A.T. Merritt, Renaissance Music Authority, Dies

Arthur Tillman Merritt, the Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music Emeritus, died of bladder cancer on Oct. 25 in Bedford, Mass. He was 96.

Merritt specialized in Renaissance music, but his tastes and teaching showed remarkable breadth, according to longtime colleague Elliot Forbes, the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music Emeritus. Equally at home with undergraduates and graduate students, Merritt taught everything from harmony and counterpoint to survey courses and 20th-century works.

"He loved the new and adventuresome in music," Forbes recalled this week. "He was teaching Monteverdi at a time when few people were studying him and at the same introducing his students to the newest music by composers like Hindemith and Stravinsky. He was a complete musician, your grand example of covering the whole area."

Twice chairman of the Music Department (1942-52 and 1968-72), Merritt played a central role in establishing five of Harvard's endowed professorships in music: the Walter W. Naumburg, the Walter Bigelow Rosen, the Fanny P. Mason, the James Powell Mason, and the Fanny Peabody.

Merritt became the first Fanny P. Mason Professor in 1953 and also led the fund drive that resulted in the 1971 completion of the Fanny P. Mason Music Building, which significantly expanded the Department's library and studio space.

Merritt retired in 1972, the same year that Chicago wine merchant and music-lover Paul Fromm moved his 20-year-old Fromm Music Foundation to Cambridge. Merritt served as first chairman of the Harvard-based organization, which commissions new works and sponsors their premiere performances. Merritt held the Fromm chairmanship until the spring of 1973.

That was not the only example of his commitment to new music. In May 1947 after almost two years of tireless organizing, Merritt's efforts brought a major three-day "Symposium on Music Criticism" to Harvard featuring panelists such as novelist E.M. Forster, composers Roger Sessions and Virgil Thomson, music critics Olin Downes and Alfred Frankenstein, and musicologist Paul Henry Lang.

Merritt commissioned seven works of chamber, choral, and dance music for the occasion, and all had their world premieres during the event: Copland's In the Beginning; Hindemith's Apparebit Repentina Dies; Malipiero's La Terra; Martinu's String Quartet No. 6; Piston's String Quartet No. 3; Schoenberg's String Trio, Op. 45; and William Schuman's Night Journey.

As curator of Harvard's Isham Memorial Library, Merritt also organized major conferences in 1957 (instrumental music) and 1961 (French and Italian secular music). Through his efforts, the Isham developed into a "first-class research repository," Forbes said.

Harvard University Press published papers from the three symposia as Music and Criticism (1948, ed. Richard F. French), Instrumental Music (1959, ed. David G. Hughes), and Chanson and Madrigal, 1480-1530: Studies in Comparison and Contrast (1964, ed. James Haar).

Born on February 15, 1902, in Calhoun, Mo., Merritt earned his A.B. (1924) and B.F.A. (1926) degrees from the University of Missouri, and his A.M. (1927) from Harvard. As a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellow (1927-29), he pursued additional studies in Paris with celebrated pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and composer Paul Dukas.

Merritt first taught at Harvard as an assistant in music from 1929 to 1930. In 1930, as an assistant professor of music, he established the Music Department at Hartford's Trinity College. He returned to Harvard in 1932 as a music instructor, rising to full professor in 1943. He also served as senior tutor of Eliot House, one of Harvard's upperclass undergraduate residences. Merritt held honorary degrees from the University of Missouri and the New England Conservatory of Music (both, 1964).

His publications include Sixteenth Century Counterpoint (1939), a six-volume edition of the polyphonic chansons of Clément Janequin (1971, with François Lesure), and a 12-volume edition of the Complete Madrigals of Andrea Gabrieli (1981-84).

Merritt leaves no survivors.

A Harvard memorial service will take place in the Eliot House Library at a date to be announced.