In Memoriam

Brinkmann came to Harvard from Berlin, where he had been Professor at the Hochschule der Künste since 1980, and prior to that, Professor of Musicology at the University of Marburg. In 2001, he was the first musicologist to be awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. The international scope of his work and influence is further reflected in two Festschriften, Music and the Aesthetic of Modernity, edited by Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb and published with Harvard University Press (2005), and one produced by the Humboldt University in Berlin, where Reinhold held an honorary professorship: Musikalische Analyse und kulturgeschichtliche Kontextualisierung, edited Tobias Bleek and Camilla Bork (2010).

His writings span a broad range of topics, including the Second Viennese School (especially Schoenberg), the Romantic Lied tradition, Wagner, Skryabin, Varèse, Eisler, and Ives. Reinhold also lived and breathed new music, and enjoyed close friendships with Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, and Luciano Berio, who dedicated Brinkmann came to Harvard from Berlin, where he had been Professor at the Hochschule der Künste since 1980, and prior to that, Professor of Musicology at the University of Marburg. In 2001, he was the first musicologist to be awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. The international scope of his work and influence is further reflected in two Festschriften, Music and the Aesthetic of Modernity, edited by Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb and published with Harvard University Press (2005), and one produced by the Humboldt University in Berlin, where Reinhold held an honorary professorship: Musikalische Analyse und kulturgeschichtliche Kontextualisierung, edited Tobias Bleek and Camilla Bork (2010). His writings span a broad range of topics, including the Second Viennese School (especially Schoenberg), the Romantic Lied tradition, Wagner, Skryabin, Varèse, Eisler, and Ives. Reinhold also lived and breathed new music, and enjoyed close friendships with Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, and Luciano Berio, who dedicated his Sonata per pianforte solo to him in 2001.

Reinhold’s work combined intimate knowledge of the music, often shown in detailed, painstaking analyses, with an awareness of social and political backgrounds and ramifications. His publications in English include his nuanced and thought-provoking study of Brahms’s Second Symphony, Late Idyll (Harvard University Press, 1995) and the essays “Distorted Sublime,” in Music and Nazism: Art und Tyranny, 1933-1945 (2003);  “Schoenberg’s Quartets and the Viennese Tradition,” in “Music of My Future”: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio (2000); “The Fool as Paradigm: Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the Modern Artist,” in Schoenberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter (1997); and “What the Sources Tell Us About Pierrot lunaire,” in From Pierrot to Marteau (1987).

With his colleague Christoph Wolff, he organized an international conference at Harvard on the German musicians who fled Fascism, and co-edited the volume “Driven Into Paradise”: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (1999). Reinhold was always fascinated with the frieze of famous composers’ names in Paine Hall, and his last publication was a playful and learned essay on origins of the building and its visible display of the musical canon, anno 1914 (Harvard’s Paine Hall: Musical Canon and the New England Barn, 2010). His edition of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire for the Schoenberg Complete Works Edition, in particular his book-length critical report on the work’s sources and its historical and biographical position, was a ground-breaking contribution to the Schoenberg literature. His 1967 dissertation, Arnold Schönberg, Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11: Studien zur frühen Atonalität bei Schönberg, was republished in a second edition (with a new foreword) in 2000. A lifelong interest in German Lieder and poetry is reflected in his monograph, Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Op. 39 (1997) and in his substantial contribution on the 19th-century Lied tradition in the volume Musikalische Lyrik (2004). A selection of his essays in German, Vom Pfeifen und von alten Dampfmaschinen: Aufsätze zur Musik von Beethoven bis Rihm, appeared in 2006.
—Anne C. Shreffler October 11, 2010

After college, El Forbes first taught at secondary schools before returning to Harvard in 1945 as a graduate student. He earned the A.M. degree in 1947. Professor Walter Piston, the noted composer, was one of his principal teachers. While a graduate student, Forbes served Professor G. Wallace Woodworth “Woody” as assistant conductor of the Glee Club. Choral conducting really was his passion, and it became his profession and primary function when in 1951 he was appointed director of the Princeton Glee Club. He taught at Princeton University for eleven years before returning to Harvard in 1958 to become conductor of the Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society.

Following in the footsteps of Woody and the Glee Club’s first conductor, Archibald T. “Doc” Davison, El prepared the Choral Society and Glee Club for their annual performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra—what became more than a fifty-year-old tradition. As conductor of the Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society he also toured extensively throughout the world and trained a generation of conductors, among them William Christie, founder and director of the baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants of Paris. As Forbes had contracted polio in 1951, which mildly affected his conducting, he decided to step down from his conducting post in 1970.

In the following years he focused primarily on undergraduate teaching. His Music 2, dealing with basic principles of elementary composition through exercises in writing and analysis, became his signature course. There he taught many an enthusiastic non-concentrator how to engage in musical fantasies, invent sensible musical ideas, and work them out according to sound principles.

Professor Forbes chaired the Music Department from 1972 to 1976 and became an emeritus professor eight years later, in 1984. That year also saw the publication of a festschrift, Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes, edited by Lewis Lockwood and Phyllis Benjamin. Harvard awarded him the Alumni Medal in 1991 and an honorary doctorate in 2003. As a scholar Forbes is best known for his revision and critical annotations of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, originally published in three volumes, 1866–1879. Also a Bostonian and a Harvard alumnus, who graduated in the class of 1841, exactly a century before Forbes, Thayer had written the first authoritative biography of Beethoven. It had long become a true classic in the field and continues to retain its status thanks to Forbes’s revised edition of 1964. Besides editing the Harvard-Radcliffe Choral Music Series and publishing a number of scholarly articles, El Forbes wrote two sequels to Walter Spalding’s 1935 book Music at Harvard, the first A History of Music at Harvard to 1972, the second A Report of Music at Harvard from 1972 to 1990. El Forbes, the quintessential Harvard man and himself deeply rooted in the university’s history, always felt a very deep commitment not only to furthering the institution’s progress but also to recording it.

