Anthony Pople

Anthony John Leonard Pople (18 January 1955 – 10 October 2003) was a British musicologist and writer. He is known for his technological approach to musicology and music analysis. During his career, Pople held professorships at Lancaster University, University of Southampton and University of Sheffield. He also served as the editor of Music Analysis for five years.

Early life and education

Pople was born on 18 January 1955 in Croydon, Surrey. He attended Dulwich College before studying mathematics at St John's College, Oxford, through an open scholarship. Pople then decided to pursue a doctorate in music at the University of Oxford. His research, supervised by Arnold Whittall, culminated in his 1985 thesis: Skryabin and Stravinsky 1908–1914: Studies in Analytical Method (republished in 1989 as Skryabin and Stravinsky 1908-1914: Studies in Theory and Analysis).

Career

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Pople completed much of his work with computer programs while at Lancaster University

Pople's specialist area of musicology was the classical music of the early twentieth century, specifically the Second Viennese School and pre-World War I Russian classical music. He also published on the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Michael Tippett and Olivier Messiaen.

Pople held various professorships in England, at Lancaster University (lecturer 1983–95, professor 1995–97), University of Southampton (1997–99), University of Nottingham (1999–2003) and University of Sheffield. During his time at Lancaster, he worked with Alan Marsden to implement computer-based music analysis. This led to Pople to develop two computer programs for this purpose in 1994: RowBrowser and SetBrowser. These programs used spreadsheets to input musical notation, which was then analysed by a computer. Pople also created the "Tonalities" project, which is a software package for music analysis.

Aside from teaching positions, Pople was director of the Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Music, Lancaster, from 1989 to 1997. He served as the editor of Music Analysis for five years, from 1995.

Pople was also a proficient violin player. According to Jonathan Dunsby, Pople was not only an important musicologist, but also "a most gifted composer and performer of music".

Personal life

Pople married Angela Horrocks in 1988 and they had two daughters. He died from cancer on 10 October 2003 in Nottingham.