Lorenz Christoph Mizler von Kolof (or Mitzler de Koloff) (26 July 1711 – March 1778) was a German physician, mathematician, and writer on music.
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He was born in Heidenheim, Mittelfranken; his parents were Johann Georg Mizler, court clerk to the Margrave of Ansbach at Heidenheim, and Barbara Stumpf, of St Gallen. According to his autobiography, his first teacher was N. Müller, a minister from Obersulzbach, and learnt the flute and violin. From 1724 to 1730, he studied at the Ansbach Gymnasium with Rector Oeder and Johann Matthias Gesner, who became director of the Thomasschule zu Leipzig from 1731 to 1734. He enrolled at Leipzig University on 30 April 1731, and chiefly studied theology; his teachers included Gesner, Johann Christoph Gottsched, and Christian Wolff. He took a bachelor's degree in December 1733 and a master's degree in March 1734. During this time, he also pursued the study of composition, and had some association with J. S. Bach, who he said he had the honour to call his 'good friend and patron.'
He moved to Wittenberg in 1735 to study law and medicine, and returned to Leipzig in 1736. From May 1737, he began lecturing on music history and Johann Mattheson's Neu-eröffnete Orchestre; he was the first to lecture on music at a German university for 150 years. He also began the Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek, a monthly publication; in 1738 it became the periodical of his newly-founded Korrespondierenden Sozietät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften, which had the support of Count Giacomo de Lucchesini and G.H. Bümler, Ansbach court Kapellmeister. He also began a business publishing music. In 1743 he became secretary, teacher, librarian and court mathematician to Count Małachowski of Końskie, for which he learnt the Polish language, and about Polish history and Polish literature.
He decided to take a doctorate of medicine at Erfurt University in 1747, and moved to Warsaw in 1752, where he became court physician and was able to study the natural sciences. He again established a publishing business, in 1754, became a member of the Erfurt Academy of Sciences in 1757, and received Polish nobility in 1768. He died in Warsaw in 1778.
He was only an amateur composer but deeply interested in music theory, advocating the establishment of a musical science based firmly on mathematics and philosophy, and the imitation of nature in music. He translated Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum into German (the original was in Latin), having written of it that 'this methodical guide to musical composition [is] among all such works the best book that we have for practical music and its composition.' In intellect and study he was a polymath, his interests encompassing music, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, and the natural sciences in great detail. He was influenced in philosophy by the ideas of Wolff, Gottfried Leibnitz, and Gottsched.
The Musikalische Bibliothek, which he published between 1736 and 1754, is an important document of the musical life in Germany at the time, and includes reviews of books on music written from 1650 up to its publication. Mizler himself contributed commentaries and criticisms on the writings of Printz, Leonhard Euler, Scheibe, Schröter, Spiess, Gottsched, and Mattheson; especially the latter two's Critische Dichtkunst and Vollkommene Capellmeister. His essays were detailed and perceptive and offer a useful musicological resource for present-day scholars of Baroque music.
He founded the Korrespondierenden Sozietät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften (Corresponding Society of the Musical Sciences) in 1738. The aim was to enable musical scholars to circulate theoretical papers and to further musical science by encouraging discussion of the papers by correspondence. Many of the papers appear in the Musikalische Bibliothek. It is to the entry requirements of this society that we owe both the famous 1746/1748 Haussmann portrait of Bach and his Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her" for organ, BWV 769.
The membership was limited to twenty; the following joined:
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