Leo Treitler

Leo Treitler (b. Jan. 26, 1931) is an American musicologist born in Dortmund, Germany, and is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Treitler studied at the University of Chicago under Grosvenor Cooper, achieving the BA in 1950 and the MA in 1957. He received an MFA from Princeton University in 1960 and a Ph.D. in 1967; there he studied under Oliver Strunk, Arthur Mendel, and Roger Sessions. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Chicago, and following this at Brandeis University and SUNY Stony Brook.

Treitler's major work is in Medieval and Renaissance music, particularly in Gregorian chant and the earliest polyphony. He also published a series of essays exploring historiography in music history, which were collected, with other works on music history and theory, in Music and the Historical Imagination. He revised Oliver Strunk's Source Readings in Music History in 1998.