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Barbara Haggh-Huglo Named Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Barbara Haggh-Huglo, professor of musicology in the University of Maryland School of Music, was elected an honorary member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the largest musicological organization in the world. Honorary members are those scholars “who have made outstanding contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the Society wishes to honor.” The award is the highest honor of the AMS, reserved for the most esteemed of scholars.
 
Haggh-Huglo, who specializes in medieval and Renaissance music, has conducted extensive research in libraries and archives across Europe and the British Isles, as well as in the United States and Mexico, and has published widely on the music and musicians of northwest Europe from 800–1600. The AMS called Haggh-Huglo “a committed pedagogue.”
 
The “author of over 100 articles and chapters, Dr. Haggh-Huglo is a reservoir of knowledge on medieval and Renaissance music whose expertise has made for a significant international presence and enduring impact at her institution,” the AMS statement said.
 
Haggh-Huglo became immersed in the history of medieval music thanks in large part to her multilingual upbringing; by the time she was 20, she read English, French and German and had taken lessons in Dutch. During her doctoral research at the University of Illinois, she took several research trips to Europe and began working with early archives.
 
In Lille, France, Haggh-Huglo found documents to prove that Guillaume Du Fay, considered by many the greatest composer of the 15th century, composed a day’s worth of plainchant, or music with a single melodic line.
 
“No one had known about it and still, to this day, it is an exception in the history of music because we don’t know of any well-known composer of choral music who also composed chant,” Haggh-Huglo said.
 
She went on to write the first histories of music in the cities of late medieval Brussels and Ghent in her dissertation and articles, and later became known for her editions and studies of pre-modern plainchant offices, which were sung from one evening to the next in churches and told the lives of patron saints. During her research on offices, she rediscovered a lost 15th-century office used by the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece.
 
Haggh-Huglo has also published articles on topics ranging from Old Hispanic and Irish chant to German radio dramas of the 1950s and 1960s.
 
She has been at the University of Maryland since 2000, where she has taught courses on early music, notation and theory, research methods, and the survey of music history. She will teach a course on music, art and architecture from Vitruvius to the present for the first time in Spring 2022.
 
Her forthcoming three-volume book is “Recollecting the Virgin Mary with Music: Guillaume Du Fay's Chant across Five Centuries.” She will lecture about the book to the Belgian Academy of Sciences next spring.
 
“This was very unexpected and I am deeply honored,” Haggh-Huglo said about the award. “I have dedicated my life to this scholarship and this puts me in the company of a very elite group of people in the field. I hope this distinction will help me to continue and encourage others to pursue this research.”

Date of Publication: 
Thursday, December 16, 2021