David Brown

David Clifford Brown, born in Gravesend on 8 July 1929, was an English musicologist specialising in Russian music and the Elizabethan madrigal. His career combined university teaching with research focused on two territories little connected in Anglo-Saxon historiography of the period: English Renaissance music and Russian Romanticism.

His initial training covered English, Latin and music at the University of Sheffield, where he took his first degrees in 1950 and 1951. During his national military service (1952-1954) he studied Russian, a language that would prove decisive in his career. After working as a schoolteacher from 1954 to 1959, he was a music librarian at the University of London Library in Senate House from 1959 to 1962. In 1962 he joined the University of Southampton as a lecturer, rising through the ranks to the chair of musicology, which he held from 1983 to 1989. The university awarded him his doctorate in 1971 for his study of Thomas Weelkes. In 1980 he joined the editorial board of Musica Britannica.

His early research dealt with Weelkes, Wilbye and Thomas Morley, as well as with Britten and Vaughan Williams. He then devoted much of his work to Glinka, whose study was the first substantial one published in English, and above all to Tchaikovsky. His four-volume biography of the composer is regarded as his principal contribution: the most complete to date, with analysis of the major works and a chapter on the Russian character of his music. The final volume presents the composer's last days with balance and leans towards the theory of suicide. To this must be added Tchaikovsky Remembered, an edition of documentary sources, among them all those relating to the musician's death.

Brown was also a regular contributor to radio. His legacy lies in having made Russian musical history accessible to the English-speaking public and in having rigorously rescued sixteenth-century English polyphony.