Howard Mayer Brown was an American musicologist.

Brown obtained his BA from Harvard in 1951 and his Ph.D. in 1959, studying under Walter Piston

Walter Piston

Walter Hamor Piston Jr., , was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter....

 and Otto Gombosi among others. He conducted and performed on flute often as a graduate student. He taught at Wellesley College, 1958–60, and then at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 from 1960, where he became chair of the music department in 1970. In 1972 he became professor at King's College

King's College London

King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...

 in London, but returned to Chicago in 1974. Brown was editor of Renaissance Music in Facsimile, published 1977-1982, and was the general editor of several other monument series of musical editions. He contributed prolifically to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He served as 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,...

, 1978-80.

Brown's scholarship covered a wide range of subjects. He published on the music of the Renaissance, especially the chanson

Chanson

A chanson is in general any lyric-driven French song, usually polyphonic and secular. A singer specialising in chansons is known as a "chanteur" or "chanteuse" ; a collection of chansons, especially from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, is also known as a chansonnier.-Chanson de geste:The...

and instrumental music, and frequently returned to problems in historical performance practice, a subfield in which he was one of the most important commentators. His work Musical Iconography (1972) was an important study of the depictions of musical instruments in the visual arts. He also made contributions to the study of Baroque opera.

Books

• Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (dissertation Harvard U., 1959; publ. Cambridge, MA, 1963)
• Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: a Bibliography (Cambridge, MA, 1965)
• (with J. Lascelle) Musical Iconography: a Manual for Cataloguing Musical Subjects in Western Art before 1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1972)
• Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: the Music for the Florentine Intermedii (1973)
• Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music (London, 1976)
• Music in the Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976)
• (ed. with Stanley Sadie
  Stanley Sadie
  Stanley Sadie CBE was a leading British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , which was published as the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.Sadie was educated at St Paul's School,...
  
  ) Performance Practice, i: Music before 1600 (London, 1989); ii: Music after 1600 (1989)