Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Tom Bickley <>]

Dear Silence Readers,

I thought others would be interested in noting the passing of Charles Hamm, a significant scholar of American music and a participant in this listserv. Here's the information about him from the American Music Center. I recall meeting him at an AMS meeting years ago and his enthusiasm about the Cage discussions on this list.

Pax, -Tom

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/A-Tribute-to-Charles-Hamm-Composer-Historian-Educator/

and the following obituary from the AMS list and the Music Library Association list:

*********************

Given the man, it will surprise no one that Charles wrote his own
obituary.  Here it is, with necessary details added.

Charles Edward Hamm, 86, one of seven children of Strother and Ruby
(Barksdale) Hamm, died on October 16, 2011, at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical
Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
       Born in Charlottesville, Virginia on 21 April 1925, he was a 1942
graduate of Lane High School, where he was a member of the football team,
the band and the choir. He also played trombone in a local swing band. He
entered the Engineering School of the University of Virginia in 1942, but
his education was interrupted by the war. Volunteering for the United
States Marine Corps, he was commissioned a second lieutenant as a member
of the 17th Platoon Commanders' Class at Quantico, Virginia.
       Returning to the University after being honorably discharged from
service, he served as president of the Glee Club, and earned a BA in music
in 1946. He began graduate work at Princeton University as a Woodrow
Wilson Fellow, earning a MFA in musical composition in 1950. His first
teaching position was at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where he
was active as a composer. Among his compositions were Sinfonia for
orchestra, premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1954, The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on the story by James Thurber, which
won a national prize for a new chamber opera in 1956, and numerous songs
and piano pieces.       He returned to Princeton to earn his Ph.D. in
musicology in 1960, after which he held professorships at Tulane
University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and Dartmouth
College, where he was named the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music in
1976 and chair of the Department of Music. He also held visiting
professorships at the University of Texas at Austin, Hamilton College,
Brooklyn College, New York University, the University of Natal in Durban
(South Africa), Harvard University, and Colorado College. In 1976 he made
a lecture tour of music schools in India under a Fulbright grant, and in
1988 he made a similar lecture tour of the Peoples' Republic of China.
       As a musicologist, he first studied the music of the Italian and English
Renaissance,. H founded the Archive for Renaissance Manuscript Studies at
the University of Illinois and traveling throughout Western and Eastern
Europe to locate and catalogue manuscripts of Renaissance music. After
writing on the composers Guillaume DuFay and Leonel Power, he turned his
attention to American and popular music. One of the first musicologists to
study popular music, he was a founding member of the International
Association for the Study of Popular Music, twice serving as chairperson
of that organization. Two of his books, Yesterdays: Popular Song in
America (1979) and Music in the New World (1983), both published by
Norton, became standards in their field, and the latter was awarded the
first Irving Lowens Prize by the Society for American Music. Later books
included Putting Popular Music in its Place, published by Cambridge
University Press in 1995, and Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot
(Oxford University Press, 1997). His Music in the New World was translated
into Italian, and much of his work has been published in Chinese
translation. He also wrote on the music of American avant-garde composers
such as John Cage, on George Gershwin, and on the popular music of South
Africa and China. He was a major contributor to The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians and the Harvard Dictionary of Music.
       He served as President of the American Musicological Society in 1973-74
and was elected an Honorary Member of that society in 1993. ASCAP (the
American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers) gave him a Special
Achievement Award in 1998 for his work on Irving Berlin, and the Society
for American Music presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in
2002. Other awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright research
grant, and several grants from the American Society for Learned Societies
       He loved Vermont and his home on Bragg Hill, where he lived for more than
30 years. He was a longtime member of the Norwich Duplicate Bridge Club
and the Hanover Poker Club. A volunteer at the Norwich Public Library, he
also served a term on the Board. He enjoyed golf and games of Upwords with
various friends.
       Predeceased by two sisters, Dorothy and Frances, and two brothers,
Douglas and George, he is survived by a sister, Ruby, of Charlottesville,
and a brother, Jerry, of Weems, Virginia; three children: Bruce, of
Berkeley, California; Chris, of Seattle; and Stuart, of San Francisco;
four grandchildren; his first wife, Helen Hamm, of Seattle; and his second
wife, Marilyse de Boissezon Hamm, of Wilder. He shared his life with a
succession of cats, most recently Mao, Junior, Woody, and Genji, and he
was devoted to his dog Tati.

Onwards,
Dale Cockrell