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Music
and Ritual in South India
Richard Wolf's Indian
Studies
In Madras, India, in a bustling knot of
streets called Mylapore, vendors sell
rubber sandals, bangles, fruit, and
vegetables to those who come to visit the
area's most famous Hindu temple. Amidst
the din and dust is a narrow side alley,
home to three or four musical shops, among
them, that of C.M. Sambandam. His shop is
tiny-8-ft. by 10-ft.-and packed with
stringed instruments, vinas and tamburas
in every stage of repair. Visitors leave
their shoes outside on the steps. Incense
smolders under the framed images of local
deities, their foreheads smudged with red
powder.
To test an instrument in Sambandam's
shop, a prospective buyer might close the
rattling metal door to shut out street
noise. There, in the dark, you can hear
the distinctive sound quality of each
instrument.
Assistant Professor of Music Richard
Wolf has been to visit C.M. Sambandam
before. This time, he went hoping to pick
up a few instruments for the Music
Department to add to its world music
collection. He's using the instruments in
his classes at Harvard: in his course,
Classical Music of South India, for
example, students learn to play the
mridangam drum and the vina.
It was an overnight train ride to the
field site where Wolf had done doctoral
research - the Nilgiri Hills in South
India. He was hoping to collect more data
for a book he's writing about music and
ritual and their relationship to time.
Questions about large-scale time
structures led him back to this part of
the world for an ethnographic project that
takes account of local Indian calendars,
agricultural cycles, and the Western
calendar.
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He'd come to talk with members of a modern
peasant tribe called the Kota, who live in a small
village nestled in Ketti valley. Wolf was looking
forward to a spate of quiet research and interviews
in this beautiful and quiet location. But he'd
arrived in the middle of religious
observances.
"The music begins at sunset," Wolf recounts.
"Male Kota drummers and shawm players set the tempo
for the dancers, wrapped in white cotton
waistcloths and embroidered upper body wraps, who
perform around them in a circle."
Wolf donned a waistcloth and shawl and joined
in, dancing until early in the morning. After only
a few hours' sleep, he woke to the commotion of the
festival taking place outside the wattle-and-daub
walls of his 7-ft.x7-ft. room.
Says Wolf: "It's important to me to show my
commitment, joining in even if I am tired or cold.
It's also an appropriate means for demonstrating
affection and comradarie."
Wolf's research goes deep into local rituals to
study changes in Kota representations of time:
"There have been environmental changes over the
last 100 years like deforestation, widespread
cultivation of tea, a huge influx of people, and
pollution. These things affect the seasonal
calendar, in that people eat different things now,
are no longer at the subsistance level, and
agriculture as a basis of understanding the passing
of time is not the same as it was. I'm trying to
see how this effects the way rituals are scheduled.
I'm interested in the ways in which people move
between flexible and fixed representations of time,
which you can find in both music and in the
calendar."
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Music and
the Aesthetics of Modernity Conference, November
9-11
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER
9
Karol Berger: Time's Arrow and the Advent of
Musical Modernity
Lydia Goehr: The
Double Take: on Music, Dissonance, and Humor
Charles Rosen: Berg's Kammerkonzert: Uniform
Mapping of the Chromatic Space
Leo Treitler: "Vom Pfeifen und alten
Dampfmaschinen," Kurt Schwitters, Virgil Thomson, A
Reply to Milan Kundera, and My Galoshes:
Reflections on Modernity
Martin Warnke: Graphic Warfare
David Lewin: Some Theoretical Thoughts about
Aspects of Harmony in Mahler's Symphonies
Karen Painter: Beyond the
Bourgeoisie
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER
10
Henri Zerner: A propos
of Bufon's Discours du style
Horst Bredekamp: Iconography of Chance
Hermann Danuser: The Textualization of the
Context: Comic Strategies in Meta-Operas of the
18th and 20th Centuries
Scott Burnham: On the Beautiful in
Mozart
Klaus Kropfinger: Modernity and the
Dialectics of Artistic Freedom
Anne Shreffler: Ideologies of Serialism:
Political Implications of Modernist Music,
1945-1965
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht: Music, A
Non-hermeneutic Art?
Judith Ryan: Schoenberg's Byron: the "Ode to
Napoleon," the Antinomies of Modernism, and the
Problem of German Imperialism
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER
11
Peter Burgard: Of
Aprons, Buses, and Bridges: Kafka's Judgment
Anton Kaes: Avant-Garde and Agitprop in Film
Music: Eisler's Collaboration with Brecht
Anthony Newcomb: The Anxiety of Allusion
Carolyn Abbate: Modernist
Dishonor
This conference is dedicated to Reinhold
Brinkmann.
