music history
Professor of Music History. Professor Tirro served as dean of the Yale School of Music from 1970 to 1980, having previously served as chairman of the department of music at Duke University. An accomplished clarinetist and saxophonist, he has performed chamber music with distinguished Yale colleagues Sidney Harth, Erick Friedman, Syoko Aki, Jesse Levine, Aldo Parisot, Elizabeth Parisot, and Joan Panetti, among others, and has played occasional concerts with jazz artists including Willie Ruff, Dwike Mitchell, Clark Terry, Donn Trenner, and Mary Lou Williams.
Among his published compositions, the American Jazz Mass and American Jazz Te Deum are the most frequently performed. His Sonata for Clarinet and Piano was granted a National Federation of Music Clubs award, and his ballet, Masque of the Red Death, won the Ida M. Vreeland Prize in composition. Over the years, he has received several A.S.C.A.P. Standard Composer Awards. Professor Tirro is a specialist in both Renaissance music and the history of jazz and is the author of Jazz: A History (W. W. Norton), Renaissance Musical Sources in the Archive of San Petronio in Bologna (Haenssler-Verlag), and Living with Jazz (Harcourt Brace). He co-authored The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities (Houghton Mifflin) and edited a volume of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Duke University Press). He served as associate editor for American National Biography, primarily responsible for jazz, ragtime, and related areas.
His most recent book, The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates (2008), is published by the College Music Society and Pendragon Press. Frank Tirro has been a Fellow of Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska, a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.