The Peter Burkholder and Doug McKinney Musicology Research Travel Fund was established by J. Peter Burkholder and Doug McKinney and supports research-related travel, including conference travel, and other research expenses for masters and doctoral students enrolled in the Department of Musicology within the Jacobs School of Music.
Peter is distinguished professor emeritus of musicology and former chair of the Department of Musicology. His husband Doug McKinney is the head of Music Library Acquisitions at the Indiana University William and Gayle Cook Music Library. Peter and Doug have hosted many gatherings and events for the Musicology Department, including department picnics, holiday parties, and house concerts.
Peter graduated from Earlham College in 1975 with a liberal arts degree in Music. At the University of Chicago, he earned an MA with a double concentration in Music Composition and the History and Theory of Music (1980) and a PhD in the History and Theory of Music (1983). After six years teaching in the School of Music at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in 1988 he joined the Musicology Department faculty at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he taught until retiring in 2019. While at IU, he directed sixteen PhD dissertations and twenty DM documents. In addition, he was an adjunct professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and served as Associate Dean of the Faculties in 1995-2000 and as chair of the Musicology Department in 2009-2013. He has also served as president, vice-president, and director-at-large for the American Musicological Society; as president and treasurer of the Charles Ives Society; and as a board member of the College Music Society.
Doug came to Bloomington in 1979 to attend Indiana University and graduated with a BA in Germanic Studies. He joined the staff of the IU Libraries in 1988 and served in numerous positions at the Herman B Wells Library before moving to the Cook Music Library as head of acquisitions in 2009. He and Peter met in 1990, were wed in 1993 under the care of their local Quaker congregation, and married in Canada in 2006 after it became legally possible.
Peter has published more than thirty scholarly articles in journals and edited collections, spanning topics from twentieth-century music to musical borrowing, musical meaning, and music history pedagogy. In his books Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing, and Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America and in a series of articles Peter has demonstrated Ives’s deep roots in both American and European musical traditions and traced his development as a composer. He also edited or coedited Charles Ives and His World and Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (with Geoffrey Block). Through his articles on borrowing and related subjects in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and elsewhere, he has helped to show both how prevalent and how diverse borrowing practices have been throughout music history. For more than three decades he has directed the online annotated bibliography Musical Borrowing and Reworking, to which numerous students in the Musicology Department have contributed.
Peter is best known to students around the world as the author of A History of Western Music and editor of the three-volume Norton Anthology of Western Music, the most widely used English-language textbooks for music history courses in colleges, universities, and schools of music. He took over both books after the founding authors Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca passed away, and he has written the four most recent editions of each. His scholarly and pedagogical writings have been translated and published in Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
In 2010, the American Musicological Society named Peter an Honorary Member in recognition of his contributions to research on twentieth-century music and Ives, to teaching and music history pedagogy, and in service to the AMS. His research has been honored with the Alfred Einstein Award from the AMS, two Irving Lowens Awards from the Society for American Music, and two Deems Taylor Awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. He has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and IU President’s Arts and Humanities Initiative. On the Bloomington campus, he has been recognized with awards from the Campus Life Division for improving the campus climate and from the Commission on Multicultural Understanding for promoting understanding of diversity issues.