Alan Buechner collection

Alan C. Buechner, Ed.D. (Music), was born in El Paso, Texas on April 16, 1926. He was Professor of Music and Coordinator for Music Education at the Copland School of Music, Queens College, CUNY, from 1967 until his retirement in 1992. Dr. Buechner’s career was devoted to musical scholarship and to teacher education in music, and included prior appointments at Harvard university, the University of Texas, and the University of Hartford.

His study, “Yankee Singing Schools and the Golden Age of Choral Music in new England, 1760-1800” (Ed.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1960), laid the foundation for many subsequent studies of that popular institution. During the past two decades his investigations into American revivalism of the 1840’s, into 19th-century American music and dance as reflected by the fiddle tune collection of W. S. Mount, and into the musical activities of the painter Thomas Hart Benton have been the subjects of papers delivered at meetings of the American Folklore Society; the Old Sturbridge Conference “Joyful Sounds”; the Berea Conference on Rural Hymnody; the Stony Brook Conference “Catching the Tune”; the American Musicological Society; the Violin Society of America; and the Sonneck Society. He has also lectured on various topics in American music at Emory University, the University of Kansas, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and at Bard College.

The recording The New England Harmony, a collection of early American choral music was produced under his direction at Old Sturbridge Village in 1964. Articles and reviews have been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Association; in Symposium, the Journal of the College Music Society; in American Music, the Journal of the Sonneck Society; the Music Educators Journal; and the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

A founder and officer of the Sonneck Society for American Music, he served on the Board and as its vice-president as well as chairing the Nominating, Bylaws, and American Music in American Schools and Colleges Committees.

On October 31, 1998, the Sonneck Society Board awarded Dr. Buechner the Distinguished Service Citation, the Society’s highest award for members. On December 10, 1998, Alan C. Buechner died at a convalescent center in Woburn, Massachusetts. At the memorial service on January 16, 1999, Allen McConnell’s eulogy described Dr. Buechner as a remarkable man, distinguished by scrupulousness, intelligence, kindness, and courage.