I got a message not long ago that the papers of music theorist Leonard B. Meyer have now been catalogued and are ready to be accessed by scholars in the Special Collections of the University of Pennsylvania library. Meyer’s writings in books such as Emotion and Meaning in Music, Music, The Arts, and Ideas, and Understanding Music are exceptionally insightful and elegantly written. I had the privilege of taking a course with Meyer while I was a grad student at Penn. I think he was especially hard on the composers in the class (“only a composer would think sonata form is a three-part form” – the implication being that only a composer would be so foolish) because of his own background as a composer, something of which I was not aware at the time. (I did manage to get a hard-won A- from Lenny for my Debussy paper.) He was generously supportive in attending New York performances of my music during his later years. Find a blog post about Lenny and his papers here.
I heard yesterday that Howard Karp died last week at age 84. Did you ever meet him? He taught piano at UW-Madison for many, many years. His obituary is here:
http://www.news.wisc.edu/22970
Hi Susan,
Thanks for your comment and for reading the blog!
No, I didn’t know Prof. Karp.
Sounds like an extraordinary individual and an extraordinary musician. Did you study with him?
Hope the summer is going well for you.
Actually, no, I never studied with him. He retired right before I started at the school of music and I studied with Christopher Taylor for two years before switching my focus to collaborative. But Howard performed often with his family and I met him many times.