ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of the proposal and editor of its Web site, Dr. Thomas F. Heck, is an independent scholar, consultant, and musician currently living in California. An internationalist at heart, having traveled widely, he aspires some day to be a World Citizen — to enjoy the same status that the HLP proposal might confer on the residents of present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories. He was raised in an academic and diplomatic family, his father having served in the U.S. Embassy in France.  He is fluent in several languages. After his formal education (B.A., University of Notre Dame; Ph.D., Yale University), Heck had a career in academia, both as a musicologist and as an academic librarian.

He has twice been a Fulbright scholar: first in Vienna (1968-69), to work in the area of classic & early romantic music and the history of the guitar; then in Florence (1985-86), to explore Italian improvised theatre traditions. He has contributed a number articles to the major music encyclopedias (MGG, and especially The New Grove Dictionaries of Music).  He was also a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in 1994-95, where he undertook interdisciplinary arts-related research. Click here to reach him by e-mail.