I trace how
musicologists consolidated this elite position through their daily actions,
documented meticulously in minutes of meetings. This exploration of the
unspectacular will provide, I hope, insight into the often-overlooked but
crucial difference between bureaucratic decision making (motions!) and
conceptual thinking (historiographic or aesthetic choice) in the formation
of scholarly disciplines. My analysis will show that musicology as a profes-
sion developed in a particular way in the United States that is different
from how it developed in countries like Germany and Austria. In spite of
a persistent myth to the contrary, its origins were not Austro-German but
rather “international.” I will not provide in this article a comprehensive
history of the profession of musicology in the United States, and I warn
against drawing sweeping conclusions for the present from the early his-
tory I present. Instead, at the end of this article, I will return to the current
debates about curriculum change, language exams, and public musicology,
and reexamine them there through the lens of the history I have told. In this
way I hope to show how minute archival analysis, even of a small moment
in the history of the discipline, can reorient perceptions and conceptual
frames and provide the firm material ground needed for decolonization.

Exclusive Internationalists: The Founding of the Committee

on Musicology of the American Council of Learned Societies
and the Rebirth of the Internationale Gesellschaft für
Musikwissenschaft (IGMw)9
The birth of musicology as a profession in the United States was inauspi-
cious. One can argue that it began on July 11, 1929, when the Committee
on Musicology of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) first
met under the chairmanship of Carl Engel.10 Waldo Gifford Leland—the
indefatigable secretary (1927–39) and later director of the ACLS (1939–
46)—appears to have had the idea to form this committee, which at first in-

12
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cluded the music critic Richard Aldrich, the committee’s secretary Donald
Goodchild, Otto Ortmann (Director of the Peabody Conservatory and a
scholar of piano technique), and Leland himself.11 The committee’s per-
spective on musicology was not German but rather “international.” Leland
was an internationalist who had played a key role in founding the ACLS
to represent the United States in the Union Académique Internationale
(International Union of Academies), and in 1926 had created the
International Committee on Historical Sciences.12 He also represented the
Carnegie Institute in Europe, worked with the International Committee on
Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, and regularly negoti-
ated with European colleagues about international disciplinary standards.
He had enormous experience organizing archival practices in the United
States in the early twentieth century. Upon returning from Europe to the
United States to become secretary of the ACLS in 1927, Leland stepped up
his actions to centralize and standardize professions in the humanities and
distinguish them in their methods and goals from the social sciences. He
received major support for his project from the Rockefeller Foundation,
which granted the ACLS $30,000/year for three years for operations in 1935
(Leland 1935c). At this time, Leland developed an interest in musicology.
Carl Engel shared Leland’s internationalist perspective. Engel’s promi-
nence in the early history of US musicology stemmed in part from his
role in the Internationale Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft (IGMw)
and as chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, columnist
and editor at The Musical Quarterly, and president of G. Schirmer Inc.
Engel’s publishing activities may have influenced his selection as chair of
the Committee on Musicology of the ACLS: in Germany (with Breitkopf
& Härtel) and in the United States (with The Musical Quarterly and G.
Schirmer, Inc.), publishers played a key role in establishing a public sphere
for musicology as a profession. Further, Carl Engel was the only US citi-
zen who collaborated in the reinvention of the IGMw in 1927, and who
was invited to be a member of its executive board for its first meeting in
Basel, Switzerland in 1928.13 Although he did not attend the board’s annual
meetings in 1928 and 1929, his contact with its members surely shaped
his approach to musicological research as chair of the ACLS committee.
In appealing to international models, he was also following a venerated
US tradition: music teachers had participated actively in the Internationale
Musikgesellschaft (IMG) until it dissolved at the outbreak of World War
I.14 Oscar Sonneck fondly remembered, for example, the gatherings of the
US Section of the IMG at the annual conferences of the Music Teachers
National Association (MTNA) before the war, and especially after 1907
(see Sonneck 1929).

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The small group of European friends who resuscitated the IMG—

which had lain dormant for over a decade—during the Congress on
Music History in Vienna in 1927 pursued a very specific, nationally ori-
ented model of internationalism.15 As the elder of musicological study
in Europe, Guido Adler’s vision of internationalism dominated in these
deliberations.16 In the notes he scribbled on the back of flyers for the con-
gress, Adler appealed to French models, describing the new organization
as a “confederation” (“Confédération”) or “union of existing societies” de-
voted to the study of music. He was thinking transnationally, describing
the new society as “internationally oriented yet with a full clarification of
the national characteristics of all participants.” In Julien Tiersot’s and Curt
Sachs’s words (as jotted down by Adler in French in his notes), this was an
“international grouping of professional musicologists with an office of in-
formation that would facilitate works and research in all countries” (Adler
1927a).17 Prunières and Adler subsequently parted ways with Tiersot over
their definition of internationalism (and specifically over the question of
whether individuals could join the new society), with Tiersot taking the
hardline stance that it could mean only a “federation of existing musico-
logical societies.”18
Adler and his colleagues indirectly addressed how they might move
beyond a confederate model of internationalism as they prepared “propa-
ganda” to recruit members for the IGMw in its first year. Financial con-
cerns motivated their geopolitical strategies. In a long letter to Wilhelm
Merian about a planned flyer from February 1928, Adler wrote about the
“very dire” financial state of the society and about its lack of patrons—a
situation he feared would keep the most “qualified and capable” musicolo-
gists from joining (Adler 1928a). He suggested they could attract members
by combining Austria and Germany into one German-speaking territory
on the flyer without “implying anything political.” He also thought it would
be “important and advantageous” to appeal explicitly to musicologists in
Germany, England, France, and Italy, because the latter three nations could
include their colonies and that “would be an asset” in recruiting members.
“Then, after all,” he wrote, “the individual colonies of these nations will
hardly be able to build their own separate departments.” Finally, Adler sug-
gested reserving a place for North and South America on the board “for
economic reasons,” as a way of assuring greater financial support for the
IGMw.19 They tried to entice individuals, associations, institutes, libraries,
and musicology departments to join the IGMw by opening their flyer with
an idealist statement about how “art and science are not bound to any na-
tional barriers but rather need to have mobility across a country’s frontiers
to have their full impact,” although they knew that they themselves could

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not travel freely in Europe, not even to their own IGMw conferences, be-
cause of passport and visa regulations.20 They established the Swiss Franc
as their currency, requesting 5 CHF for regular membership and 50 CHF/
year (or a one-time payment of 500 CHF) to become a patron—sums that
would have prevented a vast number of people worldwide from applying.21
By the time of their first official board meeting, Adler and his friends
seem to have settled into thinking of the IGMw largely as a confederation of
European nations. On September 4, 1928 the executive of the IGMw met at
the home (alternatively called “Antiquariat” or “Musikbibliothek”) of steel
industrialist and music aficionado Paul Hirsch at Neue Mainzer Strasse 57
in Frankfurt.22 The magnificently wealthy Hirsch was an important first
patron of international musicology. The executive at that first meeting
included president Peter Wagner (Fribourg, Switzerland), vice presidents
Johannes Wolf (Berlin), André Pirro (Paris), and Edward Dent (erroneous-
ly described as living in London), secretary Wilhelm Merian (Switzerland),
and substitute secretary Gaetano Cesari (Milan). The Honorary presidents
were Guido Adler (Vienna) and Henry Prunières (Paris). Members of the
board or “Direktorium” at this first meeting included, arranged on official
lists according to nationality: Rudolf von Ficker (Austria), Charles van den
Borren (Belgium), Knud Jeppesen (Denmark), Higinio Anglés (Spain)
(consistently misspelled Higino Anglès), Albert Smijers (Netherlands),
Zdenek Nejedly (Czechoslovakia), and Carl Engel (“Amerika”).23 Pirro,
Cesari, Prunières, van den Borren, and Engel did not attend the meeting.
This roster, and the general membership, was hardly international, but
rather had a provincial flavor; the IGMw had simply formalized existing
personal relationships between a network of privileged, mostly European
intellectuals and friends.24
The ostentatiously national make up of this board was also no accident.
According to item §12 of the IGMw’s statutes, planned and solidified that
day, members of the board had to come from different nations—although
the Swiss nationality of the secretary and treasurer “didn’t count.” The “four
countries that lead the way in musicological research”—Germany, France,
England, and Italy—had to be represented in the board, and three of them
in the office of the society as well.25 Adler seems to have pushed hardest to
implement this form of national representation.26 In his copies of the stat-
utes, Adler consistently corrected “four countries,” or what his colleagues
sometimes described as “four states,” to “four nations.”27
Yet board members did not welcome every nation into their midst,
and may have discriminated in particular against musicological scholar-
ship in Slavic countries. At the first meeting of the executive of the society
on September 4, 1928, Johannes Wolf informed the members that Lucjan

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Kamieński was annoyed Poland was not represented. Wolf pointed to

Zdenek Nejedly (for reasons that are unclear to me, but perhaps hinting
that there was already a representative of a Slavic nation) and emphasized
that “not all states can be represented on the board.” Dent then advised
that, “We should have only personalities, representatives of science [the
branches of musical science] not nations.”28 The board then contradicted
itself and displayed something of its potential prejudice by suggesting
Tobias Norlind become a member because “Sweden is a country of cultural
high standing” (da Schweden kulturell hochstehendes Land). At their sec-
ond meeting, in Paris on October 1–2, 1929, the board was noncommittal
when Semyon Lvovich Ginzburg’s asked to have the State Institute of the
History of the Arts represent the IGMw in the Soviet Union. Members
agreed in principle as long as there was “no independent Russian section.”
They wanted to arrange the details only with Mikhail Ivanov-Boretzky, but
then dragged their feet about pursuing any plans at all.29
Members of the board consciously sought out models of international-
ism to emulate. Their choices reflect the general influence at that time of the
League of Nations—an institution established in 1920, yet which Germany
joined in 1926, the Soviet Union in 1934, and which the United States never
joined. Internationalism in the context of the League of Nations reflected
less a notion of universal musical values or global cooperation than what
Susan Pederson (2015) analyzes as a form of diplomacy that maintained
Europe’s imperial control over labor and capital internationally.30 Board
members seemed to imitate this form of European diplomacy when they
established as the mission of their society the pursuit of “musicological
research and [the] easing [of] musicological relationships between coun-
tries” (“Internationale Gesellschaft Statuten” 1928, §1). Their belief that
national boundaries limited scholarship led them to open an information
office in Basel where employees would answer questions “that could best
be answered on an international basis.” They saw it as the job of this office
to facilitate contact between music scholars in different countries, share
scientific material, make local research known, and create a central cata-
logue.31 They used as their models the Union Musicologique, the Institute
of International Education in New York City, and the League of Nations’
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.32 They also made
sure the IGMw was listed in its Handbook of International Organizations
published in 1929.
Board members hoped to gain recognition for their society by appeal-
ing for financial and public support to the national governments in Europe
they represented.33 This transnational model of financial organization
was one of the IGMw’s most innovative institutional strategies, but it was

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an upward climb, and created power imbalances.34 Like in the European

Union today, members from countries with the best economies (in this
case, for musicology) wielded the most power on the board. Although not
acknowledged as a nation, Switzerland—more specifically the local gov-
ernment in Basel—played the largest role in funding the society.
The IGMw board discussed the society’s finances in detail at their
first meeting on September 4, 1928, joined by the society’s treasurer, the
Swiss banker Theodor Speiser-Riggenbach. He was a partner in the pri-
vate bank, Speiser, Gutzwiller u. Co., which founded the first investment
fund management company in Europe a few years later.35 Deliberations
that day give strong evidence of board members’ unequal circumstances.
President Peter Wagner remarked that the municipal government in Basel
had donated 3000 CHF and expected others to do the same; the German
government, thanks to his efforts, had donated 1000 CHF. Merian asked
members to emulate Wagner in requesting funds from their national
governments and attracting members in their respective countries. André
Pirro apologized that there were so few French members and suggested
holding their next meeting in Paris, and Gaetano Cesari said “propaganda”
in La Rassegna musicale had not been successful. Edward Dent reported
that “There are very few friends of musicology in England, the journals
are not read,” but that he hoped when he became president of the Royal
Music Association in November things would improve. Rudolph von
Ficker thought the Austrian government might give something, but was
still recovering financially. Knud Jeppesen hoped the Danish government
would be interested, Albert Smijers said the Dutch government didn’t
know what musicology was, Higinio Anglés thought only Catalonia might
show interest (but received praise for recruiting many Spanish members),
and Zdenek Nejedly offered 20 Reichsmark from the Czech Republic (see
“I. Vorstandssitzung” 1928). A year later, Wagner announced at the annual
meeting in Paris that the city of Basel, the German and French govern-
ments, and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation had all funded the
society and the Belgian government was also thinking of offering support
(“II.  Vorstandssitzung” 1929). This became something of a familiar pat-
tern: at the third meeting of the IGMw board in Liège on August 30, 1930,
Speiser-Riggenbach reported that Germany, France, Belgium, and Austria
had given small one-time subventions, and that the city of Basel planned to
give 3000 CHF/year and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation $200/
year (“III. Vorstandssitzung” 1930).36
The national jostling for power inherent in the IGMw’s form of inter-
nationalism played out most dramatically in its publications. Adler was
eager from the start to create a collective bibliography of all writings on

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music, reviving the IMG’s pre-war planned project of a Corpus Scriptorum

de Musica.37 He hoped the journal he envisioned would be available to all
IGMw members who paid dues. In other words, it would be limited to
a paying elite, constituting an initial form of exclusive academic publica-
tion. Members of the board determined that the society’s business should
be conducted and its journals published in five languages: German,
English, French, Italian, and Latin.38 They thought their bulletin should
appear in German and French, however, to make it “linguistically neutral”
(“I.  Vorstandssitzung”  1928).39 Although the question of languages was
quickly resolved, debates about the journal—which eventually became
Acta Musicologica—remained fraught. Board members worried about how
the new international journal might negatively affect subscriptions for,
and content of, the national journals (see Wolf 1929). Problems also oc-
curred when the IGMw tried to break its contract with Breitkopf & Härtel
in 1934.40
With the establishment of the Committee on Musicology of the ACLS,
Waldo Leland, Carl Engel, and a small coterie of their trusted friends
brought the spirit of the IGMw to the United States, laying the foundation
for an internationally recognized, US-based discipline of musicology. They
and others applied what they had learned from the model of international-
ism established by the IGMw to centralize and nationalize musicological
research in the United States—a strategy that had lasting consequences for
how the profession of musicology developed there.

Carving Out Scholarly Territory: The Foundation of the American

Musicological Society

The activities of the IGMw and Committee on Musicology of the ACLS

seem to have stirred musicological interest more broadly among a group
of friends living mostly on the East Coast of the United States. On January
29, 1930, about six months after the ACLS Committee’s first meeting,
Henry Cowell, Otto Kinkeldey, John Redfield, Lazare Saminsky, Joseph
Schillinger, Charles Seeger, and Joseph Yasser met to plan the New York
Musicological Society (NYMS), with May de Forest serving as their secre-
tary. Thomas Washington Talley—potentially the first African American
in the society—and an unidentified individual named “Frace” attended as
guests.41 The men who met that day envisioned this society from the start
as the “nucleus” for a national society they temporarily postponed. Their
perspective, like that of members on the ACLS committee, was interna-
tionalist: they saw the NYMS as a continuation of the disbanded American
Section of the original IMG. Seeger reported in the society’s first bulletin
that Waldo Selden Pratt and O. G. Sonneck had attempted in vain to revive

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that society after World War I, but interest had lagged, with Sonneck be-
coming before his death “pessimistic in regard to the outlook in America”
(NYMS 1931). Now, they were ready to try again.
The NYMS, like the IGMw upon which it was partly modeled, relied
for its existence on the generosity of wealthy patrons, in this case Blanche
Wetherill Walton, whose husband worked for Edward De Coppet. A pa-
tron of the arts and founder of the Flonzaley Quartet, De Coppet owned
a company, De Coppet and Doremus, that managed trading on the New
York Stock Exchange. Stock market trading, even in the depression, made
the professionalization of musicology possible by enabling leisure time and
a venue for musicological pursuits. Members of the NYMS and AMS later
tended to obscure these material foundations and the financial capital that
enabled the development of musicological expertise by historically ignor-
ing these patrons. Although Blanche Walton “aided housed, fed, + even
nursed (one or all things) very many struggling, poor, starving, sick musi-
cians + composers who might never have arrived without her help,” as well
as supported the AMS, provided her home at 25 Washington Square North
in New York City as a venue for its first meetings, and funded publications
until her fortune failed in the 1930s, she has been neglected and left unac-
knowledged in the organization to the present day.42
At first, members of the NYMS envisioned musicology as a broad dis-
cipline free of power struggles or hierarchies; they appeared determined to
cast a wide net. Although Seeger reported in the first Bulletin that members
preferred systematic over historical musicology, “stressing speculative and
experimental methods in close liaison with the vanguard of the living art of
music,” he also noted that they saw their group as the “nucleus for a National
Society” that would be broad enough “to allow the organization of local
groups upon a variety of subjects as sections of the parent society, without
dominance by anyone” (NYMS 1931). Seeger loosely encouraged five chief
sections to coexist: “(1) science, (2) criticism, (3) history, (4) bibliography,
[and] (5) comparative musicology.” The fourth was already underway with
the “American Music Librarians Association,” Seeger noted, and the fifth
promised “a fast and healthy development owing to the tardy but sure
awakening of a widespread interest in exotic or non-European musics.” A
year later, members tried to ensconce this plurality in their constitution by
specifying that the object of the society was “the encouragement of original
research of a musicological nature” (NYMS 1932). They planned to focus
on meetings, the advancement of research, education, and publications.
Yet the NYMS’s lecture series gives a different impression of its mem-
bers’ scholarly magnanimity (see Appendix I). There, members’ personal
preferences and connections, as well as financial, educational, racial, gen-

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dered, and social privilege came strongly to the fore. Papers given in the
first and second seasons, 1930 and 1931, focused on what today would be
considered a global perspective on music theory, or systematic musicol-
ogy, with evidence of members’ connections to the New School for Social
Research. Members found some approaches more suitable to musicology.
Seeger noted, for example, that when Mr. and Mrs. Sarat Lahiri came to
demonstrate “rhythmic features of the music of modern India” on March
20, 1931 the event “was of musical, but not of musicological interest”
(NYMS 1932).43 He likewise considered Adolph Weiss’s presentation on “A
Comprehensive View of the Schönbergian Technic” on April 27, 1931 to
be “adequate, but exception was taken to the use of the word ‘systematic’ in
connection with the subject.”
In designing their speaker series, members of the NYMS seemed to
rely on the circumstantial coincidence of who happened to be in New York
City at the time, or who might enjoy a personal connection with them—the
main criterion for selection being that the guest had to be a music scholar
of some sort. In its first year, for example, the NYMS worked closely with
the “Russian Group of Musicologists of New York City,” which included
Russian and Russian-Jewish émigré composers, teachers, and scholars
who met regularly to explore the science of harmony, as well as Russian,
Ukrainian, and Jewish music (see Appendix I).44 But by the second season
(1931–32), the connection with the Russian émigrés—and with Jewish
music— appears to have waned. At that time members considered inviting
guests ranging from Percival Robson Kirby—a Scottish-born professor of
music at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who developed a
colonial form of the study of the music of South Africa—and Mr. Gerald F.
Warburg—a professional cellist who studied Schenkerian analysis and was
the son of the philanthropist Felix M. Warburg.45 Warburg, Seeger noted in
the Bulletin, had “established a studio for experiment in the development
of new art forms” in New York City, and “specific instruments have been
constructed for the promotion of theoretical as well as of creative work”
(NYMS 1932). Joseph Schillinger—a close friend of the society—was run-
ning the activities with Warburg and Mary Ellen Bute.46 Bute also served
as secretary of the NYMS; she was the fourth woman after May de Forest,
Helen Heffron Roberts, and Blanche Walton to be welcome there, albeit in
a limited capacity.
The NYMS’s speaker series also gives evidence of a disjuncture between
systematic and comparative approaches. This incongruence was evident
as well in the publication series, “The American Library of Musicology,”
funded by Blanche Walton and incorporated in spring 1932. Designed to
include “all the important musicological classics with original text and

