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PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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Release: Oct. 24, 1995
Contact: Jacquelyn Savani (609/258-5729)


Thomas R. Walker

Princeton, N.J.--Thomas R. Walker, professor of music at
Princeton University, died Oct. 22 at the Princeton Medical
Center. The cause of death was cancer. He was 58 years old.

Walker was an expert on 17th century Italian opera and the music
of Carl Nielsen, a Danish composer of the early 20th century.
Walker served as one of three editorial directors of the
_Drammaturgia musicale veneta_, a projected 30-volume series of
which 13 volumes have been published. He was a member of the
advisory board of the _Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum_, a
medieval Latin music theory database project, and corresponding
editor of the definitive edition of Carl Nielsen's works.

Appointed professor of music at Princeton in 1989, he served as
acting Music Department chair in 1991-92 and director of
graduate studies for musicology from 1989 to 1991 and again in
1994-95. He was a member of Princeton's Interdepartmental
Committee for the Program in Italian Studies and a member of the
Committee for Renaissance Studies.

Walker was born Nov. 5, 1936, in Malden, Mass. Having
interrupted his undergraduate career as a music major at Harvard
to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, Walker received his A.B.
degree in 1961. The next year under a Fulbright Scholarship, he
went to Denmark to investigate Carl Nielsen's music and to study
musicology, piano and composition at the University of
Copenhagen.

A graduate student in music at the University of California at
Berkeley from 1963 to 1968, Walker was assistant professor of
Music at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1968
to 1971. Lecturer in music at the University of London's King's
College from 1973 to 1980, he was appointed professore
straordinario and director of the Istituto di Discipline
Storico-artistiche at the Universit di Ferrara in 1981. In 1982
he was made dean of the Facolt di Magistero there and in 1984
professore ordinario of music history.

Music critic for _The Times_ of London from 1973 to 1977, Walker
also worked during those years as a staff editor at Macmillan
where his efforts focused on the _New Grove Dictionary of
Music_.

A member of the American Musicological Society, he served on its
Committee for Study of Computer Applications in Musicology. He
was a member of the Comitato Ferrara/Musica, established to
develop musical activity in

Ferrara, Italy. He also served as a member of three other
Ferrara-based organizations, including the Administrative Board
of the Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, the Advisory Board of
Aterforum festival of music, and the Advisory Board of Centro di
Studi Shakespeariani. On the editorial board of Early Music
History, a yearbook published by Cambridge University Press, he
was an honorary faculty member Dottorato di Ricerca in
Musicologia at the University of Bologna in Italy.

Walker is survived by his wife Barbara of Princeton, one
daughter Antonia Walker of New York City, and a brother Frank
also of New York.

A memorial service will be held in Taplin Auditorium later in
the fall. Arrangements are by Kimble Funeral Home of Princeton.

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