Knud Jeppesen

Knud Christian Jeppesen (Copenhagen, 1892 – Risskov, 1974) was a Danish musicologist and composer whose research into the Italian Renaissance gave him considerable standing in the discipline for much of the twentieth century. Although largely self-taught in music, he combined university study with training in organ and composition, and his name is above all associated with Palestrina.

Before devoting himself to research, he worked as an opera conductor under the pseudonym Per Buch, in Elbing and Liegnitz (now Legnica), until the outbreak of the First World War forced him to return to Denmark. Back in Copenhagen he studied musicology with Angul Hammerich and came under the decisive influence of Carl Nielsen and Thomas Laub, to whom a strong impact on his development as both composer and scholar is attributed. He served as organist at St Stephen's Church (1917–1932) and at Holmens Kirke (1932–1947). After a concert of his works in 1919 was unsuccessful, he devoted roughly fifteen years to research. His dissertation on Palestrina and dissonance, submitted in Copenhagen in 1922, could not be assessed there owing to Hammerich's retirement, so it was examined in Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate that same year.

His institutional career includes a seat on the council of the International Musicological Society, of which he was president from 1949 to 1952, and editor-in-chief of Acta musicologica from 1931 to 1954. He was the first professor of musicology at the University of Aarhus (1946), where he founded the discipline's institute in 1950. After retiring, he spent some years in Italy, where his research led to several discoveries that were published in his later editions. His contributions to the editing of Italian music include the discovery, in Milan in 1949, of ten previously unknown masses by Palestrina, as well as the edition of the song collection Kopenhagener Chansonnier and of the frottola, in a two-volume study.

His legacy rests on his new reading of Palestrina's style, set out in his major study and in a manual of sixteenth-century vocal counterpoint, works that markedly influenced the later appreciation of Italian Renaissance music. As a composer, his music, traditional in character yet personal, shows the imprint of Renaissance counterpoint and of the late Viennese Romantics such as Bruckner and Mahler. He wrote motets and choral works that were highly valued in his day, as well as orchestral works and pieces for organ.