EDWARD A. LIPPMAN

LIPPMAN--Edward A., Professor emeritus of Musicology at Columbia University, died in Teaneck, New Jersey, on June 9, 2010, two weeks after a 3-day family celebration of his 90th birthday. A gifted musician, he composed, played classical piano weekly on WNYC as a child, and later played jazz piano in a hotel band. He was an honor graduate of Clinton High School in New York City and went on to earn a B.S. from CCNY in 1942, an M.A. from NYU in 1945, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1952. A polymath, he taught radar to Air Force trainees after graduating from college, and later, while a graduate student, he taught the entire curriculum (which included calculus and English as well as radio and television repair) at the RCA Institutes. At various times he taught at City, Hunter, Brooklyn, and Queens Colleges and at Bryn Mawr. But it was during the 35 years he spent at Columbia (from 1954 to 1989) that he developed his original ideas on the philosophy and aesthetics of music, ideas which he elaborated in five books (one of which was translated into Chinese) and numerous articles (including three for the prestigious German music encyclopedia MGG) and reviews. When teaching, which he loved, he preferred the Socratic method interspersed with quiet humor; bursts of laughter emanated frequently from the rooms in which he held his classes. His warmth, wisdom, and humor are sorely missed by Violet, his beloved wife of 68 years, his sons Robert and Richard and their wives Marlene and Celi, his four grandchildren, Li (and her husband Richard Faustino), Philip, Julia, and Laura (and her husband Jason McCabe), and his two great-grandchildren, Mira Faustino and Conor McCabe.