Willi Apel
Willi Apel (10 October 1893 – 14 March 1988) was a German-American
Life and career
Apel was born in Konitz, West Prussia, now Chojnice in Poland. He studied mathematics from 1912 to 1914, and then again after World War I from 1918 to 1922, in various universities in Weimar Germany. Throughout his studies, he had an interest in music and taught piano lessons. He then turned to music full-time, and essentially taught himself about musicology. He received his Ph.D. in 1936 in Berlin (with a dissertation on 15th and 16th century tonality) and immigrated to the US the same year. He taught at Harvard from 1938 to 1942, but moved on to spend twenty years at Indiana University beginning in 1950. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university.
Apel's work of the 1940s included books of broad scope, such as
In 1950 Apel's interest in early polyphonic notation resulted in an important edition, French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century. In 1958 he published a large work on
1967 saw the publication of Geschichte der Orgel- und Klaviermusik, a large work on the history of keyboard music. An English translation (by Hans Tischler) appeared in 1972. Apel's last book was a collection of essays from 1973–81, all dedicated to Italian violin music of the 17th century.
Willi Apel died at age 94 in Bloomington, Indiana.
Major works
- The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900–1600 (1942)
- Harvard Dictionary of Music (1944) (editor)
- Masters of Keyboard (1947)
- Historical Anthology of Music Volume I: Oriental, Medieval and Renaissance Music, (1947) (with Davison)
- Historical Anthology of Music Volume II: Baroque, Rococo and Pre-Classical Music, (1950) (with Davison)
- Gregorian Chant (1958)
- The History of Keyboard Music to 1700 (1967, English edition published 1972)
- Italian Violin Music of the Seventeenth Century (1983, English edition published 1990)
References
- White, John Reeves; Caldwell, John (2001). "Willi Apel". In ISBN 978-1-56159-239-5.
External links
- Willi Apel page at the Indiana University website, includes a comprehensive list of Apel's writings.
- Corpus of Early Keyboard Music (CEKM) current catalog