McClain, Ernest Glenn

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McClain, Ernest Glenn

McClain, Ernest Glenn , American music scholar; b. Canton, Ohio, Aug. 6, 1918. He studied at Oberlin (Ohio) Coll. (B.Mus., 1940), Northwestern Univ. (M.Mus., 1946), and Columbia Univ. (Ed.D., 1959). He was band director at Denison Univ. (1946–47) and the Univ. of Hawaii (1947–50), and then taught at Brooklyn Coll., City Univ. of N.Y., from 1950 until his retirement in 1981. He developed an effective way of teaching tuning systems using the monochord. His articles and books are sophisticated explorations of the interface between acoustics, mathematics, philosophy, and religion in ancient and medieval cultures.

Writings

The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics, and Music from the Rig-Veda to Plato (Boulder, Colo., 1976); The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach, Maine, 1978); Meditations through the Quran: Tonal Images in an Oral Culture (1981).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire

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