Few musicologists moved so easily between the worlds of European classical music and the US vernacular traditions as Wiley Hitchcock, who combined a scholarly interest in the French and Italian music of the 17th century with a proselytising zeal for the music of America in all its forms.

On the one hand he was the acknowledged world expert on the music of the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, of whose works he produced a comprehensive catalogue in 1982, and on the other he was the joint editor (with the English musicologist Stanley Sadie) of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986), which made its reputation by covering the works of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis with the same scholarly clarity and distinction as it did those of John Cage, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson.

Hitchcock's passion for US music also found other outlets. He was the author of the bestselling textbook, Music in the United States, which went through four editions between 1969 and 2000; he was an expert on the iconoclastic music of Charles Ives (as well as serving as president of the Ives Society for many years, he edited a definitive critical edition of Ives's 129 songs, which appeared in 2004); and he founded the Institute for Studies in American Music at the Brooklyn College campus of the City University of New York. This centre for the study of musical Americana, which he directed from 1971 to 1993, is to be renamed the Hitchcock Institute in his honour.

A clean-cut, square-jawed man with a distinctive head of cropped grey hair and a taste for fine handmade shirts and ties, Hitchcock divided his time in the 1980s between his home in Park Avenue, New York, and the Villa I Tatti in Florence, the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies, where he and his second wife, the art historian Janet Cox-Rearick, decamped every summer with their pet cats to pursue their interests in the European arts. This annual pilgrimage between their American work and their European studies was something of a metaphor for their joint interests in the arts of the Old and New worlds.

Hitchcock continued this division of interest when he was elected one of the first Getty scholars at the J. Paul Getty Centre for Art History and the Humanities in 1985.

Hugh Wiley Hitchcock was born in Detroit, and after studying for his BA at Dartmouth College, moved to the University of Michigan, where he took his MM and PhD degrees, interspersed with studies in Paris under Nadia Boulanger. His doctoral dissertation was on the sacred music of Charpentier, but while teaching at Michigan in the 1950s he developed his interest in American composition, and the theory that popular (or “vernacular”) traditions had, particularly between 1820 and 1920, a separate and independent development in the US from art music. By the time he arrived at Hunter College, New York, in 1961, he was already establishing his reputation as a wide- ranging scholar who treated the composers and performers of his own land with the same academic curiosity and scholarly interest as he did the key figures of the European Baroque.

While at Hunter he published the first edition of his textbook, pointing out to his fellow Americans that “we know less about our own music than about that of Western Europe”. Largely as a result of his own efforts in marshalling US scholars to write about matters American in the Grove Dictionary (affectionately known in the musicological world as “Amerigrove”) and in founding the Brooklyn Institute, which nurtured generations of scholars, he was able to amend that preface in 1998 to read: “There has been an extraordinary upsurge in American music scholarship.”

These achievements alone would have guaranteed Hitchcock's importance and significance in US musical life. But largely as a result of his powers of charm and persuasion, he also found himself invited to participate in many additional levels of American musicological life, in a community all too often riven with petty disagreements and factionalism. Hitchcock's managerial skill, tact and energy led him to serve successively as president of the Music Library Association, the Ives Society and the American Musicological Society, and in all three he was a unifying and calming influence. In similar manner he sat on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly, American Music and New World Records.

From its inception in 1981 until its publication in 1986, Hitchcock was one of the driving forces behind American Grove, along with Sadie and the book's managing editor, Susan Feder. He read all 5,000 articles in manuscript, galley and page proof during his daily commute to Brooklyn, wryly joking that if he had known the toll it was going to take, he would have asked Macmillan (the British publishers of Grove) for a new pair of eyes. He contacted just about every leading scholar in the field, from rock journalists to folklorists and from organologists to feminist theorists, and by letter, phone call and — in those days before e-mail days — fax and telex, helping to coax their words from them to produce the most comprehensive lexicographical coverage of American music ever attempted since Waldo Selden Pratt had produced Grove's first, somewhat colonialist, survey in the 1920s.

Few articles were exempt from Hitchcock's pointed, helpful and incisive criticism, added in the margin in his characteristic slanting hand. A team of editors in London and New York had their work tactfully but firmly revised as they attempted to impose a consistent house style on this most varied palette of writing. The dictionary will remain his crowning achievement, and its launch in 1986 with speeches from Lord Stockton, William Schuman and Lionel Hampton, and music from Paquito D'Rivera, showed the catholicity of its spread and the enthusiasm of those whose careers were summarised between its covers.

Hitchcock's other great talent was as a teacher, and in between publishing further works on Charpentier, Ives and the Italian composer Giulio Caccini, he nurtured the career of several generations of students at Brooklyn and founded a monograph series that explored aspects of America and its musical life in detail.

In a world of stuffy scholarship and high, if not hobby, horses, Hitchcock was refreshingly down to earth, and thought there were few academic problems that could not be sorted out through reasonable discussion and the consumption of a few stiff Martinis. After his retirement in 1993, he continued to teach at Harvard, Columbia and New York University, until the onset of his final illness.

He is survived by his wife, Janet, and the two children of a former marriage.

H. Wiley Hitchcock, musicologist, was born on September 28, 1923. He died on December 5, 2007, aged 84