Plamenac, Dragan (EN)

Plamenac Dragan, *2 February 1895 Zagreb, †15 March 1983 Ede (the Netherlands), American composer and musicologist of Croatian Jewish origin. In his youth, he received a basic musical education (piano and violin, harmony, counterpoint), and for a time he also studied composition with F. Schreker in Vienna (1912). When he published his first works in 1915, he changed his surname from Siebenschein to Plamenac. He continued his musical education after graduating with a law degree from the University of Zagreb in 1917, studying composition with V. Novák in Prague and musicology at the Sorbonne with A. Pirro. He obtained his doctorate in musicology in 1925 in Vienna with his thesis J. Ockeghem als Motetten- und Chansonkomponist, written under the supervision of G. Adler. In 1926–27 he worked as a répétiteur and assistant to B. Walter at the Städtische Oper in Berlin. From 1928 he lectured in musicology at the University of Zagreb. In 1936 became a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1939 he represented Yugoslavia at the IMS Congress in New York, remaining in the United States after the outbreak of World War II. In 1940–43 he worked at the Saint Louis Institute of Music and subsequently collaborated with the Office of War Information. In 1946 he became an American citizen, and in 1947 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to conduct research in European libraries. He combined his academic work with teaching, lecturing at the University of Illinois in Urbana from 1954 to 1963 and as a guest lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh (1964–65) and the University of California in Santa Barbara (1967). Plamenac was also involved in the American Musicological Society, serving as its vice-president from 1956 to 1958, and was made an honorary member in 1971. In 1976, the University of Illinois awarded him an honorary doctorate. Plamenac’s extensive library and archive, containing among other materials his manuscripts and about 500 rare items, are housed at the Yale University Library in New Haven.

His compositional work—of which seven pieces survive, revealing a fascination with the music of C. Debussy —was merely a youthful episode in Plamenac’s life; after completing his musicological studies, he devoted himself entirely to academic work. His wide-ranging research interests included the music of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Baroque period with a particular focus on fifteenth-century compositions. In his studies, Plamenac combined comprehensive analyses of style and compositional techniques with highly competent source criticism, which resulted in numerous editorial projects. His greatest achievement in this field was the publication of the collected works of J. Ockeghem; successive reissues—revising primarily the underlay of the text and the placement of accidentals—attest to his thoroughness and editorial perfectionism. He enriched the commentaries in the editions with supplements published successively in musicological journals, in which he even expanded on issues related to the criticism of the verbal text, revealing his considerable philological competence. Plamenac’s studies on the music of Ockeghem and composers from the Burgundian school, as well as facsimile editions of chansonniers (including a songbook from Seville reconstructed by him) accompanied by erudite introductions, contributed significantly to the expansion of knowledge about 15th-century music. An important part of Plamenac’s scholarly output concerns his research on one of the oldest sources of instrumental music, manuscript 117 from Faenza, which culminated in the publication of a selection of compositions from this codex. This work not only established concordances and attributions of the pieces but also identified the original order of the fascicles (restored at Plamenac’s request when the manuscript was rebound). His extensive archival research across Europe brought to scholarly attention other valuable sources of medieval and Renaissance music (as well as seventeenth-century violin tablatures) and led to the discovery of previously unknown compositions, including works by Italian Trecento composers, G. Dufay, and W. Frye. Plamenac also played a significant role in research on the musical culture of Dalmatia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His pioneering studies in this field, which he continued after leaving his homeland, included the work of composers such as I. Lukačić, T. Cecchini, I. Jelić, A. Patricij, J. Skjavetić and D. Nembri. These constitute a lasting contribution to musicology in that region, as reflected in the Croatian edition of his writings (1998). In 1961 Plamenac conducted research in Polish libraries (Gdańsk, Toruń, Warsaw, Krakow, Wrocław, Poznań, Gniezno, Kórnik), and in 1982 he presented a paper at the “Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis” in Bydgoszcz.

Literature: Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, ed. G. Reese and R.J. Snow, Pittsburgh 1969; Spomenica u počast Dragan Plamenac (1895–1983) (‘memorial book in honour of Dragan Plamenac’), collective work, “Arti Musices” XVII, 1986 (includes: E. Stipčević Bibliografija muzikoloških radova Dragana Plamenca); C.E. Steinzor American Musicologists, c. 1890–1945: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook to the Formative Period, New York 1989; E. Stipčević Music Historiography and Terra Incognita: The Case of Dragan Plamenac, in: Music’s Intellectual History, ed. Z. Blažeković, B. Dobbs Mackenzie, «RILM Perspectives» I, New York 2009