El Forbes continued to be a steady presence at Harvard for the more than twenty years of his retirement right up to his death. He regularly attended concerts given by the undergraduate student groups, joined the long table at the Faculty Club (for as long as it was there), and in nearly half a century rarely missed Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel. A much-loved figure on and off campus, El Forbes was, as the Reverend Peter Gomes so fittingly put it at his memorial service, “a man always preceded by his smile.”

Hughes co-compiled the Index of Gregorian Chant, and was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (1959-63). Hughes published many articles and was honored with a Festschrift on his 70th birthday, Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David Hughes (1995). Professor Hughes taught at Harvard full-time from 1957 until his retirement.

Mr. Kirchner was born into an immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn but moved at an early age to Los Angeles, arriving at a time when the city had become home to a number of Europe’s most prominent composers, including Arnold Schoenberg. Mr. Kirchner also studied with Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions, but it was Schoenberg who became his most influential teacher and, in later decades, an ethical lodestar whose integrity he deeply admired.

Even as a young composer, the force of Mr. Kirchner’s music was unmistakable. In a 1950 review in the journal "Notes," composer Aaron Copland wrote that "the impression carried away from a Kirchner performance is one of having made contact not merely with a composer, but with a highly sentient human being; of a man who creates his music out of an awareness of the special climate of today’s unsettled world. Kirchner’s best pages prove that he reacts strongly to that world; they are charged with an emotional impact and explosive power that is almost frightening in intensity."

Over the years, Mr. Kirchner’s music attracted several prominent champions, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and conductor James Levine, who last year led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Kirchner’s orchestral work The Forbidden.

Mr. Kirchner came to Harvard in 1961 and eventually assumed an endowed chair previously held by the composer Walter Piston. At Harvard he became a revered pedagogue and the founder of a highly regarded course, Music 180, that creatively combined the performance and the analysis of music. Among the early students in the course were Ma, violinist James Buswell, and violinist Lynn Chang.

Robert Levin, the Harvard music professor who now teaches Kirchner’s storied course, also emphasized how much Kirchner gave to his students.
"Leon’s monument is just as much for those who were fortunate enough to experience him as a teacher," said Levin, "as for those who have been transformed by the urgency and intensity of his music."

To many in Boston’s musical public, Mr. Kirchner was best known as the conductor of the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, whose concerts, especially performances of Bruckner and Schoenberg, became essential local events. "Performing is a level where all the talking and theorizing stops, a completely different way to solve life’s problems," Kirchner told a Globe interviewer in 1982. "It’s a test being up there, and it’s important for creative people to be tested. A performer calls upon things in himself that are otherwise dormant, and his whole life process becomes revitalized."

On one occasion in the 1970s, Mr. Kirchner wrote to the Globe congratulating a colleague with words that might have been applied to their author: "We might cheer you," he wrote, "simply for standing erect after all these years under the heavy weight of public honor, constant effort, and that special travail which comes to all who have the temerity to orbit some inner region of the soul."

"His music can be harrowing to listen to," Robert Levin said in a recent phone interview. "It shatters and transforms us. Leon gave us self-portraits without any mercy to himself. He showed the anguish within and did not flinch from it. The number of composers who are able or willing to do that is not large."

Triptych, from the personal collection of Lynn Chang "[This is from] a copy of the final two movements of Triptych, for violin and cello, composed in 1988. The handwritten manuscript (with amended ending) was used for its premiere by myself and Yo-Yo Ma later that summer at Tanglewood." For additional information, and for rights/reproduction and research on Kirchner material, please contact the New York Public Library, which houses the Kirchner papers and letters.

"As performers, we are mostly outside the score looking in, but, as a composer Leon had the idea of looking from the inside of the score outward. It was a completely difference perspective for me and for all the performers there."- Lynn Chang.

Earl Kim was born in Dinuba, California, on January 6, 1920, into a family of Korean immigrants. His musical propensities were revealed and nurtured early and led to studies at the University of California: with Arnold Schoenberg at U.C.L.A. and with Ernst Bloch and Roger Sessions at Berkeley. Though Kim, at this early stage of his career, was surrounded by major figures whose compositional practices differed fundamentally from those prompted by his own instincts, he was able to assimilate and absorb the influences he needed to nourish his own emerging artistic vision. Kim generously acknowledged his indebtedness to his teachers even as he mimicked their personal and musical mannerisms in hilarious impersonations. He was a good actor!

Earl was a very special person who, even among musicians of great talent, was in a class by himself. It was all of a piece—his quiet humor, his ear for sound and silence, his innate feeling for the human in everything. Kim never lost sight of nor wavered along his chosen artistic path. His genuine modesty belied an inner conviction about his own artistic vision. He knew who he was and trusted his formidable intelligence and sensitive intuition. Once asked in a public forum what were the sources of his creative energies he replied “I am an American composer who happens to be Korean.”

The composer Kim embraced a kindred spirit in Samuel Beckett, whose works were a constant source of inspiration. He found in Beckett’s writings analogs and parallels to his own musical aims. The author’s deployment, juxtaposition, repetition and transformation of sculptured, finely polished, critically selected, aphoristic modules of language—brightly active with meaning and dense with shadowed implication, continually redefined by context, seemed to mirror and propel the composer’s search for a music—minimal and delicate of utterance, yet forceful and maximal in impact; labyrinthine in its myriad relationships but clear in its path. Every sound reduced to its maximum function and connected by poignant silence. The principal works based on Beckett texts are Exercises en Route, Footfalls, Eh Joe, Lessness, Earthlight, Watt solo, and Melodrama 1 & 2. The features of Kim’s music cited above were not confined to his settings of Beckett texts but were fundamental underpinnings of his style whether he engaged texts by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Keats, Coleridge, Rilke or Anne Sexton— or in whatever music genre or performance medium he employed.

