“I am sorry now that I did not write an opera with her every year,’ Virgil Thomson once wrote about Gertrude Stein. ‘It had not occurred to me that both of us would not always be living.’

More and more, I am reminded of that sentiment, most recently last month, when I heard about David Lewin’s death at age 69.

His name does not spur widespread recognition. Obituary notices after he died of heart disease on May 5, tended to be of the paid variety. And the area in which he displayed incomparable mastery is the most esoteric branch of a rarefied subset of a specialized discipline.

David Lewin was a musical analyst— a specialist in the theory of how musical compositions are constructed. The compositions to which he devoted attention tended to be 20th-century works with an already limited following; he wrote essays on such exotica as Dallapiccola’s “Simbolo” and Stockhausen’s Klavierstück III. And his own work was an attempt to construct a mathematical theory of musical composition, drawing on fields in higher mathematics, including group theory, algebraic topology and projective geometry.” NY Times