H.W. Hitchcock

Born in Detroit, Hugh Wiley Hitchcock is regarded as a leading scholar of American music and the founding director of the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College. Hitchcock earned a bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he began his teaching career, and studied music with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. 

In 1961 he relocated to New York to take a post at Hunter College, then later joined the faculty at Brooklyn College. He retired from CUNY in 1993 as a distinguished professor but continued to teach in the 1990s at Yale, Columbia, and New York University. A teacher, editor, and author of works including important studies of baroque music, Hitchcock played a major role in building a support structure for scholars and studies in American music.

Hitchcock served as president of the Music Library Association, the Charles Ives Society, and the American Musicological Society. He was also on the editorial boards of The Musical Quarterly and American Music, as well as of New World Records, a recording venture devoted to American music. He may be best known as the co-editor (and chief content editor), along with the British musicologist Stanley Sadie, of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986). The voluminous “Ameri-Grove,” as it was known, was praised both for its embrace of vernacular musical idioms and for the relaxed writing style of its articles. Among his published books is Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (1969, revised in 2000), still used as a valuable textbook. His last completed work was a critical edition of the 129 songs by Charles Ives, published in 2004.