Actress Irene Worth, who gave the premiere performance and many subsequent performances of Eh Joe recalling her first meeting with Kim, relates that after “exquisite social small talk, my knees gently weakened as I melted under his considerable charm… He then played a bad, rather jumpy tape of ‘Earthlight.’ It had hardly begun when I knew instantly that I was in the presence of a master and a unique musical imagination. It was shattering and glorious ... and, I had the rare chance of hearing him play the piano. What a revelation!”

This aspect of his musicianship—his extraordinary ability as a pianist—was also spare, elegant, refined, and somehow beautiful and profound. More than that, he had the capacity, as do some composer-pianists, to create an analysis in sound—to reveal the logic of a work quite unpretentiously, at the same time revealing his loving wonder at the beauty of sound. One composer colleague, invited by Earl to participate in his Harvard seminar, wished at one juncture to illustrate a point by playing a Chopin Mazurka but, being a clarinetist himself, did not feel up to the task. “I asked Earl to read through the piece. As he played I thought ‘What else is there to say?’” Harvard colleague and close friend Professor Reinhold Brinkmann recalls Kim’s mission to Berlin to select and purchase for the Harvard Music Department several new grand pianos. “The next two days were spent at the Bechstein piano factory amidst ten grands, going from one to the other, playing, listening, comparing, excluding, selecting until we arrived at three or four beautifully sounding instruments. It was there that I learned what a musical ear can be. Earl was incredible, sensitive, precise, critical, never satisfied, insisting that small changes needed to be made where nobody heard the differences; that sound or action could still be improved and the improvements could indeed be heard! During the second day, the top Bechstein technician spent more than ten hours with Earl at two of the pianos, adjusting, readjusting, finding the technical solutions for Earl’s musical requests.”

Earl spent fifteen years as a faculty member at Princeton before coming to Harvard. His modesty, coupled with his artistic conviction made him a formidable composer-pianist-teacher throughout his life. He would brook no compromise when it came to matters of human compassion and musical relevance. In both, his sense of honesty and moral integrity prevailed. On hearing of his death, violinist Itzhak Perlman (for whom Earl composed two of his major works) wrote in the New York Times—“composer, devoted teacher, musician extraordinaire. Earl brought to music colors we only dreamed existed but had never before heard. Creative and imaginative, he was truly inspired.” Earl had a spontaneous tendency to reconciliation and we were all disarmed by his handsome, ever-youthful face, his warm smile and twinkling eyes.

Martino was active as a guest lecturer, and was Composer-in-Residence at Tanglewood, the Composers Conference, the Yale Summer School of Music, the Pontino Festival in Italy, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Ernest Bloch Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Música de Morelia, Mexico. His many commissions came from, among others, the Paderewski Fund; the Fromm, Naumburg, Koussevitzky, and Coolidge Foundations; and from the Chicago, Boston and San Francisco Symphonies, along with other performing organizations.

In Florence, where he lived from 1954 to 1956 on a Fulbright scholarship, Martino studied with the eminent Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola, and the blend of lyricism and rigor that Dallapiccola instilled into his own music may have formed a partial model for the direction of Martino’s mature works, which blend these features in a musical language of high originality and expressivity. In an interview for his sixtieth birthday, Martino offered the view that, in utilizing the full resources of the chromatic scale, in his own highly personal adaptation of the so-called “twelve-tone system,” he wanted to write music that “would sing and think, too.” Despite frequent misunderstandings by critics and others of where he stood as a composer, he asked that if future listeners “look and listen to my music, they will judge that it’s really pretty old-fashioned and traditional stuff… I used to bridle at that realization but I’ve come to view it tenderly of late. When I listen to a Brahms Intermezzo or his C Minor Piano Quartet I don’t analyze it, I sit and weep. That’s what I’d like my audience to do...”

Having established a significant profile through works such as Pianississimo and his piano masterpiece Fantasies and Impromptus, the Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra, Paradiso Choruses and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Martino composed Notturno for an ensemble of six players for which he was awarded the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. One critic described the work as “nocturnal theater of the soul” and Martino expressed his pleasure “with that poetic description.” Martino’s musical appetite was voracious and democratic. In his early teens, he studied with the local bandmaster, an Italian immigrant, who awakened his love for Italian opera and bequeathed to the composer a large collection of Italian opera transcriptions from the late nineteenth century. Many decades later, these transcriptions fired Martino’s imagination and he made his own arrangements of them, whose objective, in Martino’s words, “has not been to stubbornly confirm the authenticity of the music as much as it has been to recreate the authenticity of my youthful experience.”

Jazz also ran in his veins. One of his Plainfield, New Jersey, acquaintances was the great jazz pianist/composer Bill Evans; they occasionally played music together in the early 1950s. Recently heard recordings of the fourteen-yearold Martino playing jazz clarinet caused his lifelong friend Gunther Schuller to remark “at fourteen he played better than Artie Shaw, and I speak with authority.”

The list of Martino’s students is long, and includes many of the most prominent names in American composition today. His teaching encompassed not only profound insights into the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Beethoven, and Brahms, but also a single-minded insistence on the same high levels of musical craftsmanship that he observed in his own composition. This craftsmanship had to start at the most basic level of harmony and instrumentation; one of the pedagogical tools he developed for his own students, a comparative edition of 178 chorale harmonizations by J. S. Bach, is still used by many today, as is his “Stringograph,” which he invented to help non-string players compose for the violin, viola, and cello.

