US early music pioneer dies, 91
RIPWe have learned of the death of Milton Scheuermann, founder in 1966 of New Orleans Musica da Camera, now the oldest surviving early music organization in the US. He also co-hosted Continuum, America’s longest-running early music radio program.
Milton taught at the Tulane School of Architecture for 56 years, retiring as adjunct professor in 2015.
Requiescat in pace.
I wonder whether the early music revival/boom will survive much past the demise of the generation that engendered it. To them, it was a new and exciting, unexplored realm, resurrecting long-forgotten pieces. But early music has now been with us for decades, and familiarity has bred, perhaps not so much contempt, but indifference. And I would submit that rightly so, as 99% of the music the early music fanatics rescued from oblivion it turns out deserved to remain there all along. It just so happens that the canon is very rarely wrong, and I look forward to the day when the current explosion in interest for obscure and terminally mediocre female composers succumbs to the same fate and they once more become justly forgotten.
Ya don’t have to listen to it, ya know.
Thanks, michael
Mediocrity is not gender specific. Misogyny is!
I was an architectural student of Professor Scheuermann’s at Tulane and am saddened about his passing. He was my favorite professor and not only did I love his kind, gentle and encouraging teaching style, but he was a renaissance man as well. In addition to his post at Tulane, he was the campus architect at Dillard University in New Orleans, a Historically Black University. He was also a founder of at least heavily involved with the New Orleans Friends of Music, the organization that helped bring musicians to New Orleans to perform recitals. Professor Scheuermann was also a magician, a calligrapher and mountain climber. He was a passionate Wagnerian as well as an enthusiast of Saint-Saëns. He invited his classes over for dinner vat his lovely home in Uptown New Orleans, and invited me to private receptions in his home after concerts. We were in touch for decades after I graduated and returned to the Northeast USA. A very good man, who had a lovely wife, Margie. Knowing Milton Scheuermann was amongst my best memories of my college years, I wish him and his family peace and strength. He was beloved by his students and impacted all who came in contact with him.