Glenn
Watkins, currently Earl V. Moore Professor of Music at the University of Michigan,
is one of the most distinguished musicologists of our time. Raised in the
American Midwest and South, Watkins earned bachelor's and master's degrees
in Music at the University of Michigan before coming to Eastman for doctoral
studies in musicology with Charles Warren Fox.
After earning his Ph.D. in Musicology in 1953, he was a Fulbright Scholar in London and Oxford, taught at the University of Southern Illinois and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, before returning to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, in 1963 where for more than three decades he imbued through his magisterial teaching thousands of students with a love for music and for musical scholarship.
Watkins's Eastman dissertation on mid-sixteenth century settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah served as a springboard for his edition of four volumes of the sacred music of Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman and composer (and murderer), as well as for his well-known monograph on this composer's life and no less fascinating works. The book has been translated into several languages, carries a preface by Igor Stravinsky, and even served as an inspiration for an opera by Alfred Schnittke.
Watkins's mentor Fox instilled in him also a fascination with tile music of our century and this has borne fruit over the decades in numerous articles, lectures, program notes and - most important - two books on twentieth-century music: Soundings and Pyramids at the Louvre. Watkins's books have been praised by critics for their bold departures from modernist historiograpical paradigms and for paving new avenues for understanding the music and its relation to other arts of the last hundred years.
In recognition of his distinguished career and his many contributions to music, the Eastman School of Music proudly confers upon Glenn Watkins the Alumni Achievement Award.
Rochester, New York
May 10, 1996