22 Facts About Philip Brett

Philip Brett was a British-born American musicologist, musician and conductor.

Philip Brett was particularly known for his scholarly studies on Benjamin Britten and William Byrd and for his contributions to the development of lesbian and gay musicology.

Philip Brett was born in Edwinstowe, a coal-mining village in north Nottinghamshire, England.

Philip Brett's father was a collier and his mother a school teacher.

Philip Brett was educated first at the choir school of Southwell Minster and then attended King's College, Cambridge as a choral scholar.

Philip Brett received his BA degree from Cambridge in 1958 and a MusB in 1961, studying under Philip Radcliffe, Boris Ord and Thurston Dart.

Philip Brett wrote his doctoral dissertation on the songs of William Byrd, a composer on whom Brett would write extensively throughout his career.

Philip Brett was made a full professor in 1978 and went on to become chairman of the music department in 1988.

In 1991, Brett moved to University of California, Riverside to be with his long-term partner, George Haggerty, a professor of English there.

Philip Brett was appointed Associate Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Riverside in 1998, a position which he held until 2001 when he became Distinguished Professor of Musicology at University of California, Los Angeles.

Philip Brett died of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 64, a year after taking up his appointment at UCLA.

Philip Brett edited the whole corpus for Musica Britannica in 1967 and Byrd's own songs separately in 1970.

Philip Brett collaborated with Dart in revising a series by Edmund Fellowes on English madrigal composers.

Philip Brett revised one of the volumes in the Collected Works of William Byrd and demonstrated the doubtful authenticity of many of the pieces which Fellowes had attributed to Byrd.

On Dart's recommendation, Philip Brett was appointed General Editor of the new seventeen-volume Byrd Edition, which revised the work begun by Fellowes.

Philip Brett worked on the series right up until his death and edited several of the volumes himself.

The extensive introductions which Philip Brett had written to the volumes on Byrd's Gradualia were published posthumously as a separate monograph in William Byrd and His Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph.

In 1976, Philip Brett delivered a paper on Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at a national meeting of the American Musicological Society.

From 1966 to 1991, Philip Brett was the conductor of the University of California, Berkeley Chamber Chorus.

Philip Brett's 1990 recording of Handel's oratorio Susanna was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Philip Brett played the harpsichord and Renaissance organ in some of these performances, as well as giving solo harpsichord recitals.

Philip Brett published many articles, monographs, books, and critical editions of scores during his lifetime.