20
 Tamara Levitz

English translation side by side” and “original works by Americans,” the

series launched with Joseph Yasser’s (1932) A Theory of Evolving Tonality,
and continued in 1933 with Helen Heffron Roberts’s (1933) Form in
Primitive Music: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Melodic Form
of Some Ancient California Indian Songs.47 Schillinger’s “Science of Musical
Composition” was postponed, however, because of the general economic
crisis, and the series soon collapsed into a morass of legal disputes and
distributional nightmares.48
In the fourth and final season of the NYMS speaker series, historical
musicology suddenly became more dominant with the arrival of Harold
Spivacke and Carleton Sprague Smith (joining Kinkeldey, who had been
there from the start). Seemingly trying to insert historical musicology into
the society’s narrative about itself, Spivacke gave a talk on April 29, 1934
about “The Relationship between Systematic and Historical Musicology,”
during which he “expressed the hope that the two branches may be brought
closer together.” Spivacke had been elected secretary of the society and
“charged with the special task of formulating a basis upon which a National
Musicological Society could be founded.”49 This was the first indication
that the historical musicologists were about to take over (NYMS, 1933–34).
In the same years that the NYMS was establishing itself, a small group
of comparativists decided to form their own society. Seeger had mentioned
in the first NYMS Bulletin in 1931 that plans were in the works to form a
“Society for Research in Non-European Musics” to work with the Gesellschaft
zur Erforschung der Musik des Orients in Berlin. He felt the preservation of
phonographs would be its first important task and that a Phonogrammic
Archive needed to be established in the US comparable to those in Berlin,
Vienna, Hamburg, Paris, Moscow, and Leningrad. In 1933, Dorothy Lawton,
Helen Heffron Roberts, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, Harold Spivacke,
and George Herzog established the American Society for Comparative
Musicology (ASCM) in close association with Erich von Hornbostel, Robert
Lachman, and the Berlin institutes.50 Blanche Walton opened up her home to
the comparativists, too, but they were so scattered geographically they found
few opportunities to meet.51 Three patrons supported the society as “cor-
responding members” with donations of more than $10: Roberts, Walton,
and Mary C. Wheelwright. The list of members compiled by Spivacke in
1933–34 included the names of 49 scholars, 21 of them women, who tradi-
tionally had more access to careers as folk song collectors than as university
professors. It also included members from Bulgaria, China, and Hawaii (see
Appendix II). Like their colleagues in Berlin, these comparativists had little
support within the academy and few financial or administrative resources
for establishing an international society (see Christensen 1991).

21
 Current Musicology

The ASCM dedicated itself to aiding the Gesellschaft für Vergleichende

Musikwissenschaft in Berlin, which was under extreme duress with the rise
of the Nazis. In the constitution finalized in 1933, members stated that the
object of the society was “To advance musicology by the encouragement
of research into the music of all peoples, primitive and civilized, Oriental
and Occidental, for the purpose of preserving it and making it accessible
to all for comparative study.”52 They aimed to collect phonographs, manu-
scripts, instruments, books, and recordings, and to establish phonogram
archives in the US. They also hoped to release records, publish a bulletin,
and finance expeditions. The bifurcation of US musicology into historical
and comparative halves at this moment in its history left a lasting mark
on the nation’s musicological psyche: recordings and recording technol-
ogy, preservation, phonograph collections, and non-academic institutes
became associated with comparativists or folklorists, while university cur-
ricula and institutional power in higher education became associated with
historical musicology.
Tensions between the subdisciplines represented in the NYMS may
have led its members to call the meeting at Blanche Walton’s home on June
3, 1934 to dissolve their local society and form a new one—the American
Musicological Association (AMA), later to become the American
Musicological Society (AMS). Those attending included Carl Engel, George
Dickinson, Gustave Reese, Joseph Schillinger, Charles Seeger, Harold
Spivacke, W. Oliver Strunk, and Joseph Yasser, with Helen Heffron Roberts
as a non-voting guest (“Minutes” 1934a).53 Seeger, as chair of the NYMS’s
Executive Committee, read a prepared statement about why he and his
colleagues thought their society should be dissolved and replaced; they
wanted to reorganize on a national scale. All those present unanimously
agreed to motions to nominate and elect seven of their eight members
(everybody except Schillinger) to serve on the Organizing Committee of
the new society with Dickinson as chair. They also nominated and elected
Reese as their secretary and Kinkeldey as their president. Kinkeldey be-
longed to their elite, was a member of multiple exclusive clubs, including
the Andiron club, and actively traded with his brothers on the stock market.
Since 1930, he had also held the first professorship in musicology in the
United States, as well as a job as head librarian at Cornell University. And
he brought with him an international perspective: like Engel, he became a
member of the IGMw board (in 1933), knew Edward Dent, and regularly
attended European meetings (see, e.g., Dent 1938).
Helen Heffron Roberts attended this first meeting as secretary and rep-
resentative of the ASCM, with the goal of brokering some kind of associa-
tion between the two societies. Two weeks later, at a second meeting, mem-

22
 Tamara Levitz

bers of the AMA/AMS Organizing Committee formally requested Roberts

discuss such a merger with the ASCM, but when she got back to them later
that summer, they hedged (“Minutes” 1934b). At their second meeting on
September 15, 1934, they deferred any motion on the issue “until after the
taking of definite action on the report of the Publication Committee.”54 At
the same meeting, they instructed the Constitution Committee to change
the name of the organization to the “American Musicological Society” and
to incorporate an article specifying that: “The object of the society shall be
the advancement of research in the various fields of music as a branch of
learning” (“Minutes” 1934c). Although this remains the core of the mission
statement of the AMS to the present day, at the time it may have constituted
an attempt on the part of a small group of historical musicologists to take
over and exclude others.
Or, at least, Roberts seems to have read it this way. When she heard of
the Organizing Committee’s plans, she expressed concern to Reese about
how the group was becoming a society rather than an association, because
of how this would affect comparative musicology. She worried that if the
ASCM dissolved, Robert Lachmann in Berlin would lose crucial support
for the Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (Roberts 1934a).
She also complained bitterly to Lachman in Berlin about how the historical
musicologists had acted. It is worth quoting her letter to Lachman at length
because it gives striking and rare insight into the financial need that drove
competition between the emerging subdisciplines of music scholarship in
the United States in the 1930s, and into how acrimonious the split between
comparative and historical musicology had been:

Now for the long promised news about the new society [the AMS]. An
organizing meeting was held in New York last spring by about nine in-
dividuals and the sense then was to make it the American Musicological
Association. Most of the members present at the meetings were dyed-
in-the-wool historical musicologists and Dr. Kinkeldey (who is one of
them, but not present) was elected president. It was understood at that
time by some of us, at least, that this association would include in a larger
membership, the memberships of various societies like the comparative
and the society of acousticians. [Added in pen here: “and like before this
would materially increase subscriptions to the Zeitschr (Zeitschrift für
Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft)]. . . . I am sorry to say that some of these
historical musicologists never responded in any way to our invitation
[in pen: “two years ago”] to join the comparative society. . . . I have won-
dered if they refrained from joining because they belonged to the N.Y.
Musicological society and resented our organizing on a national basis
before they did, and if they were determined to stand back as a bloc. At
any rate, last spring they disbanded the old society and formed the new
one, of national scope, and after the initial [sic] meeting, they completely

23
 Current Musicology

changed the sense of the society they organized at the Spring meeting
making it a society instead of an association, stiffening up on member-
ship requirements, and in many ways springing a complete surprise on
us who had not been present at the intervening committee meetings.
Evidently the historical and not the comparative aspect of musicology
is still to be very much in evidence, though I believe they will some day
have to admit that the latter is the most important and all-embracing
and give way. Those of us who had the comparative musicology at heart,
however, did not make a scene at the meeting. After all, they have a right
to organize what they choose, though really they had no right to change
what was so clearly set forth last Spring without a vote. However, it was
so far done, and nothing much to be gained by holding out against them,
that those of us who disagreed silently accepted the situation, or almost
so. There is a profession of cordiality to comparative musicology, and a
not too clear indication that it will not be completely crowded out. Aside
from this being a powerful group, they have arranged, through Mr. Engel
and Mr. Reese, to have the Musical Quarterly as the official medium for
short papers by giving over to the society 100 pages a year, and hope
to finance later, still larger separate publications. So they have a set-up
which is much stronger than ours. And the close similarity of names
is going to be unfortunate. Of course, as far as the American Soc. For
Comp. Mus. [ASCM] is concerned, we never had the membership of
those I have mentioned, but what is a real menace to our society’s life is
the fact that a lot of our people have also been asked to join this one, and
have. Naturally, there is more prestige for them at present. Most of these
people are poor, too poor to belong to both, or they may think they are.
Membership in each is $3.00 a year, some very fine quarterlies are is-
sued, or even monthly magazines, gorgeously printed and illustrated. Of
course it could never be done without large subscription lists and strong
backing, but people often do not consider that. (Roberts 1934c)

Board members of the AMS tried to maintain cordial relations with the
ASCM after this historic break by stipulating in their bylaws that vice
presidents had to be chosen from different branches of musicology, and
by nominating Roberts and others as members-at-large or for officer posi-
tions (which they did not obtain).55 But the damage had been done.56
By failing to establish a solid professional association with an indepen-
dent society for comparative musicology, the AMS lost the membership
and contributions of many women studying folk music, as well as input of
scholars studying the music of the Southwest and Mexico, and also work-
ing outside the US and Europe. Roberts valiantly attempted to keep the
ASCM afloat after this rupture, but received little help (see Frisbie 1991).
The situation became dire in 1936, when the German society collapsed and
Seeger attempted to transfer its activities to the United States—an action
that failed to gain traction.57 Roberts tried to help in reorganizing the soci-
ety and having Elma Loines elected to the Council “as a safeguard against

24
 Tamara Levitz

high-handedness on the part of one or two members.” Unfortunately, she

wrote to Loines, Otto Ortmann and Joseph Yasser were elected instead at
the annual meeting.58 Roberts’s many efforts to integrate women, broaden
the society’s base, establish comparative musicology in the university
and internationally, and help her endangered and persecuted German-
Jewish colleges were in vain, and by 1937 the ASCM had for all intents
and purposes ceased to exist, with its members—when they did continue
their association with professional musical life—sometimes finding their
place in the AMS. This led to a situation in which, I speculate, comparative
musicologists and other music experts may have started to feel an amor-
phous sense of how they belonged to the ruling discipline of “musicology.”
In spring 1936 Yale cut off Roberts’s funding and she left academia. She
moved to North Carolina to take care of her father and devote herself to
horticulture.59
Until the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) was founded in 1955—
in other words for twenty-one years—historical musicologists defined
themselves within a framework that included comparative musicology,
acoustics, music theory, composition, systematic musicology, and other
subdisciplines. The historical musicologists allowed scholars working in
these subdisciplines to assert varying degrees of importance in their soci-
ety, while working toward strengthening their own professional privilege
and power. The dynamic they established in these years relied on the lack
of general recognition in the United States for music theory, comparative
musicology, and other subdisciplines as independent scholarly profes-
sions. During this period and for an extremely long time (well into the
1960s, when intense professionalization across the humanities in the US
narrowed the playing field), the AMS was not a society dedicated solely
to the study of Western classical music, although an aggressively stubborn
myth persists in US musicology that it was. In the early years, musicolo-
gists studied non-Western music, popular music, and jazz.
The first Organizing Committee of the AMS wanted to distinguish its
society not only from the ASCM and comparative musicology, but also
from the Music Teachers’ National Association (MTNA)—a large, estab-
lished organization with a sturdy membership, strong institutional affilia-
tions, and an illustrious tradition of supporting the scholarly study of mu-
sic. In the early years, AMS members seemed to view the MTNA in general
as their more recognized and organized but intellectually impoverished
cousin, although several were members of both organizations. At their first
meeting on June 21, 1934, members of the Organizing Committee planned
to discuss whether they should affiliate with the MTNA, Gesellschaft für
Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, and/or IGMw, and whether they should

25
 Current Musicology

publish in The Musical Quarterly, MTNA proceedings, or a new journal.

They decided they would affiliate only with the IGMw and publish only
through The Musical Quarterly (“Minutes” 1934b).60 Although they then
instructed the Constitution Committee to make sure there would be no
association with the MTNA, they held onto the possibility of holding their
annual meetings jointly with that association as a way of attracting partici-
pants and building their membership.
The decision to share conference space with the MTNA forced the mu-
sicologists to distinguish themselves professionally from music educators
and to specify the unique object of their study. As a consequence, many of
the most vital debates on the object and future of musicology occurred at
the MTNA annual meetings in these years.61 In 1936, Kinkeldey responded
positively to an invitation from the president of the MTNA, Earl V. Moore,
to plan a joint meeting in Chicago because he liked how working with the
much bigger MTNA had brought out members “who came from long dis-
tances” in the past (quoted in Reese 1936a).62 At the same time, Kinkeldey
thought the additional AMS session would have to “be more technical
papers, without interference between interests of the MTNA and AMS”
(quoted in Dickinson 1936).63 At the conference, president Moore praised
the collaboration between the two societies in his opening remarks. At
the general session jointly with the AMS, Spivacke, Ortmann, Donald M.
Ferguson, Roberts and others explored the relationships between musi-
cology and other subdisciplines and presented historical work (“Official
Program” 1936).
A year later, when preparing another joint meeting, Moore wrote
Engel that he wanted to work out the relationship between the two asso-
ciations “in the most amicable manner,” and that maybe their presidents,
secretaries, and treasurers should meet to discuss the issues. The AMS’s in-
volvement caused him as president to want to distinguish the pedagogical
aspect of the MTNA more than previously. Given the fine selection of AMS
papers, Moore wrote Engel, “we have given more attention in the M.T.N.A.
meetings to demonstrations and discussions of problems connected with
teaching rather than research.” He also noted that MTNA members had
submitted papers in musicology “but I have declined to accept them in
view of the fine series which you have prepared” (Moore 1937). During
the conference, members of the MTNA, NASM, AMS, and Phi Mu Alpha
visited the White House to meet with Eleanor Roosevelt—the prestige of
the MTNA having rubbed off on the ambitious but fledgling new profes-
sion of musicology (“Official Program” 1937).
This pattern of association and joint annual conferences with the
MTNA continued for many years, until the AMS was able to establish

26
 Tamara Levitz

itself after World War II. The demise of the relationship at that time had
a harrowing impact on the profession. As the AMS gradually severed its
ties to the MTNA, it lost the potential membership and collaboration of
a wide range of music teachers—many of them women—across the coun-
try.64 They also lost the intrinsic connection between their enterprise and
music pedagogy, as well as access to established institutional mechanisms
for insuring curricular norms and change. I do not mean to overemphasize
this shift away from pedagogy, given many musicologists remained active
in the MTNA for years, and that other organizations, mechanisms, and
strategies emerged to keep musicologists engaged in teaching. But I think
the early musicologists’ desire to distinguish themselves from music teach-
ers gave the discipline its characteristic idealist positionality and approach
to curricular change.
The AMS’s separation from the MTNA weakened its material and
practical foundation. Musicology became a profession concerned with
relatively esoteric knowledge about music, somewhat untethered from
mandatory requirements, assessment, or accreditation, and with an elusive
relation as a discipline to labor relations and material history. Musicologists
in the AMS could focus on the music itself because of their society’s finan-
cial independence, which they gradually secured by appealing to the be-
nevolence of rich benefactors, establishing an increasingly refined system
of membership dues, achieving nonprofit status, and applying for grants
from private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie
Corporation. In spite of their disciplinary feelings of superiority, however,
worries about being compared to colleagues in the MTNA persisted, caus-
ing AMS members to exaggerate their distinction. In 1969, Paul Henry
Lang could still write William S. Newman, for example, that he felt grate-
ful that “we no longer give the appearance of being a poor relation of the
MTNA” (Lang 1969).