Dissatisfied with the publishing world for new music, Martino, together with his wife, Lora, founded his own company, Dantalian, Inc., to produce, promote, and distribute his music. (By the way, “Dantalian” has nothing to do with the words “Dante” or “Italian,” but refers to a medieval talisman that Martino came across in the 1960s.) He was a major force in the world of new music for many years, a devoted teacher and colleague, and a wholly committed composer. His music is not easy listening because he would not give in to facile productivity, but rather reflects his need to go to deeper levels and to write music that was strong enough to last. His music stands, and will stand, for a very long time as among the most expressive and memorable of our time, and not only by American composers. Martino was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many awards include two Fulbright scholarships; three Guggenheim awards; grants from the Massachusetts Arts Council, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Brandeis Creative Arts Citation in Music; First Prize in the 1985 Kennedy Center Friedheim Competition for his String Quartet (1983); and the Boston Symphony’s Mark M. Horblit Award.

As a concert pianist, Luise appeared with major orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She regularly played keyboard parts with the BSO under Serge Koussevitzky and Charles Munch. Her commitment to contemporary music was evident from her long association with new-music groups such as Musica Viva. Among the composers she worked with over the years were Paul Hindemith, Aaron Copland, Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, Lukas Foss, Karel Husa, Walter Piston, Arthur Berger, Luciano Berio, John Adams, Ivan Tcherepnin, and Leon Kirchner. When Luise joined the Harvard Music Department, performance was relegated to extracurricular activity. Luise was put in charge of a new program, Basic Piano, and it came to life.

Undergraduates decided to stay in the department as long as possible; they knew that they were learning musicianship from a superb craftswoman. Consequently, Professor Tillman Merritt asked Luise to join him in teaching Music 51 (Theory I). Impressed with the electricity in her teaching, he turned the course over to her. In 1971, to the delight of colleagues who felt the department was overdue in recognizing performance, Harvard took the unusual step of elevating a lecturer to full professor.

Vosgerchian’s professorship marked the start of a transformation within the department. Incoming talented performers, whether concentrators or not, were drawn to Luise’s tutelage and, through her, to closer contact with the work of the department as a whole. The study of music gained a new dimension: performance informed by insightful analysis. Luise’s teaching was lively, intelligent, and inspirational. Easily able to impart the tangible aspects of music, her most extraordinary talent was for teaching the intangibles. She placed great emphasis on developing a student’s ear by employing a fusion of analytical and intuitive skills. She believed that each of her students had a unique perspective; she convinced them to trust equally their ear, intuition, and intellect. The greatest tribute to Luise is the vast number of her students who have made significant contributions as composers, scholars, and performers. All would echo what Yo-Yo Ma has said on many occasions, “she was one of the most important influences in my life.”

“Miss V” expected students to work as hard as their ability and training permitted; anything less was contemptible. She reserved the sharp side of her tongue for those who did not take their music seriously. Of course, this was just another facet of her tremendous enthusiasm. She was in love with music, and woe to anyone who failed to maintain the standard that love exacts. Always outspoken and noted for her directness—perhaps to a fault—Luise took pleasure nonetheless in recounting the story of one student who, after a rather frank critique, said, “Miss V, you need a crash course in tact.”

Beyond the time spent in musical meditation with devoted music concentrators, Luise gave equally to students in other fields; their lives were made more meaningful by what can only be described as “Vosgerchian Encounters.” By far the greatest number of these students— who were not musicians—were those in Luise’s very popular Core courses: Structure and Form Through Music and Movement (with Claire Milardi), The Development of the String Quartet, and Shorter Keyboard Works of the Nineteenth Century. Luise brought musical repertoire to heretofore musically uninitiated students with astounding results. She had a gift for conveying the essence without the encumbrance of technical jargon.

Luise’s analytical skill was evident in her playing as well as in her teaching. Her superb musicianship was just what showed on the outside. When she played you heard the music, not the performer; she was the window through which the music passed, undistorted. A singularly charismatic musical persona, Luise journeyed forward as inspired performer, interpreter, and student of the great masters past and present, pausing from time to time to digest and refine her very special information. Intimacy thus gained resulted in the creation of an analytic skill profoundly dependent upon “vitality” and “feeling,” a skill not everywhere apparent in our time, and one that helped her to achieve—perhaps her ultimate goal—the translation of the symbols and structures of this high Art into human life-discerning value. As a reflection of this goal, The Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award was established in 1986 by Professor and Mrs. Ray Goldberg and the Max Goldberg Foundation in order to perpetuate the values and commitment to teaching that Professor Vosgerchian brought to generations of students. It is administered by the Office for the Arts. Among the qualities recognized in recipients of the annual award are “a selfless commitment, a constant renewal of approach to subject matter, an artistic conscience, and a sincere interest in the development of the whole person.”

After her retirement in 1990, Luise remained busy with concerts and made a superb recording of two works especially close to her heart, Schubert’s late Sonata in B-flat Major and Schumann’s “Kreisleriana.” She divided her time between Watertown, her Manomet house near Plymouth, trips to Europe as Lecturer on Alumni Tours, and travels in Slovakia with her husband, visiting Kamil’s relatives or vacationing in their beloved Tatra Mountains.

James Yannatos was Music Director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra from 1964 until his retirement in 2009.  Known as “Dr. Y” to his students, his joyful, loving presence touched thousands of young lives.  Under his leadership, the orchestra toured to Europe, Russia, South America, and Asia. He also organized and co-directed the New England Composers Orchestra, the Tanglewood Young Artists Orchestra, and taught conducting at Tanglewood and also at Harvard University. He has appeared as guest conductor-composer at the Aspen, Banff, Tanglewood, Chautauqua, and Saratoga Festivals, and with the Boston Pops, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Baltimore, and San Antonio Symphonies and the Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, Cleveland, and American Symphony Chamber Orchestras.

