Nigel Fortune: An Appreciation
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gcp058
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoDr Nigel Fortune, who was co-editor of Music & Letters for twenty-eight years from 1980 to 2008 (see the memoir of him by Edward Olleson, published in Music & Letters, 89 (2008), 163–4), died at his home in Birmingham on 10 April 2009. Active as writer, editor, teacher, and administrator, he was one of a group of scholars who established musicology as a serious professional discipline in Britain after the Second World War. Fortune was born on 5 December 1924 in Hall Green, Birmingham, later moving to the suburb of Handsworth, where he attended the local Grammar School. After military service he went on to study at the University of Birmingham from 1947, under the newly appointed Head of Music, Anthony Lewis, graduating in 1950 with a first-class honours degree in Music and Italian. He proceeded to doctoral study with Thurston Dart at Cambridge, completing his dissertation ‘Italian Secular Song from 1600 to 1635: The Origins and Development of Accompanied Monody’ in August 1953 and gaining the Ph.D. in 1954—only the second degree of its kind in Music to be awarded in Britain. While preparing the dissertation he published two articles arising from this research. The first, in Acta musicologica (1951), on Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, MS Q49 and its place in the early history of continuo song, shows that even at this early stage Fortune had a clear mental picture of the development of the repertory within which he was able to situate the manuscript and its contents. The second article (Galpin Society Journal (1952)) is a translation, with introduction, of the discourse on instruments in Vincenzo Giustiniani's Discorso sopra la musica de’ suoi tempi.
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