Neal Zaslaw
American musicologist
Neal Zaslaw (born June 28, 1939) is an American musicologist.
Life and career
Born on June 28, 1939 in New York, Zaslaw graduated from Harvard in 1961 with a BA and obtained his master's from Juilliard in 1963. He played flute in the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski from 1962 to 1965, when he returned to graduate coursework at Columbia University. Zaslaw began teaching at CUNY in 1968 and taught there for two years. While pursuing graduate studies at Columbia, he took a seminar in historiography with Edward Lippmann. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 1970 and joined the faculty at Cornell University that same year. Zaslaw was named the Herbert Gussman Professor of Music at Cornell in 1995. He served as the musicological advisor to Christopher Hogwood, Jaap Schroeder, and the Academy of Ancient Music for their Mozart symphony recordings from 1977 to 1981. Zaslaw also was the editor-in-chief of the journal Current Musicology from 1967–1970 and was the book review editor for Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.
Zaslaw's early work dealt with performance practice, especially tempo and ornamentation with respect to French and Italian styles.
The public source identifies “Neal Zaslaw” as american musicologist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Neal, Zaslaw and American.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12134700. VIAF identifies the subject as 76324557. The Library of Congress control number is n85251214. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1961, 1963 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Neal Zaslaw” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.