Old Music, New Generation

Early Music Scholar Tom Kelly “Inspires Spirits and Excites Minds”

June 14, 2011

Music graduate student Matthew Mugmon had never even heard of Ambrosian chant—religious music from medieval Milan—until he signed up for a seminar with Harvard chant expert Thomas Forrest Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music.

Before long, Mugmon had not only examined newly acquired Ambrosian chant manuscripts in Houghton Library, but sung lines of this Roman Catholic liturgy, visited Milan to see the music’s birthplace, presented a paper at an international conference, and coedited a book with Kelly expanding the limited literature on the topic.

That these things happened is a testament not only to Mugmon’s curiosity, talent, and initiative—even though he’s not a medievalist—but also to Kelly’s skills as a mentor and scholar.

“Professor Kelly makes students feel like they’re on a path to discovery,” says Mugmon. Recalls Kelly, “The students discovered things about these Ambrosian manuscripts that were absolutely wonderful. It was a source of great pride for me to have a conference in which the world’s experts and freshly minted scholars were giving papers side by side. It’s a proud moment when your students become your colleagues.”

In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Harvard’s teaching and research goals are inextricably linked, with meaningful student-faculty collaborations that advance knowledge and enrich the experience for everyone involved, notes FAS Dean Michael D. Smith, John H. Finley, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“To be a teacher is to enter a uniquely powerful relationship and to take on a weighty responsibility,” says Smith. “To kindle understanding, to untangle knots, to inspire spirits, and to excite minds—this is the power and the passion of teaching. It’s a role that shapes both teacher and student in important and lasting ways.”

Bend in the Road

Tom Kelly Kelly’s infatuation with early music— that is, from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque periods—began with an organ at Groton, the Massachusetts boarding school he attended. “I fell in love with the technology,” he remembers, describing his boyhood awe at the instrument’s knobs, dials, and pedals. “Here’s this thing that looks like a combination of airplane cockpit and the machinery behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. Name the twelve-year-old boy who’s not gonna say, ‘I want to do that!’”

Kelly graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1964 and planned to study Baroque music. But when a friend urged him to take a course on Gregorian chant while in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship, his scholarly path took a turn.

As a music graduate student at Harvard, he realized that medieval music had a strong pull. “I love it for all sorts of reasons,” explains Kelly, whose voice rises and falls to emphasize key words. “The music itself is interesting. But I also like to be the first person in the world to have opened a book in a thousand years. And it’s sort of like doing a jigsaw puzzle because there are lots and lots of missing pieces.”

Detective Work

Anne Searcy Puzzle solving was the task at hand in one of Kelly’s seminars this spring. Like detectives working on a 1,000-year-old case, students in “Early Polyphony: Music of the Winchester Troper” struggled to transcribe a collection of two-part music to better understand how it might have sounded when chanted during the Middle Ages. This involved deciphering the troper’s musical notations, which don’t indicate pitch. The students think they have decoded one “Alleluia” section.

“It’s an exciting class,” says Anne Searcy, a second-year graduate student in historical musicology. “Anything you can figure out is interesting because there’s so little evidence about medieval music. It’s hugely important for this field.”

Although she plans to study 20th-century American and Russian music, Searcy has taken two chant-related seminars with Kelly. She and others describe him as a charismatic, approachable teacher who often starts off class with singing from the material they’re studying. He encourages students to dive into difficult work, such as transcribing manuscripts with few clues. And his knowledge is vast.

“He knows everything,” Searcy says. “One of the reasons you come to Harvard is to work with someone like Tom Kelly and other professors in the department.”

While Searcy typically worked by hand from a copy of the Winchester Troper, another student in the tiny seminar—Ryaan Ahmed ’12, a junior from Baltimore and Eliot House— took a more high-tech approach. A computer science concentrator, Ahmed spent part of the term developing a computer program to help translate the music’s ambiguous notations. It used statistical and linguistic theory to search for patterns in these and other chants, almost as if translating one language into another.

Ryaan Ahmed “I’m a huge early music nerd; that’s my thing,” admits Ahmed, an aspiring professional musician and one of the few, if not the only, Harvard undergraduates who play the lute—a stringed instrument with a rounded body that dates back to the 12th century. Ahmed also codirects the Harvard Early Music Society, sings with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and conducts the group’s Chamber Singers, and plans to direct a Baroque opera at Harvard next year. “The music scene here is fantastic,” he observes. “There are so many talented performers.”

Kelly agrees, pointing to the abundance of student art-making at Harvard, whether on stage or in the studio. “Art just bubbles out of the ground here,” he said on the eve of ARTS FIRST, the school’s annual arts festival. “I want people to be aware of the difference art can make in their lives. It feeds a hunger that nothing else feeds, and it gives a kind of satisfaction that nothing else gives. We all know that funny feeling in the pit of our stomach when we’re deeply moved by something artistic.”

Staying Fresh

music manuscript That art can enrich one’s life is a point that Kelly drives home in his popular General Education class, “First Nights,” which highlights the debuts of five famous musical pieces by Monteverdi, Handel, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Stravinsky. Held in Sanders Theatre, the class draws hundreds of undergraduates.

Kelly adapted “First Nights” from a course he taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music before moving to Harvard in 1994. Despite the many times he has given these lectures, Kelly finds himself constantly learning.

“Every year, students write papers that teach me something about pieces that I’ve been teaching for so long,” says Kelly. “They come up with wonderful new angles. What a privilege it is to meet, year after year, Harvard students—some of the most talented people in the world.”

The “First Nights” class also advances musical knowledge by commissioning a piece each year to be performed at semester’s end; one year, cellist Yo-Yo Ma ’76, DMU ’91 and the Silk Road Ensemble were the creators.

“We bring a new piece of art into the world, and nobody has heard it but us,” Kelly says. “And that’s very exciting for students. Then they write a paper about this first performance—a paper that will be useful when the performance is one of the ‘First Nights’ taught at Harvard a hundred years from now.”