The ACLS Committee on Musicology as a Laboratory for

Inventing the Profession of Musicology in the United States

During these years, as the AMS gradually separated from the ASCM and
the MTNA, a small group of scholars worked assiduously in privileged
circumstances within the context of the Committee on Musicology of the
ACLS to develop the US profession of musicology. That committee’s at-
tempts to create a profession out of what had been until then a diffuse
and inchoate plurality of programs and resources related to music study in
the United States distinguished how musicology developed as a discipline
there from how it had developed in different countries in Europe since the
nineteenth century. Although the ACLS Committee on Musicology and

27
 Current Musicology

the AMS sometimes shared board members, they differed in their goals,
and the existence of the former did not assure the recognition of the latter.
Minutes of the ACLS Committee on Musicology’s annual meetings from
1935 to 1939 (with the exception of 1936, when no meeting took place),
memos, peer evaluations, and correspondence give evidence of the many
hours of largely unpaid labor its members devoted to inventing a disci-
pline “in principle” and allegedly from scratch. They depended for their
work on the benevolence of private organizations such as the Carnegie and
Rockefeller Foundations, and they received no governmental support. This
gave them considerable freedom: as experts, they were not really account-
able to anybody.
Otto Kinkeldey’s vision for musicology dominated in the ACLS after
1935, when he became chair of the Committee on Musicology, which then
became more active again after a five-year period of minimal activity.65 His
team included Jean Beck, Glen Haydon, George Herzog, Otto Ortmann,
and Oliver Stunk. The constellation of careers these men represented—
historical musicologist, librarian, scientist, comparativist, French-born
Medievalist—says a great deal about how members of the ACLS under-
stood musicology, namely as a discipline led by a broad range of scholars
who “knew” the field and emulated “international” models of knowledge
production. It also demonstrates that even as the AMS narrowed its schol-
arly scope, the Committee on Musicology of the ACLS sustained a broader
vision.
The ACLS Committee on Musicology continued to embrace an in-
ternationalist stance after Kinkeldey became chair. Waldo Leland had at-
tended the seventeenth plenary session of the International Committee on
Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Geneva on August 8,
1935, and the influence of that international body on the Committee on
Musicology’s activities remained palpable (see International Committee
1935). But rather than, like the AMS, aiming to represent the United
States in an international organization that established contact between
national societies devoted to musicology (the IGMw), the Committee on
Musicology hoped to gather information on US musical practices, archives,
recordings, and scholarly literature to contribute to the League of Nations’s
Commission Internationale des Arts Populaires.66
Since its founding in 1929, the Committee on Musicology’s primary
goal had been to establish the discipline of musicology in the US. In its
first year of operations, the ACLS had commissioned Oliver Strunk to con-
duct an inquiry into the “state and resources of musicology in the United
States for the information and guidance of the committee in planning its
future activities” (Strunk 1932, 5). With the help of Peter W. Dykema,

28
 Tamara Levitz

Otto Kinkeldey, George S. Dickinson, and the National Bureau for the
Advancement of Music, Strunk had completed his report on library re-
sources by December 1929, and on musicology by November 1931. He
had discovered only three graduate course offerings in musicology in the
fifty schools he studied: Kinkeldey’s “Seminar in Musicology” for gradu-
ate students at Cornell, Jean Beck’s “Seminar in Medieval Musicology”
at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduate courses in paleography
and musicology (as part of a music theory sequence called “Homophonic
Forms and Musicology”) at the Eastman School of Music. He had also
noted up-and-coming developments at Vassar, New York University, and
the University of Michigan. The schools singled out in this report (and
others) gained a prestige in the musicological community that they have
retained to the present day. But in spite of these hopeful developments,
Strunk emphasized that musicology was not recognized in the United
States; Harvard, for example, had not considered it on equal footing with
theory and composition (Strunk 1932, 7–10).
In his report, Strunk made the first step toward professionalizing the
discipline by separating musicology from music appreciation courses—
confirming a distinction Carl Engel had made in an article on the discipline
in The Musical Quarterly (Engel 1925, which Strunk cited). Engel had urged
educators to think of musicology as defined by Guido Adler as a science
and to reject music appreciation. “Imagine a university,” he wrote, “devis-
ing courses in law for non-practicing, non-professional students of law!”
(Engel 1925, 620). Engel had also recommended a precise list of courses he
had taken in musicology, music psychology, and comparative musicology
in Berlin and Vienna as models for the new US discipline. He had listed
“international” (IGMw and not German) musicologists he admired.
Building on Strunk’s work, members of the Committee on Musicology
cobbled together a discipline one bureaucratic step at a time by follow-
ing protocol, writing memos, and generating reports.67 They focused on
specific strategies: defining the scope of the discipline and documenting
its activities and progress, preserving primary sources and research mate-
rials, designing curriculum, and building up a trustworthy personnel. In
preparation for the first meeting with Kinkeldey as chair in 1935, secretary
Donald Goodchild (1935a) sent committee members an agenda with items
he hoped would convince the council to “seek support for a general pro-
gram in Musicology” even though it could not currently fund any projects.
He wanted the committee to decide whether it would concern itself “with
all phases of musicological studies—historical, comparative, psychological,
aesthetics, acoustic, etc.,” or rather concentrate on the “needs and facilities”
of specific areas. He hoped the committee would address material ques-

29
 Current Musicology

tions (specifically, the location, preservation, and collection of recordings

of “primitive” and folk music), instruction (following on Strunk’s survey),
personnel (who would practice musicology), and publications, especially
for subdisciplines that lacked a forum for written work. He proposed a
tentative list of members of the field (Appendix III), but then asked how
“inclusive” it should be. He also proposed an annual or biannual report,
duplicating European sources and making them available in the United
States for the study of Medieval music, locating US sources for study-
ing music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making a list of
instruments in US collections, finding sources for the study of US music,
and extending facilities for re-recording phonograph cylinder collections
(Goodchild 1935b).68
At the meeting itself on June 15, 1935, committee members decided to
include as part of their mandate all fields of study related to musicology,
taking into account that some (like acoustics) already had well-established
journals (“American Council” 1935). They thought of organizing a musi-
cology conference to explore their object of study. They also considered
how they would begin surveying and cataloguing all musicological source
material available in collections in the United States. They proposed an
annual or biannual bulletin on “the progress of musicological studies in the
United States,” modeled on the bulletin published by James F. Willard for
the Medieval Academy of America.69
Yet even at this first meeting, members of the Committee on Musicology
found it difficult to reconcile their all-encompassing view of what musi-
cology should be with plans for a viable university curriculum. Although
they had little power to implement such a curriculum anyway, this did not
stop them from trying. Glen Haydon thought the committee should be
advising university administrators on how to form musicology depart-
ments, and suggested sending those administrators Kinkeldey’s articles on
“American Higher Music Education Compared to That in Europe” (1934a)
and “Musicology in American Colleges and Universities” (1934b) to that
end.70 The committee listened to his suggestions and asked him to prepare
a model curriculum for their next meeting. At that meeting, on June 24,
1937, Haydon presented the curriculum at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, which was based on the model of a Bachelor of Arts rather
than Bachelor of Music (“American Council” 1937). At the same meeting,
Strunk gave a preliminary report from the Committee on Graduate Study
in Music of the National Association of Music and the MTNA on require-
ments for admission into a graduate program in musicology, which stipu-
lated that students had to complete a four-year degree. Recommendations
included the “usual” study of English literature and composition, reading

30
 Tamara Levitz

a foreign language, “skills and capabilities” in western theory and music

history, enough pianistic ability to sight-read Haydn string quarters and
Bach chorales in the original clefs, and focused “historical, philosophical,
or scientific” preparation for graduate work. These requirements built on
long-standing traditions of music education in the United States, and did
not take into account the Committee on Musicology’s potential new per-
spectives. I think this lack of coordination between curriculum plans and
conceptual understandings of the discipline—exacerbated by the lack of
organized institutional coordination between the ACLS and institutions
of higher education in the United States—became characteristic of US
musicology.
Members of the Committee on Musicology also hoped to establish
musicology in the United States by creating opportunities for, and fund-
ing, musicological research. At the 1935 meeting, Kinkeldey had expressed
concerns about students having to study in Europe because of lack of re-
search possibilities at home. He had suggested establishing a program at the
Library of Congress to train students in the study of “American music,” and
scholarships to assist doctoral students in doing research at US libraries
(“American Council” 1935). When the Committee on Musicology received
$1500 to implement such a grant program in 1936, its members decided
to distribute summer fellowships of approximately $300 each to gradu-
ate students for two months of archival research at libraries in the United
States, primarily the Library of Congress (Goodchild 1936a, 1936b).71 This
model of research funding became foundational for the economy of US
musicology as a profession.
Having initiated their program of summer fellowships, members of the
Committee on Musicology realized they would need to establish criteria
for evaluating applications. The assessment practice they established was
based on determining expertise based on a person’s stature in the field—a
model that embedded knowledge production in a harrowing power hierar-
chy and shaped how principles of free speech developed in the profession.
They decided students would not be able to apply on their own, but rather
would have to be nominated by one of the few scholars in the country
who were training musicologists. The playing field was astonishingly small,
and, at first, committee members seemed to think it might consist only of
themselves. Goodchild wasn’t so sure. He wrote Kinkeldey that whereas
he was confident the members “covered the field pretty well,” he thought
they should still consider asking scholars at institutions not represented
on their committee to nominate candidates as well (Goodchild 1936a).72
They ultimately asked Paul Henry Lang at Columbia, Hugo Leichtentritt
at Harvard, and Charles Fox at Eastman to suggest candidates for summer

31
 Current Musicology

fellowships (Goodchild 1936b). On June 3, 1936, Goodchild sent com-

mittee members the four nominations (in the form of brief evaluations
of projects and rudimentary biographies with information about whether
candidates were married or not) to vote upon. Two years later, members
again struggled to find competent musicologists to nominate candidates
(Goodchild 1936c). When Harold Spivacke recommended they consult
Earl V. Moore, Goodchild questioned this and asked Kinkeldey for advice.
“Like you,” Kinkeldey responded, “I was not aware that the University of
Michigan had anyone of real academic caliber for musicological studies”
(Goodchild 1938d; Kinkeldey 1938b).73
The Committee on Musicology stepped up its efforts to found a pro-
fession of musicology in the United States after February 1, 1938, when
the Carnegie Foundation awarded it $10,000 over three years, with an-
nual grants of $4000, $3000, and $3000 for expenses and “grants-in-aid”
(Goodchild 1938a, 1938b, 1938c). Leland told committee members at their
annual meeting on April 16, 1938 that the Council had tended to look on
“musicology as a relatively underworked field in need of systematic devel-
opment,” but that he was eager to see that change. He advised them to work
on gathering information, cataloguing materials, funding research, and
making scholarship available to the public. The committee responded by
creating two subcommittees: the first, chaired by Strunk, to deal with cata-
loguing and the second, chaired by Haydon, devoted to “ways and means
for the improvement of the academic quality of curricula and degrees in
musicology” (“Committee” 1938; Leland 1938; Kinkeldey 1938a, 1938c).
Once the new funding arrived, the Committee on Musicology set to
work updating a report it had in progress on publication and research
in musicology and “allied fields” from 1932–38 (Daugherty 1938).74 This
was to be the first of what members hoped would be an annual bulletin,
and it included names of journals, individuals, departments of instruc-
tion, libraries, papers read, grants, and publications in musicology. In his
introduction to the freely-distributed, mimeographed document from
1938, D. H. Daugherty (1938) noted that the committee had assembled
the information by sending a questionnaire to “persons assumed to be in-
terested in musicological scholarship” (1), based on a list he had created of
institutions where at least one person taught who was worthy of inclusion
(see Appendix IV).75 This approach created a hierarchy of institutions of
musicological higher learning that would later be hard to dismantle. He
reached out to 250 people, including “teachers in colleges, universities,
and schools of music; music librarians; [and] independent scholars,” but
excluding those who taught music education or theory, which he and the
committee considered “vocational rather than scientific” (2). Herzog and

32
 Tamara Levitz

other advisors assured that the list included many South American articles,
but unfortunately cited several of them as appearing in the Boletín Latino-
Americano de Música when they did not. Committee members also did
not read all the materials they received or discovered, and acknowledged
that their bibliography was thus probably uneven in quality (Daugherty
1938, 1–3).76 Two years later, the committee published its first official bul-
letin, covering the period from October 1, 1938 to September 30, 1939
(Daugherty 1940). This time, they listed the scholars they had consulted,
among them Frances Densmore, Eleanor Hague, and Lota M. Spell—the
latter two of whom worked on Spanish-American and Southwest music.
The arbitrary bibliographic method, sloppiness, and fluctuating rules of
inclusion in this and other bulletins caused the content of the new field of
musicology to become somewhat flexible and random, depending princi-
pally on the coincidence of scholarship at hand, and who was compiling
the list.
The Committee on Musicology used some of the money it received
from the Carnegie Corporation after 1938 to fund the AMS, which started
applying regularly for grants. AMS board members knew that recognition
from the ACLS was crucial to their success. They also knew that in order for
their society to become a member of the ACLS, they needed to prove not
the scholarly worth of musicology as a discipline, but only that they could
conduct their business efficiently and remain financially solvent. Things
started well in 1938, when the ACLS Committee on Musicology awarded the
AMS a first grant of $300 to publish the proceedings of the society’s last an-
nual conference (Reese 1938). But when Engel asked if the AMS was eligible
for membership in the ACLS at the Committee on Musicology’s meeting in
April of that year, Leland had responded that such an application would be
legitimate but that they should wait one or two years because the ACLS was
not currently expanding its membership (“Committee” 1938; Leland 1938;
Kinkeldey 1938a, 1938b). A year later, in 1939, the Committee on Musicology
hesitated to award the AMS $450 to publish its conference proceedings (as
Engel had convinced them to do), because it worried that the 1938 bulletin
of abstracts had not appeared (Reese 1939a, 1939b). A few years later, in
1942, the AMS treasurer reported that the chances of becoming a member
of the ACLS had diminished yet again because the society was in debt as a
result of its international conference and behind in its publications. At that
time, members voted to empower the incoming president to take any steps
necessary to insure their society’s eligibility. The AMS executive responded
by asking each member for a $1 “voluntary contribution” to resolve the soci-
ety’s debt (“Minutes” 1942). The journey toward disciplinary recognition was
long, and the AMS became a constituent member of the ACLS only in 1951.

33
 Current Musicology

Prestige through Exclusivity: Membership Rules in the American

Musicological Society as a Status Profession

Members of the ACLS Committee on Musicology created a public sphere

for musicology by funding research, compiling bibliographies, and sug-
gesting ideas for a standard curriculum. Separated from the daily working
lives of music scholars and teachers in their committee work (but not in
their lives), the tiny, elite group of seven chosen men focused on construct-
ing a discipline in its own image. The AMS, in contrast, required members
for its survival. Its executive board knew that it needed to attract music
scholars from across the country, and that the best way to do this was to
convince them that the profession of musicology was prestigious, and that
belonging to a society representing it would give them a certain status.
Board members lent their society prestige by implementing exclusionary
rules of membership that implied a seniority of expertise. They gradually
transformed musicology into a status profession in which the very act of
belonging became a sign of one’s ability.
In establishing membership rules, members of the AMA/AMS ex-
ecutive at first took their cue from the work already completed by the
NYMS—to which many of them had belonged. They tended to maintain
the distinction, established in the NYMS, between active experts and more
passive guests or listeners. At the first meeting of the NYMS on January 29,
1930—which I discussed earlier in this article— organizers had spoken, for
example, about keeping the membership “small, comprising only men of
active musicological interest as shown either in publication, achievement,
or in the reading of a paper by invitation.” They had resolved to invite Carl
Engel, John Redfield, and Leon Theremin as members, and Joseph Achron,
Leslie Leet, Paul Boepple, Adolph Weiss, Sarat Lahiri, Jacob Weinberg,
Lazare Saminsky, Abraham Wolf Binder, Andre Illiashenko, Wallingford
Riegger, Thomas Washington Talley, Frace Edward J. Stringham, Nicholas
Slonimsky, and “Miss Crawford” (Ruth Crawford Seeger) as guests.
Although Seeger had reported in the Bulletin that, “no particular distinc-
tion was made between the members and the guests,” their decision to
distinguish them in the first place counters this claim (see NYMS 1931). It
is notable that their first Bengali, African American, and female speakers
were among these guests, but not invited to become members.
Within a year of its founding, a subcommittee consisting of Cowell,
Seeger, and Yasser had enshrined such hierarchies in the constitution and
bylaws for the NYMS by proposing two types of membership, based on
a hierarchy of expertise: active members (resident or nonresident) who
demonstrated “original work” and associate members who showed “inter-
est in such work.” Both had to know at least one of the existing members

34
 Tamara Levitz

of the society and to have a general level of awareness of the topics be-
ing discussed—a stipulation that severely narrowed the range of the pool.
Active members could bring guests, but they had to be able to “contribute
to the discussion.” Further, item three in the bylaws stated that “Candidates
for membership must be personally known to a member of the Executive
Committee, who may propose his name, at any meeting of that commit-
tee to be voted upon. More than one dissenting vote shall exclude him.”
Members paid $3, nonresidents $1, and associate members a whopping $5
per year (see NYMS 1932).
Members of the NYMS had revised their thoughts on membership
when they met to dissolve their society in favor of the AMA/AMS on June
3, 1934. Charles Seeger had reported in the Bulletin at that time that the
NYMS’s members had wanted that day to create more formal membership
requirements as they expanded into being a national society. They had en-
visioned two new classes of membership, based on the idea of establishing
an even more exclusive expert elite: “(1) Fellows, who will be drawn from
the leaders in the field,” and “(2) Members, who will be elected by a mem-
bership committee upon a basis of scholarship, interest or activity, to be
determined later” (“Minutes” 1934a). Seeger’s remark that specific mem-
bership rules would “be determined later” proved prescient: for the next
few decades, the changing boards of the AMS would struggle to determine
the rules for membership in their society, while remaining convinced that
such rules were foundational to their purpose (see “The Founding” 1936).
Discussions about membership rules had begun in earnest in the
AMA/AMS when members of the Organizing Committee had met two
weeks later, on June 21, 1934. That day the Organizing Committee had cre-
ated a Constitution Committee made up of Seeger, Yasser, and Reese, and
a Membership Committee made up of Engel, Strunk, and Spivacke, with
Kinkeldey ex officio on both. In the spirit of the NYMS, the Organizing
Committee had instructed the Constitution Committee to draft a constitu-
tion that established a hierarchy of members distinguished by their power
to vote. It had requested that the Constitution Committee: 1) provide for
full members and associate members; 2) provide that only full members
had the right to vote; 3) define qualifications of members and associate
members; 4) not preclude the possibility of creating “fellows”; and 5) figure
out if corresponding members should pay dues by examining the constitu-
tions of other societies.
Members of the Organizing Committee of the new AMA/AMS seemed
most concerned about attracting a respected community of music experts
to their project and obtaining their support. To that end they instructed
the Membership Committee to prepare “a list of prospective members” to

35
 Current Musicology

submit to them. (“Minutes” 1934b). The list compiled in response included

familiar names from the NYMS and had eight names in common with the
ASCM membership list, corroborating Helen Heffron Roberts’s view that
the AMS may have been poaching the ASCM’s members (see Appendix V).
This time the list included 59 names, but, notably, only 3 women—a drastic
reduction from the ASCM list. It is interesting to compare this list also with
that compiled by Donald Goodchild for the ACLS about a year later (see
Appendix III). Goodchild includes a wider range of music critics, compos-
ers, musicologists, comparative musicologists, systematic musicologists,
acousticians, and music theorists from across the country (and including
Nicholas George Julius Ballanta from Sierra Leone), with areas of research
briefly noted. Goodchild lists 114 people, among them 13 women. These
two lists give evidence of the arbitrary criteria implemented to establish
the first US musicological elite: in both cases individuals assigned to create
membership lists simply looked for any experts on music they could find
among the people they knew or had heard about. This means that being
invited to become a member of the AMS depended on one’s personal rela-
tionship to the few chosen men who had founded the organization, or on
one’s general “reputation” among them.
The constitution Seeger, Yasser, and Reese drafted for the AMS in fall
1934 included categories of membership designed to increase the society’s
prestige and encourage philanthropic support. It divided members based
on their financial contributions, place of residency, and voting rights.
Three categories of members were permitted under Article III: 1) regular
voting members, or “persons, organizations, or institutions” who had a
“serious interest in furthering the stated object of the Society”; 2) sustain-
ing members who “contributed $100 or more and did not pay dues”: and
3) non-voting corresponding members, who did not reside in the United
States. This latter category also included “organizations or institutions
of other countries that have made notable contributions to the further-
ing of the stated object of the Society” (“American Musicological Society
Constitution” 1934). At the general meeting of the AMS at the Clubhouse
of the Beethoven Association in New York on December 1, 1934, the as-
sembly established a two-third favorable vote of the executive board to elect
members of all classes. Dayton C. Miller successfully proposed a motion
by which membership requirements would be made stricter (“Minutes”
1934d).
The AMS established its exclusivity not only with stringent membership
rules, but also by adopting an “invitation only” policy for reading papers at
annual meetings. A small program committee consisting of Spivacke and
Dickinson invited colleagues to read papers, for example, at the general

