Morton B. Knafel Research Professor
Historical Musicology
tkelly@fas.harvard.edu
Website
Professor Kelly’s main fields of interest are chant and performance practice. He received his B.A. from Chapel Hill; spent two years on a Fulbright in France studying musicology, chant, and organ. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard (1973) with a dissertation on office tropes. He has taught at Wellesley, Smith, Amherst, and at Oberlin, where he directed the Historical Performance Program and served as acting Dean of the Conservatory. He was named a Harvard College Professor in 2000 and the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music in 2001.
Kelly won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Other books include First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (Yale University Press, 2000), First Nights at the Opera (Yale, 2004), Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (W. W. Norton, 2014), Music Then and Now (W.W. Norton, 2012), and Early Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2011) He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Citizen of the city of Benevento, and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French Republic.