Joan Peyser

Joan Peyser (June 12, 1930 – April 24, 2011) was an American musicologist and writer, particularly known for her writing on 20th-century music and for her biographies of George Gershwin, Pierre Boulez, and Leonard Bernstein. Her biography of Bernstein was, according to Leon Botstein, the first attempt at a critical account of his life and work.

Biography

Born Joan Gilbert in New York City, Peyser began studying piano when she was 5 and gave her first recital at the age of 13 in New York's Town Hall. When she enrolled at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, she continued to study piano and took up the viola as well. After graduating from high school, she attended Smith College from 1947 to 1949 and then went to Barnard College where she majored in music and received her BA in 1951. She earned her MA in musicology in 1956 from Columbia University studying under Paul Henry Lang. She was one of the winners of ASCAP's first annual Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing with her 1966 article on the American composer Marc Blitzstein ("The Troubled Times of Marc Blitzstein" published in the Columbia University Forum).