Helen Strassburger Boatwright (November 17, 1916 – December 1, 2010) was an American soprano who specialized in the performance of American song, recorded the first full-length album of songs by composer Charles Ives and had a career that spanned more than five decades.

Born as Helena Johanna Strassburger in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, she was the youngest of six children in a large German American family. After high school, she studied with Anna Shram Irvin and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in music from Oberlin College. Her operatic debut was as Anna in a production of Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor at Tanglewood.

During her career, she worked with many important figures in the world of music, including conductors Leopold Stokowski, Erich Leinsdorf, Seiji Ozawa and Zubin Mehta. She also performed with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood in the 1940s, sang opposite tenor Mario Lanza in his operatic stage debut, and performed for President John F. Kennedy in the East Room of the White House in 1963. In 1954, she became the first person to record a full-length album of Ives' songs, 24 Songs, with pianist John Kirkpatrick. She also studied with composer Normand Lockwood. Another particular favorite composer of hers was Hugo Wolf. She knew his songs intimately, and in her later years she nearly always included a set or even an entire half of a recital of his work.

She met her future husband, violinist, composer and musicologist Howard Boatwright (1918-1999), in Los Angeles in 1941 when they were to perform in a National Federation of Music Clubs competition. They married two years later, on June 25, 1943, and had three children. They performed together throughout their married life in North America, Europe, and India. Many of her husband's compositions for voice were written for her. Other notable orchestral and choral groups she sang with were Paul Hindemith's Collegium Musicum, Alfred Mann's Cantata Singers, and Johannes Somary's Amor Artis Chorale.

In 1964, her husband Howard became the dean of the Syracuse University School of Music and she joined him teaching there. In 1969 the Boatwrights established a university-sponsored summer program, L'École Hindemith in Vevey, Switzerland. They taught and performed there every summer until 1988. She was a professor of voice at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester from 1972 to 1979, and was a guest professor at Cornell University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University. She also gave master-classes at Glimmerglass Opera, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of North Carolina and Washington University in St. Louis.

In 2003, Syracuse University presented Boatwright with an honorary doctor of music degree. Boatwright continued to study music and teach, and in 2006, she celebrated her 90th birthday with a standing-room only concert at St. David's Episcopal Church in DeWitt, New York. Her achievements were honored during the 2011 Grammy Awards.

Robert S. Freeman (August 26, 1935 – October 18, 2022) was an American pianist, music educator, and musicologist who is known for leading several music schools in the United States. He was director of the Eastman School of Music from 1973 to 1996. Freeman was senior educational liaison to Music in the Air (MITA) at UCLA, and he served on the board of the National Center for Human Performance at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas.

Born into a family of musicians, Freeman grew up in Needham, Massachusetts and attended Milton Academy. His paternal grandfather played trumpet and cornet in Sousa's Band. His father was a double bass player in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, ultimately principal bass. In his youth he studied the oboe with Fernand Gillet in addition to studying the piano with Gregory Tucker. He went on concurrently to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in music with highest honors from Harvard and a diploma in piano performance from the Longy School of Music in 1957. He also studied privately with Artur Balsam and Rudolf Serkin during the summers of 1955 and 1956. In 1957–58 he held one of Harvard's Sheldon Travelling Fellowships. He went on to pursue graduate studies at Princeton where he was awarded both an MFA and PhD in musicology. A Fulbright Scholarship enabled him to pursue further studies in Vienna in 1960–1962. He was also awarded a Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation Award in 1962 and later an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College. In 1984 he was awarded Rochester, New York's Civic Medal, in connection with his work on downtown development.

In 1963 Freeman joined the music faculty at Princeton, leaving in 1968 to join the music faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1972 he was named director of the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester), a position he held for 24 years. From the fall of 1996 through the spring of 1999 he served as president of the New England Conservatory, then as dean of the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin till 2006. In 2015 he retired from the Susan Menefee Ragan Regents Professorship of Fine Arts at UT Austin, where he taught courses on the history and future of music.

A Steinway artist, Freeman performed in concerts and recitals throughout North America and Europe. He also made several recordings, mainly with colleagues from Eastman and the University of Texas. As a musicologist, his publications focused on 18th-century music history and on the history and future of musical education. His book, "The Crisis of Classical Music in America; Lessons from a Life in the Education of Musicians," was published in August 2014. He was awarded an honorary degree in April 2015 by the Eastman School of Music, which named the atrium of its Sibley Music Library in his honor. He was an emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the senior educational liaison for Music in the Air (MITA), a revolutionary computer-mediated means of learning music, developed by UCLA's Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff and published by ArtsInteractive Inc., designed to develop broader audiences for music of all kinds while extending human attention spans.

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Donald Jay Grout (September 28, 1902 – March 9, 1987) was an American musicologist. He is best known as the author of A Short History of Opera, first published in 1947. The fourth edition was published by Columbia University Press in 2003.

