Glenn Watkins
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University of Michigan
Glenn Watkins | |
|---|---|
 Watkins in 1993 | |
| Born | May 30, 1927 |
| Died | June 19, 2021 (age 94) |
| Alma mater | University of Rochester (Ph.D., 1953) University of Michigan |
| Known for | Study of Renaissance and twentieth-century European art music. |
| Awards | Premio Internazionale Carlo Gesualdo, Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Musicology |
| Institutions | University of Michigan |
| Website | Faculty profile |
Glenn E. Watkins (May 30, 1927 – June 19, 2021), was the Earl V. Moore Professor (Emeritus) of Music History and Musicology at the University of Michigan and a specialist in the study of Renaissance and 20th-century music.[1]
Born in McPherson, Kansas, Watkins served in the United States Army from 1944-46. During this period he was enrolled in the ASTP engineering program at the University of Oklahoma, the Japanese language programs at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota, and was later stationed in Tokyo with the "Allied Translator and Interpreter Section" of MacArthur's General Headquarters. Immediately after the war in 1947 he briefly attended North Texas State University where his first organ teacher, Helen Hewitt, directed him to the field of musicology.
He received a B.A. (1948) and M.Mus. (1949) from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, in 1953. Watkins was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship at London and Oxford, 1953-54. He studied organ with Jean Langlais in Paris in 1956 and analysis and organ at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, who commissioned him to play the Poulenc Organ Concerto for the composer. His teaching career began at Southern Illinois University from 1954–58, and continued at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1958-63. In 1963 he moved to the University of Michigan, where he taught until retiring in 1996.
Awards
In addition to the Fulbright Award, Watkins received an American Council of Learned Societies Grant, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. He has published numerous articles, reviews and editions, and is co-editor of the complete works of Gesualdo. His critical study of that composer, Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (1973), which carries a Preface by Igor Stravinsky,[2] was a 1974 National Book Award nominee. It was translated into Hungarian in 1980 and into German in 2000, and a second revised English edition was published in 1990. In 2005, he was awarded the Premio Internazionale Carlo Gesualdo and was elected as an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.[3]
