Neumann, Frederick(actually, Fritz)

Neumann, Frederick(actually, Fritz), distinguished Austrian-born American violinist and musicologist; b. Bielitz, Dec. 15, 1907; d. Richmond, Va., March 21, 1994. He studied violin with Ondficek, Sevcik, and Marteau in Prague, and also took courses at the Univ. of Berlin (Ph.D., 1934, in political science and economics); subsequently studied violin with H. Kaplan in Berlin and A. Busch in Basel. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, and served as head of the string dept. of the Cornish School of Music and Arts in Seattle (1939–42); during World War II (1942–45), he was in the intelligence service of the U.S. Army, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen (1943). After the war, he studied at Teachers Coll., Columbia Univ. (M.A., 1947), and at Columbia Univ. (Ph.D., 1952). He was prof. of music and concert-master of the orch. at the Univ. of Miami (1948–51) and prof. of music at the Univ. of Richmond (Va.) (1955–78); also was concertmaster of the Richmond Sym. Orch. (1957–64), and a visiting prof. at Princeton (1970–71), Yale (1975–76), and Indiana (1978–79) univs. He made valuable contributions to the field of 17^th– and 18^th–century performance practices. He pubi, the books Contemporary Violin Technique (with F. Galamian; 2 vols., N.Y., 1966, 1977), Violin Left Hand Technique: A Critical Survey of the Literature (Urbana, 111., 1969), Ornamentation in Baroque and Post- Baroque Music (Princeton, N.J., 1978), Essays in Performance Practice (Ann Arbor, 1982), Ornamentation and Improvisation in Mozart (Princeton, N.J., 1986), New Essays on Performance Practice (Ann Arbor, 1989), and Performance Practices of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (N.Y., 1992).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis Mclntire