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This article supplements "The Guitar Foundation of America: Origins and Early Years," which begins on page 8 of this issue. In the pages that follow, and in a second installment to appear in our next (June) issue, I provide profiles of early GFA figures mentioned in "Origins and Early Years," all of whom attended or helped plan the inaugural meeting in Santa Barbara in 1973 to create a national guitar organization. Most were signatories to the GFA Articles of Incorporation and served on the Executive Committee, Board of Directors, or played other vital roles in the Foundation. Two of the profiles below derive from earlier Soundboards and are so noted. The others are new.
Thomas F. Heck
First and foremost, Tom Heck stands as the prime mover behind the creation of the GFA. Born July 10, 1943, in Washington, DC, he spent most of his early years in New Orleans. Later, his father, Harold J. Heck, served as commercial attache at the American Embassy in Paris. So T ,, , loms teenage years were spent immersed in French culture and language while attending secondary school at a Parisian lycée. It was also at this time that he began his lifetime devotion to guitar. Upon completion of his secondary education in I960, he returned to the United States to pursue university studies.
In 1965, Tom received his bachelor's in liberal arts and music history from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. In 1970, having received a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue guitar research in Vienna, Austria, he earned his PhD in Musicology from Yale University. That research resulted in "The Birth of the Classic Guitar and Its Cultivation in Vienna, Reflected in the Career and Compositions of Mauro Giuliani," a seminal two-volume thesis that established him as a major figure in guitar scholarship and a catalyst to further inquiry into the guitar's past and place in the musical-cultural life of Europe.
Heck went on to teach music history for five years at Western Case Reserve and John Carroll Universities in Cleveland, and at Chapman University in Orange, California. Earning an MLS in academic librarianship from the University of Southern California in 1977, he took a position as Assistant Music Librarian at the Wisconsin Conservatory...