Obituary of Jerome Weber

Jerome F. Weber died on May 3, 2024 at the age of 95. Jerome was born in Utica, NY on March 29, 1929, the son of Clarence L. and Linda Archambault Weber, and grew up in Oswego, NY, attending St. Paul’s Academy. Returning to Utica, he graduated from St. Francis de Sales High School in 1947 as valedictorian and the first editor of the school paper, The Crier. He received the B.A. from St. Bernard’s Seminary in 1951 and the M.A. from St. Bonaventure University in 1955.

He was ordained a priest on May 19, 1956 and served parishes throughout the Syracuse diocese for 25 years. He also served as a synodal judge on the diocesan marriage tribunal. In 1960–66 he was a board member of the Utica Symphony Orchestra, in 1964–66 a founder of the Oneida Area Arts Council, and in 1971–72 a trustee of the Rome Community Concert Association. After a sabbatical leave studying Gregorian chant at The Catholic University of America, he devoted the rest of his life to the music of the Catholic Church.

He published 21 monographs in Discography Series beginning in 1970. The two-volume A Gregorian Chant Discography (1990) won the first ARSC Award for Excellence in Recorded Sound Research. He received the same award for the online Cantigas de Santa Maria Discography in 2018 and the ARSC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. The final volume in the series was Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony, a Discography in 2000.

For over 45 years beginning in 1978, he reviewed recordings of sacred music for Fanfare. From 1992 he contributed an annual article on recordings of Gregorian chant to the Cambridge University Press journal Plainsong and Medieval Music, and served on its editorial committee as Audio Review Editor until 2017. He was treasurer of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections for 11 years and president from 1994 to 1996. He wrote articles, discographies and reviews for its Journal from 1973 to 2000. He wrote a monthly column on sacred music for The Tidings of Los Angeles from 1994 to 2001. He was a member of the Editorial Council of Goldberg, a magazine of early music, from 1997, contributing articles and reviews for 10 years.

He was active in Cantus Planus from 1990 to 2011, presenting papers on recorded chant at nine meetings. He produced Gregorian Chant Early Recordings on two CDs for Parnassus Records in 1998. He contributed a dozen articles to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition in 2000, including “Discography” and “Recorded Sound: History.” He analyzed recorded chant offertories with verses at a symposium in Trondheim in 2004; it was published in 2007.

In 2010 he created the website chantdiscography.com and from 2015 contributed a series of 23 discographies of early music to the website of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society. From 1968 he contributed numerous articles to Sacred Music, including “The Lost Collection of Chant Cylinders” (2009) and “Ten Chant Recordings Not to Be Missed” (2020). “A Century of Chant Recordings” was published in Calculemus et Cantemus in Amsterdam in 2015. He was a frequent guest on the nationally syndicated broadcast “Millennium of Music” from 1983 to 2023. He identified over 2,000 descendants of his second great-grandfather in Leonard Weber and his Progeny (second edition, 2008).

He was predeceased by his beloved sister, Sister Claire Weber, CSJ, of Latham, NY. A solemn Requiem Mass will be sung in Gregorian chant at St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven, CT at a later date. There are no calling hours.