Barry S. Brook

Barry Shelley Brook (born November 1, 1918 in New York City , † December 7, 1997 ) was an American musicologist and university professor .

Brook studied at the City College of New York until 1939 . At Columbia University he was a student of Paul Henry Lang , Erich Hertzmann , Hugh Ross and Roger Sessions and obtained his master's degree in 1942. At the Sorbonne he received his doctorate in 1959 with the dissertation La symphonie française dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle as Docteur de l'Université .

During World War II, Brook was a navigator captain in the United States Air Force and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross . From 1945 until his retirement taught Brook at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He worked scientifically in the field of music iconography, music sociology and aesthetics and the history of musical theme catalogs. In the course of his source studies he developed a technique for analyzing compositional manuscripts that enabled him, among other things, to identify authentic works by Giovanni Pergolesi .

At the CUNY Graduate School , he founded the Pergolesi Research Center , which has an extensive microfilm collection of sources on Pergolesi. As editor, he was involved in a 60-volume collection of symphonies written between 1720 and 1840 and a twelve-volume collection of French operas from the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1979, under the patronage of the UNESCO International Music Council , he initiated the project The Universe of Music: A History , which aims to provide a comprehensive history of the world's musical cultures.

As early as the early 1960s, Brook advocated the use of computers to capture musical sources. In 1964 he submitted the proposal for a Plaine and Easie Code , a system for notating music with normal typewriter and keyboard characters, which is still in use today. In 1965 he founded the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), an international annotated bibliography of musicology, and in 1967 the first volume, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature , was published under his editorship .

At the meeting of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centers in Sankt Gallen in 1971, Brook initiated the Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM), an international project to develop methods for classifying, cataloging and researching music-relevant iconographic sources. In 1972 he organized the Research Center for Music Iconography (RCMI), an archive of iconographic material at the CUNY Graduate Center , and developed a computer-based information retrieval system for this purpose. From 1986 to 1997 he was also a member of the International Commission of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicale (RISM).

In addition to his work at CUNY, Brook has taught as a visiting professor at nine other universities in the USA, Australia and France. From 1977 to 1987 he was also director of the DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) program at the Juilliard School . He also served as Vice President (1974–77) and President (1977–80) of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centers (IAML) and as Vice President (1980–82) and President (1982–84) of International Music Council (IMC). For his achievements he was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (1965) and was named Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government (1972). The Center for Research and Music Documentation , founded at CUNY in 1989 , was named after him after his death.

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personal data
SURNAME	Brook, Barry S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Brook, Barry Shelley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American musicologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH	November 1, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH	New York City
DATE OF DEATH	December 7, 1997