Nigel Fortune, who has died aged 84, was a leading member of the generation of musical scholars - including Thurston Dart, Oliver Neighbour and Stanley Sadie - who played a vital role in establishing professional musicological standards in Britain in the decades after the second world war. They ensured that the country took its place on the international stage through research initiatives, conferences and scholarly publications.
Fortune was born in Birmingham, and despite his international reputation and wide range of contacts, remained a resident of that city and in close contact with its institutions for much of his life. As a longstanding Labour party member - he was Clare Short's agent during most of her time as an MP - and as a chairman of school governors, he was engaged in matters of educational policy and practice well beyond Birmingham University, where after army service he read music and Italian (1947-50), and to which he returned as a lecturer and reader (1959-85).
In 1950, Fortune took the then unusual step of embarking on research for a PhD at Cambridge University, working with Dart on early 17th-century Italian monody. Student and supervisor were both indebted to Anthony Lewis, who had become professor of music at Birmingham in 1947 and whose initiatives as honorary secretary of the Purcell Society and initiator of the Musica Britannica series - a national collection of British music published in conjunction with the Royal Musical Association - greatly influenced Fortune's career.
Before returning to Birmingham, he worked for three years in the London University music library, laying the foundations of those bibliographical skills and enthusiasms that were legendary among generations of friends and pupils. No less crucially, he became secretary of the Royal Musical Association in 1957, and during his 14 years in the post he was tireless in encouraging younger scholars, not least those whose areas of interest might have been thought challenging to the orthodoxies of that time.
Two initiatives of the 1960s were particularly significant in placing him at the heart of academic developments. The rapid expansion of universities during that decade created a body of postgraduates who needed not just expert supervision, but also the opportunity to meet with other students, exchange ideas and explore new possibilities. Together with Denis Arnold, a fellow specialist in 17th-century Italian music then teaching at Hull University, Fortune founded the annual conference for graduate students in music, which proved an invaluable forum for discussions and was triumphantly successful in countering the isolationist tendencies of the older universities.
At much the same time, the decision was taken to initiate a new version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which had been through five editions between 1889 and 1954. Fortune became a senior member of the editorial team led by Sadie, and remained closely involved, especially at the proof-reading and correction stages, until the first edition of the New Grove was published in 1980. He then took on co-editorship of the quarterly journal Music and Letters (1980-2007).
Fortune's dedication to editorial improvement of the scholarly work of others left him all too little time for work of his own, and in this area he was undoubtedly happiest when collaborating, especially with Arnold, on the Monteverdi and Beethoven Companions, published in 1968 and 1971, or in editing collections of essays such as that published in honour of another longstanding colleague, Winton Dean, in 1987.
Beyond his work as writer and editor, however, his enduring legacy is found in the careers of students whom he encouraged and befriended, and whose interests ranged well beyond the 17th-century confines of his own initial research specialism. While very much a private person, he was an unfailingly convivial companion, with a sense of humour that never veered into those areas of maliciousness so common among his fellow academics.
He was the very model of the undogmatic, open-minded musician, supportive of developments in contemporary composition while always keeping up to date with historical musicology. University music, not only in Britain but worldwide, owes him an enormous debt.
Clare Short writes: Nigel was a dedicated member of the Labour party that stood for liberty, social justice, public service and internationalism. We often sighed together over the new one. He came to live in Handsworth when he was 10 and lived and died in the same house. He complemented his dedication to music, teaching and writing with knocking on hundreds of doors to win the constituency for Labour.
When I was elected in 1983, he asked to help at my advice bureau. He looked after the people in the queue - often troubled people with low incomes, spanning all ethnicities. He treated everyone with total respect and loved to greet them later in the street and on the bus. He helped them until he could not walk any more. He was then cared for beautifully at an NHS hospice and then at home. He told me a few months ago that he had never been so happy. He was amazed by former colleagues and students telling him how much they respected him. He luxuriated in the tenderness of his carers, friends and neighbours. He was a quiet and shining example.