Necrology

Neil Harvey Gould '55

Dec. 11, 1933-Feb. 3, 2020

Composer, author, director, musician, ­educator, artistic director, critic, producer: Neil Harvey Gould ’55 was all of these things throughout the course of his­ ­creative life.

One of his major successes was writing what was considered to be the definitive biography of composer and conductor ­Victor Herbert. Gould’s Victor Herbert: A Theatrical Life was published in 2008 by Fordham University Press.

Gould, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., died on Feb. 3, 2020, at age 86.

Born on Dec. 11, 1933, in New York City, the son of Dr. Albert and Mildred Gould, he attended the High School of Music and Art. At Hamilton he double majored in music and German. He also joined the College Choir, performed with the Charlatans, and worked on the staffs of The Continental and The Spectator.

After he left the Hill, Gould completed a postgraduate fellowship through the Tona-Shephard Foundation and then entered the U.S. Army, serving from 1956 to 1958. He was discharged as a private first class.

For much of his life, Gould continued to advance his education. He earned graduate degrees in musicology from Indiana University in 1960 and from New York University in 1972; and in German literature from the State University of New York at Albany in 1968.

Gould and his wife, Gretchen Sheerer Gould, a jazz pianist and teacher, wrote the songs for a musical version of Mort Walker’s long-running Beetle Bailey comic strip. In 1988, when the show opened for a limited run, The New York Times reported on the efforts leading up to the production and included this comment from Walker: “Neil asked, ‘Would you like to do a musical?’ and told me, ‘I’ve got the songs.’ I asked, ‘What songs?’ and he came by and played 10 of them. I loved them. They caught the humor and the spirit of the characters, so I got into this morass of writing a musical and I can’t get out. There’s no way you can stop it.”

Gould’s professional life was varied. Among other work over the years were his positions as the artistic director of the ­Victor Herbert Festival at the Saratoga County (N.Y.) Arts Center and director of Herbert festivals in San Diego, Chicago, and Baltimore; stage director in Salzburg and Munich; a public relations director; a radio arts critic; and an administrator at a day school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

His survivors include his wife, two sons, a daughter, and grandchildren.

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