American Music was a marginal subfield in the 1960s when he began his research as a student, and then as a faculty member, at the University of Michigan.
Richard Crawford, a longtime professor of musicology at the University of Michigan who helped legitimize and popularize the study of American music, died on July 23 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 89.
His wife, Penelope (Ball) Crawford, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”
While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)
Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.
So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.
His timing was fortuitous: Preparations for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration spurred a new public interest in reviving early American music, and Mr. Crawford helped build its scholarly infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Sonneck Society, later renamed the Society for American Music; wrote the first biography of the Revolutionary-era composer William Billings, with David P. McKay in 1975; and, through painstaking bibliographic work, excavated large swaths of repertory from the beginnings of American sacred music.
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
