Guido Adler (1 November 1855, Ivančice (Eibenschütz), Moravia – 15 February 1941, Vienna) was a Bohemian-Austrian musicologist and writer. Biography Early life and education Adler was born at Eibenschütz in Moravia in 1855. He moved with his family to Vienna nine years later. His father Joachim, a physician, died of typhoid fever in 1857. Joachim contracted the illness from a patient, and therefore told his wife Franciska to "never allow any of the children to become a doctor". Adler studied at the University of Vienna and — at the same time (1868-1874) — the Vienna Conservatory of Music (where he studied piano (main subject) and music theory and composition under Anton Bruckner and Otto Dessoff). He even briefly served at the Vienna Handelsgericht before deciding to pursue his interest in music history. He received an arts diploma from the conservatory in 1874. In 1878, he graduated from University of Vienna as doctor of jurisprudence, and in 1880 as doctor of philosophy. His dissertation, Die Grundklassen der Christlich-Abendländischen Musik bis 1600 (The Chief Divisions of Western Church Music up to 1600), was reprinted in Allgemeine Musikzeitung. Two years later, he completed his accreditation as a university lecturer, also known as Habilitation, with a dissertation on the history of harmony. A pioneer of musicology In 1883 Adler became lecturer in musicology at University of Vienna, on which occasion he wrote Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Harmonie (An Essay on the History of Harmony), published in the "Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-Historischen Klasse der Wiener Academie der Wissenschaften", 1881. In 1884 he founded (with Friedrich Chrysander and Philipp Spitta) the Vierteljahresschrift für Musikwissenschaft (Musicology Quarterly). Adler provided the first article of the first issue, "Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft" ("The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology", 1885), which not only constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive description of the study of music, but also famously divides the discipline into two subdisciplines, historische Musikwissenschaft (historical musicology) and systematische Musikwissenschaft ("systematic musicology"). In Adler's article, systematic musicology included Musikologie or vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (comparative musicology), which later became an independent discipline (cf. ethnomusicology). Although these subfields do not exactly line up with current practice, they are roughly maintained in modern European musicology and roughly correspond to the North American division of musicology into music history (often called "musicology"), music theory, and ethnomusicology. In 1885 he was called to the newly established German University of Prague, Bohemia,