36
 Tamara Levitz

meeting of the AMS on December 29, 1935 in Philadelphia. Conferences

remained insular and focused on the work of executive members and their
friends for some time.
From the start, the AMS executive board was torn between maintain-
ing the AMS as an exclusive club of experts on the one hand, and expand-
ing its enterprise by creating state chapters for local musicologists (a prior-
ity established in Article VIII of their first constitution) on the other. As
the society grew, some members saw a contradiction between these two
approaches, and began to worry about the quality of scholarship in the
society. At the meeting of the executive board at the annual conference in
Chicago in 1936, Dickenson lamented that the standards for membership
had not been sufficiently strict. Leichentritt thought this lack of severity
would do “no harm as long as the controlling positions were kept in the
proper hands, and that the support of as many people as possible was de-
sirable in order to enable the society to widen the scope of its activities.”
This dialogue prompted Kinkeldey to appoint Dickinson and Reese as a
subcommittee to advise on creating a policy on “open or restricted mem-
bership” (“Minutes” 1936).77
The lack of degree programs in musicology in the United States, and
thus of standard certification, also made it difficult to assess expertise
when determining membership eligibility.78 At the Business Meeting on
December 29, 1937 in Pittsburgh, AMS board members sought to resolve
this problem by instigating peer review by experts. They tightened the
application procedure by discussing an amendment to Article III.1 of the
bylaws to require potential members to provide sponsorship recommenda-
tions from two society members, as well as a comprehensive statement.
They also gave themselves increased control as gatekeepers by requiring
under III.3 a positive vote from seven executive board members, rather
than a two-thirds majority (“American Musicological Society Bylaws”
1937). At first Kinkeldey opposed these amendments and asked “to raise
the number of negative votes that would blackball a nominee or applicant
to 5.” Harold Gleason, Otto Ortmann, Leonard Ellinwood, Dayton C.
Miller, and Glen Haydon discussed this point, expressing their concern
about keeping “a high level of membership.” Some members suggested
admitting “graduate students and other interested but not highly qualified
persons.” Engel noted that the AMS wanted to become a member of the
ACLS and should adopt its criteria of membership. Miller reminded every-
body that the ACLS required a PhD and three publications, and that those
without such qualifications were admitted as associate members with lim-
ited privileges. Ruth Hanna and Paul Henry Lang remarked that a PhD in
musicology could not be required because it was awarded too infrequently

37
 Current Musicology

in the United States and that an equivalent for it had to be found. The issue
remained unresolved (“Minutes” 1937).
Kinkeldey and members of the executive board of the AMS exacer-
bated the problem of musicological inbreeding by refusing from the start
to relinquish their power. For quite a while, the list of officers of the AMS
hardly seemed to change. During the Pittsburgh meeting in 1937, Benjamin
F. Swalin requested that there be “more democratic election of officers,”
noting that, according to the bylaws of fall 1934, officers were nominated
by the nominating committee elected by the executive board and elected
by an “absolute majority” of voting members at the annual meeting.79
After considerable discussion between Ellinwood, Spivacke, Engel, and
Kinkeldey, the consensus was that Swalin’s suggestion was “irrelevant,”
given “the election of officers is being handled by a committee whose duty
it is to proceed in a democratic fashion” (“Minutes” 1937). From this point
forward, and to the present day, the AMS has remained an undemocratic
institution, guided by the principle of an executive board electing commit-
tees that nominate candidates for office.80
As the AMS tightened the reins on its membership and became more
exclusive, music educators and administrators moved in the opposite
direction, reaching out to broader constituencies by establishing or con-
tinuing music appreciation courses in their revamped music departments
or humanities divisions. Music appreciation sometimes functioned in
this context as social uplift. Albert Sydney Raubenheimer, who became
Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of
Southern California in 1937, saw it that way. A Boer from South Africa,
Raubenheimer spent his first years at USC giving lectures on the “white
man’s future in Africa” and championing the politics of white dominance
that emerged from the celebration of the “Great Trek” of the Boers in
1938.81 His presence at USC reflected the importance in higher education
at that time of a larger network of South African and US educators and
researchers involved in studying education transnationally through the ef-
forts of the Carnegie Foundation.82 Raubenheimer had studied with Lewis
Terman at Stanford during the years when Terman was developing theories
of Intelligence Tests for gifted children based on biased and prejudiced cri-
teria of racial character.83 Terman was a member of the Human Betterment
Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group founded by E. S. Gosney in
1929, and he was active in sterilization programs in California (Brigham
1923; Gosney et al. 1929; Seiden 1999). It is in this context that Albert
Raubenheimer decided as Dean to integrate two years of music apprecia-
tion into the core curriculum of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences,
at USC in 1938 (Alderman, n.d.).84

38
 Tamara Levitz

The very year Raubenheimer implemented these changes at USC,

concerns about lax criteria for admitting members to the AMS led to a
revolt among its constituency—the paradox of reaching out to a broader
constituency while closing ranks as a profession becoming characteristic of
US musicology. In May 1938, Carleton Sprague Smith circulated a petition
to dissolve the AMS. Davidson told Kinkeldey that he would not sign it
because he was the head of the New England Chapter, but that he agreed
with it, and that he wanted the society to be reorganized and to “com-
mand the respect other societies in the country do.” Davidson thought they
should dissolve the membership and reinstitute the original members as
the core of a new organization. “I would make membership in the soci-
ety entirely dependent on the quality of publication,” he wrote Kinkeldey.
“Unless that line is drawn there is a great danger that many who are not
really eligible but who have the reputation of being scholars will become
members.” Though this would mean “a relatively small membership,” he
continued, “such a Society could properly lay claim to recognition by the
Council of Learned Societies [ACLS] and it would command the respect
which it ought to have.” He suggested there be a separate group of friends
of musicology who were not connected at all with society but consisted
“of musicians and others who had an interest in musical scholarship and a
desire to see it furthered in this country, and whose function would be to
support the official publication of the society” (Davidson 1938).
National chauvinism also played a role in determining membership el-
igibility for some board members. On May 9, 1939, Howard Hanson at the
Eastman School of Music, speaking also for his colleague Charles Warren
Fox, expressed to Reese his concern that six of the eight applications for
membership they had received were from foreigners. Given how difficult it
was, in his view, for “Americans” to be admitted into the society, he thought
they should discuss the matter. “Both Dr. Fox and I believe,” Hanson wrote,
“that one of the aims of the American Musicological Society should be to
encourage American musicologists and give them opportunity for growth
and development. We do not see how this end can be accomplished by ad-
mitting a majority of foreigners and apparently relegating the applications
of Americans to the pigeonholes of the Membership Committee.” Hanson
and Fox said they felt emboldened to speak because they knew that a lot of
members shared their opinion on this (Hanson 1939).
Appearing not on the same wavelength as his Eastman colleagues,
Reese sent Hanson’s letter to George S. Dickinson, chair of the Membership
Committee. Reese noted that article II.B.3 of the bylaws did not specify
nationality (Reese 1939c). Dickinson (1939a) responded that they needed
a “clearer official definition of terms of membership.” He thought this

39
 Current Musicology

problem had to be resolved because the “reputation of the society, and,

incidentally, of the membership committee is rather bad as far as prompt
action is concerned.” The same day, Reese responded to Hanson (copied
to Dickinson) that it was a coincidence that the batch of applicants they
saw included so many foreigners, given no applications had been passed
on in a year and they had piled up. “I believe you will see that I am correct
in stating that the ratio of foreigners to Americans, in the whole lot, is not
at all fairly indicated by that ratio in the first batch” (Reese 1939d, 1939e).
AMS members criticized the executive board not only for welcom-
ing foreigners, but also for accepting members who were unqualified but
needed to establish chapters in states with few musicological traditions. At
the very moment when Reese was arguing with Hansen about foreigners,
Warren D. Allen at Stanford wrote Reese to discuss how to create an AMS
chapter in Southern California, given the lack of musicologists there. He
wanted to nominate Albert Elkus at the University of California, Berkeley
for membership to the AMS, although he was not eligible because he had
no publications. “I am afraid that we would have a hard time getting a
branch established out here without his cooperation because of his influen-
tial position,” Allen wrote. He suggested asking Elkus’s “close friend” Engel
to second the nomination, so they could get the ball rolling (Allen 1939a).
Reese passed this letter onto Engel, who felt irked enough to write Allen
a response. He said he would second Elkus’s nomination, but not because
he was allegedly his friend. Rather he admired Elkus “as a man of broad
culture and as an excellent musician.” “I admit that it may be difficult to
draw an exact line of division between those who are real ‘musicologists’
and those to whom the term applies loosely,” Engel wrote Allen. “But the
Society will, sooner or later, have to draw such a line, and stick to it, un-
less two classes of members can be established: the one for ‘musicologists’
in the narrower sense (entitled to vote) and other class comprising the
members admitted ‘by courtesy’ (excluded from voting). Only by some
method of this kind will the Society avoid the dangers which are bound to
spring from an indiscriminate extension of its membership” (Engel 1939).
Allen responded that there weren’t many men or women “in this particular
neighborhood” (California) who could qualify for membership according
to Engel’s standards, but there were “an increasing number of young people
interested in musicology,” and forming a chapter could “stimulate that in-
terest.” Allen added that he himself had nominated Elkus in the hope of
making Berkeley a “center for musicological research” (Allen 1939b).
A few days later, on June 21, 1939, James Coopersmith, motivated
by his concerns about membership quality, wrote Dickinson, proposing
a plan to dissolve the AMS that was almost identical to the one Carleton

40
 Tamara Levitz

Sprague Smith had suggested a year earlier. Coopersmith thought they

should amend the constitution to include fellows who met the require-
ments, and associates who did not, and thus could not vote or be elected to
any office, or appointed to any committee. The latter group could include
“laymen, students, instrumentalists, etc.,” he explained. He thought fellows
should have all or any of either “1. A graduate degree (Ph.D. or Mus.Doc.)
from an institution recognized for its musicological activity” (but that this
requirement could be waived if they had attended an equivalent number of
hours of formal courses with established musicologists); “2. Publications
either of books, music in scholarly editions, or periodical articles in jour-
nals of recognized merit—of “important research”; or “3. Unpublished
research which can leave no doubt (after oral or written discussion with
the candidate) that the candidate is a proficient musicologist.” He thought
the committee’s selection had to be “autocratic.” Coopersmith realized that
current members would not fulfill these criteria, and thus suggested either
dissolving the society or adapting the “amended” requirements to the cur-
rent group (Coopersmith 1939).
In September 1939, Dickinson, exasperated, asked in response to these
debates to be relieved of his duties as chair of the Membership Committee.
“I am sure that there is considerable diversity of opinion on the question of
appropriate membership qualifications,” he wrote Reese, “and I am afraid
that I have little to contribute to the resulting conclusion. In any case there
will be obviously marked difficulties in the operations of a membership
committee for some time to come under the present terms” (Dickinson
1939b).
By the end of the 1930s, the executive board’s personalized procedures
for selecting members had led to a majority white, male membership.
Some women were active in the society in these years, but giving papers
rather than serving on the board or as officers.85 On occasion, the issue
of women’s role in the society did arise. During the 1939 meeting, Jacob
Coopersmith, who was on the nomination committee, nominated himself
for vice president. The president of the Society that year, Carleton Sprague
Smith, admonished him for doing so and suggested a female candidate:
“Mr. Engel made the suggestion that a woman nominee would be diplo-
matic at this time, and I entirely agree with him. After all, a vice president
is a little like a fifth wheel on a carriage or a third person in a love duet. It
means very little. As president of the Society I am keeping in pretty close
touch with the general psychology of the organization and I should like to
suggest the name of Helen Roberts for your consideration. I doubt whether
she will be elected against Harold Spivacke, but I feel sure that many of our
members, particularly the comparative musicologists, will approve of this

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choice” (Smith 1939). Helen Heffron Roberts was nominated, but did not
win the election.86 It would take sixteen more years until Louise E. Cuyler
became the first women to be elected as an officer of the AMS, when she
became secretary in 1955. Janet Knapp became the first female president
in 1975, and Eileen Southern the first African American member-at-large
the same year (but only for one year).
The prestige the AMS gained through exclusive membership rules led
to a situation in which the public began to respect, fear, and exaggerate
its expertise. A gradual shift in public perceptions occurred as profes-
sional musicologists replaced critics and intellectuals as spokespeople
for music. How professionalization affected intellectual life is evident in
Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno’s application for membership to the AMS
from around 1941. Alfred Einstein and Walter Rubsamen had nominated
Adorno—the latter as part of his larger efforts to strengthen the AMS chap-
ter in Southern California. In contrast to the case of Albert Elkus, described
above, Adorno appeared almost overqualified in terms of the kind of in-
formation the AMS required. In his application, he provided a daunting
list of achievements—his pedigree seemingly exceeding the limits of the
AMS’s mundane form. Although asked for statements, he provided lists,
reducing his experience of exile into a one-line entry in the chronology
of his training (“1933: expelled by the Nazis”) (see Appendix VI). As was
characteristic at the time, Walter Rubsamen, Adolph Weiss, and Arnold
Schoenberg focused in their recommendations on Adorno’s character and
on generalities rather than the content of his scholarship. “Although one
may not always agree with Dr. Adorno,” Rubsamen writes, “his contribu-
tions to a musicological discussion are always original and penetrating. He
would make a valuable member of the Society.” This form gives evidence
of the bureaucratization of knowledge within professional musicology as
represented by the AMS: to be an expert, Adorno’s general worth and char-
acter needed to be verified by other experts, his output quantified, his life
reduced to a timeline (Adorno, n.d.). Independent music scholars working
across the country began submitting to this regime when the AMS na-
tionalized the profession by creating chapters. They made compromises in
multiple directions to fit into the rubric as musicological expertise became
standardized.
The story of Albert Einstein’s involvement in the AMS leads me to
similar conclusions about how professionalization affected intellectual
life. When invited to speak on a joint AMS-MTNA panel at the annual
meeting in Cleveland in 1940 on “the musical scientist” with musicologist
Alfred Einstein responding with a talk on “the scientific musician,” Albert
Einstein responded that “I see myself, cause of incompetence, unable to
accept this friendly invitation.”87 If Albert Einstein felt incompetent, AMS

42
 Tamara Levitz

members were clearly doing a good job of promoting musicology as a sta-

tus profession.
I have dwelt here on archival details about the struggle to establish
membership rules in the AMS in its early years because I believe such
minutia reveal the most about how status came to precede knowledge pro-
duction in the society. The cronyism and nepotism that resulted from such
rules, and that characterized the AMS well into the 1970s and beyond, lead
me to conclude that the quest for professional status compromised scholar-
ship in the AMS and prevented it from becoming a meritocracy.

The Decolonizing Profession

It is a long road from the exclusive early years of the AMS to debates about
the future of the discipline of musicology today. If I have taken that path,
it is because I think the exercise of uncovering the mundane bureaucratic
decisions and material circumstances that determined how musicology
became a profession in the United States may be the best way to reorient
current discussions about decolonization. My premise is that musicolo-
gists need to know which actions were undertaken, and on what material
basis, in building their elite, white, exclusionary, patriarchal profession
before they can undo them.
I have learned several things from undertaking this exercise. First, I
have understood more clearly the geopolitical position of US musicology,
which is grounded in and continues to support the form of international
intellectual cooperation championed by the League of Nations in the in-
terwar years. Although US musicologists have extensively critiqued the
Eurocentrism of their field, they have not fully acknowledged, or perhaps
even known a lot about, their profession’s internationalist basis. They do
not know that it is their choice to continue to perpetuate interwar Western
models of internationalism that subjugate or objectify peoples of the global
south, and that it is their choice to bracket out intercolonial collaborations,
as well as pan-African, pan-Asian and other global networks as a basis for
their work.88 Rather than research the historical specifics of international
relations, musicologists have tended to romanticize and even naturalize
internationalism as an idea. A general lack of dialogue with scholars of
international relations, and failure of imagination about geopolitical possi-
bilities within the discipline, has prevented musicologists from developing
a grounded strategy for promoting equality in musicological research. It
has also led some US musicologists to believe the language exams they re-
quire—in French, German, and Italian (sometimes Spanish)—reflect val-
ues they have, rather than their country’s geopolitical priorities. Language
exams in US musicology are neither innately positive nor representative of

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a superior pedagogical tradition. Any language can be required in musicol-

ogy, and that choice is always arbitrary and geopolitically determined.
I have also learned that the AMS executive has consistently bluffed
about the society’s object of study and that this has been a power play,
a way to receive advantages and acquire cultural capital. To this day, the
AMS has retained, with slight modifications, the mission statement crafted
by Kinkeldey, Dickinson, Seeger, Strunk, Yasser, and Reese at their orga-
nizational meeting on September 15, 1934: “The object of the society shall
be the advancement of research in the various fields of music as a branch
of learning” (see “Minutes” 1934c).89 That this statement has endured so
long is remarkable, especially given it is generic and untrue: the AMS has
never advanced research in “various fields” of music, but rather has always,
in spite of efforts in its early decades, prioritized—and even considered
its sole domain of expertise—historical musicology. As I documented
above, the first AMS executive used this statement to assert power, annex
disciplinary territory, and exclude others (especially the comparativists).
The illusion of doing something grander than it does has served the AMS
well since that time, in that it has allowed it to dominate among scholarly
societies devoted to music scholarship in the United States. Fewer people
would find the AMS so central to academic music studies if it admitted to
its limited research methods and repertoire.
My investigation has also helped me to develop a more cogent critique
of curricular changes at Harvard, because it has shown me that establishing
musicology as a profession had little to do with deciding upon a standard
curriculum or canon of musical works and everything to do with secur-
ing financial support, gaining access to powerful institutions, creating an
exclusive public sphere and rules of entry, and asserting white male privi-
lege. It is helpful to remember this when considering the Harvard Music
Department’s decision to change their music theory requirements—a
case that exposes in a dramatic way the social inequality built into higher
education in the United States. Although colleagues in the Department
of Music at Harvard will surely make their program more flexible by
eliminating music theory and other requirements, this will not affect the
entrance requirements to the university, which focus heavily on determin-
ing a student’s character, interests, and potential (Harvard College, n.d.).90
In his study of Yale University, where similar curricular changes are now
taking place (Turner 2018), Joseph A. Soares (2007) investigated how such
character assessments came to be used in determining admission to elite
schools and how they have contributed to perpetuating class privilege. In
contrast to scholars of higher education who assume old Protestant institu-
tions like Yale and Harvard became meritocratic after the introduction of

44
 Tamara Levitz

SAT tests and launching of the American College Testing in 1959, when
“universalistic academic criteria” for judging applicants replaced social
pedigree, Soares argues that SAT scores correlate with class (Soares 2007,
8–9).91 He describes how Yale and other schools circumvented even such
allegedly objective criteria by focusing in their selection processes from the
1960s onward on character assessments that helped in determining leader-
ship qualities, at first because they needed a mechanism that would allow
them to exclude Jews and other minorities (16, 39–41). Such criteria for
admission—which can be instrumentalized to include or exclude depend-
ing on admissions committees and underlying administrative goals—still
dominate, if Harvard’s process is any indication. Recent studies on Harvard
corroborate Soares’s view that financial aid—which was consolidated in the
“Ivy Group” in the early 1960s and intended to ensure that student bodies
in elite colleges not remain exclusively upper class—has not altered the
class makeup at the elite colleges as expected it would (66–70).92
Learning about the economic elitism of Harvard’s student body altered
my view on the faculty’s decision to relax the music theory requirements
in the Department of Music. From an economic perspective, curricular
change appears to reinforce class distinctions by offering exceptionally
wealthy students a more omnivorous education (see Drott 2012; Peterson
and Kern 1996). Such an approach appears premised on the false assump-
tion that the consciousness of an enlightened elite will ultimately trickle
down and create an enlightened general population. It fails to address the
material conditions of the adjuncts and teaching assistants who may ulti-
mately end up teaching students in these new classes, and who may have
little say in curricular change.93 Here, I share Ghassan Hage’s concern about
whether the struggle to decolonize the curriculum is a way of “creating
decolonized bubbles in an otherwise colonized social space,” or of “creating
a generation of cultural fighters who extend the struggle for decoloniza-
tion from the university to its outside.” Have we thought enough about
what Hage calls the “respect for the elders”—decolonial and anti-capitalist
ways of consuming academic texts (Hage 2018, 110)? Yasmin Nair (2018)
speaks in a related context of how “radical” academic discourse eclipses
genuine labor concerns.94 In other words curricular reform allows tenure-
track professors to maintain the illusion that they are doing something to
promote equality when in fact they may not be. In a worst-case scenario,
curricular change may merely stand in symbolically for equal access and
economic justice.
I also have doubts about the specific nature of current curricular
change, which is often based on wedding musicological content to a stu-
dent’s identity. Minorities, the argument goes, should be able to study the

