It is with great sadness that we report that Nicholas Temperley passed away on 8 April 2020. 

Following studies at Cambridge, Nicholas taught there and at Yale, before moving to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1967.  He was an authority on church music (The Music of the English Parish Church, the online Hymn Tune Index) and published on a wide range of 18th- and 19th-century topics, including the standard edition of the Symphonie fantastique.  He was an advocate of late Georgian and Victorian music at a time when this was a decidedly unfashionable research field: how far he changed this perception is reflected in the 2012 Festschrift entitled Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (edited by Bennett Zon).

In addition to numerous books and essays, Nicholas produced several editions designed to encourage performance of neglected British repertoires, including volumes of psalmody and songs in Musica Britannica and the monumental London Pianoforte School 1766-1860.  It is fitting that an edited volume on the Loder family should have been followed in 2018 by the first recording of Edward Loder’s opera Raymond and Agnes, a work he had rediscovered over fifty years earlier.  Nicholas became a member of the RMA in 1955, and has long been regarded by his many students and colleagues in the UK and the USA as a founding figure of 19th-century British music research. In 2004 he was elected first President of the North American British Music Studies Association.

A fuller tribute by Christina Bashford can be read at https://music.illinois.edu/news/remembering-nicholas-temperley .