Cecil Adkins
Cecil D. Adkins
cecil.adkins@verizon.net
Cecil D. Adkins (b. 1932) studied music at the University of Omaha (B.F.A. 1953) and the University of South Dakota (M.M. 1959). He taught music in the Iowa public schools from 1955 until 1960. After his graduation from the University of Iowa (Ph.D., 1963) he was invited to join the faculty of the College of Music at the University of North Texas, where in 1969 he was promoted to Professor of Musicology and in 1985 was named a Regents Professor.
Professor Adkins is well known as a music historian, bibliographer, and organologist. Together with Alis Dickinson he edited for thirty years the important Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology, of which five editions appeared between 1972 and 1997, sponsored by the American Musicological Society and the International Musicological Society. In 1972 these groups established the International Center for Musicological Works in Progress under his direction. His numerous publications include performing editions and translations of operas by Joseph Haydn and his student Ignaz Pleyel, Renaissance madrigal comedies, and many books and articles on musical instruments, among them significant studies of the monochord, the trumpet marine, the positive organ, and the eighteenth-century oboe.
In 1963 he founded a program at the University of North Texas for the performance of early music. Over the years he provided many of his own editions of music for the early music ensembles, and in his own workshop built or restored numerous instruments, many of which are still in use in the university’s program. In 1983 he established Les petits violons, the first period-instrument Baroque orchestra in the Southwest. At the time of his retirement in May of 2000 the early music program was one of the largest in the country, and many of the more than 750 students who learned historical performance practices in this program are still active in the field, including much of the string section of today’s Dallas Bach Society and Fort Worth's Texas Camerata
Dr. Adkins’ numerous professional positions included terms as president of the American Musical Instrument society (1987-91), for which he also served as a member of the Board of Directors and the Editorial Board. In 1992 he received the Frances Densmore Prize from that society for his article “Oboes beyond Compare (1990), and in 1999 he was honored with the Curt Sachs Award for his important contributions to the study, history, and preservation of musical instruments. In 2001 Adkins was granted the first honorary membership in the International Pleyel Gesellshaft for his research and performance of the music of Ignaz Pleyel, and in 2006 he was awarded the Paul Riedo Legacy Award by the Dallas Bach Society.