Louise E Cuyler

Louise Elvira Cuyler (Omaha, 1905 – Carmel, California, 1998) was an American musicologist whose work focused on Franco-Flemish Renaissance music and German musical practice in the age of Josquin. She began as a violinist: in Omaha she performed in public while still at high school, and she later earned a bachelor's degree in violin at the Eastman School of Music in 1929.

She taught theory at the University of Michigan School of Music, where she graduated in theory and composition in 1933. During the Second World War she served with the American Red Cross. On completing this service she returned to Michigan and, at the same time, resumed her studies at Eastman, where she received her doctorate in musicology in 1948 with a dissertation on the third book of Heinrich Isaac's Choralis constantinus. At Michigan she became a professor (1953), chaired the musicology department (1957) and was made professor emerita in 1975. For more than two decades she also worked as music critic of the Ann Arbor Daily News, a post she left in 1971.

She gave numerous lectures and was a visiting professor at several universities, among them Washington in Seattle, Stanford, Indiana and Santa Barbara. She sat on the council of the American Musicological Society for more than twenty years and served as its secretary between 1955 and 1971.

Her legacy rests above all on her studies of the Franco-Flemish Renaissance and on the political use of the motet, as well as on the relationship between Church and State in musical commissions. Her work on Isaac and on the Emperor Maximilian I continues to be cited in research on Renaissance polyphony.