Alexander L. Ringer
»... representing a generation of victims persecuted by the Nazi regime, a fate that led him to his life’s keynote themes of ‘Germany, Judaism and music’. He is thus a particularly authentic symbol for the significance and importance of reflection through music, besides his undisputed stature in the field of musicological interpretation.«
The musicological historian Alexander L. Ringer was born in Berlin in 1921, the son of Dutch Jews. Despite emigrating to Amsterdam at the age of 17, he did not escape the Nazi terror, and was deported in 1943. He survived a concentration camp and from 1946 onwards devoted himself to studying music and sociology. From 1958 to 1991, Ringer taught at the University of Illinois, where in 1963 he was appointed Head of the Musicological Department. In the same year, he assisted in establishing the Musicological Faculty at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he headed as its Director in the years 1966/67. Alexander L. Ringer died in May 2002 at the age of 81 in Lansing, Michigan.