Harvard University Department of Music

The essays included here bridge the conventional divides between theory, history, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, performance practice, cognitive psychology, and dance studies. In these investigations, music emerges as an art form that has an important lesson to teach. Not only can music be understood as sounds shaped in time but—more radically—as time shaped in sounds.

Ordering information

In addressing a broad array of topics and regions—ranging from Beneventan chant in Italy and Dalmatia, to music theory in medieval France, to later transformations of chant in Iceland and Spain—these essays honor and build upon Thomas Forrest Kelly’s work in keeping cultural, geographic, and political factors close to the heart of the musicology of chant, early music, and beyond. Two essays complement Kelly’s scholarly and pedagogical interests by investigating the role of the city in premieres of works composed long after the end of the Middle Ages.
Ordering information

The Organ in the Academy. Essays in Celebration of the Installation of the Charles B. Fisk & Peter J. Gomes Memorial Organ. Thomas F. Kelly (2013)

The Organ in the Academy. In Celebration of the Installation of the Charles B. Fisk & Peter J. Gomes Memorial Organ Thomas F. Kelly On the occasion of the installation of the new Charles B. Fisk and Peter J. Gomes Memorial Organ in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, the Department of Music at Harvard sponsored a symposium dealing with the organ at Harvard, the organs of Harvard, and the role of Harvard organs and organists in American music and musical education. The symposium took place on Sunday, April 22, 2012. This volume presents the papers delivered at the symposium, along with information on the organs in the Memorial Church at Harvard. 2013, Harvard University Department of Music.

The symposium took place on Sunday, April 22, 2012. This volume presents the papers delivered at the symposium, along with information on the organs in the Memorial Church at Harvard. 2013, Harvard University Department of Music. [download for free in pdf form]

Harvard's Paine Hall. Musical Canon and the New England Barn, Reinhold Brinkmann (2010)

Part aristocratic Italian Renaissance elegance, part New England barn, Paine Hall rose up early in the twentieth century to house a burgeoning Music Department at Harvard. Despite the fact that music students had long outgrown their quarters in the basement of Holden Chapel, the building was opposed by many of the faculty, including science professors who begged the President to leave the site—a wedge of Ward 9 in Cambridge—vacant so as not to “steal our light.”

It was Harvard’s first music professor, John Knowles Paine, who envisioned a building set aside exclusively for the study and making of music. It took three Harvard presidents, a long courtship of the Corporation and faculty, and the tireless campaigning of department chair Walter R. Spalding to make Paine’s dream a reality. This volume chronicles the building of Paine Halll, its famous frieze of composers, and puts all in context of music history in Boston at the turn of the 20th century, with its avid music journalists and transcendentalists. Most of all, Harvard's Paine Hall tells a story of men of music and passion carving a permanent place for art at Harvard and in education. 2010, Harvard University Department of Music. [download for free in pdf form]

The Century of Bach and Mozart. Perspectives on Historiography, Composition, Theory, and Performance, ed. Sean Gallagher and Thomas Forrest Kelly (2008)

For many today Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stand as towering representatives of European music of the eighteenth century, composers whose works reflect intellectual, religious, and aesthetic trends of the period. Research on their compositions continues in many ways to shape our broader understanding of eighteenth-century musical thought and its contexts.

This collection of essays by leading authorities in the field offers a variety of new perspectives on the two composers, as well as some of their important contemporaries, Haydn in particular. Addressing topics as diverse as the historiography of eighteenth-century music, concepts of time and musical form, the idea of the musical work and its relation to publishing practices, compositional process, and performance practice, these essays together constitute a major contribution to eighteenth-century studies. This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on September 23-25, 2005 to honor Professor Christoph Wolff, Adams University Professor at Harvard University.Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music, Harvard University. Sean Gallagher is Visiting Associate Professor of Music at Boston UniversityISHAM 22February 6 x 9 56 music examples; 14 tables; 24 plates 500 pp. Paperback $39.95 IBSN 0-9640317-5-2

Ordering information

Compiled by Matthias Roeder, Houghton Library and Sarah Adams, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. 40 pgs. $13.95.

