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Sylvia Kenney
American musicologist (1922–1968) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sylvia Wisdom Kenney (November 27, 1922 – October 31, 1968) was an American musicologist. She originally performed as a violist and played for the United Service Organizations in World War II. After completing her graduate studies, she worked in music cataloguing and later as a professor at Bryn Mawr College, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Smith College. A 1963 Guggenheim Fellow, her publications included Catalog of the Emilie and Karl Riemenschneider Memorial Bach Library (1960) and Walter Frye and the Contenance Angloise (1964).
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Sylvia Wisdom Kenney was born on November 27, 1922, in Tampa, Florida.[1] Her father Arthur W. Kenney worked as a chemist for DuPont. and her mother Marion Coes spent World War II as a WAVES officer.[2] The family later lived in Wilmington, Delaware.[2] She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College in 1944.[3]
Kenney originally performed as a violist. Her music teacher was Max Aronoff.[4] The Portland Press Herald said that Kenney "possesses an inborn love of the old masters, which gives to her work a depth of interpretation both mature and musicianly".[4] During World War II, she was a violist for the United Service Organizations, appearing in shows throughout East Asia.[2] After the war, she studied at the Yale School of Music and got her BMus there in 1946.[3][2]
She returned to Yale for her graduate studies, obtaining her MA in 1948 and PhD in 1955.[3] Her doctoral dissertation, The 'Contenance angloise' in the Music of Walter Frye and his contemporaries, was supervised by Leo Schrade.[1][5] In 1950, she went to Belgium as a Fulbright Fellow in music,[6] and she studied at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where Charles Van den Borren, Albert Vander Linden, and Robert Wangermée were her mentors.[1] In 1952, she worked at the Library of Congress' copyright division as a cataloguer in the music section.[7] From 1952 to 1954, she was a music instructor at Wells College,[7] where she was also head of the music library.[1]
She went to Baldwin–Wallace College to work on a catalog of the college's Bach collection;[8] it was published as Catalog of the Emilie and Karl Riemenschneider Memorial Bach Library (1960).[1] She was editor for The Collected Works of Walter Frye, published by the AIM the same year.[9][1] In 1963, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research on the motet.[7][10] In 1964, her dissertation was republished as a book, Walter Frye and the Contenance Angloise.[5] Philip Keppler called both her Walter Frye books "monuments to scholarly exactitude and indispensable contributions to our knowledge of early English influence on the music of the Continent".[11]
In 1957, she began working as an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, and she became associate professor in 1963.[7] In 1961, she worked at University of California, Los Angeles as an assistant professor of music during the summer session.[7] In October 1964, she was appointed to the University of California at Santa Barbara Department of Music,[12] becoming an associate professor there.[3] She moved to Smith College in 1966[11] and became professor of music history.[3]
Kenney died on October 31, 1968, in Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, two days after falling ill at a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert.[13]
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