45
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music that represents their cultures. Although I emphatically agree with

creating an equitable and just classroom, I wonder whether students’ racial,
ethnic, gendered, sexual, and class identities can be correlated so easily
with specific repertoire or traditions, and whether such assumptions about
cultural background and taste are anachronistic in the current streaming/
global listening age. I worry about administrators and faculty extracting
identities from their social, intersectional context and mapping them onto
music for the purpose of imbuing their teaching with moral purpose,
and reinvigorating the humanities as a social justice project. Although I
think a rigidly canonical, exclusionary curriculum causes epistemologi-
cal and personal harm, I might at first agree with Jacques Rancière that it
is not course content that matters but rather how it is taught, the critical
positionalities of all involved, and the degree to which students achieve
emancipation.95 That said, I doubt myself on this point, because I know
that the majority of professors are still white, and arguments of this kind
can be seen to justify racial exclusion. I also wonder about the soundness of
a curriculum designed to promote “diversity” in the neoliberal university,
and of the hollowing out of epistemological and conceptual grounding that
occurs when the survival of the disciplines is at stake. All in all, I remain
concerned that the current focus on curriculum may be, in part, a diversion
that allows academic musicologists to evade the job market crisis, class and
racial inequality in higher education, the erosion of their profession, and
labor injustices.
I can best clarify my position on curriculum in reference to the criti-
cal work of la paperson (an avatar created by K. Wayne Yang). In A Third
University is Possible, la paperson draws on Marcos’s México Profundo and
Third Cinema to theorize the university as an “amalgam of first, second,
and third world formations.” The first university is an academic-industrial
complex committed to capitalist and brand expansion, accumulation of
debt, patent, publication, and prestige, procuring state resources to gov-
ern, and technologies of power associated with institutions of “policing,
bordering, incarceration, illegalization, and militarization.” “The ability to
turn anyone into a debtor is what fuels the first university toward inclu-
sion,” he argues. The second university hopes to transform the first, and
society, through critique. It is made up of thoughtful academics who teach
literary and social critical theory, for example of the Frankfurt school,
but mistake “personalized pedagogy of self-actualization for decolonial
transformation.” The music scholar who aims to decolonize through cur-
ricular change, or the pedagogy of Jacques Rancière that I evoked above,
fall into this category. Teachers in the second university assume people will
“naturally” produce freedom, and that “freedom’s doppelgänger is critical

46
 Tamara Levitz

consciousness.” The second world university is a pedagogical utopia that

depends materially on the fees, debt, and land accumulated by the first
university (La paperson 2017).
In my view, most musicologists, including myself, have been trapped
in the first and second university. We confuse decolonization with liberal
critique, embrace utopian notions of inclusion that support the first uni-
versity’s project of expansion and debt, create new curricula based on nos-
talgic notions of self realization, and remain intransigent about changing
the material circumstances of our professional privilege and committing
to radical action. In order to decolonize we would have to enter what la
paperson calls the third university, which exists within the first, and which
he compares to Black radical film as “assembling,” “strategic,” “timely,”
“vocational,” “unromantic,” “problematic,” and “anti-utopian.” In the third
university, teachers talk about rematriating land, disciplining scholar-
warriors rather than “liberating” students, acting upon financial systems
rather than just critiquing them, helping to accumulate third world power
rather than simply disavowing first world power, supporting a school-to-
community pipeline rather than a community-to-school pipeline, and so
on. The third university is made up of “scyborgs,” la paperson explains in
his last chapter, who have the technological condition of being embedded
in the “assemblage” of the university, and from there “assemble decolonial
machines.” They develop “far-reaching transformative radical projects”
from within existing structures, creating a decolonizing rather than de-
colonized university.
The final lesson I have learned from undertaking this investigation
is how indebted US musicology still is today to the model of academic
professionalism established by the ACLS in the mid-twentieth century, and
to the work of professionalizing the discipline undertaken specifically at
that time by the ACLS Committee on Musicology. That committee funded
research with grants and fellowships from private sources—committing
to a model of humanistic scholarship built on the capitalist ventures of
industrialists of the gilded age (the Carnegies and Rockefellers). It also
tried (but only minimally and unsuccessfully) to suggest a standard cur-
riculum in universities across the country, establishing the boundaries of
the knowable within the settler colonial/land grant university. It created
an exclusive musicological public sphere by gathering bibliographies, sup-
porting publications, contributing to the development of a system of peer
review, aiding in the expansion of library collections and archives, and as-
suring the accessibility of primary sources. With these concrete strategies,
the committee established a blueprint for how to build musicology into a
successful “first and second” profession (to use la paperson’s terms).

47
 Current Musicology

But today, there are cracks in the mirror of this elite profession—which
has become parasitic of the first university yet survives morally by promot-
ing social justice on the basis of the second. The crisis in higher education
has damaged its foundations, and now many of its strategies are failing
and in need of rethinking: the number of people applying for funds far
exceeds available resources; major bibliographies and library collections
are no longer necessary for a pluralistic discipline to thrive in the Internet
age; academic articles and monographs are not being read; and peer review
is under harsh scrutiny. The “decline in authority and autonomy” of the
professions that Marie Haug spoke about in the 1970s has progressed to
a point where the boundary between public and professional knowledge
about music has all but disappeared, causing the profession to lose its rai-
son d’être. As the professional foundations of musicology have collapsed,
graduate programs in musicology around the country have accelerated
the professionalization of their students—a dynamic that speaks to me of
the current desperation to keep up appearances. Graduate programs in
musicology offer students professional status and prestige divorced from
financial security and the possibility of obtaining a job, entrance into an
elite without the standard of living that once went with belonging to one,
the skills required to act like a professional without the defined knowl-
edge to be one, professional boundaries without a territory to bound, and
a dissipated multiplicity of public spheres no longer supported by major
publishers. Many recent graduates face a landscape that has become almost
impossible to negotiate, except as unpaid volunteers.
This situation leads me to ask whether it is time to undertake serious
reconsideration of what it means to be a professional musicologist in the
twenty-first century and whether US musicologists should not rebuild their
profession on a more sustainable and equitable basis, or abandon profes-
sionalism altogether. What would be the blueprint for building musicology
as a decolonizing, rather than decolonized, profession today?
It is in this context that I question the current trend toward public
musicology—the “AMS” or professional form of which I distinguish from
university outreach programs and the work of public intellectuals. I admire
the public musicologists within the AMS, but I want to ask them some
questions. I wonder how they feel about the fact that musicology as an
expert profession has had a long, conflicted, sometimes paradoxical rela-
tionship with music appreciation and public outreach, and that they may
be repeating history. I wonder if they are aware of how their predecessors
created a musicological elite through rigid membership rules and exclu-
sionary practices, and whether they think such a finely tuned and long-
standing social formation can be broken down with rhetoric—a shift away

48
 Tamara Levitz

from expert speech—alone. Does public musicology not evade the crisis
of professionalism by embracing a faux populism? Does it not ignore the
fact that knowledge about music history was public in the United States
before musicology professionalized in the mid-twentieth century and that
attempts at “outreach” of multiple kinds have occurred regularly since then
and may in fact constitute one of the musicological elite’s most well-worn
mechanisms for distinguishing itself? Where do public musicologists
stand on strengthening the school-to-community-pipeline, scyborgs who
assemble decolonial machines, and the third university as described by la
paperson? Do they not reify the profession of musicology within the first
and second university, rather than transform it?
I like to think of public musicology in terms of Antonio De Lauris’s
(2014) argument about the “bourgeois academic” who dominates in the
university and who perpetuates the status quo by producing “a specific
bourgeois knowledge particularly in relation to social inequality.” I rec-
ognize standard musicological practice in De Lauris’s description of the
bourgeois academic as somebody who transforms “the highly factual and
brutal dimension of social suffering and marginality” into issues of rep-
resentation in their scholarship, and who champions resistance yet func-
tions increasingly as a bureaucrat whose relationship to the institution is
marked by “moral ambiguity, corporativism, and formal obedience.” As the
university becomes the preparatory institution of neoliberal efficiency and
pragmatism, De Lauris writes, academics who still largely identify as bour-
geois have supported the political forces that “impede the non-bourgeois
knowledge that could destabilize the social order.”
No amount of public musicology will erase the guilt of belonging to an
exclusionary, elite profession forged and maintained by white patriarchal
privilege. Having gained insight into the mechanisms of US musicology as
a profession by exploring the archive of its early history, I am convinced the
main goal now should be to reinvent it.

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Appendix I: Speaker Series of the New York Musicological

Society, 1930–1934.96
1930 1933
February 19: Round-table discussion of Joseph Yasser’s The January 9: Henry Cowell, “Evidence against Some Axioms of
Future of Tonality Musical Theory”
March 13: Otto Kinkeldey, “Some Japanese Polyphony” January 23: Informal discussion of George Herzog’s paper, “The
April 1: Leon Theremin, demonstration in his laboratory of Connection of Language and Music in West Africa”
certain electrical instruments, and exposition of some theories in February 5: Otto Kinkeldey, “Scale: Mode and Tonality”
connection with them. February 26: John Redfield, “Is a Just Chromatic Scale Possible”
April 22: Round-table discussion of Consonance and Dissonance March 19: Joseph Schillinger, “Rhythm in Art Continuum”
with Otto Kinkeldey, Henry Cowell, and Charles Seeger April 3: Edward J. Stringham, “A Modern Space-Time Nerve-
May 14: Charles Seeger, “Dissonant Counterpoint” Grouping Theory of Hearing and its Application to Standardized
Pitch Discrimination Tests”
1931 April [typo]: Charles Seeger, “Musical Logic and the Linguistic
January 14: E.G. Stringham “Music Reviewing” Logic of Music”
February 16: Joseph Schillinger “Classification of Scales within the
Equal Temperament” 1934
March 5: Henry Cowell “Some Aspects of a Rhythmic Harmonic January 17: George Herzog, “Speech as a Factor in Primitive
Series” Music”
March 20: Mr. and Mrs. Sarat Lahiri, “a special meeting for a February 25: Charles Seeger, “The Method of Criticism”
demonstration of some of the rhythmic features of the music of March 18: Helen H. Roberts, “Some Primitive Musical
modern India.” Instruments and their Culture Connections”
April 6: Round-table discussion of The Classification of Tonal April 8: Symposium on “Objective and Subjective Factors of
Chords within the Equal Temperament (following on the event on Musical Taste”
February 16) April 29: Harold Spivacke, “The Relationship Between Systematic
April 27: Adolph Weiss, “A Comprehensive View of the and Historical Musicology”
Schönbergian Technic” May 15: Carleton Sprague Smith, “The Performance of Old
May 18: Joseph Yasser, “The Past of Tonality” Music”

November 9: Joseph Schillinger, “A System of Tonal Harmony” The Russian Group of Musicologists, meetings 1930–193297
November 30: Charles Seeger, “A Modern Neume Theory” 1. February 10, 1930: Joseph Yasser, “The Theory of the Supra-
December 28: Nicholas Slonimsky “Consonant Counterpoint in Diatonic Scale”
Mutually Exclusive Tonal Systems” 2. March 23, 1930: Alexandre Gretchaninoff, “On the Influence of
Secular Russian Music upon Church Music”
1932 3. April 16, 1930: Nicholas Slonimsky, “Consonant Systems of
January 10: Henry Cowell, “Some Aspects of Comparative Harmony”
Musicology” (during which Cowell also told of his studies in 4. Spring 1931: Joseph Schillinger, “The Process of the Formation
Javanese music with Raden Mas Jodjana). of Harmonic Tissue”
January 31: Leon Theremin, “Light and Sound” 5. October 18, 1931: Solomon Rosowsky, “New Analytical Theory
February 21: Round-table discussion of The Relation of the of Biblical Cantilation”
Composer and Performer 6. Winter 1931: Alexandre Koshetz, “Ukranian Folk Songs, Past
March 31: John Redfield, “Is a Just Chromatic Scale Possible?” and Present”
[lecture cancelled] 7. February 4, 1932: Joseph Schillinger, “The Varieties of Musical
April 10: Helen Heffron Roberts, “Some Ancient California Experience”
Indian Songs”
November 29: Joseph Yasser “A New Method of Harmonization
for some Biblical Cantillations, Medieval Chants, Negro Spirituals,
and Russian Folk Songs”

Appendix II: “Members [of the American Society of Comparative

Musicology] During 1933 and 1934.”98
Honorary Member:
Hornbostel, E.M. von c/o The New School New York City
66 West 12th Street
Contributing Members:
Walton, Mrs. B.F. 25 Washington Square, North New York City
Wheelwright, Miss Mary C. c/o C.C. Wheelwright Boston, Mass
344 Atlantic Avenue
Roberts, Miss Helen H. Room 245, I.H.R. New Haven Conn.
333 Cedar Street
Regular Members:
Achron, Joseph 2631 Beachwood Drive Hollywood Calif
Barry, Phillips 5 Craigie Circle Cambridge, Mass
Boulton, Mrs. Laura C c/o Division of Birds Field Museum Natural History Chicago, Ill.
Burrows, Edwin G. c/o B.P. Bishop Museum Honolulu, H.I.
Chamberlain, Miss Gladys E. 437 East 58th Street New York City
Chao, Yuen Ren 1 Chi Ming Szu Road Nanking China
Nat. Research Institute of Social Science

50
 Tamara Levitz

Appendix II (continued)
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Mass.
Cowell, Henry Menlo Park, California
Flower, Mrs. Elisa M.C. 168 East 63 Street
rd
New York City
Gibbs, Dr. Becket 99 Claremont Avenue New York City
Grainger, Percy c/o Antonia Morse White Plains, NY
9 Cromwell Place
Hague, Miss Eleanor 640 Hillside Terrace Pasadena California
Hammel , S.G. 209 West 14th Street New York City
Harrington, J.P. Bureau American Ethnology Washington D.C.
Smithsonian Institution
Haydon, Prof. Glenn Department of Music Chapel Hill, N.C.
Univ. of North Carolina
Herskovits, Melville J. Department of Sociology Evanston, Ill.
Northwestern University
Herzog, Dr. George Room 249, I.H.R. New Haven, Conn.
333 Cedar Street
Hinman, Mrs. Mary Wood 353 West 57th Street 353 West 57th Street
Katz, Miss Adele T. 277 West End Avenue New York City
Kazarova, Mme Raina Vel Tarnoviz Sofía, Bulgara
Lathrop, Francis C. 50 Orange Street Brooklyn, N.Y.
Lawton, Miss Dorothy 121 East 58th Street New York City
Lehmer, Derrick N. 2736 Regent Street Berkeley, Calif.
Lewisohn, Miss Irene 133 West 11th Street New York City
Loines, Miss Elma 3 Pierrepont Place Brooklyn, N.Y.
Marks, Robert W. 500 Riverside Drive New York City
Mayer, Clara W. 66 West 12th Street New York City
Ortmann, Dr. Otto Peabody Conservatory of Music Baltimore, M.D
Parsons, Dr. Elsie Clews Harrison New York
Potter, Mark 414 West 118th Street New York City
Quackenbush, Mrs. Dorothy Killam’s Point Branford, Conn.
Russell, William 182 Claremont Avenue New York City
Samaroff, Madame Olga 1170 Fifth Avenue New York City
Seashore, Dean Carl Graduate School Iowa City, Iowa
University of Iowa
Seeger, Charles L. Jr. c/o The New School New York City
66 West 12th Street
Serly, Tibor c/o George Herzog, Room 249, New Haven, Conn.
I.H.R., 333 Cedar Street
Spivacke, Harold Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Music Division
Street, Mrs. W. D. 4 Ridgeview Avenue White Plains, N.Y.
Swadesh, Mrs. Mary Haas Room 250, I.H.R.,333 Cedar Street New Haven Conn.
Tozzer, Prof. A.M. 7 Bryant Street Cambridge, Mass.
Vasser College Library Poughkeepsie New York
Vrionides, Christos Villa Byzantium, P.O. Box 871, Babylon, L.I., N.Y.
Winne, Miss Jane 2065 Lanihuli Drive Honalulu, H.I.
Yale University, Library of The School of Music Yale University New Haven, Conn.
Yasser, Joseph 7 West 83rd Street New York City

Appendix III: “COMMITTEE ON MUSICOLOGY. List of persons

interested in Musicology, January, 1935. (Note. This list does not
include all persons addressed, but only those who have given
information concerning fields of interest, publications, etc.)”99
Ethel G. Aginsky Linguistics-Musicology Edward Ballantine, Composition, Pianoforte
2685 University Ave., Apt. 51E (Ethnology) Department of Music, Harvard Players. Analysis of works of
New York City Cambridge, Mass. Mozart, Brahms
Richard Aldrich Musical history J. Murray Barbour Musicology
317 W. 74th Street 416 W, Seneca Street
New York City Ithaca, N.Y.
Nicholas George Julius Ballanta, West Africa Phillips Barry, Folk-song and folk-music
Freetown, Sierra Leone, 5 Craigle Circle
Africa Cambridge, Mass.

