Zdravko Blažeković
Research Center for Music Iconography, CUNY Graduate Center, director
Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography, founder and editor
ICTM Study Group on Iconography of the Performing Arts, chair

Zdravko Blažeković graduated (1980) and received his master’s degree (1983) at the Musicology Department of the Zagreb Academy of Music. In 1997, he earned his Ph.D. degree at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with a dissertation on music symbolism in medieval astrological iconography, particularly in the early-thirteenth-century celestial atlas produced by Georgius Zothorus Zaparus Fendulus on the basis of Hermann of Dalmatia’s Latin translation of the treatise Introductorium maius in astronomiam by Abū Ma’šar. Following his graduation in Zagreb, he was an assistant at the Institute of Musicology of the Academy of Music (1980), research assistant at the Institute for Musicological Research of the Yugoslav (now Croatian) Academy of Sciences and Arts (1980–81 and 1984–87), and the editor at the Music Information Center KDZ (1983). Between 1978 and 1987, he worked on the cataloguing of archival collections held at the Hrvatski Glazbeni Zavod and music libraries in Franciscan monasteries throughout Croatia, as well as on cataloguing of Croatian music manuscripts for the RISM project. Between 1979 and 1983 he collaborated with Alexander Weinmann (Vienna), cataloguing early Viennese music editions kept in Croatian collections.

Since 1987, he has lived in New York City, working in different capacities at the international office of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), serving since the summer of 1996 as its Executive Editor and since 2015 he is also member of its Board of Directors. Under his leadership, RILMs global coverage of music scholarship has greatly expanded. The bibliographic database currently includes about one million bibliographic records concerning scholarship on any type of music, coming from some 150 countries, and published in about 170 languages.

He is also director of the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (since 1989). In 1998 he founded the journal Music in Art, dedicated to the research of the relationship between music and visual arts. The journal is published annually in print, and it is also available on the JSTOR and EBSCOhost platforms.

He served as a member of the Editorial Board for the second printed edition of the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Bärenreiter & Metzler), responsible for entries about music in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia; and as a member of the Commission Mixte International of the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM; 2004–2012). He is chair of the ICTM Study Group for the Iconography of the Performing Arts (since 2009), and with it organized conferences in Beijing (2012), Torino (2014), Venice (2016), and Xi’an (2016).

He is also the ICTM representative on the advisory board of the Grove Music Online (since 2010). In 2017 he has been elected to the Council of the Academic Program of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smol’ny) of the Sankt-Petersburg State University. He has been a member of the editorial boards of Muzikologija (since 2017), Studia ethnologica Croatica (since 2013), Studia musicologica: An international journal of musicology (2007–2010), De musica disserenda (since 2006), Le Paon d’Héra = Hera’s Peacock (2006–2012), and Arti musices: Hrvatski muzikološki zbornik (since 1996). In 2017 he has founded the monograph series Music and Visual cultures, published by Brepols Publishers.

In the center of his scholarly interest is Central European music history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, representations of music in the visual arts, organology, history of European ideas, and the reception of Greek and Roman music in the 18th century. Among his published works are biographical studies on Ivan Zajc, Nikola Strmić, Аuro (György) Arnold, Franz von Suppé, Franjo Ks. Kuhač, Giuseppe Michele Stratico and Leopold Alexander Zellner, studies on musical life in Zadar, Zagreb, and Slavonia, Croatian music historiography, social dances of the nineteenth century, the history of musical instruments (particularly the harp, the organ, and approaches to Greek and Roman organology by Charles Burney and Jean-Benjamin de La Borde), and the musical contacts between Europe and China before the early 19th century.

In 2018 he has received a Festschrift: Music Cultures in Sounds, Words and Images: Essays in Honor of Zdravko Blažeković, ed. by Antonio Baldassarre and Tatjana Marković (Wien: Hollitzer Verlag, 2018), 810 p. The monograph Hrvatska glazbena historiografija u 19. stoljeću, jointly written with Sanja Majer-Bobetko and Gorana Doliner, was awarded by the Croatian Musicological Society the annual Josip Andreis award for 2010. The volume Speaking of music: Music conferences, 1835–1966, edited with Barry S. Brook and James R. Cowdery, received the 2006 Vincent H. Duckles Award of the Music Library Association for the best book-length research tool in music. In 2002, he was awarded by the President of Croatia the Order of the Zvijezda Danica for his contribution to Croatian culture.
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