Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 14 Number 2, August 2013

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Anthony (Tony) J. Palmer, 81, retired music professor at Boston University and University of Hawaii died suddenly on Feb. 1, 2013, while vacationing in the Bahamas. He had a long and fruitful career as a teacher, composer, arranger, critic and editor for over fifty years.  Born in Youngstown, Ohio to Frank and Mary Palmer (originally Palmieri) Tony was surrounded by a multi-generational Italian family, whose renditions of Torna a Surriento he could still evoke from his childhood days.  After World War II the family moved to southern California where Tony received his B.A.. in voice in 1958 and his M.A. in music education and composition in 1960 from California State University. In 1975 his Ph.D. in music education and ethnomusicology from UCLA was awarded with distinction. He spent 20 years in California first as a high school choral director and later as director of choral activities, choral conducting and theory at Los Angeles Valley College. It is a great tribute to him as a teacher and humanist that students from this period of his life recontacted him through Facebook to express their gratitude for his nurturing of their intellects and spirits fifty years earlier. 

 

While associate professor of music at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tony was awarded a grant by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission to study traditional Japanese court music. He took a ten month leave to travel throughout Japan.  It is during this time that his interest in world musics as they bear on aesthetics and music education started to color his many professional publications. For the next eleven years he taught undergraduate and graduate courses and guided dissertations at both UCLA and the University of Hawaii, Manoa. It is after retirement that Tony’s career took off in unexpected ways though still anchored to music education. After moving to Boston in the summer of 1999 he was in the right spot to shore up a floundering  Department of Music Education at Boston University, who hired him on the spot. He was also the director of the Waltham Philharmonic orchestra for two years.

 

The culmination of his career many would say lies in being the director of the Tanglewood II Symposium in 2007. “It was his biggest dream; he had a sense of urgency for music education to have this kind of event,” said his colleague, Dr. Andre De Quadros. The second Tanglewood symposium furthered the research of the first held in 1967. It brought together 32 music educators and scholars to cultivate a new understanding of music learning in light of 21^st century challenges and discoveries. Just a month before his death Tony was rewarded with the publication of the book he and Andre edited, Tanglewood II: Summoning the Future of Music Education. Those who knew him experienced his generosity, self-sacrifice and warm human compassion. He is survived by his wife, Linda Palmer of Hudson, MA, son David Palmer of Oklahoma City and daughter Carolyn Palmer of Colorado Spring from his first marriage, four grandchildren and one great-grandson.

 

Anthony J Palmer was member of the editorial board of Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, and contributed to the journal

 

Articles

Consciousness and Varying Musical Systems (5:1, April 2004)

 

Unconscious Apprehension of Metapatterns Expressed

 

Consciously Through Musical Form (10:1, April 2009)

 

Poetry

Thoughts About You (3:3, December 2002)

 

Book Reviews

Graham, Gordon. Philosophy of The Arts (3:1, April 2002)

 

Hargreaves, David J. and Adrian C. North, Eds. The Social Psychology of Music   (4:2, July 2003)