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Web-Based
CAI: a New Ear-Training
Resource
The Harvard Music
Department has begun tapping the resources of the
FAS computer network in its music theory curriculum
by providing an ear-training facility on the web.
The Earlab Website--the first of its kind in the
department--is a resource that provides
ear-training drills to students at all levels of
musical proficiency.
The resource is web-based,
so any student with a web-browser and a connection
to the FAS network can use the site and its
programs, regardless of their computer platform
(Mac or PC). And because the software was designed
and written specifically to complement Harvard's
music theory curriculum, the drills and exercises
reinforce that course work better than any
commercially available software.
The site was conceived and
created by Ed Gollin, Preceptor in Music at
Harvard. It became clear that the ear training
exercises undertaken in Music A, the department's
basic musicianship course, needed daily
reinforcement to be of maximum benefit. The website
provides a partner and drill instructor to any
student, 24 hours a day, allowing them to maximize
their classroom instruction at home.
The site will soon be
integrated into other music courses, and will
feature exercises aimed at non-music concentators:
students in the rudiments courses as well as others
in the Harvard community interested in improving
their musical skills.
Interested in exploring
the site? Visit
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~earlab/index.html.
An additional tutorial is available at
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~earlab/tutorial/index.html
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Ying
String Quartet Named Blodgett
Artist-in-Residence
From the world's most prestigious
stages to the rural farm towns of America,
the Ying Quartet has earned recognition
for both its brilliant concert
performances and its enterprising
promotion of chamber music's larger role
in society. Winners of the 1993 Naumburg
Chamber Music Award, Quartet-in-Residence
at the Eastman School of Music since 1996,
and creators of LifeMusic, we are pleased
to have the Yings join the Music
Department as Blodgett
Artists-in-Residence for 2001-2002. The
Yings replace the Avalon String Quartet,
who are undergoing personnel changes.
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Richard
F. French, Musicologist
1915-2001
The music community is saddened by the
loss of Richard French S.B. '37 and A.M.
'39. French initiated the first endowed
professorship in the U.S. in the field of
music librarianship--the Richard. F.
French Librarianship Chair--at Loeb Music
Library in 1988. Assistant Professor of
Music at Harvard from 1947 to 1951, French
retired from the Yale faculty in 1985,
where he received two of its highest
honors: the Samuel Simons Sanford Medal
(1991) and the Gustave Jacob Stoeckel
Award (1999). Memorial services will be
held this fall on both the Yale campus and
at the Juilliard
School.
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Kao
and Burgoyne Named 2001 Hoopes Prize
Winners
Seventy-three
undergraduates have won the Thomas T.
Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly
work or research. The prize is funded by
the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes '19.
Recipients from the Music Department are
John Ashley Burgoyne ("Cinderella Stories.
Vladimir Propp and the Analysis of Opera")
and Grace Kao ("Performance Pitch of
Sixteenth Century English Sacred Music: An
Interdisciplinary Approach").
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Sarah Adams
Directs RISM
Dr. Sarah Adams, Keeper of the Isham Memorial
Library in Loeb Music Library, was appointed
Director of the U.S. Office of Répertoire
International des Sources Musicales (RISM) in July
2000. RISM is an international inventory of musical
sources, dedicated to identifying, cataloging, and
describing sources of music and writings about
music from the earliest times through about
1850.
Housed in the Loeb Music Library, the U.S. RISM
Office was first moved to the Harvard College
Library from the Library of Congress in 1977. The
U.S. Office is charged with receiving data from
U.S. libraries and archives, updating the RISM
database, and supplying information to the
international RISM office.
The major project of the Office since 1985 has
been RISM Series A/II, Music Manuscripts,
1600-1800, the largest RISM project to date. Dr.
Adams will complete the transition of the Office
from the principally production-based facility it
was under the NEH-sponsored work on Series A/II to
a service facility that assists U.S. librarians and
archivists in reporting and cataloging materials
relevant to the RISM resources.
Adams has identified her immediate goals: "I
have two key projects right now: I am looking to
mount a website linked to the main RISM site where
librarians can submit new data, and I will begin
collaborating with the Yale Music Library for the
cataloging of Yale's music manuscripts, which have
to date not been included in the RISM
database."
