In Tuesday’s (3/22) New York Times, Sam Roberts writes, “Charles Kaufman, who led a faculty coup that spared the century-old Mannes College of Music in Manhattan from a troublesome merger in 1979 and then restored it to fiscal soundness, died on Thursday at his home in Hillside, N.J. He was 87. The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, his son Jason said.” During his sixteen years as Mannes’s leader, Kaufman “transplanted the school from four cramped brownstones on East 73rd Street to a building on West 85th Street that included concert halls, a library and a dormitory; transformed it into an independent division of the New School; expanded the faculty; and created early-music preparatory and graduate programs and the Mannes Camerata, dedicated to performing medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music.” A native New Yorker, he received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University, earned master’s and doctoral degrees in musicology at New York University, and joined the Mannes faculty in 1974 as a teacher of music history and theory. He retired as the school’s dean in 1996. Kaufman’s survivors include his wife, four sons, and four grandchildren.
Posted March 23, 2016
