Charles M. Atkinson Designated an Inaugural Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor for 2009

Charles M. Atkinson has been designated an Inaugural Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor for 2009. This prestigious appointment allows him to hold the permanent honorific title of Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of Music. Professor Atkinson, who joined the musicology faculty in 1978, received the University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1990, became the inaugural University Distinguished Lecturer in 1996, and has thrice received the School of Music Distinguished Research Award.

Dr. Atkinson is a preeminent specialist in the history of medieval liturgical chant and music theory. His research reflects his deep understanding of intellectual and cultural history, Latin and Greek philology, and paleography, as well as his sensitive musicianship. His first article, “The Earliest Agnus Dei Chant and Its Tropes” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1977), won two highly coveted prizes, the Alfred Einstein Award from the AMS and the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. In it he clarified the chronological and stylistic relationship of text, music, and embellishing tropes as found in the earliest recorded evidence of this chant. Soon after, he focused on the Missa graeca (the Greek Mass in the Latin West), providing rich evidence of cultural and liturgical exchanges between the Byzantine and Frankish empires in the ninth century.

The crowning achievement of his work to date, developed over a period of decades, is an innovative approach to the history of medieval music theory. His extended study of “mode” (Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, 1996) forms the centerpiece; and his new book, The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music (Oxford University Press, 2009), marks the culmination. In the book he considers the challenges faced by medieval musicians and music theorists as they adopted the tone system of ancient Greece to notate the church music of their own time, and the subsequent creation of new theoretical constructs. The book brilliantly traces the intellectual conceptualization of Western music over a period of centuries.

Dr. Atkinson is currently completing a major critical edition of melodies for the Sanctus and Agnus Dei of the Roman Mass (supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities); working on a critical edition of a medieval treatise, the Alia musica; and preparing a translation of the works of the late German musicologist Fritz Reckow.

In addition to his Ph.D. in Musicology (University of North Carolina), Dr. Atkinson holds B.F.A. and M.M. degrees in Clarinet Performance. He has written and lectured on early jazz, has directed a concert band (University of California, Irvine), and teaches a broad array of topics in the history of European and American art music, spanning the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Dr. Atkinson has served the profession in numerous ways, large and small, most recently as President of the American Musicological Society, an office he managed with consummate grace and sensitivity. He is long-time General Editor of the series Recent Researches in Medieval and Early Renaissance Music (Madison: A-R Editions) and has served as chair of the International Musicological Society’s study group Cantus Planus. He is well-known in many European centers of musicology, where he routinely lectures in German as well as English, and he recently served a term as Directeur d’Etudes Invité at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Perhaps the most visible of his countless contributions to the intellectual life of the School of Music is the ongoing series entitled Lectures in Musicology, which he founded in 1985. Finally, Charles Atkinson is routinely described as a colleague of exceptional generosity, known to many in the scholarly community for his unfailing willingness to share and support—to give of himself for the well-being of others.