D W Krummel

Donald William Krummel (Sioux City, Iowa, 12 July 1929) is an American music librarian and bibliographer whose work focuses on music printing and publishing and on early American music. His work has been a point of reference for those who need to date and locate early music prints, a question that combines the history of music with the history of the book.

Krummel was educated at the University of Michigan, where he obtained a Bachelor of Music in 1951, a Master of Music in 1953 and a Master of Library Science in 1954. In 1958 he also received a doctorate in library science. Between 1952 and 1956 he taught at that university and, from 1956 to 1961, worked as a reference librarian in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. In 1962 he joined the Newberry Library in Chicago, first as head of the reference department and then as associate librarian. In 1970 he was appointed professor of library science and music at the University of Illinois. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1976-1977 and, between 1976 and 1979, directed the Resources of American Music History project for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His research revolves around two main areas: music printing and publishing, and early American music. In his doctoral dissertation and later writings he studied how to date eighteenth-century music prints, especially those of American publishers, combining cultural and bibliographical evidence, including graphic analysis, that is, the study of the printed musical page. He was also compiler of the quarterly bibliographical list in The Musical Quarterly between 1957 and 1960, and has been an active member of the Music Library Association and the IAML.

His legacy is above all bibliographical. Works such as Bibliographical Handbook of American Music (1987), The Literature of Music Bibliography (1992) or English Music Printing, 1553–1700 (1975) are working tools for musicologists and librarians, and his articles on modern music classification and the German national music bibliography show a sustained interest in organising and describing the printed repertoire.