Harvard University Department of Music

Mario Davidovsky

Professor Emeritus
Composition

Davidovsky directed the Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center for many years while he was MacDowell Professor of Music at Columbia University. He also served as Director of the Composers' Conference at Wellesley for 29 years. At Harvard, he received the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship. In 2000-2001, two CDs of his works were recently released by Bridge Records: Flashback and Canticum Cantorum; and his Cantione Sine Textu, for soprano and chamber ensemble, was published by C.F. Peters.

Davidovsky served as vice-president of the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress; vice-president of the Robert Miller Fund for Music, and consulted for the Guggenheim Foundation both in the U.S. and Latin America. He was also Director of the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition.

Robert Levin

Professor Emeritus

Pianist Robert Levin has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia, in recital, as soloist, and in chamber concerts. Levin is renowned for his restoration of the Classical period practice of improvised embellishments and cadenzas; his Mozart and Beethoven performances have been hailed for their active mastery of the Classical musical language. He has made recordings for DG Archiv, CRI, Decca/Oiseau-Lyre, Deutsche Grammophon, ECM, Klavierfestival Ruhr, New York Philomusica, Nonesuch, Philips, and SONY Classical. Among these are the complete Bach concertos with Helmuth Rilling as well as the English Suites and the Well-Tempered Clavier (on five keyboard instruments) for Hänssler’s 172-CD Edition Bachakademie.

Robert Levin studied piano with Louis Martin and composition with Stefan Wolpe in New York. He worked with Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau and Paris while still in high school, afterwards attending Harvard. Upon graduation he was invited by Rudolf Serkin to head the theory department of the Curtis Institute of Music, a post he left after five years to take up a professorship at the School of the Arts, SUNY Purchase, outside of New York City. In 1979 he was Resident Director of the Conservatoire américain in Fontainebleau, France, at the request of Nadia Boulanger, and taught there from 1979 to 1983. From 1986 to 1993 he was professor of piano at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University until his retirement.

Lewis Lockwood

Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music
Historical Musicology

Lockwood (b. 1930) has been called by Joseph Kerman “a leading musical scholar of the postwar generation and the leading American authority on Beethoven” (New York Review of Books). As a music historian he has worked primarily in two fields–the Italian Renaissance and the intensive study of Beethoven’s life and music, with an emphasis on the sources that amply document Beethoven’s creative process. He did his graduate work at Princeton under Oliver Strunk, and then taught at Princeton for many years before coming to Harvard in 1980. At Harvard he taught graduate seminars in both of his major fields, and also created and lectured in the Core Course on Opera for twenty years. His Renaissance scholarship culminated in his major book, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400-1505 (1984, rev. 2008), which received the Marraro Prize of the Society of Italian Historians, and in 2008 he was given the Kristeller Award by the Renaissance Society of America.

As a Beethoven scholar he published numerous studies and trained a generation of younger scholars at Princeton and Harvard. His books include Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (1992), and Inside Beethoven’s Quartets, co-authored with the Juilliard String Quartet (2008). In 1992 he founded the yearbook Beethoven Forum, which ran for fourteen years, and in 2003 he brought out his Beethoven; The Music and the Life, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in biography. In 2013 he co-edited the critical edition of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook with Alan Gosman, a project on which he had worked for many years. His newest book, published in 2015, is Beethoven’s Symphonies: An Artistic Vision. He has received honorary degrees from the Universitä degli Studi di Ferrara, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Wake Forest University.

Jameson Marvin

Senior Lecturer
Choral Director

Dr. Marvin received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Music from the University of Illinois, a Master of Arts in Choral Conducting from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition from the UCSB. He was Director of Choral Ensembles at Vassar College before coming to Harvard in 1978. Dr. Marvin conducted the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, and offered courses in Choral Conducting and Choral Analysis/Interpretation.

Marvin has conducted 80 choral-orchestral works and is a conductor, teacher, author, scholar, editor and arranger. He has written on subjects ranging from choral intonation to Renaissance music for men's voices including The Conductor's Process, Five Centuries of Choral Music: Essays in Honor of Howard Swan, Pengragon Press, Mastery of Choral Ensemble, E. C. Schirmer, Choral Excellence: Elements of Successful Leadership, and Perfection and Naturalness: A Practical Guide to Renaissance Choral Performance, Oxford University Press. Dr. Marvin sustained and expanded a choral environment rich enought to attract thousands of students to his program, from the beginning singer to the advanced musician. The choral program at Harvard was named the top collegiate choral program in the country by Classical Singer magazine.

www.bernardrands.com

Christoph Wolff

Adams University Research Professor
Curator of the Isham Memorial Library
Historical Musicology

Wolff's primary research interests extend to the music from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, especially to Bach and Mozart studies. Publications include Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (1991), Mozart's Requiem (1994), The New Bach Reader (1998), Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (1999; ed. with R. Brinkmann), Music of My Future. The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio (2001; ed. with R. Brinkmann), and The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook (2012; with M. Zepf). A recipient of the Dent Medal of the International Musicological Society (1978) the Humboldt Research Prize (1996), and the Bach Prize of the Royal Academy of Music (2006), he won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000), which has been translated into nine languages. Wolff's recent book is Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune. Serving the Emperor, 1788-1791(2012), which received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Professor Wolff taught at the University of Erlangen (1963-68), the University of Toronto (1968-70), Columbia (1970-76) and Princeton Universities (1973 and 1975) before joining the Harvard faculty in 1976. At Harvard he was Chair of the Department of Music (1980-88, 1990-91), Acting Director of the University Library (1991-92), and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1992-2000). He also was President and Director of the Bach-Archiv Leipzig (2001-13) and President of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (2004-13). An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Saxon Academy of Sciences at Leipzig, and the Akademie für Mozart-Forschung in Salzburg (which he chaired 1996-2006), he holds an honorary professorship at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is an honorary member of the American Musicological Society, the German and American Bach Societies, and the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg. He currently serves on the Board of the Packard Humanities Institute and on the Graduate Faculty of the Juilliard School.

Mozart at the Gateway to his Fortune. Music Facsimilies and Recordings

Emeriti Faculty

Mario Davidovsky

Robert Levin

Lewis Lockwood

Jameson Marvin

Bernard Rands

John Stewart

Christoph Wolff

Harvard University Department of Music

©2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Website by Christine Southworth and Steve Robertson.

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Emeriti Faculty

Mario Davidovsky

Robert Levin

Lewis Lockwood

Jameson Marvin

Bernard Rands

John Stewart

Christoph Wolff

Harvard University Department of Music

©2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Website by Christine Southworth and Steve Robertson.

Quick Links

Practice Room Hours

©2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Website by Christine Southworth and Steve Robertson.