Jan Olof Rudén

Jan Olof Rudén is a Swedish musicologist born in Helsinki on 28 August 1937, whose work focuses on music bibliography, music for plucked instruments and Swedish musical life in the seventeenth century. His career is useful for understanding how Sweden's musical heritage was organised and documented in the second half of the twentieth century.

He trained at Uppsala University under Ingmar Bengtsson from 1957, earning the degrees of filosofie kandidat in 1961 and licentiate in 1969. Between 1970 and 1974 he worked at the university library, first as an assistant and then as a librarian. In 1974 he became librarian and bibliographer at the Swedish Centre for Music Information in Stockholm.

His output encompasses bibliographies, thematic catalogues and source studies. Notable among these are the Swedish music bibliography of the 1960s, the thematic catalogue of Hugo Alfvén's works published in 1972, and a study of watermarks as a tool for dating manuscripts in the Düben collection at Uppsala. He also prepared editions of Swedish music from the eighteenth century and earlier for the series Monumenta Musicae Svecicae, in some cases in collaboration with C.-A. Moberg. In 1990 he took on the secretaryship of the Hugo Alfvén Society.

His legacy lies above all in the working tools he has left to researchers: catalogues, bibliographies and editions that facilitate the study of Swedish music, both old and modern. The extent of his later impact is not known with certainty, so his importance may be assessed on the basis of these reference works.