Robert Bailey *69

Robert Bailey, faculty member at Juilliard and the retired Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music emeritus at NYU, died of cancer July 6, 2012. He was 75.

Bailey received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in 1959 and a master of fine arts degree and Ph.D. in music from Princeton in 1962 and 1969, respectively. He was an instructor in music at Princeton (1962-63); then went to Yale and rose from acting instructor to associate professor by 1974. In 1977, he joined the Eastman School of Music, and in 1985 became a full professor. In 1986 he went to Juilliard. That year, he also became the Petrie Professor of Music at NYU, retiring in 2009.

When he joined NYU, he was introduced as one of the world’s leading scholars in 19th-century German music and was considered one of the three top Wagnerian scholars in America. Earlier, Bailey had studied piano with Friedrich Wührer in Munich and Edward Steuermann while at Princeton. As a practicing musician, he always specified that performance was the foundation of musicological study.

In 2008, Bailey donated his library, which contained many rare sources of 19th-century music history and theory, plus many jazz recordings, to Juilliard.

He is survived by his sister, Judith Wilson.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.