Hofstra Professor from Little Neck Receives Musical Society's Highest Honor

A Hofstra University professor from Little Neck has been named the recipient of a prestigious honor from the American Musical Instrument Society, a spokeswoman for the Hempstead-based school said.

William Hettrick, a professor of music at Hofstra, was recently given the Curt Sachs Award, which is the highest honor bestowed by the American Musical Instrument Society.

The award is handed out to a scholar who has contributed to the field of organology.

Hettrick will be recognized at the society’s annual meeting this spring in Williamsburg, VA.

"I feel greatly honored," he said. "This is an important award that has been given in the past to a number of great scholars. I'm proud to join their ranks."

The professor, who lives in Little Neck, joined Hofstra’s faculty in 1968. From 1994 to 1995, he was chairman of the school’s music department and has served as acting and associate chairman.

For 44 years, he has directed the school’s Collegium Musicum, an organization of students, alumni and community members dedicated to the performance of repertoire from the heritage of early music.

The group, which consists of a chorus and several ensembles of historical instruments, performs a concert during the fall semester and plays in Hofstra’s Shakespeare Festival in the spring.

Hettrick, who also directs the degree program in music history, served for seven years as editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society as well as the editor of the society’s newsletter.

Additionally, he was president of the society for four years.

At the group’s meeting in late May, he will present the paper, “Movin’ On Up: The Great Migration of Piano Factories to Harlem and the Bronx in the Period from 1880 to 1930.”

The professor is widely published in scholarly journals and encyclopedias. And he has served as author and editor for “The Musica Instrumentalis Deudsch” and published several editions of “Selected German Works” by composer and conductor Johann Herbeck.

The Curt Sachs Award was named after a German-born American who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and was one of the founders of musicology - and organology - in the United States.