Serge Hovey; Musicologist, Burns Expert

Serge Hovey, a composer and musicologist whose devotion to the poetry and song of Robert Burns seemingly enabled him to overcome for years the devastating debilitation of Lou Gehrig’s disease, died Wednesday evening at his home in Pacific Palisades.

His wife, Esther, said her husband was 69 and had just recently compiled and completed the sixth recorded volume of Burns’ music while planning for a seventh album later this month.

He had been diagnosed more than 20 years ago with having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a crippling neurological disorder. Doctors at the time gave him only two to three years to live.

But Hovey credited his fascination with what he called “the folk tradition in music” for the strength that enabled him to continue his labor of love.

Massive Project

He already was a successful composer when he embarked on the massive Burns project that was to dominate the last years of his life.

Hovey had been a composition student of Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler and had written the scores for the New York shows “Tevya and His Daughters” and “The World of Scholem Aleichem.” He had also been musical director of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo.”

His other works--film scores, choral pieces, operas and chamber music--have been performed by ensembles throughout the United States and in Berlin.

He was the son of a New England father and a Russian-Jewish mother. At mid-life, he began seeking his own roots. In the 1960s, that research into folk lore led him to Burns.

“Burns wrote several hundred poems and 323 lyrics,” Hovey said in a wide-ranging interview with The Times in 1983.

“As I read, I would find underneath the title of the lyric, ‘Tune: So-and-so,’ ” Hovey elaborated. “Under ‘A Red, Red Rose,’ it said: ‘Tune: Major Graham.’ ”

Hovey set out to find what was “Major Graham?”

He soon found out that no one knew, and that if there was to be an authority, he would be it.

Trips to Scotland located a few songs in the National Library in Edinburgh, which in turn led to others. He located published books containing melodies that Burns had used himself. Following as he could Burns’ instructions, he matched each lyric to a tune. (Even the bawdy ones that the poet was fond of writing, either after or before he had done an acceptable version.)

Hovey even found that the world had been singing “Auld Lang Syne,” a lyric Burns wrote in 1799, to a melody the poet had never intended.

The song that symbolizes the New Year to much of the English-speaking world was “carelessly selected” after Burns’ death. Hovey published the lyric and the unknown melody Burns had intended for it in Volume 2 of “The Robert Burns Songbook.”

Most recently, one of Hovey’s four sons, Daniel, went to Scotland and with a string quartet and recorded the sixth volume. The seventh is due in the recording studio late this month, Esther Hovey said.

In addition to his wife and sons, Hovey is survived by six grandchildren and a sister. Services will be private.