Tracking My Musical Heritage

Lineages are everywhere around us in our life experiences. No matter what field of study you get into, there is a heritage. Looking into the past gives you a greater appreciation for the “genealogy” of your educational past and may shed new light on where you are today in your profession and the influences it had.

I have a university education in music and have moved through library and genealogy circles since then. From time-to-time I think of my musical “grand-folks” and how what they learned filtered down to me. More specifically, my music composition teacher in graduate school, Jan Bender. He was Dutch-born and moved to Germany at age 13, living there during the World War II era. According to accounts, he studied composition with Karl Straube and Hugo Distler.

When we look at Karl Straube’s musical heritage, who was described as the “eleventh successor to [the great composer] J. S. Bach in the cantorate of St. Thomas School, Leipzig,” you find that he was particularly influenced by the writing of Max Reger.

Hugo Distler, who studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, learned harmony from the teachings of Hermann Grabner. Hermann was a student of Max Regers’, who happened to have studied with Hugo Riemann, who influenced the foundation of modern music theory. Riemann learned music theory from Heinrich Frankenberger who just happened to have studied composition with Thomaskanto Moritz Hauptmann in Leipzig.

For this very general quick search in the information cited above, I used Wikipedia. But to get more in depth, one could investigate biographical books about a particular trade and its people. For music, there may be specific biographies written expressly about some of the more notable musicians. Among other sources, there is the Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, You can find the 7th edition at the Midwest Genealogy Center. Using Google Books, you can search by name (with quotes around it) to find a listing of books about that contain references to the person you’re researching.

The same concept could be used with my organ instructors. I might find biographical articles or obituary information in periodicals, such as American Organist from the American Guild of Organists, the Diapason (another organ journal), Choral Journal from the American Guild of Choral Directors, or the Hymn or the Stanza from the Hymn Society of America. Pick whatever journals you know in YOUR field of expertise to conduct research. For further discussion, please join us at Coffee and Conversations: Lineage without Bloodlines on October 2, 2026 from 10:30am – 11:30am at the Midwest Genealogy Center.

Twila R
Midwest Genealogy Center