Peyser, Joan(née Gilbert)
Peyser, Joan(née Gilbert)
Peyser, Joan(née Gilbert), American musicologist, editor, author, and journalist; b. N.Y., June 12,1931. She majored in music at Barnard Coll. (B.A., 1951) and studied musicology with Lang at Columbia Univ. (M.A., 1956). She then devoted herself mainly to musical journalism. Peyser pubi, the popular book The New Music: The Sense Behind the Sound (N.Y., 1971; 2nd ed., rev., 1981 as Twentieth Century Music: The Sense Behind the Sound), and created considerable excitement in the music world with her biography Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (N.Y., 1976). From 1977 to 1984 she was ed. of the Musical Quarterly, the first woman to occupy this position; during her tenure, she attempted to veer away from the prevalent musicological sesquipedalianism toward plain diction. Among her other publs. are The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations (N.Y., 1986), Leonard Bernstein: A Biography (N.Y., 1987; rev. ed., 1998), and The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin (N.Y., 1993).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire