Gary Alfred Tomlinson (born December 4, 1951) is an American

musicologist Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some m ...

and the John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...

. He was formerly the Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

. He graduated from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, with a Ph.D., in 1979 with thesis titled ''Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi, and the humanist heritage of opera''. Tomlinson became Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, in 2012. Tomlinson's research has ranged across diverse fields, including the history of opera, early-modern European musical thought and practice, the musical cultures of indigenous American societies, and the philosophy of history and critical theory. His latest research concerns music, culture, and human evolution. Here he is concerned to reshape the relations of evolutionary theory, archaeology, and humanistic theory so as to offer a novel model of the emergence of human modernity. The chief ingredients of his model are the niche-construction theory of biologists'

extended evolutionary synthesis The extended evolutionary synthesis consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis w ...

, a growing systematization of culture evident in the archaeological record, and an extended semiotics indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce.

Selected awards

*1983–84

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the art ...

*1988–93

MacArthur Fellows Program The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

*2001 Elected to

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

*2010

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars s ...

, Derek Allen Prize *2016 Honorary membership,

American Musicological Society The American Musicological Society (AMS) is a musicological organization which researches, promotes and produces publications on music. Founded in 1934, the AMS was begun by leading American musicologists of the time, and was crucial in legitim ...

Books

''Culture and the Course of Human Evolution''
University of Chicago Press, 2018 *''A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity'', Zone Books, 2015
''The singing of the New World: indigenous voice in the era of European contact''
Cambridge University Press, 2007, *''Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays'', Ashgate, 2007
''Metaphysical song: an essay on opera''
Princeton University Press, 1999, *''Music in renaissance magic: toward a historiography of others'', University of Chicago Press, 1993
''Monteverdi and the end of the Renaissance''
University of California Press, 1987 * (with Joseph Kerman) ''Listen'', sixth edn., Bedford/St.Martin's, 2008 *Ed., ''Italian Secular Song, 1606–1636'', 7 vols., Garland, 1987–88 *Ed., ''Strunk's Source readings in Music History'', revised edition, ''The Renaissance'', Norton, 1998

Selected essays

* "Two Deep-Historical Models of Climate Crisis," ''South Atlantic Quarterly'' 116 (2017) * "Sound, Affect, and Musicking before the Human," ''boundary 2'' 43 (2016) * "Evolutionary Studies in the Humanities: The Case of Music," ''Critical Inquiry'' 39 (2013) * "Parahuman Wagnerism," ''The Opera Quarterly'' 29 (2013) * "''Il faut mediterraniser la musique'': After Braudel," in ''Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800'' (University of Toronto Press, 2010) * "''Hamlet'' and ''Poppea'': Musicking Benjamin's ''Trauerspiel''," in ''The Opera Quarterly'' 25 (2009) * "Monumental Musicology," review essay of

Richard Taruskin Richard Filler Taruskin (April 2, 1945 – July 1, 2022) was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as ...

, ''The Oxford History of Western Music'', in ''Journal of the Royal Musical Association'' 132 (2007) * "Musicology, Anthropology, History," in ''The Cultural Study of Music'' (Rutledge, 2003, 2011) * "Vico's Songs: Detours at the Origins of Ethnomusicology," in ''The Musical Quarterly'' 83 (1999) * "Ideologies of Aztec Song," in ''Journal of the American Musicological Society'' 48 (1995) * "Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer," in ''Current Musicology'' 53 (1993) *"Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies," in ''Black Music Research Journal'' 11 (1991) * "Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in Their Affinities," in ''19th-Century Music'' 9 (1986) * "The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology," in ''19th-Century Music'' 7 (1984) * "Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's ''via naturale alla immitatione''," ''Journal of the American Musicological Society'' 34 (1981)

References

External links

"Where it all began"
''Penn Current'', Jan. 10, 2008. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tomlinson, Gary A American musicologists Living people University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty MacArthur Fellows 1951 births