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Grace
Kao '01: Practicing Music and Medicine
Grace Kao graduated with a
joint concentration in chemistry and music. She'll
be spending a year in Taiwan before going on to
medical school. Grace Kao graduated with a joint
concentration in chemistry and music. She'll be
spending a year in Taiwan before going on to
medical school.
Your commitment to
music must be strong to earn a joint concentration
with chemistry. How do the two work together?
I'm not sure if chemistry
itself really works together with music, but
science and a quantitative approach to things in
general is very useful. My thesis was sort of an
interdisciplinary approach to a musical problem--I
was using medical, anthropological, and statistical
data to determine the performance pitch of
16th-century English sacred music. Also, I often
use science/math analogies when I'm conducting,
like "No, I want an exponential crescendo there,"
or "This should have an periodic feel to it, like a
sine wave." The orchestra usually finds it really
funny, but it works!
Tell me about
volunteering in Taiwan--what does the next year
hold for you?
I'll be volunteering for
the Tzu-Chi Compassionate Relief Foundation. It's a
group, sort of like the Red Cross, that sends
medical teams to help at international disasters,
builds hospitals, spreads awareness on public
health, and tries to improve the spiritual
well-being of people all over the world. I will be
working at the main hospital in Hualien, on the
eastern coast of Taiwan. I will also be doing some
public health work, teaching English and possibly
music, and hopefully organizing a music group of
some sort. And, I'll be applying to medical
schools.
How do you see music
fitting in with your life at medical school?
I'm not sure yet how
medical school and music will work together. At the
very least, I hope to be a doctor during the day
and a musician by night. I'd like to find a nice
church choir and maybe a community orchestra to
conduct or play in. I'm also interested in using
medicine to benefit musicians--many people have
sustained injuries as a result of their playing and
perhaps I could do something with that. Or, I could
specialize in treating musicians, since they value
their hands and voices in a different sort of way
from most. I'm also interested in learning more
about how the voice works and other physiological
aspects of music production. As part of my thesis I
was studying the changes in vocal production from
the 1400s to the present (changes in larynx size,
etc). I would really enjoy some sort of
interdisciplinary research, or medical research
aimed to benefit musicians, but I guess I will wait
to see how this all fits together for me. No matter
what, it's bound to be interesting.
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Brinkmann
Receives Ernst von Siemens
Foundation 2001 Music Award
"In all highly evolved
cultures," write the directors of Ernst
von Siemens Foundation, "thinking, talking
and writing about music and coming to
terms with it analytically have a
significance inseparable from the actual
invention of music itself. In Reinhold
Brinkmann, the Ernst von Siemens Music
Foundation has singled out a figure whose
areas of interest range from the Middle
Ages to the present day. But in order to
understand and recognize music in such
all-embracing terms one has to have
supreme musicality, intelligence, and an
unrelenting passion for great works of art
and their history--all qualities that
distinguish this year's Siemens
laureate."
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In the late 1960s Brinkmann, along with
Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan, was a leading
force in the reinterpretation and revaluation of
modern music, a field previously ostracized by
scholars. The von Siemens Foundation found
Brinkmann's contribution noteworthy for five
reasons: the penetration of his musical analyses,
which still set standards today; his interpretation
of modern art in light of the modernization of
society; his co-establishment of music in exile as
a field of research; his open-mindedness toward
avant-garde music divorced from roots in tradition;
and finally, his study of German romanticism to
reconstruct the early history of musical
modernism.
The Ernst von Siemens Music Prize rewards the
work of both music scholars and performers in the
way the Nobel Prize does for science or literature;
the award lauds achievement apart from its
commercial potential. Past laureates include
Benjamin Britten, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter,
Yehudi Menuhin, Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Berio
and Gyorgy Ligeti.
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Faculty
News
Professor
Ingrid T. Monson, formerly Associate
Professor of Music at Washington
University, has been named the first
Quincy Jones Professor of African American
Music at Harvard University, a tenured
chair. This is the first time a
corporation (Time Warner Inc.) has ever
funded a permanent professorship in
African American studies at an American
university. And it is the first time since
Eileen Southern's retirement in 1986 that
there will be a permanent, full-time joint
professor of music and African American
Studies.
Professor Monson
won the Sonneck Society's 1998 Irving
Lowens Prize for the best book in American
music for her 1996 Saying Something, Jazz
Improvisation and Interaction. She was
also a founding member of the nationally
known Klezmer Conservatory Band, and has
many years of experience playing trumpet
with jazz and salsa bands. Prof. Monson
will begin teaching in the spring semester
of 2002.
