Lowinsky, Edward E(lias)

Lowinsky, Edward E(lias), eminent German-born American musicologist; b. Stuttgart, Jan. 12, 1908; d. Chicago, Oct. 11,1985. He studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart (1923–28); took his Ph.D. at the Univ. of Heidelberg in 1933 with the diss. Das Antwerpener Motettenbuch Orlando di Lassos und seine Beziehungen zum Motettenschaffen der niederländischen Zeitgenössen (publ. in The Hague, 1937). When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, he fled to the Netherlands; when the dark cloud of anti-Semitism reached the Netherlands, he emigrated to the U.S. (1940), becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1947. He was asst. prof. of music at Black Mountain Coll. (1942–47); assoc. prof. of music at Queens Coll., N.Y. (1948–56); prof. of music at the Univ. of Calif., Berkeley (1956–61); and prof. of music at the Univ. of Chicago (1961–76), where he also held a post-retirement professorship until 1978. He held Guggenheim fellowships in 1947–48 and 1976–77; was a Fellow at the Inst. for Advanced Study at Princeton Univ. from 1952 to 1954; was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973; was named Albert A. Bauman Distinguished Research Fellow of the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1982. He was general ed. of the Monuments of Renaissance Music series; publ. the valuable studies Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet (N.Y., 1946) and Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961; rev. printing, 1962; new ed. by B. Blackburn, 1990). He also prepared the vol. Josquin des Prez. Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival-Conference (London, 1976) and wrote the study Cipriano de Rore’s Venus Motet: Its Poetic and Pictorial Sources (Provo, 1986). He was married to Bonnie Blackburn . She ed. Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays by Edward E. Lowinsky (Chicago, 1989). With Lowinsky and C. Miller, she ed. and tr. A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford, 1991).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire