Béhague, Gerard H(enri)
Béhague, Gerard H(enri)
Béhague, Gerard H(enri), French-born American musicologist; b. Montpellier, Nov. 2, 1937. He studied at the Brazilian Cons, of Music in Rio de Janeiro (diploma, 1958), with Jacques Chailley and Edith Weber at the Univ. of Paris (diploma in musicology, 1963), and with Gilbert Chase, Howard Smither, Peter Hansen, and Norma McLeod at Tulane Univ. (Ph.D., 1966). In 1976 he became a naturalized American citizen. He was an instructor (1966–67), asst. prof. (1967–69), and assoc. prof. (1969–74) at the Univ. of 111. at Urbana-Champaign. In 1972-73 he held a Guggenheim fellowship. From 1974 he was a prof. at the Univ. of Tex. at Austin, where he was chairman of its music dept. from 1981 to 1989. He served as president of the Soc. for Ethnomusicology from 1979 to 1981. In 1997 the Brazilian government honored him as a Commander of the Order of Rio Branco. He contributed many learned articles to various scholarly books and journals.
Writings
The Beginnings of Music Nationalism in Brazil (Detroit, 1971); Music in Latin America (Englewood Cliffs, N.H., 1979); ed. Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives (Westport, Conn., 1984); Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Search for Brazil’s Musical Soul (Austin, Tex., 1994); ed. Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America (Coral Gables, 1994); Musiques Brésiliennes (De la Cantoria a la Samba-Reggae) (Paris and Arles, 1999).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire