Levarie, Siegmund

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Levarie, Siegmund

Levarie, Siegmund, Austrian-born American musicologist and conductor; b. Lemberg, Galicia, July 24, 1914. He studied conducting with Joseph Mertin at the New Vienna Cons, (diploma, 1935) and musicology with Robert Haas at the Univ. of Vienna (Ph.D., 1938), and concurrently took private lessons in composition with Hugo Kauder. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1943. He was director of concerts at the Univ. of Chicago (1938–52), where he conducted the Collegium Musicum, mostly in programs of medieval and Renaissance music; he also taught there. He was dean of the Chicago Musical Coll. (1952–54). From 1954 to 1962 he served as prof, of music and head of the music dept. at Brooklyn Coll.

Writings

Fugue and Form (Chicago, 1941); Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro”: A Critical Analysis (Chicago, 1952); Fundamentals of Harmony (N.Y., 1954); Guillaume de Machaut (N.Y, 1954); Musical Italy Revisited (N.Y., 1963); with E. Levy, Tone: A Study in Musical Acoustics (Kent, Ohio, 1968; second ed., rev., 1980); with E. Levy, Musical Morphology: A Discourse and a Dictionary (Kent, Ohio, 1983).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire