Ralph Locke received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and the master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. He joined the Eastman faculty in 1975 and taught here until his retirement in 2015. In addition to his Eastman appointment, he was a faculty associate of the University of Rochester’s Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies.
He was a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Musicological Research; Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music; Nineteenth-Century Music Review; and Journal of Music History Pedagogy; senior editor, Eastman Studies in Music; and music editor, Encyclopedia of New York State. He has written music criticism, musicological articles, and reviews on American musical life and on Berlioz, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Schumann, Loeffler, Copland, Virgil Thomson, Bernstein, and other composers.
His many other publications include entries in New Grove Dictionary of Music, Encyclopedia of New England Culture, American National Biography, The American Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dictionnaire de la musique en France au xixe siècle, and Dictionnaire Berlioz.
He has received numerous fellowships and prizes, including the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award five times (1992, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2007), and the American Musicological Society’s H. Colin Slim and Ruth Solie Awards. His book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (2009) was a finalist for the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award. Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge University Press, 2015) won an Honorable Mention in the 2016 PROSE Awards presented by the American Publishers Association. Ralph Locke has also written Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (University of Chicago Press, 1986) and was a contributing co-editor with Cyrilla Barr to Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (University of California Press, 1997).