Eleanor Selfridge-Field passed away on February 2, 2026, at the age of 85, from complications following an infection.

Eleanor was born in New Orleans in 1940, the only child of James and Dorothy Selfridge. The family moved occasionally, following James’s construction engineering work, and eventually settled in Oaklyn, New Jersey. She developed an early interest in music and had a considerable talent for the piano. But her father died when she was 14, and her mother three years later, both of sarcoma.

Eleanor studied at Drew University, supporting herself by summer work as a waitress, office work in and outside university, and dorm counseling, while continuing her piano training. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on Schönberg, and graduated Magna Cum Laude. Changing direction, she attended Columbia University to receive a master’s degree in 1963, in journalism. This involved a considerable amount of hands-on investigative and on-site reporting and had a large influence on her approach to the world, and her views on its affairs. She worked for a while for a music publisher, including editing music textbooks.

In 1965, her deep interest in music brought her to Linacre College, Oxford University, to work on a doctorate in musicology, mentored by Fred Sternfeld. After several summers spent searching through State Archives and libraries in Venice, she completed her dissertation on Venetian instrumental music as it flowered in the early baroque. Her Oxford D.Phil. was conferred in 1969.

Returning to the U.S.A., she taught at the University of Pittsburgh for a year, before another research trip to Italy. This time she flew back to the milder climate of Berkeley, California, and married Clive, whom she had met as a fellow graduate student at Linacre College. Her musicology work continued unabated.

Her son Brent, to whom she was devoted, was born in 1971, in Berkeley. Soon after, the family moved to a larger residence in Oakland. Then, following Clive’s joining the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University, they settled in Sunnyvale, at the south end of the San Francisco Bay.

Eleanor taught for several terms in the music department at Mills College. This involved some serious commuting in their little Austin car. Additionally, Eleanor was able to combine her journalism and musicology career paths while she prepared the programming and text for a weekly National Public Radio broadcast of “Music of the Italian Masters”, sponsored by the Frank V. De Bellis collection of San Francisco State University. She often recalled the disconcerting experience of being in their tall building, near a major fault line, the structure swaying back and forth for some time following an earthquake. She made some life-long friends while there.

Eleanor, with Clive, had used computers in analysis of her musicological findings since 1967 Oxford days – with punched cards. Living in the core of Silicon Valley as mini-computers and then personal computers came into reality, Eleanor, early on, took up the challenge of developing her coding skills. She took courses at De Anza Community College, while COBOL was still core curriculum, just before their punch card programming went out of fashion. It was good training.

In 1984, a good musicology friend introduced her to Walter Hewlett, a Stanford Doctor of Musical Arts, who happened to need a flexible and experienced classical musicologist with computer experience to help with the small organization he was starting, the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, CCARH. Eleanor fitted in and found the “start-up” environment very rewarding, and the staff, and continuing stream of short- and long-term- visitors, to be very stimulating and productive for the work and scholarship. Under Walter’s leadership, a system was built, first on a minicomputer, then on PCs, to produce alphanumeric data representing the full scores of an ever-increasing number of classical works. They were based on out-of-copyright, sometimes manuscript, and sometimes custom-made, editions of the works they found by searching. The data were used to produce scores printed at the highest quality, but also to be queried and studied in detail and in unprecedented quantity, by musicologists using PCs. The scores have been used for numerous performances.

The copyright issue led to another of Eleanor’s areas of work: she contributed to the field of music copyright and the understanding of music similarity, working with several legal scholars and organizations over the years.

With strong encouragement from Prof. Max Mathews, CCARH moved to the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, CCRMA, and Music Department in 1994, and began teaching the general field of computational techniques in musicology, and related topics, to graduates and qualified undergraduates. The students, many from the Computer Science department, were usually industrious, free thinking, and stimulating to teach, although it was often hard work. CCARH remains in the Music Department, and 2026 is the first year in which the class was not taught. The Center was formally brought under the support of the Packard Humanities Institute in recent years, broadening its focus and encouraging it to continue to flourish.

Eleanor was grateful for her fortune to have the support and fellowship of CCARH and PHI, and for the opportunity to interact with her friends and co-scholars at Stanford in several departments.

In addition to this work, she continued her studies based on her findings from European archives and libraries. She published several books and numerous articles, covering not only the music, but the societal background of the times. She discovered an ancient small book that turned out to be one volume of a journal of events in Venice, and, after searching for some time, she was able to obtain a fairly complete set of the series – “Pallade Veneta”. Her study of these, especially of the musical events, their sponsorship, and political and societal implications, reported therein, led to one of her books. Another was a thematic index of the music composed by the Venetian noblemen, Benedetto and Alessandro Marcello. Her book “Song and Season” discussed the role of the calendar and time of day – before standardization and the wide availability of accurate clocks – on social norms and musical life in Europe. She edited and contributed to “Beyond Midi”, an influential work by many of the originators of, and experts on, extending technology for fuller representation and higher resolution in the digitization of music. Her book “Venetian Instrumental music from Gabrieli to Vivaldi” was also translated into Italian and published there in conjunction with a set of recordings by RAI, the Italian national radio organization. Eleanor received the Distinguished Bibliography Award from the Modern Language Association for her book “A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres”, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Drew University.

As other examples of her wide range of interests, topics on which she wrote or lectured included: Thomas Edison, and his study of the psychology associated with listening to – and selling – music, and his influence on performance practice at the time; the family of the artist Canaletto including their scene painting for theater productions; music retention in Alzheimer’s syndrome; and the previous generations of the family of Antonio Vivaldi. On the last subject, she was not quite finished with a book manuscript at the time of her passing.

Since starting, at age five, to learn to play on the piano her family bought to celebrate the end of World War II, she enjoyed practicing and performing, able to master major works including Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and was a pupil of Konrad Wolff. In later years severe arthritis in her fingers made playing too difficult, to her frustration and sorrow. At various times she organized choirs, musical events, taught children’s choirs, and had several piano pupils. She loved early music, which trait she passed to her husband even before marriage. She contributed her time, as she was able, to several organizations involved in early music, and, as with Humanities West, presenting to the public the music and art of the period and its historical context. She found it very rewarding to help CCARH provide newly edited scores for several major works performed by the orchestra and choir Philharmonia Baroque.

In earlier years, when other responsibilities allowed, she volunteered for advisory work at various organizations, including Prof. Halsted Holman’s Mid-peninsula Health Service as it came into being. Locally, she co-led a successful campaign to preserve, as a park, a school site that was to be closed and sold to housing developers.

Eleanor was also an enthusiastic traveler with an inclination for picking up languages. The total duration of her research and conference trips amounted to years of her life spent in Europe, from Spain to Finland, and, early on, even behind the Cold War Iron Curtain. She became fluent in Italian, and even could manage some Venetian dialect, so that she could pursue her research in Venetian music history. Until her later years, during her trips she often fitted in a stay in Venice, something of a second home for her, and where she had numerous friends.

She is survived by her husband of over 56 years, Clive; their son Brent and his wife Carmen; and granddaughters Rowan and Lila.

She leaves a wide legacy of scholarship and achievement, and a broad circle of friends and family for all of whom she cared deeply. They will miss the supportive interest she took while keeping in touch with them.

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