"A Performer's View: Libraries in My Life" in "Music Librarianship in America, Part 4: Music Librarians and Performance"
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"A performer's view: Libraries in my life" in "Music librarianship in America, Part 4: Music librarians and performance" The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Hillyer, Raphael. 1991. "A performer's view: Libraries in my life" in "Music librarianship in America, Part 4: Music librarians and performance". Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (1), Spring 1991: 110-116. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42661670 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA I IO A Performer's View: Libraries in My Life Raphael Hillyer t has been fifty-one years since my graduate student days at Harvard, where I I studied music with Walter Piston, Tillman Merritt, Hugo Leichtentritt, and Edward Burlingame Hill, and mathematics with George Birkhoff. My contem- poraries included Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, Elliot Forbes, Gib Sturges, Leonard Bernstein, Jesse Ehrlich, Jan LaRue, Henry Mishkin, Jonathan Schiller, William Austin, and, of course, Richard French. Archibald Davison, Woody Woodworth, and Donald Grout were very much in evidence. Being at Harvard changed my life's goals. As an undergraduate in a small New Hampshire town, I had been thinking of studying mathematics, but then, in a great university, surrounded by musicians, the choice was definitely music. The music library at Harvard in 1936 was a modest room one floor above Paine Hall. We used the library frequently, not only to study musicology with the aid Raphael Hillyer is professor of of DenkmalerDeutscher Tonkunst, Riemann's Musik-Lexikon, and Grove's Dictionary music at Boston University and founding violist of the efMusic, and counterpoint with Palestrina and Giovanni Gabrieli as guides, but as Juilliard String Quartet. a room for performing chamber music written by Harvard faculty and students and by composers beyond Harvard's walls. Whether a new piece by Bernstein, an old one by Edward Ballantine, or some newly discovered Albert Roussel or Igor Stravinsky, all music excited and inspired us, and we were impatient to perform. The library here was our rallying point, Paine Hall the scene of frequent concerts by our group and by visiting artists. It may not be generally known that Bela Bart6k and his wife, Dita, gave a four-hand piano recital right here in Paine Hall. Bart6k took evident delight in stumping the Harvard audience when he asked them to identify some of his complex rhythms. No one could. In those heady Harvard days, discovering music old and new, we didn't talk much about authenticity. I am not sure when it all started, but nowadays the word authenticity has a special ring. I recall hearing Ph.D. candidate Putnam Aldrich make a strong point about ornaments in the music of J. S. Bach; performing Bach can- tatas with David Kimball, a superb young musician at Eliot House; playing Bach with Nadia Boulanger; and exploring all the Bach violin sonatas with the phe- nomenal harpsichordist Erwin Bodky, who seemed to know all of Bach from memory. We faithfully started all trills from the note above. The authenticity movement can be said to have arrived on the day Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau spoke his famous five-word dictum at Yale, and I quote him, "The composer is always right." So to the libraries we turn-performers, scholars, stu- dents, teachers-trying to discover what it was the composer actually said that we are urged to embrace as right. It is common knowledge that eighteenth-century A Performer's View: Librariesin My Life I I I john Ohl (lefi,facingcamera) and other studentsin the HarvardMusic Library about 1939, in a photographby the music librarian, Marian Stewart Rumberger. works have been edited almost beyond recognition by nineteenth-century editors. Finding the real composition behind the editions is reminiscent of Schliemann digging for the city of ancient Troy. The Bach Cello Suites, for example, appear in perhaps thirty different cello editions and a dozen viola editions. Knowledge- able musicians no longer read them at face value, because anyone can walk into a good library and find facsimiles of the old handwritten copies by Anna Magdalena Bach and Johann Peter Kellner, not to mention the venerable Bach Gesellschaft Edition and the new Barenreiter Ausgabe. As teachers we can now guide our stu- dents to libraries that have the new scholarly editions and original sources, so that their knowledge and performance of a work ultimately flows from the composer rather than the editor. The great singer and educator Phyllis Curtin recently pointed out that there are many opera editions, especially piano-vocal scores, that are full of interpolations and flagrant