Item 7.76 - Sign posts I

Robert Falck was born September 14, 1937 in Silver Spring, Maryland. He studied musicology at Brandeis University and in Göttingen as a Fulbright fellow. Falck moved to Toronto in 1967 to accept a teaching position at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. He served twice as Acting Dean (1981, 1995-6) and once as Associate Dean (1979-83), during his more than thirty years (1968-2003) at the Faculty of Music. He supervised over a dozen PhD dissertations, and many of his students are teaching at universities all over the country. Early in his career he published articles, books and dictionary/encyclopedia articles in the field of medieval music, focusing on polyphonic and monophonic music of the 12th and 13th centuries. In more recent years his research and publication interest shifted to the twentieth century, and he produced a number of published and some unpublished papers especially on Arnold Schoenberg, but also on Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Stefan Wolpe. His teaching largely reflected those diverse interests, but in 1970 he was also the first to teach a course on jazz at this university and probably in all of Canada.

Falck passed away in Toronto, Ontario on December 2, 2023 at the age of 86.