Frederick Dorian

Frederick Dorian (Vienna, 1902 – Pittsburgh, 1991) was a musicologist and critic of Austrian origin who spent most of his career in the United States. His training combined academic musicology with practical musicianship, and his writing addresses both specialists and cultivated non-professional readers.

He earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1925, with a dissertation on fugal technique in Beethoven's works, and worked there under Guido Adler. He studied composition and conducting at the Vienna Academy of Music, joined Schoenberg's seminar, and received lessons in theory and conducting from Webern, as well as piano lessons from Edward Steuermann. Between 1930 and 1933 he was music critic of the Berliner Morgenpost; in 1934 he became Paris music correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and between 1935 and 1936 he contributed to the Neues Wiener Journal.

In 1936 he joined Carnegie-Mellon University as a music professor, remaining there until 1971, when he was appointed Andrew Mellon Lecturer in Music. He retired as professor emeritus in 1975. He later served as visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1977, and subsequently at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, teaching music history.

His written output includes The History of Music in Performance (1942), which documents performing practice from the works and writings of great composers since the Renaissance; The Musical Workshop (1947), a clear analysis of the creative process; and Commitment to Culture (1964), a history of artistic patronage in Western Europe and of its contemporary sources. His legacy rests above all on these rigorously accessible books and on his role as a bridge between the Central European tradition and American musical life.