Neal Zaslaw

• Born — 28 June 1939 • Birthplace — New York City, US • Occupation — Musicologist • Education — * Harvard University (BA) • Juilliard School (MA) • Columbia University (PhD) Neal Zaslaw (born June 28, 1939) is an American musicologist.

Born on June 28, 1939 in New York, Zaslaw graduated from Harvard in 1961 with a BA and obtained his master's from Juilliard in 1963. He played flute in the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski from 1962 to 1965, when he returned to graduate coursework at Columbia University. Zaslaw began teaching at CUNY in 1968 and taught there for two years. While pursuing graduate studies at Columbia, he took a seminar in historiography with Edward Lippmann. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 1970 and joined the faculty at Cornell University that same year. Zaslaw was named the Herbert Gussman Professor of Music at Cornell in 1995. He served as the musicological advisor to Christopher Hogwood, Jaap Schroeder, and the Academy of Ancient Music for their Mozart symphony recordings from 1977 to 1981. Zaslaw also was the editor-in-chief of the journal Current Musicology from 1967–1970 and was the book review editor for Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association. Zaslaw's early work dealt with performance practice, especially tempo and ornamentation with respect to French and Italian styles. His PhD dissertation was on Jean-Marie Leclair l'aîné. Zaslaw has done extended work on the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, including a landmark 1989 work on his symphonies. In 1993, he was named the principal editor of the revised Köchel catalogue. This revised edition, the ninth edition of the Köchel, was published in 2024. Zaslaw was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class in 1991. In 1998, he was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Zaslaw has also held grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the French Ministry of Culture, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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