Cliff Eisen

• 1. A Question of Attribution

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  Cliff Eisen has spent decades probing a deceptively simple question. How do we know a piece of music is genuinely by the composer whose name it bears? Born on the 21st of January 1952 in Toronto, he trained at the University of Toronto and then at Cornell University. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and at New York University, and eventually settled in the Department of Music at King's College London. His specialty is the Classical period, and Mozart sits at the center of it. Two Mozarts, to be precise: Leopold and Wolfgang, whose overlapping legacies have generated questions that Eisen has spent a career investigating. As his career would show, the questions defining a scholar's working life can coexist with events of a very different kind.

• 2. Leopold and Wolfgang

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  Leopold Mozart occupies an unusual position in music history: famous enough to be known by name, but perpetually overshadowed by his son. Eisen has written extensively on the authenticity issues surrounding the works of both men, asking where one composer's catalog ends and the other's begins. These are not abstract debates. Attribution shapes what gets performed, what gets credited in concert programs and recordings, and how we understand the development of a musical tradition.

  Eisen's work on performance practice asks how Classical-era musicians actually interpreted the music of their time. This field fills in the distance between written notation and the sound composers' contemporaries would have produced in live performance.

  Mozart's chamber music, life in Salzburg, biography, and contemporary documentation all fall within Eisen's published work. Sources produced during a composer's own lifetime carry different weight than accounts assembled later from memory or secondary record. Cole Porter also appears in Eisen's bibliography, an American songwriter whose presence there marks a scholarly range not limited to any single archive or century.

  In 1997, events at New York University would bring his time at that institution to an abrupt end.

• 3. New York, 1997

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  In 1997, New York University ended Cliff Eisen's employment. A student had filed a lawsuit against the university alleging sexual harassment, and the institution's response was termination.

  Four other students had filed complaints before that lawsuit arrived. The university had formally reprimanded Eisen in response to those complaints, creating an institutional record that predated the 1997 suit. Questions of institutional accountability in academia rarely resolve with a single employment decision. The pattern documented in Eisen's case was not unique to New York University in the 1990s.