Grout was born in Rock Rapids, Iowa. He attended Syracuse University and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1923. He took his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1939. He taught at Harvard from 1936 to 1942, at the University of Texas from 1942 to 1945 and at Cornell University until 1970.

Early in his career, Grout's main body of research was in opera. After 1960 he became more interested in philosophies of music history, due in large part to his publication of a general music history textbook, A History of Western Music. A ninth edition of the book was published in 2014. After Grout's death, the new editions were revised by Claude Palisca and J. Peter Burkholder.

Grout also performed as a pianist and organist until the early 1950s. He served as editor of JAMS from 1948 to 1951, and was president of the American Musicological Society (1952–54, 1960–62) and the International Musicological Society (1961–64).

A reassessment of Grout's historiography was published in 2011 in the inaugural volume of Journal of Music History Pedagogy.

Doty, Ezra William [Bill] (1907–1994). Ezra William “Bill” Doty, music educator, scholar, and organist, was born in Grand Ledge, Michigan, on April 29, 1907, to William Ezra Doty, a Methodist minister, and Fannie A. (Daniells) Doty. Doty attended Western Michigan University and the University of Michigan, from which he received four degrees from 1927 through 1936: Bachelor of Arts in Education, Bachelor of Music, Master of Arts in Philosophy, and Doctor of Philosophy in Aesthetics. In 1931 he studied in Paris with Joseph Bonnet, and from 1932 to 1933 he studied at the University of Leipzig under Karl Straube. At the University of Michigan he was a pupil of the eminent organist Palmer Christian.

Doty taught at the University of Illinois and at the University of Michigan. In May 1937 the Texas legislature passed a bill authorizing and funding the establishment of the University of Texas College of Fine Arts. The college had to be activated by the academic year 1938–39 or the funding would lapse. Doty was selected as dean after a nationwide search, and he moved to Austin in April 1938. As dean of the College of Fine Arts, chairman of the music department, and professor of music, Doty assembled a renowned faculty in art, drama, and music; wrote a catalog; purchased equipment; prepared a budget; and organized curricula.

Doty taught courses in form and analysis, music literature, American music, aesthetics, philosophy, and fine arts administration. He also taught a number of distinguished organ students. Additionally, he taught classes in church music at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin. He served as organist at several Austin churches and performed solo organ recitals throughout the country, also frequently appearing as a lecturer or consultant. Doty composed several musical works, and in 1947 his text, The Analysis of Form in Music, was published by D. Appleton Crofts.

From 1955 to 1958 Doty served as president of the National Association of Schools of Music; for six years, he was that organization’s representative to the American Council on Education. He served as president of the Texas Music Teachers Association from 1947 to 1949, and he served two terms as president of the Texas Association of Music Schools between 1949 and 1955. Other memberships included active roles in the Music Teachers National Association, the Music Educators National Conference, and the Texas Federation of Music Clubs. Doty was an honorary life member in the National Federation of Music Clubs.

In addition he was a board member of the Texas Fine Arts Association and the Greater New York Chapter of the American National Theatre and Academy, and he was a charter member of the National Council of the Arts in Education. He organized the International Council of Fine Arts Deans in 1964 and served as its first chairman. He was also instrumental in founding the American Association of the Arts in Higher Education. He devoted his professional efforts to teaching, administration, and the establishment of accreditation standards and procedures, and he was an examiner/consultant for numerous schools throughout the country. Acknowledged for his consultant skills, Doty served as executive director of the Office of Cultural Affairs in New York City in 1964–65 during a leave of absence from the University of Texas.

He was a member of numerous honorary societies including Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Kappa Lambda, Phi Delta Kappa, the Philosophical Society of Texas, and the Bohemians. He was also active in civic and cultural affairs in the city of Austin. Among his major accomplishments as dean of the College of Fine Arts and chairman of the music department was the construction of the university’s first music building in 1941–42. The structure was also the first air-conditioned building on campus. A drama building was dedicated in 1962, and the art building and Archer Huntington Museum in 1963–64.

In 1965 Dr. Doty retired as chairman of the music department but retained the titles of dean of the College of Fine Arts and professor of music and continued to teach. He retired in 1972. Doty was married to Elinor Wortley in 1934 and had three children. He was an Episcopalian. E. William Doty died on June 16, 1994, and was entombed at Memorial Hill Park Mausoleum in Austin. A scholarship fund had been established in his name in 1962. In 1998 the E. William Doty Fine Arts Building on the UT campus was named in his honor.

==  Biography by John H. Slate, from the Texas State Historical Association website.  

Daniel Hege is an American orchestral conductor. He is currently the music director of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and the Binghamton Philharmonic, and is the principal guest conductor of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra. Hege previously served as the music director of the former Syracuse Symphony Orchestra (which went bankrupt in 2011. The following year it was re-constituted and re-named Symphoria.) He also makes numerous guest appearances with orchestras and music festivals across the country.

