Sylvia Kenney

Sylvia Wisdom Kenney (November 27, 1922 – October 31, 1968) was an American musicologist. She originally performed as a violist and played for the United Service Organizations in World War II. After completing her graduate studies, she worked in music cataloguing and later as a professor at Bryn Mawr College, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Smith College. A 1963 Guggenheim Fellow, her publications included Catalog of the Emilie and Karl Riemenschneider Memorial Bach Library and Walter Frye and the Contenance Angloise (1964). Biography Sylvia Wisdom Kenney was born on November 27, 1922, in Tampa, Florida. Her father Arthur W. Kenney worked as a chemist for DuPont. and her mother Marion Coes spent World War II as a WAVES officer. The family later lived in Wilmington, Delaware. During World War II, she was a violist for the United Service Organizations, appearing in shows throughout East Asia. In 1950, she went to Belgium as a Fulbright Fellow in music, and she studied at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where Charles Van den Borren, Albert Vander Linden, and were her mentors. it was published as Catalog of the Emilie and Karl Riemenschneider Memorial Bach Library (1960). In 1964, her dissertation was republished as a book, Walter Frye and the Contenance Angloise.

In 1957, she began working as an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, and she became associate professor in 1963. becoming an associate professor there.