E Eugene Helm

Ernest Eugene Helm (New Orleans, 23 January 1928) is an American musicologist whose research focuses on eighteenth-century German music and, in particular, on the work of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. His work is valued both for its studies of musical life at the Prussian court and for its contribution to the editing and cataloguing of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach's son.

Helm began his training at Southeastern Louisiana College, where he obtained the BME in 1950, and continued at Louisiana State University, where he took the MME in 1955. He received his doctorate from North Texas State University in 1958 with a dissertation on musical patronage under Frederick the Great. Between 1953 and 1955 he taught at Louisiana College. He then taught at Wayne State College in Nebraska in 1958 and 1959, and at the University of Iowa between 1960 and 1968. In 1968 he joined the University of Maryland, where he was Professor of Music from 1969 and chaired the musicology division from 1971 to 1987. He retired in 1994.

His publications include Music at the Court of Frederick the Great (1960) and numerous articles on Bach, among them 'The "Hamlet" Fantasy and the Literary Element in C.P.E. Bach's Music' (1972). His most frequently cited work is the Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1989), which serves as a reference for the cataloguing of that repertoire. Since 1989 he has been editorial coordinator of the C.P.E. Bach Edition, published in Oxford, and in 1982 he prepared, together with C.C. Gallagher, an edition of six of the composer's symphonies.

Helm also reflected on university teaching in The Canon and the Curricula (1994), a study of musicology and ethnomusicology programmes in the United States. His legacy is associated above all with the rigour of his thematic catalogue and his editorial work on Bach.