Nathan, Hans
Nathan, Hans
Nathan, Hans, German-born American musicologist; b. Berlin, Aug. 5, 1910; d. Boston, Aug. 4, 1989. He took courses in musicology at the Univ. of Berlin (Ph.D., 1934, with the diss. Das Rezitativ der Frühopern Richard Wagners: Ein Beitrag zur Stilistik des Opernrezitativs in der ersten Hälfte des 19 Jahrhunderts); studied piano with Rudolph Schmidt and Claudio Arrau, theory with Grete von Zieritz, and conducting with Michael Taube. He was active as a music critic in Berlin (1932–36). In 1936 he went to the U.S. and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. From 1936 to 1938 he did postgraduate study at Harvard Univ. After a year of teaching at Tufts Univ., he joined the faculty of Mich. State Univ. in East Lansing in 1946; held a Guggenheim fellowship in 1957; was a visiting prof, at the Inst. for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in 1957–58 and again in the summer of 1979; he retired in 1981. In the U.S. he devoted himself chiefly to subjects of American music; publ. the valuable books Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, Okla., 1962) and William Billings: Data and Documents (Detroit, 1976). He was the ed. of vol. 2 (1977) of the complete, critical ed. of works by William Billings, in 4 vols.; contributed articles on folk music, history, and modern biography to various publications.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis Mclntire