Musicologist Joel Sheveloff focused his scholarship on composers Domenico Scarlatti, Modest Mussorgsky, and Igor Stravinsky. But he loved J. S. Bach.

Bach is “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, the greatest mind ever to write music,” Sheveloff, a College of Fine Arts professor emeritus of music, musicology, and ethnomusicology, said in a BU Today profile just before he retired in 2010.

He also loved his students. When asked in the profile if he will miss them, he said, “Oh, yes, terribly. I’m very proud. My students have spoiled me rotten.”

Sheveloff, who taught at BU for 46 years, died on November 8, 2015.

In a message to the CFA community, Richard Cornell, director ad interim of the School of Music, described Sheveloff as “a great spirit.”

“I can think of no one else who touched so many students with his great wit and wisdom, who so brightened the light of knowledge of our art form, or who so enthusiastically challenged the conventional questions, the received bons mots, and the fundamental assumptions,” Cornell wrote. “He could spin a yarn.”

Sheveloff graduated from the City University of New York, Queens College, then earned a master’s and a doctorate from Brandeis University. He published numerous articles on the music of Mozart, Ravel, Scarlatti, Mussorgsky, and Stravinsky; at Boston University, he developed and taught more than 50 courses on subjects that included medieval keyboard compositions and music in the former Soviet Union. He was known to add an hour to class descriptions to weed out students who weren’t sufficiently serious about the course matter, according to the BU Today profile.

In 2004 Sheveloff received the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the University’s highest teaching honor. Cornell noted that he donated the “substantial cash portion” of the prize—and required the late John Silber (Hon.’95), then president of BU, to match the gift—to the scholarship fund named for his good friend John Daverio (CFA’75,’77, GRS’83), a CFA music professor and renowned Schumann expert, who drowned in the Charles River in 2003, at age 48. “That was Joel’s condition to accept the prize,” Cornell said, “an act completely in line with his character.”

“We are saddened,” by his loss, Cornell wrote, “but have been enormously privileged to have had Joel Sheveloff as a colleague and friend. He leaves a deep and enduring imprint on the life of our school.”

Donations in honor of Joel Sheveloff may be made to the John Daverio Memorial Scholarship Fund, Boston University College of Fine Arts Office of Development, 855 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215.