Hege was born in Colorado and raised in Idaho to parents Carl and Anne, who he names as his role models. He attended the First Mennonite Church in Aberdeen, Idaho. He began piano lessons at the age of nine and realized at that age that music would be his ruling passion.

He had majors in history and music at Bethel College, graduating in 1987. His senior seminar paper was about how the composer Dmitri Shostakovich worked under the repressive Stalin regime in Russia in the mid-20th century. He went on to obtain a master's degree from the University of Utah in orchestral conducting, where he founded the University Chamber Orchestra. He studied at the University of Southern California with Daniel Lewis and at the Aspen Music Festival with Paul Vermel.

In 2004 Mr. Hege received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from Le Moyne College.

He is active as a guest clinician and adjudicates various musical competitions nationally.

His positions have included

• Music Director of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra (September 2010 – present) 
• Music Director of the Binghamton Philharmonic (May 2018 – present) 
• Principal Guest Conductor of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra (September 2015 – present)
• Music Director of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra (April 1999 – April 2011)
• Music Director of the Haddonfield Symphony, New Jersey (1997 - 2000) (Now known as Symphony in C)
• Music Director of the Encore Chamber Orchestra in Chicago (1993 - 1997)
• Music Director of the Chicago Youth Symphony (1993 - 1997) (was honored twice by the American Symphony Orchestra League for innovative programming while in this position)
• Associate Conductor of the Kansas City Symphony (1995 - 1996)
• Assistant, Associate and Resident Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony (1996–2001) 
• Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Young Musicians’ Foundation Debut Orchestra in Los Angeles (1990 - 1993) 
• Music Director of the Newton Mid-Kansas Symphony Orchestra  (1993 - 2004)
• Director of Instrumental Music at the Orange County High School of the Arts (1991 - 1993)
• Assistant Conductor of the Pacific Symphony (1991 - 1993)

Louis Krasner

Louis Krasner was born in Cherkassy, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now part of Ukraine). He arrived in the United States at the age of 5, and graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1922. He continued his studies with Lucien Capet in Paris, Otakar Ševčík in Písek, Czechoslovakia, and Carl Flesch in Berlin. His concert career began in Europe, where he championed the concertos of Joseph Achron and Alfredo Casella.

In 1935 he commissioned Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, which he premiered on 19 April 1936 in Barcelona, with Hermann Scherchen conducting the Pablo Casals Orchestra. He also premiered Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto in December 1940, with Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. Among the American composers whose works he premiered were Roger Sessions, Henry Cowell, and Roy Harris.

Krasner retired from solo performing to become concertmaster of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, a position he held from 1944 to 1949. From 1949 to 1972 he was professor of music at Syracuse University. In 1976 he joined the faculties of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Berkshire Music Center. He won the 1983 Sanford Medal from Yale University and the 1995 Commonwealth Award.

Born in Newport News, Virginia, Boatwright studied the violin with Israel Feldman in Norfolk, Virginia, and made his début at New York Town Hall in 1942. He was assistant professor of violin at the University of Texas, Austin from 1943 to 1945. He then studied music theory and composition at Yale University (BM 1947, MM 1948), where he met Paul Hindemith, with whom he studied the viola d'amore. Hindemith urged him to stay at Yale to teach as assistant professor in music theory.

He planned to become a violinist instead of a composer, but began writing music in 1941 as a way to court the soprano Helen Strassburger. They were married in 1943 and performed and recorded new music, standard vocal works, and early music together for many years. Helen Boatwright continued to have a distinguished career as a teacher and performer, sometimes in collaboration with her husband and sometimes independently. The couple had three children: a daughter Alice and two sons, Howard III and David Alexander.

Howard became the music director at St. Thomas's Church, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1949, a position he held until 1964. It was there that he established a reputation as a pioneer in the performance of early choral music. While in New Haven he also served as conductor of the Yale University Orchestra from 1952 to 1960, and he was the concertmaster of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra from 1950 until 1962.

In 1964 he became the dean of the school of music at Syracuse University, and from 1971 he also served as a professor of music in composition and theory. At Syracuse, he transformed the music school, making it an important center for composition and the performance of new music by presenting festivals and establishing an electronic music studio. He also introduced non-Western music to the curriculum, and expanded its early music programs by acquiring collections of antique instruments. From 1969 to 1988, when he stopped teaching, he also directed a summer music program in Switzerland.

He was a Fulbright lecturer in India during the year 1959–60 and received a Fulbright grant to study in Romania, 1971–72. A pioneering scholar of Charles Ives, he was elected to the board of directors of the Charles Ives Society in 1975. He demonstrated an unusually wide breadth of erudition as a scholar, publishing writings on music theory, ethnomusicology, Charles Ives, and Paul Hindemith.