Related collectionErnst Bacon papers (ARCHIVES BACON 1); John Edmunds letters : to Cornel Adam Lengyel (ARCHIVES EDMUNDS-LENGYEL 1)

Edmunds [St. Edmunds], John (b San Francisco, CA, 10 June 1913). Composer. He was educated at the University of California, at the Curtis Institute under Scalero, at Columbia University, and at Harvard (MA 1941); subsequently he studied privately in England with Arnold Goldsbrough and Thurston Dart. Among his awards are Joseph H. Bearns Prize (1937), a Fulbright scholarship (1951), a grant form the Italian government (1954-6), a Folger Shakespeare Library grant (1967), a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (1968), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969). He taught briefly at Syracuse University and at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1957 to 1961 he was in charge of the Americana collection in the New York Public Library. From 1968 to 1976 he worked in England, returning to San Francisco in 1977. He has concentrated on arranging and transcribing English song and poetry of the 17th century. The Major Epoch of English Song (1940-76) is an unpublished collection in 12 volumes of over 300 song arrangements for voice and piano, realized from the lute tablatures and figured basses, which seeks "to reassert the greatness of English song in that one great century -not as a mass of musicological data but as living music."

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