51
 Current Musicology

Appendix III (continued)

Charles R. Baskervill, Elizabethan literature; Will Earhart Music Education - Folk-
University of Chicago, Popular drama 215 Lothrop Street Music, Pittsburgh
Chicago, Ill. Primitive Music
Marion Bauer Musical Composition, Albert I. Elkus Music generally. I am an
40 West 77th Street lecturing 3323 Clay Street active musician with a strong
New York City on music, writing—critical San Francisco interest in various aspects of
critical and analytical musicology.
Arthur V. Berger Music and Opera in 16th Herbert Elwell Criticism, biography, analysis,
31 Conant Hall, Harvard U. century English theatre 2502 Mayfield Road etc.
Cambridge, Mass. Cleveland Heights, Ohio
Martin Berstein, NYC, 17th and 18th Century John Lawrence Erb Music History and Music
Washington Square East Orchestral Music Connecticut College for Appreciation
New York City Wagner Women
Lowell P. Beveridge, Choral music before Bach New London, Conn.
Columbia University Karl Henry Eschman Form in Modern Music; new
New York City methods Granville, Ohio
William P. Bigelow, Producer of Choral and Paul Randolph Farnsworth Experimental Aesthetics and
2 Orchard Street Orchestral works. Conductor 715 Salvatierra Social Psychology
Amherst, Mass. Stanford University, Calif.
Paul Boepple Musical Rhythm Ross Lee Finney, Jr. Composition. 17th Century
9 E. 59th Street 79 West Street instrumental style
New York City Northhampton, Mass.
Laura C. Boulton, African Music; S.W. William Arms Fisher, History of Music in America
5750 Island Avenue American 359 Boylston Street
Chicago, Ill. Indian Music Boston, Mass.
Charles N. Boyd, Harmony and History Charles Warren Fox Psychological acoustics;
131 Bellefield Avenue 64 Cambridge Street bibliography
Pittsburgh, Pa. Rochester, N.Y.
Carl Bricken, Music Karl William Gerhkens Music Education and
5727 University Avenue Oberlin, Ohio Musicology
Chicago, Ill. John L Geiger, Teacher, Voice, Opera,
Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Brown, History of Music Meridian Apartments Appreciation
University of California Indianapolis, Ind.
Berkeley, Calif. Becket Gibbs Sacred Music
J.M. Coopersmith, Music of the 18th Century 92 Claremont Avenue
3720 81st Street Georg Friedrich Handel New York City
Jackson Heights, New York Harold Gleason Medieval Music
Henry Cowell Comparative musicology and Rochester, New York
66 W. 12th Street contemporary creative music Percy Goetschius Mus. Theory
New York City 120 Claremont Avenue
Edmund A. Cykler Music History New York City
13625 Califa St. Julius Gold History of Music Theory
Van Nuys, California 1101 Green Street
Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Ballad and folk song San Francisco, Calif.
Box. 1151, University Wallace Hoodrich Musical Education
of Virginia New England Conservatory of
Archibald T. Davison General Music, Boston, Mass.
22 Francis Avenue Howard Hanson Composition
Cambridge, Mass. Eastman School of Music
Miss Frances Densmore The music of the American Rochester, N.Y.
Red Wing Indians Glen Haydon Musicology-Theory
Minnesota University of North Carolina
Clarence Dickinson, NYC, Sacred Music; Medieval Music Chapel Hill, N.C.
99 Claremont Avenue and art George Herzog Comparative Musicology,
New York City 333 Cedar Street Folk New Music,
George Sherman Dickinson Various subjects in the New Haven, Conn. Anthropology
155 College Avenue border-line field between Erich M. von Hornbostel Musicology, Anthropology,
Poughkeepsie, N.Y. music history and theory 66 W. 12th Street Psychology, Physiology of the
Ralph William Downes, Gregorian Chant and New York City senses
9. Aiken Avenue Medieval Music Charles William Hughes Early instrumental music,
Princeton, N.J. 28 Ralph Avenue Chamber music
Henry Purmont Eames Musicology White Plains, N.Y.
Claremont, California Royal D. Hughes Music (before Bach)
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio

52
 Tamara Levitz

Appendix III (continued)

A. Z. Idelsohn Jewish music and Folk poetry Milton Franklin Metdessel Human voice, Folk music,
Hebrew Union College University of Southern Bird music
Cincinnati, Ohio California
George Pullen Jackson Folk-song Los Angeles, Calif.
Vanderbilt University Charles H. Mills The Development of the
Nashville, Tenn. 2119 Jefferson St. Fugue
Melville Jacobs American Indian languages; Madison, Wis. in the 17th and 18th Centuries
University of Washington Ethnology of American Earl V. Moore
Seattle, Wash. Indians (Oregon, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Washington) Stephen Morrisett Musicology
Guy B. Johnson Primitive peoples, American 111 Jefferson Road
Chapel Hill, N.C. negro; Racial differences Princeton, N.J.
Vern O. Knudsen Acoustics M.D. Herter Norton Chamber music, especially
University of California at 1 Lexington Avenue the string quartet
Los Angeles New York City
Los Angeles, Calif. Otto Ortmann Music Education and
A. Walter Kramer Music and music journalism Peabody Conservatory Research
113 West 57th Street Baltimore, Md.
New York City Mrs. Oliver H Payne Musical Research and Bach
Ernst C. Krohn History of American Music, (May de Forest)
3806 Junista Street History of Music in America - West Neck Rd., Cold Spring
St. Louis, Mo. Missouri - St. Louis Harbor, L.I.
Max T. Krone Choral Music Abe Pepkinsky Physical Basis of music
Indianapolis, Ind. 2349 Bourne Avenue
Jacob Kwalwasser Music Pedagogy, Psychology St. Paul, Minn.
Syracuse, N.Y. Carl F. Pfattsicher Church Music
Samuel L. Laciar Chamber Music 173 Maine Street
Public Ledger Andover, Mass.
Philadelphia, Pa. Isabel Pope Medieval Spanish, Philology
Paul Henry Láng, 5 Concord Avenue and Music
601 Journalism Building Cambridge, Mass.
Columbia University, New York Louisa Pound General subject of Musicology
Roberta Campbell Lawson Folk music - also collecting 1632 L Street
1008 Sunset Drive Lincoln Nebraska
Tulsa, Oklahoma Miss Margaret C. Prall History of Music - 17th
Hugo Leichtentritt Composition, Musicology 1420 La Loma Avenue century and early 18th century
198 St. Paul St. Berkeley, Calif.
Brookline, Mass. Waldo S. Pratt Church Music
Leland Avery Coon Music of the Clavecin Period 86 Gillett Strett
Madison, Wisconsin Modern French Music Hartford, Conn.
Leo Rich Lewis Foundation of Musical Style James T. Quarles History and Theory of Music:
20 Professors Row Parity of Music and Math- University of Missouri Organ
Tufts College, Mass. Ematics Columbia, Mo.
Arthur W. Locke 1) Bach and his predecessors; John Redfield Musical Acoustics
96 Round Hill 2) Music and the Romantic; 45 Redfield Road
Northhampton, Mass. 3) Modern Music Fairfield, Conn.
John A. Lomax American folk-songs Gustave Reese Medieval and Renaissance
University of Texas Station (omitting Indian songs) 3 East 43rd St., New York Music
Austin, Texas Albert Riemanschneider The Life and Works of J.S.
Clifford T. McAvoy Opera Libretto 10001 Edgewater Drive Bach
124 E. 81 Street, New York City Cleveland, Ohio
Glenn Douglas McGeoch English Music of Seventeenth Christian A. Ruckmick Psychology of Music;
Ann Arbor, Michigan Century (Italian Influences) C206, East Hall psychology of emotion
Iowa City, Iowa
Henry Lowell Mason Biography
134 Beacon Street Lazare Saminsky Modern Music, Folksong of
Boston, Mass. 1 East 65 the Near East
New York
Arthur Mendel Criticism
3 East 43rd St., New York City Robert Haven Schauffler Music, poetry, biography,
A. Tillman Merritt c/o Dodd, Mead and Co. essays
J-11 Eliot House, Cambridge 443 4th Ave., New York City
Mass. C.E. Seashore Psychology of Music
Frank J. Metcalf Sacred Music, Hymnology Iowa City, Iowa
901 Ingraham Street
Washington, D.C.

53
 Current Musicology

Appendix III (continued)

Charles Seeger Musicology and Comparative Archer Taylor Folk music; music of folk
66 West 12th St. Musicology but more University of Chicago songs
New York City particularly the methodology Miss Jean Thomas Research in folklore
and the systematic orientation 3201 Cogan St., Ashland, Ky.
George Sherburn The Eighteenth Century Randall Thompson Music
University of Chicago 30 East 42nd St., New York
Berrian R. Shute Wm. Treat Upton American music
Hamilton College, 221 Forest St., Oberlin, Ohio
Clinton, N.Y.
George A. Wedge Theory of Music
A. Mackay Smith Chamber music before 1800 120-130 Claremont Ave., New
Farnley, White Post York
Virginia
R.D. Welch History of Music
Cecil Michener Smith History of Choral Music 101 Prospect St., Northhampton
5757 University Avenue History of Dramatic music
James Woodside Research in the Historical
Leslie Spier Ethnology, Indians of W. 822 Steinway Hall Evolution of song
New Haven, Conn. North America 113 West 57th St.
Hazel Martha Stanton Psychology, Aesthetics New York City
522 Fifith Avenue, New York Music G. Wallace Woodworth J.S. Bach
Edwin S. Stringham History - Acoustics (musical) Music Building
500 West 121st St. Cambridge, Mass.
New York City Joseph Yasser Scales, Modes,
Oliver Strunk 15th century polyphony 7 West 83 Street Tonality
110 Maryland Avenue N.E. Music of Joseph Haydn Frederick Yeiser Byzantine Music
Thomas Whitney Surette Music 2950 World Avenue
21 Lexington Road Cincinnati, Ohio
Concord, Mass. Karl Young Medieval Music
Alfred J. Swan 195 Everit Street
1 College Lane, Haverford, Pa. New Haven, Conn.

Appendix IV: “INSTITUTIONS OF WHICH ONE OR MORE

MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY HAVE BEEN INVITED TO
CONTRIBUTE TO THE REPORT ON MUSICOLOGY, (Feb. 26,
1938) (*indicates some answer has been received. Notes in
brackets refer to answers received not to letters sent.)”100
*Amherst *Cornell [one grad. stud. only] Univ. Michigan *Pearl River
Arizona *Denison Mills Pennsylvania State
Arthur Jordan Cons. *Eastman Sch. of Mus. Minnesota *Rutgers
Baldwin Wallace Cons. Field Mus. of Nat. Hist. *Missouri San Diego
Bennington Fisk Mt. Holyoke *Smith
*Boston Univ. *Grosvenor Library Mus. Library, 58st, NY *South Carolina [folksong only]
*Brown Hamilton Nebraska So. California
*Bryn Mwar *Harvard New England Cons. *Stanford
Buffalo *Haverford New York Pub. Lib. *Syracuse
*California Huntington Library *New York Univ. Texas
*Calif. at L.A. [physics only] Illinois *North Carolina *Tufts
*Carnegie Tech. [psychology Indiana *N. Caro. Woman’s Col. *Tulane
only] *Iowa State *Northwestern [anthropol. Utah
Case [physics only] *Univ. Iowa [psychology only] only] *Vanderbilt [German and
*Catholic Univ. Kansas *Oberlin psychology only]
*Chicago Kentucky *Ohio State Vassar, Virginia [English only]
*Chicago Musical Col. Library of Congress Ohio Univ. *Univ. Washington, Wellesey,
Claremont Louisana State *Oklahoma *Wella, Western Reserve.
*C.C.N.Y. MAILAMM (library) Univ. Oregon *Westminster Chior [sic] Sch.
Univ. of Colorado Miami, Ohio *Peabody Cons. [one teacher West Va. *Wisconsin, *Yale
*Columbia *Michigan State only]

54
 Tamara Levitz

Appendix V: “American Musicological Association, Proposed list

of active members.”101
Aldrich Richard Kinkeldey, Otto Seeger, Charles Louis Jr. Riemenschneider, Professor
317 West 74th Street 29 East Avenue 66 west 12th Street Baldwin-Wallace College
New York Ithaca, New York New York City Berea, Ohio
Beck, Prof. Jean B. Krohn, Ernest C., jr. Smith, Carleton Sprague Schillinger, Mr. Joseph
Dept. of Music, Univ. of Penn. 3806 Juniata Street New York Public Library 315 East 68th Street
Philadelphia, Penna. St. Louis, Missouri New York City New York City
Boyd, Charles N. Kwalwasser, Jacob Strunk, W. Oliver Spivacke, Dr. Harold
131 Bellefield Avenue 860 Livingston Avenue 110 Maryland Ave., N.E. Library of Congress
Pittsburgh, Penna. Syracuse, New York Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C.
Coopersmith, Jacob Maurice Leichtentritt, Hugo Thompson, Randall Swalin, Dr. Benjamin
3720—81st Street 118 St. Paul Street 30 East 42nd Street 706 Locust Street
Jackson Heights, N,Y. Brookline, Mass. New York Greencastle, Ind.
Cowell, Henry Mattfeld, Julius Upton, William T. Pepinsky, Prof. A
New School for Social Research National Broadcasting 221 Forest Street University of Minnesota
66 West 12th Street Company Oberlin, Ohio Minneapolis, Minn.
New York Astoria, L.I., New York
Woodworth, Wallace Boas, Dr. Franz
Davison, Archibald T. Metcalf, Frank J. Music Building Columbia University
22 Francis Avenue 901 Ingraham Street Cambridge, Mass. New York City
Cambridge, Mass. Washington, D.C.
Yasser, Joseph Waters, Edward N.
Densmore, Miss Frances Metfessel, Milton Franklin 7 West 83rd Street Library of Congress
Red Wing, Minn. University Park New York Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles, California
Dickinson, Clarence Yeiser, Frederick Lomax, John Avery
99 Claremont Avenue Mills, Charles H. 2950 Wold Avenue University of Texas Station
New York University of Wisconsin Cincinnati, Ohio Austin, Texas
Madison, Wisconsin
Engel, Carl Barbour, Dr. J. Murray Additions.
3 East 43rd Street, Miller, Dayton C. 416 West Seneca Street
Fansworth, Paul R.
c/o G. Schirmer Case School of Applied Science Ithaca, N.Y.
Dept. of Psychology
New York City Cleveland, Ohio
Fox, Dr. Charles W. Leland Stanford University
Fletcher, Harvey Ortmann, Otto Eastman School of Music Palo Alto, California
342 Madison Avenue Peabody Conservatory of Music Rochester, N.Y.
Locke, Arthur W.
New York Baltimore, Maryland
Herzog, Dr. George 96 Round Hill
Haydon, Glen Pfatteicher, Carl F. institute of Human Relations Northampton, Mass.
2136 Eunice Street 173 Main Street Yale University
Redfield, Mr. John
Berkeley, California Andover, Mass. New Haven, Conn.
Redfield Road,
Hornbostel, Erich von Pratt, Waldo S. Jackson, Prof. George Pullen Fairfield, Conn.
New School for Social Research 86 Gillett Street Vanderbilt University
Stringham, Prof. Edwin J.
66 West 12th Street Hartford, Conn. Nashville, Tenn.
509 West 121st St., Apt. 407
New York
Reese, Gustave Lang, Prof. Paul Henry New York City
Howard, John Tasker, jr. c/o G. Schirmer Department of Music
Donovan, Richard
47 Lincoln Street 3 East 43rd Street Columbia University
Yale School of Music
Glen Ridge, N.J. New York New York City
New Haven, Conn.
Hughes, Royal D. Roberts, Helen H. Morrisett, Dr. Stephen
Gold, Julius
Ohio State University Institute of Human Relations Westminister Choir School
1101 Green Street
Columbus, Ohio Yale University
Pope, Miss Isabel San Franciso, California
333 Cedar Street
Idelsohn, A.Z. c/o Mediaeval [sic] Academy of
New Haven, Conn.
Hebrew Union College America
Cincinnati, Ohio Seashore, Carl E. Cambridge, Mass.
State University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

55
 Current Musicology

Appendix VI: Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno’s Application to

become a Member of the American Musicological Society, no
date, c. 1941.102

56
 Tamara Levitz

Appendix VI (continued)

57
 Current Musicology

Appendix VI (continued)

Please supply Date

as full infor-
mation as pos-
sible
AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

CANDIDACY FOR MEMBERSHIP

Statement of Sponsor
1. Name of candidate

T.W. Adorno

2. Statement concerning the quantity and type of the candidate’s research, and concerning the
quality of his scholarship:

(a) from direct personal knowledge

Dr. Adorno is a well-known scholar in the fields of musical aesthetics and the sociology
of music. He has contributed to many journals, and was co-editor of Der Anbruch from
1928-31. Some of his publications are: in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the articles
“Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,”(1932); Jazz (1936); “Über den Fetischcharacter in
der Musik,” (1938), “Fragments über Wagner,” (1939); in Die Musik, (1928) an article on
Schubert; the chapter entitled “the Radio Symphony,” in Radio Research 1941¨, N.Y. 1941;
etc. He has also a co-author of Willi Reich’s book on Alban Berg.

(b) From indirect sources (give names)

(over)

3. Statement concerning the candidate’s training, interests, and activities

Dr. Adorno was Privat-dozent for aesthetics at the University of Frankfurt before Hitler,
and is now a prominent Member of the Institute for Social Research of Columbia University.

4. Other remarks

Although one may not always agree with Dr. Adorno, his contributions to a musicologi-
cal discussion are always original and penetrating. He would make a valuable member of
the society.

5. I sponsor this candidate as a person in my judgment properly qualified for Membership in

the American Musicological Society

Signed Walter W Rubsamen

Address Dept. of Music, University of California
Los Angeles, California

Please return this form to:

Gustave Reese
Secretary of the American Musicological Society
3 East 43rd Street
New York, New York

58
 Tamara Levitz

Appendix VI (continued)

Please supply Date

as full infor-
mation as pos-
sible
AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

CANDIDACY FOR MEMBERSHIP

Statement of Sponsor
1. Name of candidate

T.W. Adorno

2. Statement concerning the quantity and type of the candidate’s research, and concerning the
quality of his scholarship:

(a) from direct personal knowledge

I know that Mr. Adorno (Wiesengrund) has contributed several articles to “Der Anbruch”,
a famous German music periodical; also to Willie [sic] Reich’s “23” a Viennese brochure for
musical polemics, where he used the pseudonym Kurt Weiler.

(b) From indirect sources (give names)

Mr. Arnold Schoenberg gave me the following information: “Mr. Wiesengrund Adorno
studied with Alban Berg for several years. Mr. Berg thought highly of him as a composer
and musicologist. I know of several articles he has written in a very thorough and scientific
manner on the analysis of some of my works, which I found extraordinarily interesting.
He obtained his Ph.D. in a German University and I heartily endorse his application for
membership in the America Musicological Society.
Arnold Schoenberg

(over)

3. Statement concerning the candidate’s training, interests, and activities

4. Other remarks

5. I sponsor this candidate as a person in my judgment properly qualified for Membership in

the American Musicological Society

Signed Adolph Weiss

Address 1803 ½ N. Bronson Ave
Hollywood, Cal.

Please return this form to:

Gustave Reese
Secretary of the American Musicological Society
3 East 43rd Street
New York, New York

59
 Current Musicology

Notes
I would like to thank Erin Brooks, Jamie Currie, Kyle Kaplan, Ben Piekut, Alejandro García
Sudo, Pradeep Kannan, Schuyler Whelden, and Tom Wetmore for making crucial intellec-
tual interventions that greatly helped me to strengthen the critical argument in this article.
I am indebted to all of them for the time and care they spent with this piece, and especially
to Tom for his exceptional editing. I also feel immensely grateful for the feedback I received
from so many thoughtful students and colleagues, especially Martha Feldman and Carol
Oja, and for the intense conversations about this topic in response to related lectures I gave
at Cornell University, Princeton University, New York University, Northwestern University,
the Society for American Music, the University of California Riverside, and the University
of Arizona, as well as at the "Essence and Context" conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. Finally,
I am grateful to Alex Rehding for his insightful responses to my queries about Harvard, and
to Benjamin Court and Kyle Kaplan for their help as research assistants in photographing
archival materials.
1. See the Harvard Music Department’s web pages: http://music.fas.harvard.edu/news.sht-
ml and https://music.fas.harvard.edu/currentugrad.shtml. See also Valia P. Leiper (2018).
Harvard was not the first university to make such changes, but their actions received the
most public attention. I am grateful to Alex Rehding for his clarification of this curriculum
in an email to me dated April 23, 2018.
2. See, for example, Professors Alexander Rehding, Suzannah Clark, and Anne Schreffler,
quoted in Robin (2017).
3. See, for a small sampling, the discussions on: http://slippedisc.com/2017/04/you-dont-
have-to-read-music-to-study-it-at-harvard; https://www.jazzguitar.be/forum/theory/60094-
harvard-drops-music-theory-requirement.html; and https://phys.org/news/2017-05-insid-
ious-class-music.html (Ian Pace). Composer John Adams caught the most attention, and
polarized the discussion, by rejecting the new requirements on Twitter.
4. Although the AMS-list was scheduled to shut down in fall 2017, it is still operating. One
can become a member at: http://www.ams-net.org/ams-l. As far as I know, the AMS-list
debate about language requirements was not archived publically.
5. William Robin gives an excellent bibliography of recent online discussions and signifi-
cant secondary literature on public musicology in a syllabus for a course he taught in the
School of Music at the University of Maryland in spring 2017: https://willrobin251824868.
files.wordpress.com/2018/08/musc-699p-syllabus.pdf.
6. I discuss the coloniality of power in “Decolonizing the Society for American Music”
(Levitz 2017). See also the bibliography included in that article.
7. I am grateful to Brigid Cohen for introducing me to this work.
8. My understanding of the musicological elite’s expertise is shaped by my conversations
and collaborations with Benjamin Court, whose work on amateurism inspired me in think-
ing about this topic, and taught me so much. See Court (2017).
9. The proper abbreviations for this society are: Internationale Musikgesellschaft (IMG),
(1899–1914); Internationale Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft (IGMw) or Société Inter-
nationale de Musicologie (SIM) (1927–), and International Musicological Society (IMG)
(1949–). See Kirnbauer (2017, 11n1).
10. Engel understood this moment as the birth of US musicology. In his presidential ad-
dress to the AMS in 1937, he described how Leland approached him at the Library of Con-
gress to create a Committee on Musicology at the ACLS after reading his tribute to Oscar
Sonneck. See Engel (1929, 1937).

