Edward Toner Cone

4 MAY 1917 * 23 OCTOBER 2OO4 EDWARD T. CONE, composer, pianist, writer, and professor emeritus of the Department of Music at Princeton University, passed away on 23 October 2004 in Princeton, New Jersey, following complications from heart surgery. An internationally renowned figure in musical studies, Cone was born to a prominent North Carolina family in the textile industry and grew up in an environment that valued high culture. His extraordinary childhood included a visit to see Matisse, arranged by his aunt Etta Cone, who, with her sister, Claribel Cone, assembled the famous Cone collection now housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Cone arrived at Princeton as a member of the class of 1939 and then spent the rest of his career there. The Latin salutatorian of his graduating class, he was the first student at Princeton to write a musical composition for his senior thesis. In 1942, already teaching in the Department of Music, Cone became one of the first to receive the degree of master of fine arts in music at Princeton and in 1945 was one of the first recipients of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. After four years of military service in the Middle East as a pianist for the army, leading to an eventual post in the Office of Strategic Services, Cone rejoined the music department faculty in 1946 and reached the rank of full professor in 1960. He was an Old Dominion Fellow in 1964-65, and he served as a Continuing Senior Fellow of the Council of the Humanities from 1969 until his retirement. During his years at Princeton, Cone was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Rochester, the New England Conservatory, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, his hometown. Cone also served as Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 1979 to 1985, and as Ernest Bloch Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley. He retired from Princeton in 1985 and was awarded an honorary degree in 2004. Among Cone's other numerous awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947, two Deems Taylor Awards from ASCAP, and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton. Ed, as he was known to generations of friends, colleagues, and students, flourished in multiple roles: composer, writer, pianist, teacher, editor, advocate. His depth, breadth, and versatility made him hard to classify; he did everything brilliantly. When pushed on this point during an interview in 2003, he simply called himself a musician. As editor and advocate of new music, Ed co-edited with Benjamin Boretz four important collections of essays on twentieth-century music and music theory. He also served as co-editor of the flagship journal of contemporary music, Perspectives of New Music, from 1966 to 1972. As writer, Ed published three major books: Musical Form and Musical Performance (1968), The Composer's Voice (1974), and Music: A View from Delft (1989). Ed's writings are, in every way, seminal. His humane and elegant style sounded a welcome new note during an era that witnessed crosscurrents of intense and often partisan development in music composition and theory. Writing about the role of musical experience, about the ways we as listeners and performers come to understand music as we hear and play it, Ed put music into a larger context that reaches out to specialist and non-specialist alike. Above all, Ed possessed the great gift of making accessible yet nontrivial observations, a sure sign of a surpassing critical intelligence and generous critical spirit. He consistently took on the biggest issues in music aesthetics and theory-meaning, agency, the nature of musical performance, and even the ontology of music-with plain-spoken eloquence. Many of his investigations commence with an artless question that, once asked, begins to percolate in the mind of the reader: "If music is a language then who is speaking?" "Where is the beginning of a piece of music? …