Youngren, in 2004. Photograph: Courtesy Virginia Youngren

If Bill Youngren ever attended an academic ceremony during the 25 years in which we overlapped at Boston College, I never saw it, and I know that he skirted department meetings as well, and that he did not turn up at the retirees’ dinner in 2002, where he was among those to be honored, and at which his department chairman was prepared to speak some words of appreciation that had been outlined by another member of the department because Bill’s chairman—though he himself had been at Boston College for decades—did not know Bill quite well enough to say what needed to be said.

Youngren, who died on November 26, 2006 at age 75, came to Boston College in 1970, having been hired away from Smith College to buttress a new doctoral program in English. (The department wasn’t keen about taking on the program, and a senior hire was the grease the administration applied.) An 18th-century literature guy who worked at the knotty philosophy-of-aesthetics end of things, Bill eventually abandoned Donne, the Herberts, and Marvell for a prior love, music. In part, he made this change because he had no interest in sojourning in the land of cultural studies, to which literature had decamped while he was busy writing articles such as “Founding English Ethics: Locke, Mathematics, and the Innateness Ques­tion”; and in part he made the change because what had been a sideline business for Bill—writing about classical music and jazz—had burgeoned into a near-career, with lucid and smart essays appearing in the Atlantic Monthly and Fanfare and other periodicals that counted.

Bill never worked by half measures, and in 1983, nearing age 52, he enrolled as a music doctoral student at Brandeis University, receiving his doctorate in 1999. His thesis, which eventually achieved nearly a thousand pages, was published in 2003, a pavement stone of a book titled C.P.E. Bach and the Rebirth of the Strophic Song and that I admired on these pages for its 3.4 pounds of large-hearted learning and its glorious lack of utility. Sager reviewers called it “monumental,” “magisterial,” and “a key illustration of what liberal arts means” (all of which pretty much guaranteed that C.P.E. would come to occupy number 2,481,344 in the Amazon sales ranking, having sold “more than 350 copies,” according to the publisher).

I first met Bill because I’d read an essay he published on Bix Beiderbecke, the early jazz cornetist, that touched on cross-pollination between jazz and early 20th-century European classical music, and so I asked him to write 2,500 words for BCM on that subject. He agreed and delivered 6,000-or-so words on the role anti-Semitism played in the critical reception that Rhapsody in Blue received when Gershwin leapt without permission from Tin Pan Alley to the concert hall stage. So began our friendship, periodically refreshed at long lunches at which we talked about many things, but mostly music, and I got to voice half-baked observations that Bill (who brooked no half-bakedness in the recordings and performances he reviewed) greeted with brilliant and delighting (to him as much as me) forays into his own well-stocked, discursive, and passionate mind. Looking for something that would show how Bill’s conversation worked, I found this bit that does the trick. It’s from a review essay in the New Republic, in which Bill wondered why the conductor James Levine would choose to record Bach’s “charming but insignificant” Wedding Cantata:

Two-thirds of the way through the side I got my answer: Suddenly, there was [the Chicago Symphony’s] Ray Still, playing the oboe more beautifully than I had ever heard it played. I have always thought the oboe the most expressive of wind instruments—one of the great delights of my childhood was the spotless oboe solo, played staccato and very fast but with each note round and firm as a tropical fruit, on Toscanini’s 1938 BBC recording of Rossini’s overture to La Scala di Seta. (Years later I learned that Toscanini had personally edited the oboe part and had sent it ahead in manuscript, weeks before his departure for London, so that the BBC’s Terence MacDonough could practice it.)

I know from my oldest son, who took Bill’s history of jazz course the year before Bill retired, that he was similarly enchanting and intellectually generous in his teaching—even if, to the dismay of my son and other students, he believed that jazz died under the burden of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew in 1970. “It’s all just repertoire now,” he argued, while irate students pecked at him with all the effect of sparrows banging on a bronze monument.

Bill was a master teacher but no Mr. Chips, and unlike Al Duhamel—a brilliant English department colleague who is appreciated on an adjoining page—he was no foundation beam either, but a crooked timber full of juice and spring, a man who relished conversation, work, friendship, his family, Wagner at top volume, playing Jelly Roll Morton–style piano, and writing hilarious poem parodies.

An iconoclast to the end, he was brought down by a mysterious illness, never diagnosed, that caused muscle weakness. The last time I spoke with him, about two years ago, he was in a wheelchair, rolling out of a jazz show in Boston. With gusto, he effusively praised one of the musicians we’d heard and effusively ripped another. And he was right and happy.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum