Obituary: Professor Howard Mayer Brown

Howard Mayer Brown, musicologist, born Los Angeles 13 April 1930, Professor University of Chicago 1960-72, King Edward Professor of Music King's College London University 1972-74, Professor of Music and Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor University of Chicago 1974-93, died Venice 20 February 1993.

HOWARD MAYER BROWN was the most brilliant of a new post-war breed of American musicologists, interested not only in writing about early music but also in how it sounded.

Trained at Harvard and in Vienna immediately after the Second World War, Brown returned to Harvard in 1953 to do graduate work. At that time the serious study of music history, comparatively new in the United States, had been much bolstered by the consequences of the collapse of scholarly and all other civilised values in Nazi Germany. At Harvard itself there was the additional stimulus of both Otto Gombosi and John Ward; the influence of the latter's legendary training in rigorous bibliographical method and control of primary sources can be seen in Brown's first two books, the companion volumes Music in the French Secular Theatre 1400-1550 and Theatrical Chansons (1963), and particularly in his magisterial bibliography Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600 (1965).

From Harvard he went briefly to Wellesley College as an instructor, and then to the University of Chicago where he spent the next 12 years publishing, editing, teaching and performing. Music-making was always central to his life, and no one who visited the comfortably disorganised house in the South Side which Howard shared with his companion Roger Weiss will forget the spacious high-ceilinged music-room lined with music and instruments. Then, in 1972, a powerful combination of Anglophilia and wanderlust brought him to King's College London as the second holder of the King Edward Chair of Music. The first, Thurston Dart, had created a lively and at times combative atmosphere in the curious and cramped premises which the faculty occupied (and still does) on the Strand; with characteristic charm and style, Brown capitalised on the considerable benefits which lay at the heart of Dart's enterprise, and set about consolidating the reputation of King's.

His impact at London was great, not so much in the formal sense of changed syllabuses but simply through the charismatic force of his example and his seemingly tireless concern with the intellectual interests of his students. Outside the university he became much involved in the musical life of London, then a leading centre for the performance of early repertories. From these points of view he thrived. Further books and articles appeared, notably his study of instrumentation in 16th-century Italian festival music and Musical Iconography (1972), the first comprehensive handbook for students on the subject (written with Joan Lascelle). But the strain was enormous. He had not really bargained for the administrative burden that falls on professors in British universities (on bad days he would claim that in the Strand he was further from the British Library than he had been in Chicago); and those elements of anti-intellectualism masked as 'real' musicianship that are such a depressingly familiar aspect of the English tradition could drive him to distraction and sometimes to hard words in public. To the dismay of his many friends, students and admirers in Britain he returned to Chicago after only two years; he was to remain there, as Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor, for the rest of his life.

He was now at the height of his powers, and while on the one hand he continued to produce important works of scholarship, such as A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (in two volumes, 1983), on the other he still found time to play a full role in national and international bodies, serving as President of the American Musicological Society and Vice-President of the International Musicolgical Society. Travelling and teaching abroad became increasingly important, particularly in France (where he became a regular visitor to the Centre d'Etudes Superieures de la Renaissance, at Tours), and in England (any excuse for a week's stay at the Reform Club in London was eagerly seized). In many ways Howard had always been a European, and at the time of his death had been planning to take early retirement and to divide his time between London and Paris. His brilliance, originality, wit and perception will be missed by historians and performers all over the world.