Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
INTRODUCTION
MUSICAL DOCUMENTATION OF A
“FORGOTTEN CENTURY” AND BEYOND
In 1968, to inaugurate the establishment of a new Ph.D. program at the City
University of New York (CUNY), the chair of this foundling department,
Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), invited fifteen distinguished scholars to give lectures
on different aspects of the growing discipline of musicology. 1 Providing
the first lecture in this series was none other than Gustave Reese (1899–1977),
Professor of Music at nearby New York University, founding member of the
American Musicological Society, and a distinguished figure in the field. In
the course of his lecture, Reese provides an overview of musicology in the
late 1960s: its foundations, status and growth in American academia; divisions
of the discipline; prominent specializations; and lacunae. 2 Reflecting
the postwar musicological focus on music of earlier eras, Reese describes the
nineteenth century as a period requiring “an immense amount of work,” summarizing
it as a musicologically–“forgotten century.” 3
One of Reese’s students, H. Robert Cohen, took up this charge over the
following five decades. Cohen’s efforts brought to scholarly attention a trove
of nineteenth-century musical iconography, staging manuals, Italian figurini,
and above all, the vast musical press from the eighteenth through the twentieth
centuries. In total, his contributions to the discipline as author, editor, and
director comprises some 327 printed volumes, one journal, numerous articles,
and four databases which contain nearly two million full text pages, more
than a million annotated citations, and treat some six hundred music journals.
Howard Robert Cohen was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied music
in his youth, performing on clarinet and saxophone, absorbing music ranging
from orchestral works to performances at local jazz clubs. Cohen attended New
York University, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts (1963), Master of Arts (1967),
and Ph.D. (1973). Interested in music in nineteenth-century France, specifically
the writings and criticism of Hector Berlioz, he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright
grant where he pursued much of the research for his Ph.D. dissertation,
1 These essays were collected and published in 1972 by W.W. Norton and republished in 1975
in a paperback edition. Perspectives in Musicology, ed. Barry S. Brook, Edward O.D. Downes,
and Sherman Van Solkema (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972).
2 Gustave Reese, “Perspectives and Lacunae in Musicological Research. Inaugural Lecture.”
Ibid, 1–14.
3 Ibid., 10.
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