Philip Brett

Life and career

Philip Brett was born in Edwinstowe, a coal-mining village in north Nottinghamshire, England. His father was a collier and his mother a school teacher. He was educated first at the choir school of Southwell Minster and then attended King's College, Cambridge as a choral scholar. He received his BA degree from Cambridge in 1958 and a MusB in 1961, studying under Philip Radcliffe, Boris Ord and Thurston Dart. After a year studying at University of California, Berkeley with Joseph Kerman, he returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of King's College and completed his PhD there in 1965. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the songs of William Byrd, a composer on whom Brett would write extensively throughout his career. In 1966 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley and remained there for nearly 25 years. He was made a full professor in 1978 and went on to become chairman of the music department in 1988. During his time at Berkeley, he became a naturalised US citizen and participated in the musical life of the university both as a recitalist and as a choral conductor in addition to his teaching.

In 1991, Brett moved to University of California, Riverside to be with his long-term partner, George Haggerty, a professor of English there. He 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. Brett died of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 64, a year after taking up his appointment at UCLA. On the 6th anniversary of his death, the University of California, Riverside dedicated the Philip Brett Memorial Peace Garden, a traditional Japanese Karesansui designed by Takeo Uesugi. The annual Philip Brett Award from the American Musicological Society honors exceptional musicological work in the field of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender/transsexual studies.

Musicologist

As a musicologist, Brett was known for his scholarly studies on William Byrd and Benjamin Britten. The two English composers were separated by almost four centuries, but united in Brett's view by their positions as 'outsiders' in their respective societies—Byrd as a Roman Catholic during the English Reformation and Britten as a closeted homosexual. Overlapping with these themes, was the other area in which Brett made a major, if at times controversial contribution—the development of lesbian and gay musicology.

Brett's earliest scholarship was in music of the Tudor period. While studying for his doctorate with Thurston Dart, he found over 50 music manuscripts from a single documented scriptorium, and identified the hitherto anonymous songs for voice and viols in one of the manuscripts as late works of William Byrd. He edited the whole corpus for Musica Britannica in 1967 and Byrd's own songs separately in 1970. Brett collaborated with Dart in revising a series by Edmund Fellowes on English madrigal composers. He also revised one of the volumes in the Collected Works of William Byrd (another Fellowes project) and demonstrated the doubtful authenticity of many of the pieces which Fellowes had attributed to Byrd. On Dart's recommendation, Brett was appointed General Editor of the new seventeen-volume Byrd Edition, which revised (and in some cases replaced) the work begun by Fellowes. Brett worked on the series right up until his death and edited several of the volumes himself. The final volume was published in 2005. According to Anthony Bye writing in The Musical Times, it was to become the first modern multi-volume, critical edition of a major English composer to reach completion. The extensive introductions which 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 (2007).

In 1976, Brett delivered a paper on Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at a national meeting of the American Musicological Society. The paper, published as an article by The Musical Times the following year, proposed that study of Britten's sexual identity could illuminate the interpretation of his music. It was the first time that this aspect of Britten had been considered in print. Britten's homosexuality had previously been what Antony Bye described as "off limits, an 'open secret' recognised but not publicly acknowledged." The reaction was mixed, and when Brett initially submitted the paper to The Musical Quarterly for publication, the then editor, Joan Peyser, dismissed it as "a personality study". However, Brett continued to explore the relationship between Britten's sexuality and his operas. In the succeeding years he wrote a series of influential articles and books both on Britten and on the more general implications of gay and lesbian sexuality in music. The discipline gradually entered the academic mainstream as part of the 'new musicology' with the American Musicological Society's Gay and Lesbian Study Group (co-founded by Brett) established in 1989. The 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, contained, for the first time in its history, an article on gay and lesbian music (co-written by Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood).

Conductor and musician

From 1966 to 1991, Brett was the conductor of the University of California, Berkeley Chamber Chorus. As a choral conductor, he received the American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award in 1980 for the performances of Jacopo Peri's Euridice and Monteverdi's Orfeo as well as motets from Byrd's Gradualia. His 1990 recording of Handel's oratorio Susanna was nominated for a Grammy Award (Best Choral Performance). Brett also played the harpsichord and Renaissance organ in some of these performances, as well as giving solo harpsichord recitals. Although most of his performances and recordings were of Renaissance and Baroque music, he also participated in the recordings of 20th century works including Lou Harrison's La koro sutro (1988) and Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1991).