Guide to the Edward E. Lowinsky Papers 1920-1986

Biographical Note
Edward Elias Lowinsky (January 12, 1908 – October 11, 1985), musicologist, served on the
faculty of University of Chicago's Department of Music from 1961-1985. An innovative
scholar of sixteenth-century music, Lowinsky set academic and editorial standards in the field of
musicology, and provoked debate and discussion that elevated musicological discourse.
Lowinsky's parents, Leopold and Clara, were Russian immigrants to Germany; Edward
Lowinsky was born in Stuttgart. He studied music performance, composition and conducting at
Stuttgart's Hochschule fuer Musik from 1923-1928. He also worked as a piano teacher during
this time. Moving on to the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, where he studied under
Heinrich Besseler, Lowinsky completed a dissertation on the Renaissance composer Orlando di
Lasso, and earned a Ph.D. in musicology in 1933.
From 1933 to 1939, Lowinsky lived in Holland, where he taught and studied music
independently. During this time, he wrote on music history and pedagogy. His pedagogical
Buch der Kindermusik was published in Copenhagen in 1933. In 1939, Lowinsky began the
process of immigration to the United States with his family. He lived for a time in Cuba, and
entered the United States in 1940. Lowinsky became a United States citizen in 1947.
Lowinsky's first professorship was at the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville,
North Carolina. Lowinsky served there as Assistant Professor from 1942-1947. From 1947-1956
he was Associate Professor at Queens College, New York. Here he became involved in disputes
over academic freedom, an issue that continued to engage him in his career. In the early 1950s
he was a fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. From 1956-1961 Lowinsky served as
Professor at the University of California.
In 1961, Lowinsky came to the University of Chicago's Department of Music as the first
Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor. He also founded and chaired the university's
interdisciplinary Renaissance Seminar. As a proponent of academic freedom and liberal political
causes, Lowinsky was engaged in campus anti-war organizations and demonstrations during the
1960s.
Lowinsky took emeritus status in 1976, but continued to be involved in departmental and
university affairs until his death. The provocative Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands
Motet (1946) was Lowinsky's first major scholarly publication. His three-volume The Medici
Codex of 1518 (1968) initiated Monuments of Renaissance Music, a series of scholarly editions
that Lowinsky founded and edited until 1977. Lowinsky also published Tonality and Atonality
in Sixteenth-Century Music (1961), and Cipriano de Rore's Venus Motet: its Poetic and
Pictorial Sources (1986). Most of his shorter writings were collected in Music in the Culture
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