THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC 1991 TO 2011 Compiled and Edited by Lesley Bannatyne 2015 John Knowles Paine Concert Hall. Photo by Shannon Cannavino. Cover photos by Kris Snibbe [Harvard News Office], HMFH Architects, Inc., Harvard College Libraries, Rose Lincoln [Harvard News Office] THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC 1991 TO 2011 Compiled and Edited by Lesley Bannatyne Department of Music Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts 2015 Photographs in this volume were provided by the Department of Music unless otherwise noted. Articles are reprinted from the Department’s newsletters, Harvard Crimson and Harvard Gazette. © 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard University 2nd printing January 2017 All rights reserved. CONTENTS Preface vii Chapter One: The Chairs 1 Chapter Two: Undergraduate Studies 11 Chapter Three: Graduate Studies 23 Chapter Four: Musicology 33 Chapter Five: Ethnomusicology 51 Chapter Six: Theory 67 Chapter Seven: Composition 77 Chapter Eight: Performance 97 Chapter Nine: Conferences, Symposia, Colloquia, Lectures 111 Chapter Ten: Concert Highlights 119 Chapter Eleven: Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library 127 Chapter Twelve: The Building 143 Appendices 151 Index 307 Music Department, 1992 Music Department picnic, late 1990s Appendices i. Music Department Faculty 151 ii. Biographical Sketches of Senior Professors, Lecturers & Preceptors 165 iii. Donors 175 iv. Teaching Fellows 179 v. Curriculum 183 vi. Fromm Commissions 207 vii. Recipients of the PhD degree 211 viii. Faculty Positions Held by Former Graduate Students 217 ix. Recipients of Department Awards and Fellowships 221 x Recipients of the AB degree and Honors Theses 227 xi. Visiting Committees 239 xii. Conferences, Colloquia, Symposia, Lectures 241 xiii. Concerts and Special Events 255 xiv. Publications 285 xv. In Memoriam 285 Elliot Forbes (1917–2006), Fanny Peabody Mason Professor, emeritus, Music Department Chair 1972–1976. Forbes wrote A History of Music at Harvard to 1972 and A Report of Music at Har- vard from 1972 to 1990. Preface Elliot Forbes published A History of Music at Harvard to 1972 to narrate the genesis and growth of the music department under John Knowles Paine, Walter Raymond Spalding, and Arthur Tillman Merritt, who retired in 1972, closing his chapter as chair with the opening of the newly built Mason Wing of the Music Building. The Music Department grew into its new wing instantly, and Forbes found it neces- sary to augment his History with the publication of A Report of Music at Harvard from 1972 to 1990, in which music courses, faculty, and innovation moved forward. In this eighteen-year period the music department acquired a permanent Electronic Music Studio, stewarded from 1972 by Ivan Tcherepnin, and organized and housed its Collection of Early Instruments. A bona fide theory department, headed by David Lewin, was created in the graduate program. The Harvard Group for New Music was revitalized in 1984 at the instigation of Donald Mar- tino, and launched a series of annual concerts that continue to this day. The Blodgett Chamber Music Series, inaugurated in 1981 through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Blodgett, continues to bring live concert music to the study of musicology: The New World String Quar- tet was named its first Quartet-in-Residence; Robert Taub, Lucy Stoltzman (91-92), James Buswell (1992-93), and the Mendelssohn, Ying, Chiara, and Parker would follow. In these scant two decades, a fledgling jazz program brought a steady parade of musical greats through Harvard’s doors; music courses became more collaborative among disciplines; and the depart- ment fostered growing interest in performance practice. Elliot Forbes’ second publication on the Music Department ended in the year 1990 because it marked the retirement of four senior faculty members: John Ferris, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner (retired in 1989), and Luise Vosgerchian. It was, as he called it, a “watershed year.” As the calendar page flipped from 1990 to 1991, the department installed a new chairperson and took up the business of envisioning what the next twenty years would hold. The changes were many. In 1991, the Department faculty numbered seventeen; two of these were women. Twenty years later there were fourteen faculty; six women and eight men, and the faculty was diversified racially, by gender, and intellectually. The Department gradually underwent a shift from an historical emphasis on Western Art Music to include new strength in American music and contemporary performance. A strong ethnomusicology program was added with foci in Africa, India, and North American traditions. A Master’s de- vii gree in Performance Practice was created, and a dual-degree collaborative program with New England Conservatory launched. In the classrooms, there was growing support for the role of performance—all performance—from early music to jazz, to Asian, to opera, and beyond. There were also constants. Successive chairs continued to petition the University for a new building, looked