“Omit needless words.” Almost every American writer has come across the maxims of The Elements of Style, first written by Cornell English professor William Strunk Jr. in 1919 and in 1959 expanded by E.B. White, the author of the beloved children’s classic Charlotte’s Web. Advocating for succinct, precise prose, Strunk & White’s “little book” has guided prose writers for generations — at least, the pre-ChatGPT ones.
Less known is the legacy of William Strunk Jr.’s son, Oliver Strunk, a wayward genius who at Princeton helped found the field of American musicology. Born in 1901, Oliver entered Cornell at age 16 but dropped out to pursue music independently, supporting himself by playing the piano for silent movies. Gaunt, tall, and precise in his thinking and words, Strunk had a “Sherlock Holmes quality to his person and his mind,” according to Kenneth Levy *55, his eventual protégé in musicology. In Strunk’s youth, Levy added, there were “stories of T.E. Lawrence-esque motorcyclings and of an impetuous early marriage that was soon annulled.”
Strunk returned to Cornell in 1925, where he was introduced to musicology by Otto Kinkeldey, a German-educated American scholar. Strunk was then inspired to spend a year in Berlin, embedded in the lively music scene of the Weimar Republic.
Upon his return to the United States, Strunk struggled to find his place in a country that didn’t yet care much for the study of music. In 1928, he took a job in the music division of the Library of Congress, and despite his relative youth, he was elevated to division head in 1934.
In the 1930s, apart from chapel services, music was rarely taught at Princeton, but that all changed with President Harold Dodds *1914, who began hiring music experts to establish a music department. Since Strunk was one of the only musicologists in the U.S., Dodds hired him in 1937 as an assistant professor, where he received mixed reviews as an instructor. “He lacked the flair for lecturing to undergraduates, and his rare offerings for the general student tended to produce respect mingled with yawns,” Levy wrote. Though Strunk bored his undergrads, he dazzled his graduate students, whom he treated as equals.
Though Strunk’s expertise was broad, his most important contribution was to the study of the music of the Byzantine Empire, the successor of the Roman Empire that once ruled over Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. In 1937, shortly after Strunk’s arrival at Princeton, he received exciting news — Princeton had acquired a set of photographs of a Byzantine choir book from Mount Athos, an all-male monastic community in Northern Greece. The musical notation was rendered in a completely different format than the familiar Western staff-and-note structure: To outside interpretation, Byzantine notation consisted of cryptic calligraphy-like dashes hovering above Greek text. At that point, Strunk had no knowledge of Greek. “Although it meant taking on a task for which I was almost totally unprepared,” Strunk wrote in 1976, he “rashly accepted.”
However, with World War II preventing fieldwork in Europe, Strunk was unable to compare the book with other Byzantine musical texts, crucial to his study. “Of the hundreds of extant manuscripts with which our photographs might have been compared, not one was held in the United States,” Strunk explained. “That was all, and, as I reluctantly concluded, it was not enough.” Strunk set aside the project until the 1950s, when he was finally able to view the texts in person. From 1950 to 1958, he traveled across Italy, Greece, and Egypt with support from Princeton and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ultimately, Strunk’s contributions to Byzantine musicology served as a foundation for a new discipline.
Strunk’s major writings were collected in Essays on the Music in the Byzantine World (1974), a finalist for the National Book Award. As an original member of the American Musicological Society and the first editor of its journal, Strunk was a founder of the field of musicology in the U.S. And despite his influence on the subject, Strunk didn’t actually publish very many articles — in that way, he followed his father’s literary advice by “omitting needless words.”
