A Composer's Notes

Jeffrey Dane (1943-2015) was a music historian, researcher, journalist, essayist and author. Born in New York, he studied at the Juilliard School (composition) with Stanley Wolfe, Peter Schickele, and Hall Overton. His chamber music has been performed at New York University on commission from the American Music Festival. He has lived in Europe where he spent time in several of the continent's musical centers, and has researched in Germany (Leipzig and Weimar), Switzerland (Zürich), and Austria (Salzburg, Bad Ischl, Gmunden, Baden, Mrzzuschlag, and Vienna, his favorite city). He had a genuine passion for music, its composers, practitioners, history, and literature. He fully acknowledged (and made no apologies for) a marked tendency to develop an almost emotional attachment to the composers, living or not, whose music he studied. His book, Beethoven's Piano, was published by New York's Museum of the American Piano. He contributed to the following books: Leonard Bernstein - A Life by Meryle Secrest (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1994), to The Composer In Hollywood by Christopher Palmer (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 1991), to the college textbook Listening To Music by Dr. Jay Zorn (Prentice Hall, New York, 1995), and to Reflections '97 by Basil Tschaikov & Jon Tolansky (Musical Performance Research Centre, Harwood Academic Publishers, London, 1997). As a historian, and as a relaxing diversion from the norm of routine, he travelled widely and researched and wrote articles having a non-musical focus, on subjects ranging from Goethe to George Washington, antiques, travel, the Alamo and other historic structures (including the Brahms Museum in Mrzzuschlag, Austria, and Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, whose Curator he interviewed and of whom he wrote a profile), essays on the relationships between the independent and the academic scholar, articles about the practical and conceptual difficulties authors face today, and a historical perspective of James Bowie.