Thomas James Mathiesen was born in Roslyn Heights, New York, US on April 30, 1947. He received a Bachelor of Arts at Willamette University in 1968, and both a Master of Music and a PhD at the University of Southern California (USC). At the latter school, Mathiesen's teachers included scholars such as Ingolf Dahl and Halsey Stevens. After a stint teaching at USC from 1971 to 1972, he became a professor at the Brigham Young University. In 1988 he became a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, and in 1996 he was made a distinguished Professor of Music there.[1]
Mathiesen's research centers around Ancient music, in particular, he is a leading scholar of the music of Ancient Greece.[1] This subject is the topic of his four book-length studies, Aristides Quintilianus on Music in Three Books: Translation, with Introduction, Commentary, and Annotations (1983), Ancient Greek Music Theory: A Catalogue raisonné of Manuscripts RISM B/XI (1988), Greek Views of Music (1997) and Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1999).[2] Other topics he engages in include the history of music theory, particularly of Medieval music and Renaissance music.[1] His scholarship includes the topics of "textual criticism, editorial technique, bibliography and codicology".[1]
Mathiesen established in 1990 the online project Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML) and led it until 2015. Due to his efforts TML became a world-wide known database of early music treatises, with a free access.[3]
The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Mathiesen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, the American Musicological Society's Kinkeldey Award and multiple Deems Taylor Awards from ASCAP, among others.[4]
