Biographical Note
Dorothy Slepian Packer was born on April 23, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts, and became a musicologist, educator, and violinist. She studied with music historian Karl Geiringer and earned her Ph.D. at Boston University in 1948. That November, she married Leo S. Packer (August 5, 1920-January 14, 2016), who was studying engineering at Harvard University. They had three children: Janet Susan Packer (died 2014), Alex J. Packer, and Michael Packer (died September 11, 2001). In 1976, she moved to Paris with her husband for fifteen years, where he worked in several positions as a consultant and United States diplomat. Dorothy gave frequent guest lectures across the United States and was a prolific scholar. Her published research encompassed diverse topics related to twentieth-century American music, sixteenth and seventeenth-century French song, and eighteenth-century French vaudeville. She taught at Boston University, Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Packer died in Boston on March 28, 2014.