for new sources of funding for graduate studies, and oversaw nearly continual building renovation. For twenty years, a monthly department calendar of events arrived in department mailboxes listing student class concerts, Fromm concerts, and Blodgett Artists-in-Residence performances, and announcing annual holiday parties and picnics. One cannot talk about this period of time without mentioning the advent of the internet. Installed at Harvard in the early 1990s, the class of 1997 was the first to be bonded electronically. Between 1993 and 1998, email traffic in FAS rose from 10,000 to 325,000 mes- sages daily. In the years between 1995 and 1998, visitors to the Arts and Sciences website went from 150,000 to 3.2 million per month. As communication grew faster and reached wider audiences instantly, the Department created its first website (originally designed by graduate students Roberta Lukes and Jennifer Baker in the mid-90s); its twice-annual newsletter was launched in 2000. The staff numbered four in 1991. Mark Kagan, our Administrator for over five and a half years, was succeeded by Nancy Shafman, who serves to this day. As the Department’s ac- tivities grew in number, an Events Coordinator was added. The combined position of building /financial manager was separated into two distinct jobs, and staff assistants came onboard to support both administration and faculty. A communications coordinator, electronic music stu- dio technical director, undergraduate coordinator, and chair’s assistant positions were added. In 2011, the staff numbered eleven members. Information in this book is focused on the years between 1991 and 2011. Reprinted articles feature the date of original publication and are intended to be snapshots of that time. Informa- tion is updated to 2014 in rare instances. viii Introduction Music can provide stimulations, often of a deep, spiritual nature, to those who perform; music can be a life of its own for those who create it through composition; and music can be a subject of total absorption for those who would study its history and its roots. Whether any of these three branches leads to a professional career or not, together they represent the paths open to lovers of music at all levels. And it is the balance between these three that was ever shifting from the time that music first took hold as an organized effort at Harvard. —Elliot Forbes, A History of Music at Harvard to 1972, vii Though much has changed since music at Harvard officially began with the hiring of the composer and organist John Knowles Paine as a “teacher of sacred music” in 1862—he was not appointed as Professor of Music until thirteen years later—Forbes’s description still holds true on many levels. First, his description of the three different ways one may encounter music still corresponds, in its basic outlines, to current realities in the Music Department. Music is still performed, composed, and studied, both outside and inside the curriculum, although the balances have shifted considerably, as Forbes points out has always been the case. Forbes also takes into account the fact that the musical transac- tion goes both ways: people can do things with music—perform, compose, and study it—but music also does things to (and with) us. Finally, Forbes speaks of the special role of music at a liberal arts university, which must address the needs of those who aspire to professional careers as well as those for whom music will remain an important part of their non-professional lives. Meeting both needs is still the Music Department’s most important task. The biggest change from Paine’s time to today has been the shift from a department with a single unified curriculum that trained all students to be proficient composers and organists (an original composition was required of all degree recipients well into the 20th century) to one that provides students with more choices of specialized training in the various subfields of music. The Music Department’s development therefore follows the transformation of the university as a whole. Morton and Phyllis Keller, in their 2001 ix book Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University, describe the move “from a Brahmin university [before 1945]—regional, parochial, dominated by Boston’s elite, resistant in varying degrees to Jews, women, and new developments in the academic disciplines—into a meritocratic university ... [in which] national and international aca- demic standing was the measure of all things.” (xiii, emphasis original). The Music Department has long been at the forefront of these academic and social transformations. The curriculum was regularly changed and expanded, over time adding the academic disciplines of historical musicology (in 1933), ethnomusicology (in 1960), and music theory (in 1985, with the appointment of David Lewin). Hugo Leichtentritt, Harvard class of 1894, was hired in 1933 as part of an effort to establish musicology in the curriculum. The noted German-Jewish scholar was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and was hired at a time when appointments of Jewish scholars were uncommon at Harvard.