Born in
Northumberland, Fortune was the son of an insurance salesman. An only child, he moved with his parents at the age of 10 to the
Handsworth, West Midlands area of
Birmingham. He lived in the same house there for his entire life; notably living next door to the mother of
British Labour Party MP Clare Short. One of his other important mentors at Cambridge was Professor
Sir Anthony Lewis, then honorary secretary of the
Purcell Society and a co-founder of the
Musica Britannica. With Lewis he worked on
The Works of Henry Purcell, "which played a significant role in establishing the position of the major English composer". From 1956 to 1959 Fortune served as music librarian at
Senate House of the
University of London. He left there to become a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in autumn 1959. He remained there until his retirement in 1985; at which point he had been working there as a
reader. From 1957 to 1971 he was the
Royal Musical Association's secretary and later served as the organisation's vice-president; posts through which he encouraged many young music scholars. During the 1970s and 1980s he worked under
Stanley Sadie as one of the senior editors and as a writer for
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980, 1st edition). From 1980 to 2008 he served as co-editor of the journal
Music & Letters. In the 1960s Fortune and musicologist
Denis Arnold founded an important annual conference for graduate students in music in England which established for the first time in that country a community for music scholarship. With Arnold he also collaborated on
The Monteverdi Companion (1968, enlarged and reissued as
The New Monteverdi Companion, 1985) and
The Beethoven Companion (1971). He collaborated on several other publications with a variety of scholars, mostly as an editor, including a collection of essays in honour of
Winton Dean in 1987. He contributed several articles to
Musica Britannica from 1975 to 1977 and to the
New Oxford History of Music in 1985. While his scholarly work tended to focus on early music, he was a champion of the music of contemporary composer
John Casken and for many years provided significant financial support to the
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He died in Birmingham at the age of 84 having never married. ==References==