Pieter C. van den Toorn is professor of music emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, in1938, he attended Amherst College and Harvard University before studying for several years with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, France. Subsequently, in 1986, he recieved his phD in music from University of California, at Berkeley. His books include The music of Igor Stravinsky (1983), Stravisnky and "The Rite of Spring" (1987), Music, Politics, and the Academy (1995), Stravinsky and the Russian Period (2012), with John McGinness, and Simply Stravinsky (2020). Stravisnsky and "The Rite of Spting" won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Award and the outstanding of the Society for Music Theory.