Part II. The Pre-Modernist Roots of Modernism. Hermann Danuser: The Textualization of the Context: Comic Strategies in Meta-Operas of the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Horst Bredekamp: John Cage and the Principle of Chance. Part III. Aspects of Modernism. Anthony Newcomb: The Hunt for Reminiscences, David Lewin: Some Theoretical Thoughts about Aspects of Harmony in Mahler's Symphonies, Karen Painter: Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Social Democracy and Musical Modernism in Interwar Austria and Germany, Judith L. Ryan: Schoenberg's Byron: the "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," the Antinomies of Modernism, and the Problem of German Imperialism, Anne C. Shreffler: Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky's Threni and the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Klaus Kropfinger: The Essence and Persistence of Modernity, Leo Treitler: "Vom Pfeiffen und von alten Dampfmaschinen," Virgil Thomson, a Reply to Milan Kundera, Kurt Schwitters, and my Galoshes: Perspectives on "Modern" and "Modernism," Peter J. Burgard: Of Aprons, Buses, and Bridges: Kafka's Judgment, Lydia Goehr: Philosophical Exercises in Repetition: on Music, Humor, and Exile in Wittgenstein and Adorno. Part IV. The Anti-Hermeneutic Impulse: Beyond Modernity or Beyond Modernism? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Production of Presence, Interspersed with Absence: a Modernist View on Music, Libretti, and Staging, Carolyn Abbate: Cipher and Performance in Sternberg's Dishonored.

Ordering information

Schoenberg's quartets and trio, composed over a nearly forty-year period, occupy a central position among twentieth-century chamber music. This volume, based on papers presented at a conference in honor of David Lewin, collects a wide range of approaches to Schoenberg's pieces. The first part of the book provides a historical context to these works, examining Viennese quartet culture and traditions, Webern's reception of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, Schoenberg's view of the Beethoven quartets, and the early reception of Schoenberg's First Quartet. The second part examines musical issues of motive, text setting, meter, imitative counterpoint, and closure within Schoenberg's quartets and trio.

Ordering information

Remembering the Future, Luciano Berio. (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993-94)

Luciano Berio
(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures).

Luciano Berio shares with us some musical experiences that "invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory." His scintillating meditation on music and the ways of experiencing it reflects the composer's profound understanding of the history and contemporary practice of his art.

Berio was one of the dominant composers of the second half of the twentieth century. Remembering the Future is the text of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1993-94, now made available for the first time. Ordering information.

Ordering information

Words and Music: The Composer's View
William W. Austin: Words and Music: Theory and Practice of 20th-Century Composers, Thomas Beveridge: And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Gordon Binkerd: Nocturne, Elliott Carter: Tarantella, Henry Leland Clarke: The Rewaking, Leon Kirchner: Words from Wordsworth, Karl Kohn: Madrigal, Robert Middleton: Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem, Robert Moevs: Ave Maria, John MacIvor Perkins: Alleluia, Randall Thompson: The Eternal Dove, Russell Woollen: Resurrection, James Yannatos: Three from E.E. Cummings.

Words and Music: The Scholar's View
Howard Mayer Brown: Psyche's Lament: Some Music for the Medici Wedding in 1565, Frank A. D'Accone: Transitional Text Forms and Settings in an Early 16th-Century Florentine Manuscript, Elliot Forbes: Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt: An Example of a Goethe Lyri Set to Music, Richard F. French: Hindemith's Mass 1963: An Introduction, James Haar: Altro non é il mio amor, Daniel Heartz: Voix de ville: Between Humanist Ideals and Musical Realities, David G. Hughes: Music for St. Stephen at Iaon, Henry W. Kaufmann: Music for a Noble Florentine Wedding (1539), Claude V. Palisca: Marco Scacchi's Defense of Modern Music (1649), Rulan Chao Pian: Text Setting with the Shipyi Animated Aria, Nino Pirrotta: New Glimpses of an Unwritten Tradition, H. Colin Slim: An Anonymous Twice-Texted Motel (Á A. T. M.), Milos Velimirovic: The Prooemiac Psalm of Byzantine Vespers, John Ward: Curious Tunes for Strange Histories. Both volumes $20.

1988 volume, clothbound, 246 pages, $25.00
1993 volume, paperback, 194 pages, $15.00
Order both, $30.00

Anguish of Hell and Peace of Soul. A 1623 Collection of Sixteen Motets on Psalm 116 by Michael Praetorius, Heinrich Schutz and Others. Ed. Christoph Wolff with Daniel R. Melamed (1994)

In 1652 Burckhard Grossmann, a court official at Jena in Thuringia and a wealthy man of letters and musical interest, published a collection of German psalm motets. Virtually without parallel in the history of sacred music, this collection comprises sixteen works by different composers, all based on one and the same text: Psalm 116 of the Lutheran Bible.

Paperback, 269 pages, $52.50

$42.00 each

Cloth bound, 306 pages, $52.50

Clothbound, 86 pages, $26.50

Clothbound, 487 pages, $36.95