| 1 | Name: | Dr. Philip Gossett | |
| Institution: | University of Chicago; University of Rome | ||
| Year Elected: | 2008 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1941 | ||
| Death Date: | June 13, 2017 | ||
Philip Gossett was the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and in the College at The University of Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1968. From 1989 to 1999 he was Dean of the Division of the Humanities. He had taught at the Universities of Paris, Parma, and Rome; in 1989 he delivered the Gauss Seminars at Princeton University in 1991, and in 2001 was the Hambro Visiting Professor of Opera Studies at Oxford University. In 2002-2003 he was a Visiting Scholar for Phi Beta Kappa and gave a series of seminars at the Beinecke Library of Yale University. In 2004 he had also become a Professor at the Università "La Sapienza" of Rome. Gossett was general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (published by The University of Chicago Press and G. Ricordi-Universal Music of Milan) and of Works of Gioachino Rossini (published by Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel). He served on many editorial boards, including the critical editions of the works of Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Kurt Weill, as well as several periodicals. He published widely in the area of Italian opera. His books include "Anna Bolena" and the Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti (Oxford, 1985) and Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (The University of Chicago Press, 2006). The latter won the Kinkeldey award of the American Musicological Society in 2007 as the best book in music of the previous year and the Laing Prize of The University of Chicago Pressin 2008 for the recent book by a member of the University's faculty that brought the most "distinction" to the Press's list. The Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, has published his studies of the autograph manuscripts of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (1993) and Donizetti's Don Pasquale (1999), together with facsimiles of these manuscripts. His scholarly articles have appeared in many journals and collections of essays. His 1971 translation of the Treatise on Harmony by Jean-Philippe Rameau continues to be used by music theorists. He also published essays on the compositional process of Beethoven and on music aesthetics. His notes are featured in opera programs in America and Europe and in many CDs. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. Gossett worked closely with opera companies in the performance of operas based on the critical editions he supervised, including the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the Santa Fe Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, New York City Opera, the Teatro alla Scala of Milan, and Finnish National Opera. He served as the 'Consulente musicologica' for the Verdi Festival in Parma in 2000-2001 and played a similar role at the Rossini Opera Festival of Pesaro from 1980 through 2000. He also worked individually with numerous singers, suggesting repertory, writing embellishments, etc., including Cecilia Bartoli, Rockwell Blake, Renée Fleming, Cecilia Gasdia, Jennifer Larmore, Samuel Ramey, and Vivica Genaux. His edition of Verdi's La forza del destino, in collaboration with the late William Holmes, had its first performances in November 2005 at San Francisco Opera (1869 version) and at the Stadttheater of Bern in April 2006 (1862 version). Gossett earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Amherst College in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1970. He held fellowships from the Fulbright program, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Amherst College in 1993. He served as Vice President (1986-88), then President (1994-96) of the American Musicological Society, and President (1993-95) of the Society for Textual Scholarship. He was three times President of the Jury of the Premio Borciani competition for young String Quartets (1997, 2002, 2008). He was on the Board of Directors of the International Musicological Society and of Il Saggiatore Musicale. Among his other awards and honors are the Alfred Einstein award of the American Musicological Society (1969), the Quantrell award of The University of Chicago for excellence in undergraduate teaching (1974), the Medaglia d'Oro, prima classe, of the Italian Government (1985), the Deems Taylor Award of ASCAP (1986 and 2007), and the Order of Rio Branca of the Republic of Brazil (1998). He was an honorary member of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna (1992), a socio straniero of the Ateneo Veneto (2001) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (2008), and an Accademico onorario of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome (2003). For his contributions to Italian culture, the Italian government named him a Grand Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito in 1997; in 1998 the President of Italy personally decorated him with the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, Italy's highest civilian honor. In 2004 he was granted a "Distinguished Achievement Award" by the Mellon Foundation, the first musicologist to be so honored. Philip Gossett was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. He died June 13, 2017, at age 75, in Chicago, Illinois. | |||