October 10 - Willi Apel (The Musical Birthday Series, 3rd Annual Cycle)

Previous posts for October 10th are here: Giuseppe Verdi; Vernon Duke; Evgeny Kissin; Thelonious Monk (2019) and Giuseppe Verdi (2020)

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Willi Apel (10 October 1893 – 14 March 1988) was a German-American musicologist, long centered at Indiana University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Apel for the Teacher

It’s difficult to overstate

The stature of the late and great

Willi Apel, who was prominent

For writing textbooks that were dominant

In graduate music history courses

For decades as essential sources.

His writing was the introduction

To any pre-Baroque instruction:

Music in precise chronology

Is there at hand in his Anthology;

Gregorian chant, arcane notation,

Got their book-length presentation;

Keyboards from the distant past

Were given just deserts at last;

And he found the beauty in

The seventeenth-century violin;

His Dictionary, statuesque,

On every music scholar’s desk.

The years, of course, have superseded

Some of this good work that he did,

But time and tide will never topple

The debt we owe to Willi Apel!

 

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