Harold Powers

Harold Stone Powers (August 5, 1928 – March 15, 2007) was an American musicologist, ethnomusicologist, and music theorist.[1][2]

For the Lieutenant Governor of California, see Harold J. Powers.

Career

Born in New York City on August 5, 1928, he earned his B.Mus. in piano from Syracuse University in 1950 and an MFA in composition and musicology from Princeton University in 1952. As a Fulbright Fellow, he studied Indian music in Madras for two years before continuing at Princeton where he received a Ph.D. in musicology. His dissertation was on “The Background of the South Indian Raga System.” Powers taught at Harvard University from 1958 to 1960 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 to 1973 before returning to Princeton where he was named the Scheide Professor of Music History in 1995 and in 2001 assumed Emeritus status. Powers returned to India several times to study music there on John D. Rockefeller III and Fulbright Senior fellowships.[2]

Powers was known for intensive study of both Renaissance music and music theory and several world music traditions (especially Indian music); this allowed him to reevaluate the concept of mode.[3] He did this in a number of articles, including “Mode” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980),[4] a landmark of scholarship on the subject, "Tonal types and modal categories in Renaissance polyphony" (1981),[5] "Modal representations in polyphonic offertories" [based mostly on Palestrina's Offertoria cycle] (1982),[6] "Is mode real?" (1992),[7] "Anomalous modalities" (1996),[8] “Language Models and Musical Analysis,”[9] and “Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition,”[10]

Powers was the first foreigner to perform at the Tyagaraja Aradhana in Thiruvaiyaru, India.[11]

The Harold Powers World Travel Fund, administered by the American Musicological Society, was established in 2006 to “encourage and assist Ph.D. candidates, post-docs, and junior faculty in all fields of musical scholarship to travel anywhere in the world to carry out the necessary work for their dissertation or other research. The Fund honors the polymathic scholar and distinguished longtime AMS member whose publications have ranged from music and language to medieval mode to Indian music to Puccini and whose interests are wider still, but always with the communicative aspects of music at their base.”[12]

Books
  • The Background of the South Indian Rāga-System (dissertation, Princeton U., 1959)
  • (ed.) Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk (Princeton, NJ, 1968)
  • William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, "Puccini's Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition" (Princeton, NJ, 1991)
gollark: You know, remote annoying beep enablement would be great on my constantly lost phone.
gollark: Shame PC speakers aren't around so you can't remotely beep them.
gollark: That makes you a BLASPH.
gollark: Ah. I see.
gollark: <@&198138780132179968> <@270035320894914560>/aus210 has stolen my (enchanted with Unbreaking something/Mending) elytra.I was in T79/i02p/n64c/pjals' base (aus210 wanted help with some code, and they live in the same place with some weird connecting tunnels) and came across an armor stand (it was in an area of the base I was trusted in - pjals sometimes wants to demo stuff to me or get me to help debug, and the claim organization is really odd). I accidentally gave it my neural connector, and while trying to figure out how to get it back swapped my armor onto it (turns out shiftrightclick does that). Eventually I got them both back, but while my elytra was on the stand aus210 stole it. I asked for it back and they repeatedly denied it.They have claimed:- they can keep it because I intentionally left it there (this is wrong, and I said so)- there was no evidence that it was mine so they can keep it (...)EDIT: valithor got involved and got them to actually give it back, which they did after ~10 minutes of generally delaying, apparently leaving it in storage, and dropping it wrong.

References
  1. Morgan, Paula (30 October 2007). "Powers, Harold S." Grove. Oxford Music Online.
  2. Stevens, Ruth (April 2, 2007). "Harold Powers, versatile scholar of music, dies at 78 - 4/2/2007". www.princeton.edu. Princeton Weekly Bulletin. Retrieved 2016-06-25.
  3. Kerman, Joseph. Contemplating Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
  4. Powers, Harold Stone (January 29, 2004). Sadie, Stanely; Tyrrell, John (eds.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195170679.
  5. Journal of the American Musicological Society XXXIV (1981), pp.428-70.
  6. Early Music History 2 (1982), pp. 43-86.
  7. Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis 16 (1992), pp.9-52.
  8. Orlando di Lasso in der Musikgeschichte, hrsg. v. Bernhold Schmid. München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996, SS. 221—242.
  9. Harold Powers (1980). Koskoff, Ellen (ed.). "Language Models and Musical Analysis". Ethnomusicology. Champaign, Illinois: Society for Ethnomusicology. 24 (1): 1–60. doi:10.2307/851308. JSTOR 851308.
  10. Ashbrook, William; Powers, Harold (April 23, 1991). Puccini's Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition (paperback)|format= requires |url= (help). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691027129.
  11. http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/music/Jon-Higgins-the-bhagavatar/article15586441.ece
  12. "Harold Powers World Travel Fund". ams-net.org. American Musicological Society.


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