Nicholas Temperley

Professor Emeritus of Musicology

ARCM, Royal College of Music, London; B.A., Mus.B., M.A., Ph.D., King's College, Cambridge; ARCO, Royal College of Organists, London; Hon. Fellow, Guild of Church Musicians.

A native of England, Nicholas Temperley first came to the University of Illinois in 1959 as a postdoctoral fellow. He then taught in the music departments of Cambridge and Yale, and joined the Illinois music faculty permanently in 1967. He was twice chair of the musicology division (1972–75 and 1992–96) and retired in 1996. Temperley has specialized in the Classic and Romantic periods, and in English music of all periods. He is also a pianist, harpsichordist, and composer.

In 1979 Temperley published a comprehensive history of English parish church music. He was editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society from 1978 to 1980, president of Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana (BACH) from 2002 to 2005, and founding president of the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) from 2003 to 2006. Since 1982, Temperley has directed the Hymn Tune Index project, originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Hymn Tune Index was published in 1998, and it now forms one of the research databases managed by the School of Music Library.

Temperley edited the 20-volume series The London Pianoforte School 1766–1860 and completed critical editions of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1971) and Haydn’s Creation. He wrote the article on Great Britain for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), and wrote or revised over 100 articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001), including new essays on Anglican, Congregational, and Methodist music. In 1991 he completed the first act of Mozart’s unfinished opera L’Oca del Cairo for a production by Illinois Opera Theatre. In 2003 he published Bound for America: Three British Composers, a book about three men who, like the author, migrated from Britain to the U. S. in the middle of their careers. His most recent publications include an edition of William Sterndale Bennett’s lectures on music (2006); a critical edition of 18th-century English psalmody for Musica Britannica (jointly with Sally Drage, 2007); a book of updated reprints of his articles on church music (2009); and Christmas Is Coming (2009), a collection of his own carol compositions and arrangements assembled over a period of fifty years. He is now editing, in collaboration with Stephen Banfield, a book on Music and the Wesleys, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.