With permission from Margaret Bent and Susan Rankin, I post their obituary of Alejandro Enrique Planchart (d. 28 April 2019)

Alejandro Enrique Planchart
born Caracas, 29 July 1935, died Santa Barbara, 28 April 2019.
Alejandro studied philosophy and literature as well as piano in his native Caracas
(Venezuela) before moving to the USA to study composition, piano and harpsichord at Yale
(Mus.B. 1958, Mus.M 1960) and music history at Harvard (Ph.D. 1971). He has taught at
Yale, the University of Victoria, Brandeis, Harvard, and the University of California at Santa
Barbara, where he was Emeritus Professor.
Words that come to mind when attempting to describe Planchart’s achievements are
polymath, inexhaustible, generous. Besides the musicological scholarship for which he is
best known and which will be his legacy, his first published article was in mathematics, and
he continued to produce original compositions throughout his life. He was an indefatigable
performer and conductor of both early and contemporary music, editing little known works
from the entire middle ages and early modern periods and bringing them alive in performance
with university and semi-professional ensembles; his pioneering recordings with his Yale
Capella Cordina brought to sound much early music that had never been performed in
modern times, let alone recorded, and was sealed by his own inimitable singing of the
plainsong intonations.
He was concerned with music at all levels, from the most arcane codicological and archival
research to editions, analysis and historical context, through to performance. But it is the
extraordinary range and quality of his work as a musicologist that form his lasting
contribution, in over a hundred articles, encyclopedia contributions and reviews, ranging
from medieval chant repertories and early polyphony, to Du Fay and a wide range of 15th-
century issues, including performance questions, but also later composers (Morales, Tartini).
Planchart’s first major contribution to scholarship was the two-volume The Repertory of
Tropes at Winchester (Princeton UP, 1977). In a first volume he made a detailed analysis of
this eleventh-century repertory of new chant compositions, working out both the manner of
its development from the time of the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform to the Conquest,
and its relation to continental traditions. In a second volume he provided a catalogue of the
Winchester trope repertories, listing all known concordances. Unlike the later Corpus
Troporum catalogues, this presented trope elements in groups: to make sense of concordances
following these (highly variable) groupings was difficult, but he managed it with clarity, and
he remained proud of that approach many years later. No previous study of any part of the
trope repertory had achieved either the breadth or depth of this study: at the time it was
described as a work of ‘formidable erudition’, bringing an ‘insightful intellect’ to bear on a
vast amount of information. Above all, it was able to bring knowledge of liturgy and music
into discussion of a significant historical context (the Æthelwoldian reforms at Winchester
and the wider monastic revival in England). Both as a model study and as a catalogue of
tropes, it has stood the test of time, and remains, more than forty years after publication, a
significant element in the bibliography of early medieval music.
Planchart’s interest in the practice of troping was then transferred to the southern Italian
repertory: the edition made with John Boe of the Beneventanum Troporum Corpus in 13
volumes now stands as the only fully edited (with music) body of tropes from any part of
Europe – with the sole exception of a much smaller body of material from Bohemia. This
edition was a monumental task, involving work from a multitude of manuscript sources.

Planchart’s consummate skill in mastering and controlling this material in its main aspects –
historical, codicological, palaeographic and musical – brought to light a repertory cultivated
in a culturally significant area, with relatively archiac liturgical traditions. The texts of tropes
sung in other parts of Europe have largely been edited (although not by source, so that the
interest of versions sung in different places has been relegated to second place); the music of
those tropes remains almost entirely unedited. The reasons for that absence (lack of interest
in the making of editions, sheer hard graft, difficulty of access to manuscript sources, lack of
knowledge of musical notations) highlight the especial significance and brilliance of
Planchart’s contribution to the field.
Planchart’s lifelong interest in the towering fifteenth-century composer Guillaume Du Fay
has resulted in a series of about twenty major articles, now crowned and digested in the
publication of his monumental and long-awaited two-volume study Guillaume Du Fay
(Cambridge, 2018). He has gradually revolutionised our knowledge of Du Fay’s career and
biography through painstaking archival research and expert interpretation of genres and
contexts. Archival research does not yield quick results, and is in no sense a mechanical
pursuit. It is his painstaking work, especially in the Archives du Nord in Lille and in the
Vatican library, that has not only uncovered documents by knowing where to look, knowing
alongside which senior clerics and patrons his quarry might be lurking, but the phenomenal
memory and historical expertise that has enabled him to interpret, flesh out, and give context
to bare mentions in records of payments or benefices. And always he cared about the music;
what he had completed of his online performing editions of Du Fay is available on
http://www.diamm.ac.uk under ‘Resources’; his musical commentaries are always fresh and
insightful.
The publication of an 800-page Festschrift in 2015 reflected the respect and affection of
numerous colleagues and former students: Qui musicam in se habet: Studies in Honor of
Alejandro Enrique Planchart, ed. Anna Zayaruznaya, Bonnie J. Blackburn, and Stanley
Boorman (Middleton, Wisconsin : American Institute of Musicology, 2015). It lists his
publications, compositions and recordings. Many of us were able to share the pleasure of
presenting it to him at conferences in 2015.
Among his many honours were the Howard Brown award of Early Music America for
lifetime achievement in Early Music, and Honorary membership of the AMS. Had he lived,
he would have been awarded a British Academy prize this year, both for life-time
achievement, and in recognition of the publication of Guillaume Du Fay.
Throughout, his great generosity in responding to enquiries, in sharing his material with (or
giving it to) colleagues and younger scholars is legendary. He was always generous in his
opinions and encouraging to scholars in whom he recognised some promise. He brought the
widest possible cultural knowledge to bear on everything he touched. He was a great talker
who nevertheless managed to take in as much as he gave out. He had an unusually wide and
well-deserved circle of friends and admirers, colleagues, former students, performers with
whom he had worked. His last years were clouded by health problems which he bore with
determined bravery, making few concessions in his travel plans – he intended to be at the
Med-Ren conference in Basel this summer. Conferences will not be the same without his
vivid presence and wide-ranging questions; he will be sorely missed.

Margaret Bent and Susan Rankin