Professor of
Music Emeritus Donald Martino
celebrated his 70th birthday with a series
of two Fromm Players concerts, February 16
and March 16th. Martino's seminal
Triple Concerto (1977) was given
two performances.
Given
Martino's early career as a jazz
clarinetist, it wasn't hard to spot the
threads of autobiography running
through the piece--that is, in the
sense of its being "about" everything
the composer has learned, dreamed,
thought, or taught with respect to the
instrument.
--Boston
Globe
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Mario
Davidovsky's Fifth Quartet was premiered
by the Mendelssohn String Quartet at the 92nd
Street Y in January. Writes The New York
Times: "Mr. Davidovsky offers not a polished
whole but a handful of glittering shards. Described
as one movement, this piece is in fact many
movements, a chain of episodes in which the
instruments establish a fragile mood only to break
it with an outburst of a new, contrasting
effect."
Dwight D. Robinson
Professor of the Humanities Robert Levin
replaced an injured Alfred Brendel for a Boston
Symphony Orchestra concert on only a few hours'
notice. Upon entering the stage, Levin addressed
the audience: "I should warn you. The cadenzas are
going to be improvised!" What followed, by all
accounts, was an extraordinary concert. Says
Globe critic Richard Dyer, "...both
conductor and orchestra seemed to enjoy every
element of this performance, the steeplechase and
the storytelling. Levin received the tumultuous
ovation his musicianship and his courage
deserved."
Assistant Professor
Mauro Calcagno helped initiate, with a group
of graduate students, weekly events called Friday
Lunch Talks. Spearheaded by Calcagno and Thomas
Peattie, the series consists of informal colloquia
given by grad students, faculty and associates of
the department who present works-in-progress.
Music of My Future: The
Schoenberg Quartets and Trio, edited by
Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph
Wolff, is now available from Harvard University
Press or directly from the Music Department. The
volume includes papers from speakers at the
Schoenberg conference held in Paine Hall, 1999; it
is dedicated to David Lewin, Walter W.
Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard.
Schoenberg's quartets and
trio, composed over a nearly forty-year period,
occupy a central position among twentieth-century
chamber music. The first part of the book provides
an 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 looks at musical issues of motive,
text setting, meter, imitative counterpoint, and
closure within Schoenberg's quartets and
trio.
To order a copy of Music
of My Future send a check for $28.95 ($25 plus
$3.95 postage) to the Department.
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Staff
News
We welcome Fernando
Viesca as Building Manager for the Department.
Fernando comes to Harvard after 20 years in his
post at the Academy of Arts and Sciences and
several years in the building industry in Mexico.
Mary Gerbi joins us
as Assistant to the Chair; she previously worked in
the Dean's Office and the Office of Career Services
at Harvard.
After six years of
exceptional work, Ann Steuernagel, Events
Coordinator, has left to become Visiting Associate
Professor of Film and Video at Mt. Holyoke
College.
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Alumni
News
Claude Palisca, Ph.D. '54, died at age 79
in New Haven, Connecticut on January 10th. Palisca,
a musicologist who specialized in the Renaissance,
was one of the outstanding scholars of his
generation. He was the Moses Professor of Music at
Yale, emeritus.
Kenneth Mansfield, A.B. '54, A.M. '55,
played an inaugural concert for the new console of
the 46 rank organ at Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian
Church in Lafayette, California, where he has
served as organist since 1968. The program included
his composition, Various and Sundry Treatments
of O Shenandoah! Mansfield is retired from the
Music Department of California State University,
Hayward.
Tonu Kalam, A.B. '69, is currently Music
Director of both the Longview Symphony Orchestra in
Texas and the Symphony Orchestra of the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is
Professor of Music.
Composer Allen Shawn A.B. '70 staged an
all-Shawn program at Longy School of Music in
February. He premiered Five Pieces, a suite for two
pianos. Also on the program were four settings of
e.e. cummings poems sung by soprano (and Music
Department staff assistant) Beth Canterbury.
Louis Karchin, Ph.D. '78, received the
American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard
Lieberson Prize. In addition, a compact disc
comprising six of his works was recently released
by New World Records. Karchin is Professor of Music
at New York University, where he directs the
advanced graduate program in Music Composition.
Ferdinand Gajewski, Ph.D. '80 , former
Teaching Fellow in the Music Department and the
Department's first Sidney B. Heywood Fellow,
divides his time between Chopin's pen scratchings
(some things never change) and his class of
fledgling piano virtuosi. Gajewski's longtime
students Peter and Allen Yu will be freshmen at
Harvard this fall.