mistakes. Bach, Handel, and Mozart scholars have brought about many changes. Curtin recommends that singers check original sources in the library as a wise precaution against the conductor who might enjoy embarrassing a singer by pointing out mistakes. She would have singers study ornamentation and perfor- mance practice, even if current thinking turns out to be a temporary fad and styles revert back in thirty or forty years. Furthermore, she encourages independent study of books, from which singers can learn how and when to employ ornamentation as an integral part of a virtuosic gesture or as a device to intensify emotion. Finally, she urges students to visit the library often to search out new repertoire. A seem- ingly inexhaustible treasure of song exists, and student discoveries bring new delights for the teacher as well. I have loved libraries as long as I can remember. I always liked the air of quiet you donned like a cloak as soon as you entered. The initial enchantment happened at Dartmouth College, where I grew up. The new Baker Library, built around 1930, offered free access to stacks, comfortable reading rooms, and a seeming infinity of choices. When I was studying Latin, I was drawn to the shelves of classics: the odes of Horace, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, and the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Romantic Romans! I would rush to the library to watch Jose Clemente Orozco, the noted 112 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN Raphael Hillyer with the composer Michaellppolitov-Ivanov in .front ef the MoscowConservatory of Music,April, 1924. Mexican painter, as he crouched on his scaffolding, creating his frescos of Ameri- can myth and history on the white library walls. At the time, I traveled a great deal with my parents. It was in the Moscow Conservatory Library, when I was nine, that I visited my first library abroad. My parents and I were guided by our new friend, the Russian composer Michael Michaelovich lppolitov-lvanov, then Director of the Moscow Conservatory. A bearded, kindly, grandfatherly figure, he had shown his affection for us-perhaps because in that year, 1923, a mere six after the Russian Revolution, when living conditions were so miserable and Russians so completely isolated from the outside world, we were the first foreigners to visit in years and were regarded as curiosi- ties. Besides, in those days being an American abroad opened doors and hearts. Ippolitov-lvanov also seemed to enjoy that this American youth was studying the violin. So here he was, this old friend of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, guiding these starry-eyed New Englanders down the corridors of the library museum, opening one showcase after another filled with historic objects. He removed several to show us: one, he explained, a letter Tchaikovsky had written him; another, a framed A Petformer's View: Libraries in My Life I I 3 miniature photo of Tchaikovsky with a dedication to him; then an old photo of the whole Tchaikovsky family, both parents with the composer and siblings as children; finally, he removed a manuscript page from a bulky music notebook-it was an early draft of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony. Ippolitov-Ivanov handed these to me and my parents, saying, "these are for you as a souvenir of our friend- ship." Another example of the open generosity shown by our Soviet colleagues occurred when my Russian violin teacher, Sergei Korgueff, decided to leave Leningrad a few years later and come to Dartmouth as a professor. He brought with him a manuscript score of Alexander Glazunov's Violin Concerto and presented it to the Dartmouth Library. Korgueff suggested I apply to the Curtis Institute of Music for further violin study. As a small-town boy, I was innocent of the musical facts of life. At Curtis, the facts hit with brutal force. I saw what real talent was. I saw what real work was. Encouraged to use the library, I discovered what a fine music library could mean to students eager to learn. Many a day we could be seen staggering under arms full of music to practice rooms, where we would sight-read by the hour, covering quan- tities of literature far beyond what our teachers could assign. I had been admitted on probation and had to prove I was a good student in order to stay on. In those years it was the custom for the Curtis faculty to take their students with them dur- ing the summer for continuing study at their summer homes in Camden, Maine. Josef Hofmann, Efrem Zimbalist, Lea Luboshutz, and the founder of Curtis, Mary Louise Curtis Bok herself, went to Maine with all their students. My teacher, Eddle Bachmann, was Hungarian and sugggested I go with him to Budapest for the sum- mer to study. This idea my music-loving parents enthusiastically approved, and they decided to come too.