Bertil Van Boer, PhD

Professor Emeritus, Musicology, Theory, Collegium Musicum

About

Bertil van Boer is an active musicologist, composer, conductor, and violist. He received his BA degree from the University of California in Berkeley in1974 and his MA in Music History from the University of Oregon in 1978. His other music education includes the Mozarteum, where he was a composition student of Cesar Bresgen. Following doctoral work at Cornell University, he received his PhD in Musicology from Uppsala University in Sweden in 1983. He came to Western as the Dean of the College of Fine and Performing Arts and Professor of Musicology/Theory, prior to which he was Professor of Music History, Chair of the Music History/Theory at the School of Music, and Interim Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. Other faculty positions include Brigham Young University, Shasta College, and the Conservatorio Nacional of Nicaragua.
 
Dr. van Boer has a wide range of publications, including articles in the Historical Brass Society Journal, the Journal of Musicology, Scandinavian Studies, the Journal of Musicological Research, Eighteenth Century Music, the Svensk Tidskrift för Musikforskning, and a host of Festschriften and Symposium reports. He has regularly contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Opera and the New Grove Dictionary of Music. He is a staff critic for Fanfare and regularly writes notes and reviews for recordings. He is the author of several books and numerous musical editions, as well has been the editor for Ars Lyrica. His research is focused upon the music of the 18th century, with particular emphasis upon the music of Scandinavia and the Gustavian period, with particular focus on the composer Joseph Martin Kraus. As a composer, his music has been performed in Nicaragua, Austria, Sweden, and the United States. He has been involved with projects with the Würtemmberg State Opera, the Royal Swedish Opera, the Teresia Baroque Orchestra, and a number of other organizations and performing groups in the United States and abroad. He is the former conductor of Opera Kansas, and as a violist has performed professionally in Austria, Central America, Sweden, and the United States. In 2023 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Recent Publications

Dr. van Boer is the author of the textbook “Music in the Classical World” (Routledge and Taylor) from 2019, as well as The Historical Dictionary of Music in the Classical Period (Scarecrow Press), with the first edition in 2012 and the second edition in 2023, as well as “The Musical Life of Joseph Martin Kraus: Letters of an Eighteen-Century Swedish Composer” (Indiana University Press, 2014) containing letters translated from the Swedish and German, along with extensive commentary and documentary appendices. He is also the translator of Arthur Boer, “The Great War from the German Trenches” (Macfarland, 2016), for which he co-authored the extensive commentary.