Dorian, Frederick (real name, Friedrich Deutsch)

Dorian, Frederick (real name, Friedrich Deutsch ), eminent Austrian-born American music scholar; b. Vienna, July 1, 1902; d. Pittsburgh, Jan. 24, 1991. He studied musicology with Adler at the Univ. of Vienna (Ph.D., 1925, with the diss. Die Fugenarbeit in den Werken Beethovens; publ. in Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, XIV, 1927); also took piano lessons with Steuer-mann and studied composition privately with Webern. He was also closely associated with Schoenberg; Dorian’s family apartment housed the headquarters of the famous Soc. for Private Musical Performances, organized by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. He also took courses in conducting, achieving a high degree of professionalism. He served as music critic of the Berliner Morgenpost (1930–33), the Frankfurter Zeitung (1934), and the Neues Wiener Journal (1935–36). In 1936 he emigrated to the U.S., becoming a naturalized citizen in 1941. From 1936 to 1954 he was a member of the Carnegie-Mellon Univ. (formerly Carnegie Inst. of Technology) in Pittsburgh; there he organized an opera dept., and conducted its inaugural performance; from 1971 to 1975 he served as Andrew Mellon Lecturer there. From 1975 to 1977 he was visiting lecturer on music history at the Curtis Inst. of Music in Philadelphia. In 1978 he gave lectures on musicology at the Hebrew Univ. in Jerusalem. He also served, from 1945, as program annotator for the Pittsburgh Sym. Orch. program magazine.

Writings

Hausmusik alter Meister (3 vols., Berlin, 1933); The History of Music in Performance (N.Y, 1942; 2nd ed., 1966); The Musical Workshop (N.Y, 1947); Commitment to Culture (Pittsburgh, 1964).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire