KARL KROEGER was born in 1932 in Louisville, Kentucky. He studied at the University of Louisville, receiving a B.M. in composition in 1954 and an M.M. in composition in 1959. His teachers included Claude Almand and George Perle. In 1960 he enrolled at the University of Illinois where he studied composition with Gordon Binkerd.

In 1962 Kroeger was appointed head of the American Music Collection at the New York Public Library, a position he retained until 1964. In that year he received a Ford Foundation fellowship to be composer-in-residence for the public school system of Eugene, Oregon.  In 1967, Kroger received an appointment as teacher of composition and theory at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. In 1968, he left to pursue a doctoral degree, first at the University of Wisconsin (1968-69) and then at Brown University (1969-71) where he received a Ph.D. in musicology in 1976. 

From 1971 to 1972, Kroeger was on the faculty at Moorhead State University in Minnesota. In 1972, he was appointed Director of the Moravian Music Foundation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a position he retained until 1980. In 1980, he received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to be a visiting lecturer at Keele University in England. The following year he received the first of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to prepare volumes of "The Complete Works of William Billings" for the American Musicological Society. In 1982 he became Head of the Music Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a position from which he retired in 1994. 

last updated April 14, 2020
home