60
 Tamara Levitz

11. Leland wrote Engel on February 9, 1929 to inform him that the ACLS, “believing that
the history and science of music constitutes an important branch of learning” had voted to
ask the Executive Committee to appoint a standing committee on musicology and “to take
such other measures as may be calculated to promote research and education in that field”
(Leland 1929a). He asked Engel to help him select the other members, five in all. On the
same day, Leland asked Kinkeldey to become a member. He was very disappointed when
Kinkeldey said no, because he viewed Kinkeldey’s “cooperation as indispensable in our ef-
forts to promote musicology as a field of learning” (see Leland 1929a; Kinkeldey 1929a;
Leland 1929c; Kinkeldey 1929b; Armstrong 1929). Leland also requested Kinkeldey’s ap-
proval of the candidates Engel had suggested: Otto Ortmann, Frances Anne Wister, and
Olin Downes. He thought Jean Beck would make a good member, but Beck had applied for
funding and was thus disqualified (Leland 1929b).
12. See J.P. Chamberlain (1920). On Waldo Gifford Leland, see Wosh (2001). Leland’s pa-
pers are kept at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/mm78029900.
13. See the list of members of the Direktorium (board) included in “Einladung” (1928). In
a letter to Merian from February 1928, Adler had suggested Carl Engel, Oscar Sonneck,
Waldo Pratt, and Albert Stanley as possible US members of the board (Adler 1928a).
14. The reports of these gatherings in the annual proceedings of the MTNA from 1899 to
1914 give evidence of the IMG’s influence on musicological practice in United States before
WW I. See, for example, Stanley (1910). Programs for the IMG’s conferences are available
in the Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, available online at https://archive.
org/details/ZeitschriftDerInternationalenMusikgesellschaft011899-1900/page/n133. See,
for example, Schering (1906).
15. The Congress on Music History was held as part of the Beethoven Centennial celebra-
tions in Vienna from March 20–27, 1927. There has recently been much interest in ex-
ploring the history of the IGMw. See, for example, Baumann and Fabris (2017) and the
conference “A ‘Musical League of Nations’?: Music Institutions and the Politics of Interna-
tionalism,” Institute of Musical Research, Senate House, London, June 29–30, 2018, https://
www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/musical-league-of-nations. I also found Yves Balm-
er and Hervé Lacombe (2017) immensely useful. On the founding of the IGMw, see also
“Centenaire de Beethoven” (1927). This unsigned article (written by Julien Tiersot) reports
that the new “international federation” was announced at the closing ceremonies of this
congress in Vienna in 1927, and that Guido Adler, Julien Tiersot, Hermann Abert, André
Pirro, Henry Prunières, Johannes Wolf, Karl Nef, Henryk Opienski, and Carl Engel were on
the commission to organize it. See also “Die Gründung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für
Musikwissenschaft” (1928) and Häusler (1977). Materials related to the organizers’ delib-
erations during the first 18 months, before their first official board meeting in September
1928, are kept in Folder 23:16, Adler Papers.
16. Edward Dent also played a large role in defining the internationalism of the IGMw as its
president from 1931 to 1949. Dent (1936) told Adler in a letter from March 17, 1936, in the
context of preparing the First International Congress for Music Education in Prague, that
he felt “like an ‘unfortunate atlas’ of the international music world” (Ich fühle mich wie ein
‘unglückseliger Atlas’ der internationalen Musikwelt.)
17. “groupement intern [sic] de musicologues professionnelles avec un bureau de renseigne-
ments pensant faciliter les travaux et les recherches en tous pays.” Adler’s vision corresponds
to what Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels (2005) describe as a standard view on
international organizations as an “an instrument through which nation-states seek to wield
power in international relations” (466).

61
 Current Musicology

18. “Beethoven-Zentenarfeier” (1928). Julien Tiersot wrote this unsigned review. In a let-
ter to Adler from March 21, 1928, Prunières apologized for Tiersot’s “malicious attitude”
(l’attitude malveillante) in the Revue (Prunières 1928). Tiersot had been an “enemy” of their
project of an international society from the start, he complained, but would no longer ob-
struct their plans because Prunières had made sure he would not be reelected as president
of the French society.
19. “Unsere ökonomischen Verhältnisse sind wie Sie wissen sehr drückend so dass ich Be-
denken habe ob sich eine grosse Zahl von Teilnehmern finden wird und gerade die Beru-
fensten und vielleicht auch die Tüchtigsten werden sich aus dem genannten Grunde fern
halten müssen. Es fehlt auch bei uns an Gönnern. Indessen wollen wir die Hoffnung nicht
aufgeben, aber Geduld und wieder Geduld. Momentan bin ich mit verschiedenen dring-
lichen Arbeiten ungemein in Anspruch genommen, allein ich behalte die Sache im Auge.
Es wäre vielleicht am besten wenn Deutschland und Oesterreich vereinigt würden, also
deutsches Sprachgebiet, ohne jede politische Tendenz. Es wäre ferner gut wenn es in dem
Aufrufe an die Freunde der Musikwissenschaft hiesse: Deutsch, Engländer, Franzosen und
Italiener. Dies wäre auch aus dem Grunde wichtig und vorteilhaft weil dann bei den Letzt-
genannten die Kolonien hinzukommen könnten und das wäre eine Bereicherung, denn
schließlich werden die einzelnen Kolonien dieser Nationen doch keine Separatabteilungen
bilden können. Auch würde ich meinen dass mit Rücksicht auf die ökonomischen Verhält-
nisse zu erwägen wäre ob nicht für Amerika sowohl für Nord—als auch für Südamerika,
eine Stellung eingeräumt werden könnte, so wie sie für die 4 Nationen geschaffen wurde.
Wollen Sie dies mit Prof. Wagner eingehend beraten” (Adler 1928a).
20. Secretary Wilhelm Merian promised board members from Germany and Austria visas
for the first IGMw conference in Liège, Belgium in 1930. At the same time, the organizing
committee eased passport regulations for all conference attendees. See Merian (1930); “II.
Vorstandssitzung” (1929).
21. “Kunst und Wissenschaft sind an keine nationalen Schranken gebunden, bedürfen viel-
mehr zu ihrer vollen Auswirkung der Bewegungsfreiheit über die Landesgrenzen hinaus.”
See “An die Freunde” (n.d.). For an example of how board members referred to their adver-
tising as “propaganda,” see Merian (1928). The IGMw’s treasurer, Theodor Speiser-Riggen-
bach suggested lowering a patron’s lifetime contribution to 200 CHF at the second meeting
of the executive in Paris in October 1929. See “II. Vorstandssitzung” (1929).
22. See “Internationale der Musikwissenschaft” (1928); Neue Preußische Kreuzzeitung (n.d.).
23. See “Einladung” (1928).
24. The society included members from more countries than were represented on the board.
At the meeting on September 4, 1928, Peter Wagner announced that the society had ac-
quired 182 members in its first year, with “members also in America, Africa, and Asia.” See
“I. Vorstandssitzung” (1928). The members are listed in “Erstes Verzeichnis” (1928). This
list includes Michel Bourla, living in Jaffa, Palestine as the one “Asian” member. Charles Ri-
beyre (engineer at the Compagnie du Canal du Suez, Egypt) and Jules Rouanet, living in Al-
ger, were the two “Africans.” “American” members included Albert Stanley, Charles Seeger,
O.G. Sonneck, Robert J. Talbot (from Québec), Ernst Krohn, Julius Gold, Mrs. Janet Rowan
Hale, John Patterson, Erich Weiler, and Carl Engel. There were only two members from
“Middle and South America”: Luiz Lavanère from Jaraguà-Algõas, Brazil, and Emirto de
Lima from Barranquilla, Colombia. The lists of members included in the Mitteilungen from
1928 to 1930 shows that the number of European members—whether individuals, institu-
tions, musicological societies, or libraries—increased, but the international members did
not, with the exception of a few new members from the United States. There were notably

62
 Tamara Levitz

large contingents from Germany, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. New members from
the United States in 1930 included Abraham Idelsohn, Alexander Mackay-Smith, Dayton
C. Miller, Walter Williams, the New York Public Library, and the Library of the School of
Music at Yale University. The only new member from Central and South America during
these years was André Sas (Peru). The membership of the IGMw remained this insular well
into the 1950s and beyond. See Häusler (1977).
25. See “Internationale Gesellschaft Statuten” (1928), item §12. In his letter to Merian from
February 1928, Adler wrote that “even though the office is located in Basel and the secre-
tary and treasurer of the society have to be Swiss, the state concept of being Swiss is not
decisive in this, but rather —along with the still fluctuating idea of being neutral—the con-
venient location of Switzerland and specifically Basel, which, by the way, is quite far for us
Austrians” (Adler 1928a). (Noch möchte ich bemerken dass die Nennung der 4 Nationen
auch für die Schweiz vorteilhaft wäre, denn wenngleich der Sitz in Basel ist und Sekretär
und Schatzmeister daselbst sein müssen so ist dabei der Staatsbegriff des Schwiezers [sic]
nicht Ausschlaggebend [sic] sondern neben der noch immer fluktuierenden Vorstellung
des Neutralen, die günstige Lage der Schweiz rekte [sic] Basels. -Allerdings für uns Oester-
reicher ziemlich weit.)
26. On Guido Adler’s role in the development of musicology as a profession, see Stumpf,
Posch, and Rathkolb (2017).
27. A second copy of the statutes in the Guido Adler Papers has the word “Länder” changed
to “Nationen.” Adler probably made this change. In the French version of the statutes the
word is “nation” from the start. The “Beitrittserklärung” (n.d.) uses the word “Staaten,” but
Adler again changed it in the margins to “Nationen.” Adler wrote Merian in February 1928
that he wanted the term “Staaten” changed to “Nationen,” especially for Germany and Aus-
tria (Adler 1928a). These materials are all kept in Folder 23:16, Adler Papers.
28. “Wolf teilt mit, dass Kamienski etwas pikiert sei, dass Polen nicht im Vorstand vertreten
sei. Prof. Wolf hat auf Nejedly hingewiesen und betont, dass nicht alle Staaten im Vorstand
vertreten sein können. Das Telegramm von Kamienski an die Gründungsversammlung war
ungeschickt abgefasst; er gibt es zu. Kamienski ist wieder versöhnt, hat Prof. Wolf beauf-
tragt, uns mitzuteilen, dass er eine polnische Gesellschaft gegründet habe.” Dent responded,
“es ist ausgeschlossen, dass die Vertreter aller Nationen in unseren Vorstand gewählt wer-
den. Nur Persönlichkeiten in unseren Vorstand, keine Repräsentanten der Nationen, son-
dern der Wissenschaft.” See “I. Vorstandssitzung” (1928). During the congress in Vienna in
March 1927, Adler had jotted down a list of possible members for an envisioned interna-
tional society that included “Jachim” from Poland, by which I assume he meant Zdzislaw
Jachimecki (Adler 1927b). In 1928, Adolf Chybinski was the only Polish member of the
IGMw. Alicja Simon joined in June 1929. They remained the only two Polish members in
1930, which means that Kamienski did not join after his correspondence with the board.
See the list of members and supplementary lists in the Mitteilungen der IGMw from Octo-
ber 1928, September 1929, June 1929, and July 1930.
29. My view on the IGMw’s relationship to Russian musicologists differs dramatically from
that of Häusler (1977). See “II. Vorstandssitzung” (1929); Merian (1930a). Adler had sug-
gested Boris Asafyev and Oskar von Riesemann as potential Russian members in the list
of personnel he wrote up in March 1927 (see Adler 1927b). But Mikhail Vladimirovich
Ivanov-Boretzky had remained the only Russian member of the IGMw until 1929, when
Boris Asafyev, Anna Chochlowkina, Semjon Ginsberg, Alexander Nicolsky, and Zenaide
Ssawelowa joined. See the lists of members and supplementary lists in the Mitteilungen der
IGMw from October 1928, September 1929, June 1929, and July 1930.

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30. On the role the League of Nation’s internationalism played in reconfiguring academic
disciplines, see Ken Osborn (2016).
31. “Auskunftsstelle für alle Fragen gedacht ist, die nur oder am besten auf internationaler
Basis gelöst werden können. Dieses Bureau steht allen Mitgliedern für Auskünfte, Anre-
gungen, und Nachforschung zur Verfügung. Seine Hauptziele sind vorerst vornehmlich die
folgenden: Herstellung der Verbindungen zwischen den Musikforschern der verschiedenen
Länder; Vermittlung von Anfragen und Auskünften; Beschaffung oder Vermittlung von
wissenschaftlichen Hilfsmitteln wie Handschriften, Kopien, Photographien; Nachweis über
Themen, die in den verschieden Ländern in Bearbeitung sind; Errichtung einer bibliogra-
phischen Zentralstelle.” See “Beitrittserklärung” (n.d.). The society’s secretary was assigned
to run the bureau, but most likely Miss J. Schaefer did. (See “III. Vorstandsitzung” 1930.)
Miss Schaefer also took the minutes for the board’s meetings in the early years.
32. At the first meeting of the IGMw executive, Dent told his colleagues that he thought
the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations could
help them in determining the legal status of their society. That organization was planning
to create a law to prevent such societies from being dissolved in war time. Dent noted that
whereas the IMG had been dissolved in World War I, the English one (the Royal Music
Society) had not been, and that this was important. See “I. Vorstandssitzung” (1928).
33. In his notes from March 1927, Adler had commented that “governments will be ap-
proached and asked for funding for the confederation” (Adler 1927a).
34. The IGMw struggled financially throughout the 1930s. In 1936, for example, Edward
Dent wrote Adler about the suggestion they approach Robert Mayer as a potential patron
to “save” the IGMw (Dent 1936).
35. For a brief history of this bank, see https://www.gutzwiller.ch/assets/content/
GUTZWILLER(ALL-GB).pdf
36. Guido Adler (1928c) had requested funds from the Bundesministerium für Unterricht
in Vienna in a letter dated December 11, 1928. They gave the IGMw 200 Schillings in Au-
gust 1930 (Merian 1930).
37. Adler announced these plans as early as 1927 in the flyer “Commemoration of the 100th
Anniversary of Beethoven: A Congress of Music History” (Adler 1927c). See also Guido
Adler’s different French version of this announcement in the same folder. He explained the
new journal in detail in his “Promemoria” to Wilhelm Merian (Adler 1928b).
38. See the statutes, §18. In his initial notes on the IGMw from March 1927, Adler had re-
marked that the journal’s languages could be “freely chosen by the authors” (Adler 1927b).
But in his Promemoria from October 1928, he wrote Merian that he wanted the journal to
be in the five languages listed here (although he suggested Latin as tentative) (Adler 1928b).
A year later, Johannes Wolf suggested adding Spanish, bringing the list of languages for the
journal up to six (Wolf 1929). It is indicative of European linguistic hierarchies that the
board did not at this time include Spanish or Czech among the IGMw’s official languages,
even though a significant contingent of Spanish and Czech members joined the society after
1930. Latin was removed and Spanish added as an official language of the IMS only decades
later. On the current language politics of the journal, see Celestini and Bohlman (2011).
39. Minutes of meetings were also in German, and I assume the meetings were conducted
in that language.
40. Dent (1934). This letter and other materials relating to Acta musicologica are kept in
Folder 23:19, Guido Adler Papers.

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41. Nancy Yunhwa Rao (1997, 376n10) provides this information based on a surviving
memorandum of the meeting in the Joseph Schillinger Collection, NYPL. She notes that
the name of the society was still up for grabs at the first meeting. In the bulletin from 1931,
Seeger listed only himself, Cowell, Kinkeldey, Schillinger, and Yasser as present at the meet-
ing (NYMS 1931).
42. Roberts expressed her dismay about how Walton had been treated in a letter to Gustave
Reese, September 26, 1946 (Roberts 1946a). She requested Walton be given a lifetime mem-
bership. In a second letter to Reese from November 28, 1946, Roberts regretted that Reese
had passed on her request to Charles Seeger, who rejected it, as she expected he would. “It
happens that Mr. Seeger is one of the worse offenders in the way I mentioned. However, the
damage is done” (Roberts 1946b).The online descriptions of materials in the collection in
which they are found do not always match labels on individual items in the archive. For this
reason, in the references section I have indicated simply the box in which materials can be
found and the label on the box if it is clear.
43. Sarat Lahiri taught Henry Cowell Hindustani classical music and performed in his New
School series. See also, from these years, Lahiri and Sargeant (1931).
44. Members included: Joseph Achron, Yuri Bilstein, Mikhail Bukinik, Vladimir Droz-
doff, Eugene Fuerst, Alexander Gretchaninov, Alexander Koshetz, Nina Koshetz, Vassily
Kibaltchitch, Nikolai Medtner, Leonard Mestechkin, Eugene Plotnikoff, Benjamin Levine,
Nicholas Slonimsky, Lazare Saminsky, Joseph Schillinger, Konstantin Shvedov, Alexander
Siloti, Nicholas Stember, Léon Theremin, Sergei Tarnowsky, Sergei Touchnoff, Jacob Wein-
berg, Joseph Yasser, and Moïse Zlatin. Seeger noted in the first Bulletin that Joseph Yasser,
Alexander Gretchaninov, Nicholas Slonimsky, Joseph Schillinger, and Solomon Rosowsky
had already given papers in joint encounters with the NYMS (NYMS 1931). Materials on
the “Russian group of Musicologists of New York City” are kept in Folder 31, Box 6, Yasser
Collection.
45. On Gerald F. Warburg, see “Gerald F. Warburg” (n.d.). See also Kirby (1934).
46. See NYMS (1931). Mary Ellen Bute may have served as secretary for the New York Soci-
ety for a time. A note at the end of the second Bulletin indicates that copies of Bulletins nos.
1 and 2 could be obtained from “Miss. M.E. Bute, 2 West 67th Street, Apartment 10F, New
York City (Telephone E.Ndicott 2-2395).”
47. This was announced in NYMS (1932).
48. See, for example, the materials in Folder 15, Box 4, Yasser Collection.
49. William J. Mitchell (1965) later joked about Spivacke’s role, highlighting, perhaps, how
unusual it was: “Who was this Dr. Harold Spivacke? Observe that in 1934 he was appointed
assistant Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Was he charged by his
superiors in Washington with the execution of a secret, callous operation? Was it his assign-
ment to wrest from New York City its own society and federalize it? Was this bureaucracy
on the move? Who was his superior?”
50. I explore this history in much more detail in an article in preparation, “The White Su-
premacist Foundations of the American Musicological Society.”
51. I have been able to find the minutes of only one meeting of the ASCM, on April 4, 1936.
Copies of these minutes are kept in the archives of Joseph Yasser, Helen Heffron Roberts,
and Harold Spivacke. Helen Heffron Roberts presided over this meeting. The following
members attended: Helen Heffron Roberts, Harold Spivacke, Joseph Yasser, Irma G. Labas-
tille, Marion Bauer, F.C. Lathrop, Christo Vironides, and M.H. Haas.