Sergio Durante (A.M. '85, Ph.D. '93) has
been appointed full professor at the University of
Padua, where he has been associate professor since
1991. He is responsible for redesigning the musical
curricula for two different programs: an
interdisciplinary program in the visual arts,
theatre, cinema, and music, and one centered around
music as a cultural resource.
Dr. Philip Lasser, A.B. '85 is a
professor at the Juilliard School and President of
the European American Musical Alliance, Inc. He is
currently running a summer program for young
American composers in Paris at La Schola Cantor,
dedicated to maintaining the Boulanger tradition in
compositional training.
Eric Kramer A.B. '87 has been invited to
be a Student Assistant Conductor with the Budapest
Festival Orchestra and the Opera National de Lyon
for 2001-02. He continues his work as Music
Director of the Collegium Westchester, and is
serving this year as Assistant Conductor for the
Bronx Opera.
Anthony Brandt Ph.D. '93 and Karim
Al-Zand Ph.D. '00 are both on the faculty of
Sheperd School of Music at Rice University. Karim
and Dereth Phillips were married this past December
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Charles McGuire Ph.D. '98 is now
Assistant Professor of Musicology at Oberlin. He
has a book forthcoming from Ashgate Press on
Elgar's Oratorios.
Noël Bisson Ph.D. '99, her husband
Alan Cooper, and daughter Josie announce the
arrival of Caroline Ellen Cooper on March 1st,
2001.
Brian Hulse Ph.D. '99 and his wife
Rebecca welcomed Finn Edward Hulse (8-lbs. 2-oz.)
on May 5, 2001. Hulse was recently appointed
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wellesley
College.
Christoph Neidhofer Ph.D.'99 starts a
tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of
Music Theory at McGill University in September,
2001.
Ed Gollin Ph.D. '01 delivered a paper to
the annual meeting of the New York State Music
Theory Society: "From Tonoi to modi: A
set-transformational approach to reception
history." He will also participate in the first
annual Mannes Institute Workshop on the history of
music theory.
Alan Gosman Ph.D. '01 will be taking the
position of Assistant Professor in Music Theory at
Michigan State University.
Jonathan Holland Ph.D. '01 and Caprice
Corona A.B. '97 were married last December in a
ceremony in Sacramento, California.
Patty Tang Ph.D. '01 was appointed
Assistant Professor Music in the Music and Theater
Arts Department at MIT. She assumes her post in the
fall.
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Graduate
Student News
Arni Ingolfsson recently spent time in
Berlin studying the reception of Scandinavian music
in Nazi Germany. This summer he will travel to
Bayreuth for additional study on a student
fellowhip from the International Richard Wagner
Foundation.
David Kaminsky won fellowships for
fieldwork in Sweden from the American Scandinavia
Foundation and the Harvard Center for European
Studies to pursue research on Swedish folk
music.
Ken Ueno took part in Wellesley College's
"Cultural Friction" lecture series with a concert
and discussion entitled, "Democratization of
Classical Music: The Use of Technology to Liberate
'Non-Privileged' Sound."
Stephan Hakenberg premiered his Five
Scenes for Vibraphone with the Auros Group for New
Music.
Julie Rohwein participated in the
Composers Symposium at the Oregon Bach Festival in
June, 2000, where they performed her work,
Triton, a piece for clarinet and
computer-generated sounds. The final version of
Triton was recently played both at Harvard
and at Digital Polyphony at Brandeis.
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Undergraduate
News
Jesse Billet '01 has been accepted as a
choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge,
England, the first graduate of an American
university to receive such an honor. Beginning in
the fall, he'll join what's considered the finest
choir in the world, the King's College Chapel
Choir, and sing in regular services, concerts and
recording sessions including the famous Festival of
Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast live by the BBC
on Christmas Eve.
Christopher Trapani's '02 Piano Sonata
received its Boston premiere in a concert featuring
pianist Sergey Schepkin at Williams Hall, New
England Conservatory.
David Salvage '01 is the recipient of the
Louise Donovan Award, which annually recognizes
Harvard students who have worked behind the scenes
in the arts. Salvage is a member of the
Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, music directed
and composed for several stage productions, and is
currently president of the Harvard-Radcliffe
Contemporary Music Ensemble. Salvage also won the
2001 Bach Society Orchestra Composition
Competition.
Ayano Ninomiya '01 was the featured
violin performer on a recent program of the Pro
Arte Chamber Orchestra at Sanders Theatre.
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