Born March 13, 1929, and educated in New York City, he attended the High School of Music and Art and the Manhattan School of Music. Subsequent studies with Nadia Boulanger, Luigi Dallapiccola, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and Philip Bezanson in composition, William Steinberg and Leonard Bernstein in conducting, and Hugo Kortschak and Ivan Galamian on violin took Yannatos to Yale University (B.M., M.M.), the University of Iowa (Ph.D.), Aspen, Tanglewood, and Paris.

As a young violinist, he performed in various professional ensembles including a piano trio, string quartet, early music groups with Hindemith and Boulanger, and in the Casals Festival. As a composer, Yannatos received commissions for orchestral, vocal, and instrumental works which include Cycles (recorded by Collage), Sounds of Desolation and Joy (Lucy Shelton), Concerto for Bass and Orchestra (Alea III and Edwin Barker), Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (Mendelssohn String Quartet followed by the Chiara String Quartet), Suite for Solo Horn (Erik Ruske), Symphonies Sacred and Secular: Prais'd be the Fathomless Universe (combined Harvard Choruses and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra), and Songs of Life, Love and Loss (Peggy Pearson/Boston Modern Orchestra Project). His most ambitious work, Trinity Mass (for soloists, chorus and orchestra), premiered in Cambridge at Sanders Theater and New York at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to great acclaim (Jason Robards, narrator), and was aired on National Public Radio in 1986. His Symphony No. 3 for Strings: Prisms and Symphony No. 5 Son et Lumiere were premiered in the former USSR by the Lithuanian State Orchestra and the Leningrad Chamber Orchestra in 1990 and 1992. Ritual Images was performed by the Seattle Symphony (conducted by Gerard Schwartz) in 2010. Two weeks before his death, he attended performances of his opera buffa, Rockets Red Blare, rewritten in 2008, at the Agassiz Theatre in Cambridge, MA. His most recently completed work, Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra, was performed by Ken Radnofsky and the Longy Conservatory Orchestra under the baton of Julian Pellicano at Sanders Theater in February, 2012 and at Bard College in April, 2012.

Ever a humanist, after the events of 9/11, Dr. Y wrote, “As we steep ourselves in music, we try to spread it in any way we can. Music of the past and present speaks to our common humanity no matter what particular country gave it birth.  We need to think of all those who suffer here and everywhere and heal when we can with life-giving activity in the arts.”

A memorial celebration of the life of James Yannatos was held Saturday, December 10, 2011, 3:00 PM at Sanders Theater, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 

Pian’s Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources and Their Interpretation (1967; 2003 reprint) was a path-breaking work in both Historical Musicology and Sinology, and it received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society as the best scholarly book that year on music history. Her extensive fieldwork in Taiwan on Peking Opera during the 1960s resulted in a series of critically important research papers in the early 1970s. When Mainland China opened its doors to foreign scholars, she began fieldwork there on narrative songs and folksongs and published several seminal papers on those subjects. Other distinguished recognitions include selection as a Fellow of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan, 1990) and Honorary Member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2004), as well as numerous Honorary Professorships and Fellowships in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

She began teaching career at Harvard University in 1947 as a Chinese language teaching assistant, later being promoted to instructor, lecturer, and professor; through her tutelage, and using as textbook her own A Syllabus for the Mandarin Primer (1961), she set her students on their way to becoming influential Sinologists. In 1961 she started teaching courses related to Chinese music, and later began mentoring graduate students in the Departments of Music and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. In 1974 she was appointed Professor in both departments, one of the first women professors at Harvard, a position she held until 1992, when she retired as Professor Emerita. In 1975-78 she and her husband Theodore H. H. Pian were appointed Co-Housemasters of South House (now Cabot House), the first ethnic minorities to hold such a position at Harvard. After her retirement, she devoted her time almost entirely to the compilation and editing of the complete works of her father, the pre-eminent linguist and composer Yuen Ren Chao, published as the 20-volume Zhao Yuanren Quanji (2002).

Rulan Chao Pian was born on April 20, 1922, in Cambridge Massachusetts, where her father was teaching at Harvard at the time. As a child, Pian’s family moved often, living in various cities in China as well as in Paris, and in Washington D.C. When she was age 16, her father, Y. R. Chao, moved the family back to the U.S. for good, where her father taught for brief periods at the University of Hawaii, Yale, Harvard, and -- eventually permanently in -- at the University of California at Berkeley from 1947 until his retirement in 1962. Pian settled in Cambridge where she received a B.A. (1944) and M.A. (1946), both in Western music history, from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. (1960) in East Asian Languages and in Music, from Radcliffe-Harvard. In 1945 she married Theodore Hsueh-Huang Pian, who later became himself an eminent Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1989; he died in 2009 at the age of 91. They had one daughter, Canta Chao-po Pian.

In 1969, Rulan Chao Pian and several prominent Chinese scholars in North America, including her father, founded the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (CHINOPERL), a scholarly organization devoted to the research, analysis and interpretation of oral and performing traditions, broadly defined, and their relationship to China's culture and society. She was also a charter member of the Association for Chinese Music Research, founded in 1986. Until shortly before she died Pian was serving tirelessly as the inspiration, guiding spirit, and enthusiastic supporter of both organizations.

