Claude Victor Palisca (24 November 1921 – 11 January 2001) was an American musicologist.[1] An internationally recognized authority on early music, especially opera of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, he was the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University. Palisca is best known for co-writing (with Donald Jay Grout) the standard textbook A History of Western Music (3rd–6th editions, 1980–2001), as well as for his substantial body of work on the history of music theory in the Renaissance, reflected in his editorship of the Yale Music Theory in Translation series and in the book Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (1985). In particular, he was the leading expert on the Florentine Camerata. His 1968 book Baroque Music in the Prentice Hallhistory of music series ran to three editions.
His musicological writings included numerous publications in the academic musical press and a number of books, some co-authored with Donald Jay Grout and others. He edited The Norton Anthology of Western Music: Ancient to Baroque.[1] In 1994, Clarendon Press republished a series of his most-cited papers, stating:
Claude V. Palisca has long been acknowledged as a leading authority on Italian music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These nineteen essays, originally published between 1956 and 1989, draw together a body of significant research into Italian music and music theory, and make readily available papers widely scattered and most now out-of-print. They have further been selected because of their relevance to current research, as evidenced by their continued citation in publications and dissertations.[3]