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, the International Society for the Investigation
and Promotion of Wind Music, 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 Index and is
now available on CD-Rom in an enlarged and revised data base entitled
Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources 1589-1839.
His latest work was an anthology of wind and percussion music published
as volume 12 in G. K. Hall’s series Three Centuries of American
Music.
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