Pian’s interest in Chinese music fell into two main areas: music history and the study of traditional musical genres of modern China. Each of these two fields demands a different set of theories, methods, and source materials. Her study of history adheres to a long tradition of historical musicology at Harvard University, as well as to the centuries-old tradition of historical studies among Chinese scholars. She consulted sources exhaustively in Harvard’s own Yenching Library, as well as libraries and archives in Japan and Taiwan. (Mainland China was inaccessible at the time.) Her interest in modern China placed her among the ranks of ethnomusicologists and took her on field trips to Taiwan, and later after the opening of the Mainland, to many parts of China. In the early 1970s she was among the first ethnomusicologists to embrace the latest technology of videotaping in her ethnographic work. The result was a rare and precious collection of videotapes of traditional performances that she captured in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, before they underwent metamorphosis like China itself.

A common thread running through Pian’s diverse research projects was her theoretical interest in musical notation and its relation to issues of transcription, analysis, performance practice, and the social contexts of music. For example, her study of Chinese music history was accompanied by detailed and careful research into historical systems of notation and the issues that arose when these old notations, which preserved compositions from as early as the tenth century, were transcribed into modern notation. Her study of the traditional music of modern China focused to a great extent on the recording, transcription, and analysis of repertory from the oral and performing traditions.

Pian’s music associates may not realize that she made two other important contributions to Chinese studies outside the area of music – contributions that in turn exerted a significant influence on her musicological orientation and thinking. The first of these was in linguistics and language teaching. Under the influence of her illustrious father, and through her long years of language teaching and self-study, she acquired a strong linguistic training and developed her own pedagogical method. Such intimate knowledge of the workings of a language and of linguistic theories provided her with insights into the workings of music and of music research, which are reflected in several of her publications, the most notable being the substantial research paper “Text Setting with the Shipyi Animated Aria” (1972).

Straddling the realms of language and music was the second of Pian’s contributions, namely her research into the nature of and the issues related to the oral and performing literature. Although the Chinese people have placed great emphasis on the written word since antiquity, they also developed and preserved rich traditions of oral literature, ranging from elaborate and complex systems of drama and narrative to simple, short, idiomatic sayings. Spoken words have performative and musical dimensions that are suppressed when these words are represented in written form. These dimensions – tonal inflections, rhythmic patterns, dynamic levels, timbral manipulations – must be taken into consideration if oral literature is to be fully appreciated and evaluated. Chinese oral literature, which broadly defined includes the performative aspects of everyday speech, has served the literary and artistic aspirations of the majority of China’s illiterate and semi-literate population for centuries; yet, until recently, it failed to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. To rectify that neglect, CHINOPERL was created, thus recognizing the importance of oral literature not only in its own right but also as an indispensable medium through which popular culture can be explored. Music specialists tend to ignore such literature because it has not been labeled as “music” and does not sound particularly “musical” to their ears. Pian was among the first to study such literature from a musicological perspective. No one disputes the fact that speech and music are wedded in song; Pian showed that there is also music in speech.

Pian’s lively mind, warm personality, and generous disposition nurtured many young scholars and inspired others who crossed her path. To students who worked with her closely, she set an example not only of how to be scholars and teachers, but also how to live fully, joyously, humbly, and generously. Pian made it clear to her students that her home and her private library were open for them to visit at any time, whether for a brief stop or an extended stay of a few months or more. Ever inviting, ever stimulating, the house in Cambridge that she shared with her husband Ted for over half a century was filled with friends and colleagues. Visitors remember countless hours of discussion in her study, around the fireplace in the living room, or over food at the dining room table, often extending into the wee hours of the morning, when she would magically bring out more food for xiaoye. Even more than the content of the discussions, visitors remember the way in which she expressed ideas, asked questions, stated propositions, and forwarded counter-arguments—quietly, gently, persuasively, leaving strong and everlasting impressions on her students and friends. Later in the 1980s, these occasions were formalized into monthly gatherings called Kangqiao Xinyu (New Dialogues in Cambridge), organized by her and her former student (and later close friend) the writer and poet Loh Waifong. In these gatherings, notable local scholars and those visiting from China were invited to give presentations to the concerned community in Cambridge on a great variety of subjects related to China. The gatherings would attract a huge crowd, sometimes numbering up to 50 or 60, completely filling every seat and square foot of floor of their spacious living room. Then Pian would bring out an enormous pot of hongdou xifan (red bean porridge) to nourish the body and warm the heart.

As a teacher, Pian’s influence reached far beyond her Harvard classrooms and her Cambridge home: she broadened the intellectual horizon of a generation of music scholars in China. Pian was the first music scholar from the West to lecture in China after the establishment of the Peoples Republic when she visited in 1974, and in subsequent years, and particularly after the early 1980s, she visited and lectured there regularly and frequently. In formal lectures and informal gatherings, she introduced her Chinese colleagues and students to contemporary Western theories and methods of research in musicology and ethnomusicology, to recent scholarship in Chinese music outside of China, and to her own work. Along with ideas, she also brought gifts of books and recordings, as well as the most advanced electronic equipment, which she would leave in China for her colleagues. Through Pian, a generation of Chinese scholars gained a broader perspective on musical scholarship than would otherwise have been available to them. In 2009, she donated almost the entirety of her personal collection, including over 5,500 items of audio-visual material and 250 boxes of books and notes to the library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Pian is survived by her three younger sisters, Nova Huang of Changsha, China, Lensey Namioka of Seattle, and Bella Chiu of Arlington MA; her daughter Canta (and husband Michael Lent) of Washington D.C., and her granddaughter Jessica Lent of New York City.

