Harold Stone Powers (August 5, 1928 – March 15, 2007) was an Americanmusicologist,ethnomusicologist, andmusic theorist.[1][2]
Born in New York City on August 5, 1928, he earned his B.Mus. in piano fromSyracuse University in 1950 and an MFA in composition and musicology fromPrinceton University in 1952. As aFulbright Fellow, he studiedIndian music inMadras for two years before continuing at Princeton where he received aPh.D. in musicology. His dissertation was on “The Background of the South Indian Raga System.” Powers taught atHarvard University from 1958 to 1960 and at theUniversity of Pennsylvania from 1961 to 1973 before returning to Princeton where he was named theScheide Professor of Music History in 1995 and in 2001 assumedEmeritus status. Powers returned to India several times to study music there onJohn D. Rockefeller III andFulbright Senior fellowships.[2]
Powers was known for intensive study of bothRenaissance music and music theory and severalworld music traditions (especially Indian music); this allowed him to reevaluate the concept ofmode.[3] He did this in a number of articles, including “Mode” in theNew Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980),[4] a landmark of scholarship on the subject, "Tonal types and modal categories inRenaissance polyphony" (1981),[5] "Modal representations inpolyphonic offertories" [based mostly on Palestrina'sOffertoria cycle] (1982),[6] "Is mode real?" (1992),[7] "Anomalous modalities" (1996),[8] “Language Models and Musical Analysis,”[9] and “Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition,”[10]
Powers was the first foreigner to perform at theTyagaraja Aradhana inThiruvaiyaru,India.[11]
The Harold Powers World Travel Fund, administered by theAmerican Musicological Society, was established in 2006 to “encourage and assist Ph.D. candidates, post-docs, and junior faculty in all fields of musical scholarship to travel anywhere in the world to carry out the necessary work for their dissertation or other research. The Fund honors thepolymathic scholar and distinguished longtime AMS member whose publications have ranged from music and language tomedieval mode to Indian music toPuccini and whose interests are wider still, but always with the communicative aspects of music at their base.”[12]
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