|
Dr. Irving Godt, Professor of Musicology at Indiana
University of Pennsylvania from 1970-2003, died Dec. 5, 2006 at his home in
Indiana, PA. A son of Solomon and Sadie Godt, he was born March 13, 1923 in
New York City. He served in the U.S. Army during WWII and is survived by
his daughter, Ella Godt and her husband, Drew Silver of Brooklyn, NY.
Dr. Godt earned his Ph.D. degree in historical musicology from New York
University in 1969, studying with such renowned scholars as Jan LaRue and
Gustave Reese. His early specialty in musicology was Renaissance music,
defending a dissertation on Guillaume Costeley. He began teaching at IUP
in 1970, after having taught at the University of Minnesota, Claremont
College in California and at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He taught
every undergraduate and graduate course in music history at IUP, and through
his teaching became a generalist.
He published more than sixty articles in a wide variety of scholarly
journals, and is one of the few musicologists to have published at least one
article on every era of music history. After retirement, he continued to
write articles on a wide variety of topics. At the time of his death he
had six articles under review and fourteen awaiting submission. He wrote
or revised three articles for the New Grove 2nd ed.
(2001).
Besides his dissertation, he wrote two books which remain unpublished: one
on word painting entitled Music About Words and the other a biography
and source book on the composer Marianna von Martines with the working
title, The Hunt for Marianna: A Lost Composer Found. He also edited
and published a major choral and orchestral work by Martines, her Dixit
Dominus (AR Editions, 1997). Since 1974, he completed more than twenty
trips abroad, to fifty-three cities in ten countries to pursue his research
interests.
He made nearly one hundred scholarly presentations, almost forty of them at
meetings of the Allegheny Chapter of the American Musicological Society.
He was a founding member of the Chapter, and served as Program Chair and
President on several occasions. He will be greatly missed.
Carl Rahkonen, Indiana University of Pennsylvania |