The A. Peter Brown and Carol V. Brown Research Travel Fund was established by Carol V. Brown in memory of her husband, A. Peter Brown (1943-2003), to support research-related travel for doctoral students enrolled in the Department of Musicology within the Jacobs School of Music. This award reflects Peter’s gratitude for the pivotal opportunities he had to examine primary music sources and witness in-person the contexts in which they were originally conceived and performed.
A[lfred] Peter Brown II earned his baccalaureate, master’s, and PhD degrees from Northwestern University. He was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii for five years before beginning his 29-year teaching career at Indiana University in 1974. In the 1970s he did post-doctoral studies with Jan LaRue at New York University and was a Guggenheim fellow (1978-79). In addition to Indiana University faculty grants, his research was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Cooke Foundation, and the Clowes Foundation. From 1997 until his death, he served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Musicology in IU’s School of Music.
Peter studied French horn with Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians Philip Farkas and Christopher Leube, prior to and during his undergraduate studies at Northwestern on a full scholarship. In the 1960s he participated in Pierre Monteux’s Domaine School for Conductors and became a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Peter completed his PhD dissertation on the solo and ensemble keyboard works of Joseph Haydn in 1970. As an ACLS fellow in 1972-73, he conducted research in public and private archives in Eastern and Western Europe to authenticate and develop a thematic catalog and critical editions for works by eighteenth-century Viennese composer Carlo d’Ordonez. He and his wife Carol leveraged their access to European sources to significantly expand an annotated bibliography of literature on Joseph Haydn that Peter had initiated with a Northwestern colleague, which was published by the Haydn Institute in Cologne. His award-winning performance edition of Haydn’s The Creation (Oxford University Press), based on multiple authentic sources, has been recorded by Sir Georg Solti, Christopher Hogwood, John Eliot Gardiner, Bruno Weil, and others. His books on performing Haydn’s keyboard music and The Creation are published by Indiana University Press.
In addition to his scholarly books and critical editions, Peter solo-authored more than eighty journal articles and book chapters on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics. During the last decade of his life, his primary research focus was documenting his musical analyses and historical comparisons of symphonic music by Western composers. This became a multi-volume series with IU Press: The Symphonic Repertoire. At the time of his death, he had completed three volumes: Volume 2, The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony; Volume 4, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony; and Volume 3, The European Symphony from ca. 1800 to ca. 1930, which includes a chapter by IU Musicology PhD Brian Hart (Northern Illinois University) on the symphony in France. Under the editorship of IU Musicology PhD Mary Sue Morrow, Bathia Churgin, and Brian Hart, more than three dozen scholars have contributed chapters to two additional books in this series: Volume I, The Eighteenth-Century Symphony (published with a CD of music by mostly little-known composers recorded under the direction of IU’s Stanley Ritchie); and Volume 5, The Symphony in the Americas.
Letters written by his students show that Peter was known for his depth and breadth of knowledge, open door policy, intellectual integrity, honesty, and dry sense of humor. As a teacher he sought to harness his students’ excitement of discovery and passion for music. He motivated doctoral students to transcend their own self-perceived weaknesses and to think, debate, and write to the best of their abilities.
Peter’s personal research library of books, facsimile editions, and scores was donated by his wife Carol to the Jacobs School of Music Library; some early music editions from his collection are part of IU’s Lilly Library holdings; and selected unpublished research materials can be accessed via the Indiana University Archives.
Carol V. Brown earned a baccaulaureate degree from Vassar College, which included music studies with Bathia Churgin and Claude Monteux (flute). After attending Nadia Boulanger’s summer program for American students in Fontainebleau, she earned a master’s degree (music performance) at Northwestern University and was a member of the Chicago Symphony’s Civic Orchestra. During Peter’s faculty appointment at the University of Hawaii, she had the opportunity to play flute with the Honolulu Symphony and taught elementary students at Punahou School. After their move to IU-Bloomington, Carol was in service administration roles at Indiana University for nine years before earning an MBA and PhD in business (management information systems) from IU as a fulltime student. For more than 15 years she was a tenure-track IS faculty member first at Purdue University and subsequently IU (Indianapolis & Bloomington).
After assisting with the editing and publication of Volume 3 of Peter’s Symphonic Repertoire series, Carol re-located to the East coast in 2007 to join the IS faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology. Prior to her retirement she was the editor-in-chief for two academic journals (Information Systems Management, MIS Quarterly Executive) and had authored or co-authored more than thirty articles and book chapters, a dozen teaching cases, and five editions (with other IU faculty) of an IS management textbook. She currently resides in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where she enjoys living near daughter Heidi & family and volunteering for the Boston Symphony Orchestra at both Symphony Hall and Tanglewood.