—Bell Yung, Robert Provine, Joseph Lam, Amy Stillman, Siu Wah Yu
December 8, 2013

Ward greatly enjoyed teaching, especially his two full-year courses. Every undergraduate major took his chronological survey, which met three times each week, while every graduate student in musicology took Music 200, which met once a week. Both classes featured oral presentations concerning the primary sources for musical scores and biographies. A written version of each presentation was submitted to Ward, who handed it back with extensive comments, always made in red ink, that often outnumbered the black typescript characters on each page.

Ward’s research interests were wide-ranging.  Initially a specialist in Renaissance music, Elizabethan music in general, and English popular and folk music from the 16th century to the present day, he eventually taught courses in film music and music in ritual. After he became increasingly involved with ethnomusicology, he taught several ground-breaking classes in the field, some in collaboration with Rulan Pian. Materials related to this field were scarce in Harvard’s libraries, so he founded the Archive of World Music, which began with recordings from his collection. He also established the Charles Seeger Room, which contains all the ethnomusicological volumes in the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library.

After Ward retired, his long-standing fascination with opera, ballet, operetta, vaudeville, and social dance led him to form extensive new collections. He donated what he had gathered to the Harvard Theatre Collection of Houghton Library. Two richly illustrated catalogues have now been published: The King’s Theatre Collection: Ballet and Italian Opera in London 1706-1883 (Houghton Library 2003, revised and expanded edition 2006) and Italian Ballet 1637-1977 (Houghton Library 2005), all co-authored by Morris Levy. Most recently Ward concentrated on French scores and documents, which includes material from the eras of Lully and Napoleon. During his decades of collecting, he formed close friendships with antiquarian booksellers, scholars, curators and librarians from around the world. In domestic matters he was ably assisted in his last years by Isabel Cortes, Alison McCarthy, and others. Andrea Cawelti, Ward Cataloger at Houghton Library, bridged both of these worlds with grace and flair.

Predeceased by his wife, Ruth Neils Ward, John Ward is survived by his sister-in-law, Margaret Padelford, of Seattle, Washington, eleven nieces and nephews, and countless friends. To generations of superbly-trained students, he will be remembered for his apposite precision, and to historians of the performing arts, for the collections that he bequeathed to Harvard University. Many mourn the loss of a meticulous scholar, a revered colleague, a devoted mentor, and a munificent donor.

Remembrances of John Ward from Friends and Colleagues

My first meeting with John Ward took place in 1955-56, when he joined the faculty of the Harvard Department of Music. I had just finished my dissertation. It had been read and approved by two senior members of the faculty, and I was looking forward to the doctorate in June of 1956. John was appointed third and last reader—both because the nature of his own work, and also by courtesy to a new professor. As such he received what I had fondly imagined was the final typed version, since at that time third readers were expected to find only minor mistakes. But that was not John’s way. He knew well the area of my work, and made a large number of suggestions, several of which required changes of some length. This meant deleting some of the original and rebuilding a number of pages, to avoid having to retype the whole thing. I was not thrilled, but of course I did what he asked, and, as I carried out the revisions, I saw how stupid I had been to let these omissions/errors/misinterpretations into the work in the first place, and how generous John had been with his time, preventing me from perpetuating errors for anyone to see. My annoyance was quickly converted to gratitude, which I feel to this day.

Thereafter we were colleagues, though I at first was a very junior one. Nonetheless John invited us and the other junior faculty to his and Ruth’s wonderful dinner parties. They showed me a an attractive and genial quality that I would not have suspected from our quite successful working relationship. They may also have contributed to the slight headaches I would feel the morning after.

But much more important was my perception, growing stronger year by year, of the total devotion with which he approached his work—his partly crippled wife of course, but also his research, his students, his service to the Department of Music and to the university—everything he undertook he accomplished with as near perfection as one person can get. Nor did his work cease with his retirement: he undertook and was still working on acquisitions for the benefit of the Harvard Library System until the time of his death. I miss him deeply. He was a good friend and a good man, and he will be long remembered.
David G. Hughes, Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music, Emeritus

To have known John for over 35 years, initially as a customer, then very quickly as a friend, was nothing but a delight. His enthusiasm for antiquarian materials in his areas of special interest was unrivalled, and the joy he so obviously took in their pursuit infectious. His continual challenges to us to find him some “tempting morsels” loomed large, with his frequent e-mails peppered with phrases including “How can I resist?” and “YES, get me the volume!” His humour and grace, not to mention his intellect, greatly enriched us, and we miss his presence enormously.
John & Jude Lubrano, J & J Lubrano Music Antiquarians LLC, Lloyd Harbor, NY

For John Ward, In Memoriam, Paine Hall, Harvard, 6 May 2012
Martin Marks

John: With your passing, what have we lost, and what do I remember? Too much for me to say here. For as you delighted in hammering home to us, quoting words of William Strunk, “Be brief! Be brief! Be brief!”  I will try.

Let’s begin with the obvious: I was your point man on movies. Not the latest ones, of course. You pretty much stopped going to see new films altogether, at just about the time I became your dissertation advisee. In fact, as you told me later, your movie-going mania came to an end once you settled down with Ruth. I think implicitly what you were saying was “once I grew up.” All the same, later on you liked to talk with me forever and ever in saeculi seculorum about the ones you saw when you were young. For instance, you recounted how terrified you were as a child when your parents took you to see Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, and later to London after Midnight. As you delighted in recalling, the latter upset you so much that when you got home that night you threw up in bed. “My parents learned their lesson!” you would say, chuckling Aesop-like over a cautionary tale.

One you were all grown up and a Professor at Harvard, you sublimated your love of movies by inventing a groundbreaking class called Music and Narrative (a complement to another imaginative course you developed called Music and Ritual). Much of the syllabus was devoted to movies from the past that had impressive musical scores, from Louisiana Story, The Heiress, and Casablanca back to Le Million and Entr’acte. Indeed, your academicization—yes, I know you would cross that word out—of this wonderful material was the spark that ignited my dissertation research. Through the years I have studied, researched, taught, and written about the films you introduced in that course, as well as going forward to many others. You pointed the way, and I thank you for that.

