Laurence Dreyfus

Laurence Dreyfus, FBA (born 1952) is an award-winning musicologist and player of the viola da gamba who was University Lecturer and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Cherry Hill High School West in New Jersey. He earned a B.A. at Yeshiva University, studied cello under Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School, and earned his Ph.D. in Musicology at Columbia University, where he studied with the distinguished Bach scholar Christoph Wolff. Commuting from New York, he studied viola da gamba with Wieland Kuijken, earning two diplomas from the Brussels Conservatoire, including its Diplome supérieur with Highest Distinction.

After teaching at Yale University, Stanford University, and The University of Chicago, he moved in 1995 to London to become Thurston Dart Professor of Performance Studies at King's College London and hold a Chair at the Royal Academy of Music (which that year elected him as an honorary member). In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy for his musicological work.

Dreyfus is a noted scholar of both J. S. Bach and Richard Wagner. He has published three books with Harvard University Press: Bach's Continuo Group (1986), Bach and the Patterns of Invention (1996) (which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award for best book of the year from the American Musicological Society) and Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (2010).

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