-– Jan 11, 2001) was an internationally recognized authority on early music

Early music

Early music is generally understood as comprising all music from the earliest times up to the Renaissance. However, today this term has come to include "any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises,...

, especially opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 of the renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 and baroque

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

 periods, and was Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. His 1968 book Baroque Music in the Prentice-Hall history of music series ran to three editions.

Palisca was born in Fiume, (in what is now Rijeka

Rijeka

Rijeka is the principal seaport and the third largest city in Croatia . It is located on Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea and has a population of 128,735 inhabitants...

, Croatia

Croatia

Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...

) in 1921. He studied at Queens College, New York, and Harvard, where he achieved a Doctorate in 1954. From 1953-1959 he taught at the University of Illinois, whence he moved to Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. From 1969-1975 (and again in 1992) he chaired the Faculty of Music at Yale. He lectured throughout the US and Europe and held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Zagreb

University of Zagreb

The University of Zagreb is the biggest Croatian university and the oldest continuously operating university in the area covering Central Europe south of Vienna and all of Southeastern Europe...

 and the University of Barcelona

University of Barcelona

The University of Barcelona is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia in Spain. It is a member of the Coimbra Group, LERU, European University Association, Mediterranean Universities Union, International Research Universities Network and Vives Network...

. On retirement he was appointed Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale.

From 1970-1972 he was president of the American Musicological Society

American Musicological Society

The American Musicological Society is a membership-based musicological organization founded in 1934 to advance scholarly research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship; it grew out of a small contingent of the Music Teachers National Association and, more directly,...

. In addition to directing the Yale music curriculum he consulted for the U.S. Office of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His musicological writings included numerous publications in the academic musical press and a number of books, some co-authored with Donald Jay Grout

Donald Jay Grout

Donald Jay Grout was an American musicologist.Grout attended Syracuse University and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1923. He took his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1939...

 and others. He edited The Norton Anthology of Western Music: Ancient to Baroque. In 1994 Clarendon Press republished a series of his most-cited papers, stating:

"Claude V. Palisca has long been acknowledged as a leading authority on Italian music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These nineteen essays, originally published between 1956 and 1989, draw together a body of significant research into Italian music and music theory, and make readily available papers widely scattered and most now out-of-print. They have further been selected because of their relevance to current research, as evidenced by their continued citation in publications and dissertations."

Selected bibliography

• Baroque Music Prentice-Hall 1968 (1991 third ed.) ISBN 0-13-058496-7
• A History of Western Music W W Norton & Co; 7Rev Ed edition (10 Aug 2005) ISBN 0-39-397991-1
• Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory, Clarendon Press, March 1994, ISBN 978-0-19-816167-7
• Aria Types in the Earliest Operas, Palisca's last completed paper for the Journal of 17th Century Music.