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52. See “American Society” (n.d.). The society issued at least one recording of “Navaho
Indian music” as a way of recruiting members. It was sent to all members who paid their
dues (see Roberts 1934b).
53. The box in which these minutes are found is now kept in the archive as a single micro-
film, labeled, on its first page: “Minutes of the American Musicological Society.”
54. Roberts had sent a memo to Reese, which he had included in the agenda he sent mem-
bers before this meeting. See Gustave Reese’s (1934a).
55. See “American Musicological Society: By-Laws to the Constitution” (n.d.), with a typed
note “Adopted December 1, 1934,” and yearly ballots kept in Box 27, AMSR. In the second
draft of the AMS constitution from summer/fall 1934, one member commented that, “The
remarks that vice-presidents shall be chosen from different branches is well made but it is,
as it stand [sic], very dangerous. The next generation of musicologists will probably be more
like Curt Sachs than like [Arnold] Schering or [John William Strutt] Rayleigh. However,
this can easily be remedied by leaving some kind of a loophole to the nominating commit-
tee—something about the availability of suitable men, perhaps.” See “American Musicologi-
cal Society: Constitution (2nd Draft),” no date but c. summer/fall 1934, Folder 16, Box 5,
Spivacke Collection.
56. Charles Seeger later confirmed his inadvertent role in enabling the historical musicol-
ogists to take over the AMS. In a letter to Oliver Strunk from January 23, 1960, Seeger
recalled: I “made a plea for formal statement of dual interest [historical and comparative
musicology] and tried unsuccessfully to incorporate it in the Constitution [of the AMS],
of whose drafting committee I was secretary. I reminded the other members, Kinkeldey
and Spivacke, of my fears in the drafting of the first, historical orientations would swamp
both the comparative musicological and systematic interests. But I had to agree with them
that constitutional concern with the matter would be inept. The old Society for Compara-
tive Musicology had to die because there were not enough serious students interested in
its aims” (Seeger 1960a). In the same letter, Seeger reveals how he later drafted a constitu-
tion for the Society for Ethnomusicology (in 1955) and “patterned it as closely as the small
membership allowed, upon that of the AMS, with eventual merging of the two societies not
only hoped for but expected.” Seeger repeats the story of how he drafted the constitution of
the SEM to match that of the AMS in a letter to Dragan Plamenac, March 30, 1960 (Seeger
1960b). I wonder about how Seeger’s constant maneuvering behind the scenes affected the
discipline at large, given the enormous role he played in the AMS, ASCM, Committee on
Musicology of the ACLS, and Pan American Society.
57. See Roberts (1937). This letter is followed in the archive by two official, undated letters
to all members of the society about the plans to transfer the activities of the German sec-
tion to the United States and create an international society. At this time Charles Seeger was
president, Henry Cowell and Harold Spivacke vice-presidents, F.C. Lathrop corresponding
secretary, and George Herzog secretary. The council consisted of Laura Boulton, Edwin G.
Burrows, Arnold Bake, Eleanor Hague, Philips Barry, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Derrick
N. Lehmer. Roberts’ correspondence with Lachmann gives detailed information about how
all these developments unfolded. These letters are kept in Group No. 1410, Series No. 1, Box
No. 3, Folder 89, Roberts Papers.
58. Roberts wrote Elma Loines on April 9, 1936: “For the past three years, the Society has
been run largely by two or three individuals because most of the membership is so scattered
and so few people were willing to take responsibility. I felt, however, that the interest would
be much keener if a number of people had an active part in it. Moreover, I have been saddled
with most of the work and it has gotten to a place where I simply cannot carry it all, so I have

66
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insisted on a full slate of officers being elected and a Council who could, if necessary, hold to
account one or two of our officers, who, while able, are most dilatory and even irresponsible
in business matters” (Roberts 1936). See also Roberts (1934b), in which she describes how
she has taken on secretarial duties for the ASCM even though she was not elected secretary.
59. Roberts lost her job at Yale when funding was cut at the end of the winter semester 1936.
See Roberts to Elma Loines, April 9, 1936. In a letter to Seeger from February 5, 1937, she
writes about the rather desperate state of the ASCM (Roberts 1937).
60. See also the agenda for this meeting (Reese 1934b), created by Reese and dated June
16, 1934.
61. A collection of yearly proceedings is online at: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Re-
cord/000046672. In order to get a sense of how musicologists distinguished themselves in
the MTNA in these years, it is helpful to read the annual presidential addresses. See, for
example, Smith (1938).
62. Reese (1936b) wrote Dickinson on August 20, 1936 that 2/3 of the board had sanctioned
the plan for a joint meeting.
63. AMS members received a photostat program that included only the musicology sessions
at the MTNA conference. This program is included in Folder 2280, Box 78, AMSR.
64. I explore the racial and gendered consequences of these ruptures in greater depth in my
article in preparation, “The White Supremacist Foundations of the American Musicological
Society.”
65. In February 1935, Leland asked Kinkeldey if he would replace the music critic Richard
Aldrich on the committee, and then succeed Carl Engel as chair. Leland had been corre-
sponding with and visiting Kinkeldey since 1929, when he had first asked him to join the
Committee on Musicology; Kinkeldey had also served in these years as an evaluator for
fellowship and grant applications. Although Kinkeldey had been hesitant, this time he said
yes. In a way he and Engel traded places: in 1937, Engel became president of the AMS, a year
after Kinkeldey took his place as chair of the Committee on Musicology. See Engel (1932);
Kinkeldey (1934); Leland (1934); Leland (1935a); Kinkeldey (1935a); Leland (1935b).
66. On the work of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and the Com-
mission Internationale des Arts Populaires, see Bjarne Rogan (2006).
67. For a brief overview of the Committee on Musicology’s activities in this period see
Daugherty (1938, 5–7).
68. Goodchild noted that Oliver Strunk had helped him compile section C of this list, on
“concrete” suggestions.
69. The committee was referring here to Progress of Medieval (and Renaissance) Studies in
the United States and Canada, published from 1922–1960.
70. Goodchild and Kinkeldey subsequently corresponded about whether to send out these
two articles to university administrators. Goodchild noted that he liked the MTNA one, but
he felt sending such articles to university administrators was a delicate undertaking. Kin-
keldey did not want to push the issue, and it is unclear whether the articles were ultimately
sent. See Kinkeldey (1935b); Goodchild (1935c); Kinkeldey (1935c).
71. Kinkeldey (1936b) talked about these summer fellowships for graduate students as the
primary achievement of the Committee on Musicology in his first year as chair in a letter
to Leland, November 21, 1936. Extensive materials relating to students’ applications and
nominations for these summer fellowships are kept in Folder 6-26, Box 6, Kinkeldey Pa-
pers. For a list of recipients of grants, etc., see Daugherty (1938, 5–7).

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72. Goodchild wrote in the same letter that the “big job” was to get scholars to “consider
themselves collaborators with us rather than advocates of their students.”
73. Goodchild and Kinkeldey seemed to get along very well.
74. Materials pertaining to this survey, including sample questionnaires, responses, and
bios, are included in Folder 6-28, Box 6, Kinkeldey Papers. Goodchild stressed how impor-
tant this work was to the “developmental program” of the Committee on Musicology. See
Goodchild (1940).
75. See Daugherty (1938b). In his letter, Daugherty mentions that he has sent the question-
naire to almost all members of the AMS, some teachers, and individuals recommended by
the committee.
76. On this publication and the questionnaire, see Goodchild (1938b); Daugherty (1938a,
1938c, 1938d, 1938e, 1938f).
77. George S. Dickinson, Glen Haydon, Otto Kinkeldey, Hugo Leichtentritt, Oliver Strunk,
and Gustave Reese were present (“Minutes” 1936).
78. Carl Seashore (1937), an emeritus professor at the University of Iowa, lamented to Gus-
tave Reese in a letter from October 9, 1937 that musicology had still not had the time to
define its “field.” He was of two minds about how this should happen. “It must be a natural
evolution and the survival of the fittest,” he wrote on the one hand. “Perhaps, on the other
hand,” he added, reconsidering, “the great diversity of interests may lend a charm to the
undertaking.”
79. See Article IV of “American Musicological Society: By-Laws to the Constitution” (n.d.).
80. See “Proposed amendments” (2017).
81. See, for example, “Dean to Speak” (1939).
82. See Golden (2004); Willoughby-Herard (2015); Carnegie Commission (1932); Ma-
gubane (2008). I explore these connections in more depth in my article in preparation, “The
White Supremacist Foundations of the American Musicological Society.”
83. Albert Sydney Raubenheimer’s dissertation was published as Raubenheimer (1925).
84. Alderman (n.d.) writes that Raubenheimer regularly attended concerts of the Los An-
geles Philharmonic and strongly supported the music department during his time as dean.
85. Dorothy Lawton was one of the first women to become a member in 1935. Isabel Pope
and Olga Samaroff Stokowsky were other early members. Marion Brauer, Mary Martha
Briney, Anabel Morris Buchanan, Barbara Duncan, Ruth Hanna, Miriam Johnson, Hertha
Schweiger, and Edith Woodruff gave papers in the society before 1939. I explore this topic
in greater depth in my article in preparation, “The White Supremacist Foundations of the
American Musicological Society.” See American Musicological Society (1984); Grassl and
Szabó-Knotik (1999).
86. See Ballot (1939). That year, Ruth Hannas was nominated to be a member-at-large.
Roberts had been nominated for vice president in 1936, running against Carleton Sprague
Smith, and also as a member-at-large in 1937. See the ballots dated December 16, 1936 and
October 27, 1937, Box 27, AMSR.
87. “Ich sehe mich wegen Inkompetenz leider nicht in der Lage, die freundliche Einladung
zu acceptieren.” Albert Einstein, quoted in German in Alfred Einstein’s (1940) letter to Ree-
se, August 7, 1940. Warren T. Allen (1940) had suggested inviting Einstein in a letter from
July 17, 1940. See also Reese’s (1940) response to Allen, July 31, 1940.
88. See, for example, Pham and Shilliam (2016); Raza, Roy, and Zacharia (2015); and Shil-
liam (2015).
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 Tamara Levitz

89. This became Article II of the first constitution of the AMS from 1934. In the first draft of
this constitution from June 26, 1934, however, the mission statement, listed as “II. Objects,”
had read: “The objects of the Association shall be to promote intercourse among those who
are cultivating musicology in different parts of America, to co-operate with other learned
and artists societies and institutions, to give a stronger and more general impulse and more
systematic direction to critical and scientific research, and to procure for the labors of musi-
cological scholars increased facilities and a wider usefulness.” See “American Musicological
Association: Constitution (Draft),” included in Reese (1934c). A second draft of this consti-
tution, completed at a second meeting, provides the original on the left-hand, and alternate
suggestions from the constitution committee on the right-hand side of the page. Here, the
members suggested that the object of the association could be: “1. to promote in the U.S.A.
the cultivation and appreciation of musicology as a branch of learning; 2. to facilitate and
stimulate the relations between individuals interested in musicology; 3. to further the coop-
eration of the Association with other learned bodies in America and abroad; X. The objects
of the Association are the study of the History of Music, musical Aesthetics, and Musical
Theory.; X. A clause modelled [sic] after: ‘The object of the Association shall be the advance-
ment of research in modern languages and their literatures.’ (From the constitution of the
Modern Language Association).” See “American Musicological Society: Constitution (2nd
Draft),” no date but c. summer/fall 1934, kept in Folder 16, Box 5, Spivacke Collection. Article
II of the current bylaws reads: “The object of the society shall be the advancement of scholar-
ship in the various fields of music through research, learning, and teaching. The Society shall
be operated as a nonprofit corporation exclusively for this object.” See the AMS “By-Laws”
(AMS 2017).
90. See also Fitzsimmons (2009). Harvard is currently involved in a law suit concerning al-
leged discrimination against Asian American candidates for admission. For an update with
links, see Franklin and Zwickel (2018).
91. Soares cites several authors who represent this view, but directs his critique at Nicholas
Lemann’s (1999) The Big Test. See Soares’s bibliography in footnote 22, page 204.
92. Today, 67% of Harvard’s students come from the top 20%; 4.5% from the bottom 20%.
See “Economic Diversity” (2017). See also Bolotnikova (2017). These studies indicate, how-
ever, that there has been long-term progress, and that the situation has improved from what
it was decades ago.
93. Harvard hires less adjuncts than other universities in the United States. See College Fac-
tual (n.d.); Aspellund and Bernhard (2015). Labor conditions at Harvard are reflected in the
bitter debate over the unionization of Teaching and Research Assistants (see HGSU-UAW,
n.d.; Office of the Provost, n.d.; Avi-Yonah and McCafferty 2018).
94. Nair quotes Steven Salaita as arguing that “the preservation of academic freedom as a
rights-based structure, in other words, shouldn’t be the focus of our work. We should focus
on the development and maintenance of just labor conditions and the disengagement of our
institutions from the exercise of state violence.” Nair’s larger argument is that radicalism is
“not a matter of gesture, of experimental tweeting or ad hominem editorializing.” And it is
not about defending free speech. Rather, it “requires speaking from and recognizing con-
text,” i.e., the material conditions of the university as revealed in acute problems of access
and economic inequality.
95. See Jacques Rancière (1987). On critical positionalities, see Dylan Robinson (forthcom-
ing).
96. NYMS (1931, 1932, 1933-34).
97. “Minutes” (1930–1932).

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98. This document is kept in Folder 1, Box 6, Spivacke Collection.

99. Enclosure included in Goodchild (1935a). Kinkeldey’s name is written in pen at the top
of this document. Somebody has also scribbled in pencil on the r.h. corner “encl. 6.12.35.”
100. D. H. Daugherty included this typed, mimeographed document in Daugherty (1938c).
101. This list is kept in Folder 16, Box 5, Spivacke Collection.
102. On these documents, regular text indicates the original typed application form, italics
indicates typed recommendations from sponsors, and text in bold indicates the sponsors’
signatures in pen. A high-resolution scan of Adorno’s full application is available in the
online supplement to this article at http://bit.ly/2CIb4eJ. This application is kept in Box
35, AMSR. I am grateful to Robert Judd, Executive Director of the AMS, for permission to
reproduce it.

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Goodchild, Donald. 1935c. Letter to Otto Kinkeldey, August 21, 1935. Folder 6-25, Box 6,
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Kinkeldey Papers.

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Leland, Waldo G. 1929b. Letter to Otto Kinkeldey, February 14, 1929. Folder 6-24, Box 6,
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Association of Schools of Music, American Musicological Society, and Phi Mu Alpha

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Reese, Gustave. 1934a. Memo to the Organizing Committee of the American Musicological
Society, September 8, 1934. Box 27, AMSR.
   . 1934b. Meeting Agenda, Organization Committee of the AMS, June 21, 1934.
Folder 16, Box 5, Spivacke Collection.
   . 1934c. Letter to Harold Spivacke, July 3, 1934. Folder 16, Box 5, Spivacke
Collection.
   . 1936a. Letter from the “Secretary of AMS” [Gustave Reese] to Otto Ortmann, July
27, 1936. Folder 2280, Box 78, AMSR.
   . 1936b. Letter to George S. Dickinson. Folder 2280, Box 78, AMSR.
   . 1938. “Report of the Secretary (December 30, 1938).” Box 27, AMSR.
   . 1939a. Letter to Dayton C. Miller, June 16, 1939. In “Board Correspondence May–
June 1939,” Box 15, AMSR.
   . 1939b. “Report of the Secretary (September 11, 1939).” Box 27, AMSR.
   . 1939c. Letter to George S. Dickinson, May 15, 1939. Folder “Board Correspon-
dence May–June 1939,” Box 15, AMSR.
   . 1939d. Letter to Howard Hanson, June 8, 1939. Folder “Board Correspondence
May–June 1939,” Box 15, AMSR.
   . 1939e. Letter to George S. Dickinson, June 8, 1939. Folder “Board Correspondence
May–June 1939,” Box 15, AMSR.
   . 1940. Letter to William T. Allen, July 31, 1940. Folder “Annual Meeting 1940,
Cleveland,” Box 79, AMSR.
Roberts, Helen H. 1934a. Letter to Gustave Reese, November 1, 1934. Box 7, AMSR.
   . 1934b. Letter to Robert Lachmann, March 24, 1934. Group No. 1410, Series 1,
Box 3, Folder 89, Roberts papers.
   . 1934c. Letter to Robert Lachmann, December 5, 1934. Group 1410, Series 1, Box
3, Folder 89, Roberts papers.
   . 1936. Letter to Elma Loines, April 9, 1936. Group 1410, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 3,
Roberts papers.
   . 1937. Letter to Charles Seeger, February 5, 1937. Group 1410, Series 1, Box 1,
Folder 11, Roberts papers.
   . 1946a. Letter to Gustave Reese. September 26, 1946. Box 7, AMSR.
   . 1946b. Letter to Gustave Reese. November 28, 1946. Box 7, AMSR.
Seashore, Carl. 1937. Letter to Gustave Reese, October 9, 1937. Box 8, AMSR.
Seeger, Charles. 1960a. Letter to Oliver Strunk, January 23, 1960. Box 8, AMSR.
   . 1960b. Letter to Dragan Plamenac, March 30, 1960. Box 8, AMSR.
Smith, Carleton Sprague. 1939. Letter to James M. Coopersmith, August 22, 1939. Folder
“Board Correspondence May–June 1939,” Box 15, AMSR.
Wolf, Johannes. 1929. Untitled, Typed Notes on the Journal of the IGMw. November 24,
1929. Folder 23:17, Adler Papers.

79
 Current Musicology

Archives Referenced
Guido Adler Papers, Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Georgia,
Athens, Georgia (cited as Adler Papers).
Pauline Alderman Papers 1930s–1980s, undated, USC Thornton School of Music Records,
USC Libraries Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles (cited as Alderman Papers).
American Musicological Society Records, Ms. Coll. 221, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
University of Pennsylvania (cited as AMSR).
Otto Kinkeldey Papers, #14-20-1000, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cor-
nell University Library, https://rare.library.cornell.edu/services/reproductions (cited as
Kinkeldey Papers).
Helen Heffron Roberts Papers, Yale University (cited as Roberts Papers).
Harold Spivacke Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://
hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/eadmus.mu011011 (cited as Spivacke Collection).
Joseph Yasser Collection, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City (cited as Yasser
Collection).

80