Another point I wish to recall and thank you for, probably just as obvious, is my status as your last Harvard degree-earner. While other graduate students enlisted you as their dissertation advisor after I did, my perfectionist tendencies and terror of the scholar’s blank page impelled me to stretch out the PhD process to almost-legendary length. Yet you never gave up on me, and when the time finally came that I was able to finish writing the damn thing and call out “Cut! Print! That’s a wrap!” … You said, “Good! But not so fast.” (Hah!) Of course you were right. There was more to be done, as there always is, and during those last few agonizing dissertational months you sat with me for days at a table in your living room, which was now an “editing” booth. A lot of terrible passages in my drafts ended up on the living room floor, and some concise and eloquent paragraphs took their place for which you deserve more than half the credit. I think that you were willing to go this far because you saw in me a kindred spirit: not just a fellow perfectionist in need of help, but someone with a similarly peripatetic interest in all types of musical repertoires, processes, and experiences. As was the case for so many fellowWardians, you grooved on my groove. With your staunch support of so many of us, scholarship about music of many different idioms has been vastly enriched. In my case, the scholarship was rooted in a very sixties-ish fascination with flickering images—and my interest rekindled—and was reinforced by—your own early, fiery movie love. Working with me page by page; later just talking randomly about favorite past movies and their music: I am glad these things helped to warm your heart and mine, as time went by.

Allow me to point sentimentally in one more direction. John was born in 1917, five years after the birth of my father, Howard, and one year after my mother, Marjorie. During his waning years, I came to see him more and more in this reflected personal light. Of course, a dissertation advisor inevitably becomes a surrogate parent—a progenitor of thoughts and words rather than of flesh and blood. But I couldn’t help feeling the link was stronger than that. In Palm Springs, where my parents lived, I saw huge numbers of elderly people, coping as best they could with the trials of growing old. Back and forth I traveled across the country to visit them, and then periodically seeing and supping with John. I always thought that he, like mom and dad, stood among the bravest and most inspiring elders I knew. All three were blessed with good health for many years, and all three used that gift by keeping actively engaged with the world. As with my parents, even as John’s physical and mental abilities and activities became tightly circumscribed, his spirits remained high. I found it deeply moving to see the three of them depart this world more or less peacefully, one by one, within the space of a couple years—John being the last to take his leave. I hope that the three of them will find occasion to cross paths somewhere else and share a few reminiscences, about music, about movies, and maybe about me—just as we will continue to think affectionately of John, our Miltonic Warder.

Mt. Auburn Cemetery Remembrances of John Ward

To many friends of John Milton Ward,
On Friday, 3 February 2012, thirty-some of John's friends gathered at 9:45 a.m. in the Story Chapel, near the entrance to Mount Auburn Cemetery. The following tributes, among others, were offered.

Tributes to John Milton Ward (1917-2011) sent from Near & Far for the graveside service, Mt Auburn Cemetery, 3 February 2012

Among John’s many qualities was a love of books and extraordinary expertise as a bibliophile. He could discuss fine points about printing and its connection with music and the theatre, especially under the Ancien Régime in France, with an erudition that would have put the greatest pundits in Paris to shame. The Harvard Library will inherit his collection, which will remain forever among our treasures as a testimony to his scholarship and his generosity.
Best wishes, Robert (Bob) Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor &University Librarian, Harvard University

John, your collecting was an inspiration: always enthusiastic about new materials and new ways of doing research. I'll miss your show and tells! But I'm sure you're keeping an eye out for the expansion of the Harvard collections from above, where you'll have a great vantage point!
With affection, Leslie Morris, Stow, Massachusetts,Curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Flights of angels, dear John, flights of angels. Thank you for your love and your benefaction!
Always, Jeanne Newlin, Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection {emerita}

I will remember John for his never-ending enthusiasm and deep love for collecting. He was overwhelmingly generous towards and unfailingly supportive of the Music Library. We miss him.
Sarah Adams, Keeper of the Isham Memorial Library & Acting Librarian, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library

John Ward was my benefactor, teacher & friend.  I will always be grateful for the opportunities he gave me and for the experience of standing in the light of his intellect, generosity & humanity.
Morris S. Levy, Senior Cataloger, Northwestern University Music Library, & former cataloguer of the John Milton & Ruth Neils Ward Collection, Houghton Library

Your zest for music will live on through its melodies. May you find peace and continue to tap to the beat.
yena do, neighbor, cambridge, massachusetts

Dear John, I will so miss your wonderful 'open house' on Follen Street, where so many of us were regaled with your delightful stories from a rich and rewarding life, shared so beautifully with Ruth. It has been quite an adventure to move from a scared graduate student in Music 200 in 1967 to someone who proudly called you friend and mentor. Rest in Peace.
Ann Dhu McLucas, Professor of Music {emerita} at the University of Oregon, Eugene, & hitherto Dean of the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, 1992-2002

John was the single greatest influence on my professional life: direction came early; his support lasted more than 40 years. It's ironic that such a great teacher will be remembered mainly by his bookshelves but entirely fitting that his name will live on long after all of us are dead. To try to lighten our sadness, here is my favourite Wardism: in the early days of the early music movement, John quipped to me after hearing a natural trumpeter and baroque strings attempting to play a Purcell overture, ‘it's not that he missed so many notes; it's that he had so few to play!’ 

Farewell old friend,
Sir Curtis Price, Warden of New College, Holywell Street, Oxford & hitherto Principal of the Royal Academy of Music in London, 1995-2008