Neal Zaslaw is an American musicologist.

Born in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, Zaslaw graduated from Harvard in 1961 with a BA and obtained his master's from Juilliard in 1963. He played flute in the American Symphony Orchestra

American Symphony Orchestra

The American Symphony Orchestra is a New York-based American orchestra founded in 1962 by Leopold Stokowski, then aged 80. Following Maestro Stokowski's departure, Kazuyoshi Akiyama was appointed Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra from 1973-1978. Music Directors during the early...

 under Leopold Stokowski

Leopold Stokowski

Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...

 from 1962 to 1965. In 1970 he received his Ph.D from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

; he also taught at CUNY, 1968-70. From 1970 he taught at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

.

Zaslaw's early work dealt with performance practice, especially tempo and ornamentation with respect to French and Italian styles. Zaslaw has done extended work on the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

, including a landmark 1989 work on his symphonies. In 1993, he was named the principal editor of the revised Köchel catalogue.

Further reading

• Zaslaw, Neal (1994) "Mozart as a working stiff," in James M. Morris, ed., On Mozart, Cambridge University Press. An influential assertion of the practicality of Mozart's motivations in composition, attacking older conceptions as romanticized and unrealistic. Available on line from the "Apropos Mozart" Web site.

Books

• Materials for the Life and Works of Jean-Marie Leclair L’ainé (dissertation, Columbia U., 1970)
• with M. Vinquist: Performance Practice: a Bibliography (New York, 1971)
• (ed.) Man & Music:/Music in Society: The Classical Era (London, 1989)
• Mozart’s Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford, 1989)
• The Compleat Mozart: a Guide to the Musical Works (New York, 1990)
• (ed. with F.M. Fein) The Mozart Repertory: a Guide for Musicians, Programmers, and Researchers (Ithaca, NY, 1991)
• (ed.) Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation (Ann Arbor, 1996)