Carolyn Gianturco (1934 - 2022)#

The Academy is greatly sadden to announce that Prof. Carolyn Gianturco, a distinguished member of the Musicology and Art History section of Academia Europaea since 2012, passed away on on April 29th 2022 after an unexpected and short period of illness.

Carolyn Gianturco studied at Marywood University (B Mus.) and Rutgers University (M.A.) in the USA. She obtained her D.Phil. in Musicology at Oxford University under the guidance of Sir Jack Westrup.

She taught Music History at Pisa University for the years 1971-2004 and was visiting professor at several Universities in Italy, the United States and Great Britain. Her research has centered on Italian 17th century music with, as she describes it, "some excursions into the 16th and 18th centuries."

In 1987, she founded the Associazione Toscana per la Ricerca delle Fonti Musicali (President 1987-2002) with the aim of cataloguing music in Tuscany and thus documenting its rich music history. An off-shoot of this is the series of publications she founded and edits, "Studi Musicali Toscani.” (13 voll. published to date). She has been President of the Società Italiana di Musicologia (1997-2001) and Vice-President of the International Musicological Society (2002-2007). She was National Advisory Editor for entries related to Italy in “The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians” 2nd ed. (London 2001).

Gianturco’s research in musicology has been published in Italy, England, the United States, Spain and Germany, and includes 7 books (of which she considers “Mozart's Early Operas” (London 1981) her “first important book”), 4 chapters, 48 articles, 165 entries in encyclopedias. She was also the General Editor of 16 volumes of Italian Seventeenth-Century Cantatas (New York 1985-87) which offer more than 400 manuscipts in facsimile and editions of the texts, as well as Editor of several other volumes of research and music.

Perhaps her greatest achievement, however, has been uncovering the life and music of the Italian composer Alessandro Stradella (1643 - 1682), a subject she continues to pursue even after 30 years. In fact, she wrote the first documented monograph on Stradella (Oxford 1997) which she translated and updated as “Stradella ‘uomo di gran grido’” (Pisa 2007). She also co-authored the first thematic catalogue of his more than 300 compositions extant in 800 mss (Styvesant, New York 1994). In 2000 the Italian Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali agreed to sponsor publication of Stradella's Complete Works in 42 volumes, and Carolyn Gianturco was named President of this Edizione Nazionale (11 voll. published to date).

Because of her conviction that music history must deal with "music", she was able to convince the University of Pisa in 2000 to allow her to found a University Choir and in 2010 a University Orchestra: both groups are open to students, faculty and staff of the university and have had an enormous impact on the university and on the city of Pisa. She maitained the coordination of the Choir until 2013.

The Academy offers its sincere condolences to the husband of Prof. Gianturco, Prof. Franco Gianturco, who is also a member of Academia Europaea.