Raoul Camus

Raoul Camus is professor emeritus of music at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York and director emeritus of the Queens Symphonic Band, a community organization. He earned his Ph.D. in music administration from New York University, and spent a number of years teaching instrumental music in secondary schools. Prior to teaching, he managed a major music-publishing firm, and performed professionally on the french horn. For many years he was director of New York’s famed 42d (Rainbow) Division Band, and is a retired army reserve bandmaster.

A past president of the Sonneck Society for American Music, he is active in many band organizations, including the College Band Directors National Association, the Association of Concert Bands, the International Military Music Society, the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles, and Windjammers Unlimited. He was elected an honorary member of the American Bandmasters Association (ABA), the International Society for the Investigation and Promotion of Wind Music (IGEB), the Company of Fifers and Drummers, and the Academy of Wind and Percussion Arts, the highest award of the National Band Association. In 2006, he received the Association of Concert Band’s Herbert L. & Jean Schultz Mentor Ideal Award. As a musicologist specializing in American music, he is a member of the American Musicological Society and contributed, along with forty-five brief entries, major articles on bands and military music for The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and fourteen entries on North American bands and composers for the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He is the author of Military Music of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1976, reprinted Westerville, 1993), Military Music in the United States Army Prior to 1834 (Ann Arbor, 1969), and articles on bands and their repertoire in journals, encyclopedias, and the Alta Musica series. His computer-generated microfiche index of “Early American Wind and Ceremonial Music 1636-1836” was published in 1989 as phase two of The National Tune Index and is now available online in an enlarged and revised data base entitled Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources 1589-1839. In 1992 he prepared an anthology of wind and percussion music published as volume 12 in G. K. Hall’s series Three Centuries of American Music. His latest work was as contributing editor for band music for the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music.