Dr. Fritz Oberdoerffer was born on November 4, 1895, in Hamburg, Germany. He studied composition and piano at Leipzig Conservatory (1919-1923) and then musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin (1929-1933), where his professors included Arnold Schering, Johannes Wolf, Curt Sachs, and Friedrich Blume, among others. He taught at the Institute of Church Music in Berlin-Spandau and at various other conservatories in Berlin, but in 1933 he was forced to give up his teaching positions and was barred from the university. Only in 1938, through the special efforts of friends, was he awarded the Ph.D. he had earned. When his dissertation on the Generalbaß in 18th-century instrumental music was published, he received international recognition as a scholar and traveled to England and Holland. But he was forced to return to Germany in 1940 for the duration of the war and in 1944 was sent to a labor camp.

Dr. Oberdoerffer and his wife emigrated to the United States after the war, and he joined the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin in 1950. He was a beloved member of the Music faculty for 25 years and was named Professor Emeritus in 1974. He contributed to the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and to various journals. Oberdoerffer also edited works by Bach, Mozart, Purcell, Rosenmüller, Schütz, Vivaldi, and other composers. For many years he did free-lance editing and proofreading for the music publisher C. F. Peters. He was a member of the American Musicological Society, the International Musicological Society, and the Music Library Association. Dr. Oberdoerffer died in Austin on December 8, 1979, at the age of 84. The Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, to honor the memory of Professor Oberdoerffer and Professor Helen Hewitt of North Texas State University, created the Hewitt- Oberdoerffer Award, given annually to a graduate student in the Chapter for the best paper submitted to a faculty committee appointed by the president the Chapter.