Molly Turner
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Thomas Forrest Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Music, Harvard University, Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Music at Harvard University, where he served as Chair of the Music Department from 1999 to 2004. In 2005 he was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of his teaching of undergraduates. Before coming to Harvard he taught at Oberlin Conservatory (where he was the founding director of the program in Historical Performance and served as acting Dean of the Conservatory); he taught at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts (Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts), where he was the founding director of the Five College Early Music Program. Previously he taught at Wellesley College. He was a Visiting Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge (1976-77) and a Professeur invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (1998).

-from Thomas Forrest Kelly

Dr. Kelly is an accomplished teacher of music. But he doesn’t teach students how to play an instrument. Rather, he teaches the history and appreciation of music. I had the pleasure of interviewing him over Skype while he was in the comfort of his office in Massachusetts. He sat in front of his own harpsichord and was engulfed in bookshelves. Now, professors of academia across many fields tend to be private, well-read, and perhaps not the most social beings, but after conversing with Dr. Kelly, I got to know both a true academic author of books and also a musician who has had a varied career in music directing, keyboard playing, and historical performance. It was a pleasure to get a glimpse into his work that equally involves historical research as well as live performances. His work and teaching beautifully combines the “then” and the “now.”

Academia and music schools are sometimes at odds with each other. Students attend music conservatories to get really good at their instrument, not to learn how to write a bibliography. But Dr. Kelly’s multi-faceted career bridges the gap between these areas. He currently teaches a graduate course at Juilliard where he works with performance majors. The course covers the premieres of five famous pieces of the past. It involves research at the New York Philharmonic Library, the New York Public Library, and even some time at Carnegie Hall. It also includes reflection on a modern premiere by a living composer. Engaging the great performers of today with research methods and historical awareness is one of the most interesting parts of Dr. Kelly’s work.

Dr. Kelly also continues to make a lot of music, whether at the harpsichord or at the helm as a music director. It’s perhaps akin to a Shakespeare professor actively performing Shakespeare live on stage. He has led choirs and directed historical performing groups, as well as curated a substantial summer music festival. His historical knowledge informs his live performance, and this is at the heart of why many people still perform medieval and Renaissance music. As a composer and conductor, I am interested in the interaction between academic and performing pursuits. Dr. Kelly’s career serves as a model for doing both.

I really appreciated Dr. Kelly’s unpretentious attitude and genuine passion for historical performance. There’s a bad stereotype of the stuffy pretentious professor, and he demolishes this stereotype. He joked he doesn’t even particularly like the word “musicologist.” He said it sounds like an unpleasant medical specialty, and most people don’t know what it is. When asked what he does, he responds, “I teach music, but I teach the history of music not the scales.” His attitude reminds me that there’s more to music than knowing all the notes.

Highlights from the Interview

Everyone’s family, community and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you? And did you adhere to or stray from that?

I was raised by a single mother who was divorced from my father when I was eight. My mother and my two younger brothers lived in a university town in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I think I continued in the path that was set for me—in the sense that I lived in a university town, I went to the university there, and I’ve never been out of college ever since. I’m sort of in the seventieth grade or something like that. And the music thing, I think it came from being dragged to church. Nobody asked me if I wanted to go to church, nobody asked me if I wanted to sing in their junior choir. In those days, some of us did what we were told most of the time. As a result, these are things that became familiar with me. I wouldn’t say I’m much of a rebel. I think I followed in the path that was set for me.

What was your primary instrumental exposure to music?

I was sent off to prep school in the north. I went to Groton School in Massachusetts at the age of twelve. There was a big, still is, a big stone gothic chapel with a great big organ in it. The organ console looked like a cross between the machinery behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and an airplane cockpit. It had a thing called a crescendo pedal that looked like a gas pedal, and when you pressed it down, a whole row of red lights went on and it played really loud. So, you name me a twelve-year-old boy who’s not going to say, “I want to control that thing.” It was really more a matter of power and technology than it was of music, maybe. But I started taking organ lessons, and while I was in that prep school I sang soprano, alto, tenor, and bass in the chapel choir. Not all at once; one after another. 

The result is that the music you’re exposed to becomes the music you’re familiar with, so I ended up knowing a lot of earlier music. Because organ music tends to be—not all, but a lot of organ music is eighteenth century music, and before, and a lot of church choral music is also relatively early music. So I got a lot of that under my belt without any particular effort, so that was a lot of my original music background.

Did you have someone who acted as a mentor, either starting in your undergraduate studies or after, that led you more into the historical, academic side of music? 

I can think of two people. One is my very nice piano teacher, Mrs. Gay. She saw me picking out tunes on a piano at a church supper and said to my mother, “This boy has talent. He must come to me.” I didn’t have any talent. I’m sure I was playing “See the Birdy in the Tree” or “Chopsticks” or something. But anyway, I went over to Mrs. Gay’s house every day because we didn’t have a piano. I practiced and took lessons from her. She was a wonderful, wonderful lovely lady. And then when I went into college, one other thing happened. I took a music appreciation course when I was in college because I knew, as all sensible people do, that it made no sense to be a music major. It was impractical. You’ll never get a job. So, I wasn’t a music major. I did something really practical and majored in French. I took a music appreciation course, where I knew the professor. His name was William S. Newman. He was a pianist but also a very distinguished musicologist. He said to me, “Tommy, I want you to stay after class. I want to talk to you.” So I did and what he said was, “You shouldn’t be taking this music appreciation course; you should be a music major. You know more stuff than you need to know to take this course. Why don’t you be a music major?” I said, “Well, thank you, Dr. Newman,” and went away. But within a couple of days, I was back in his office, and said, “Well, suppose I did want to be a music major?” He cobbled together a sort of emergency, last-minute music major for me, and I ended up majoring in French and music. It’s probably that combination of those two that got me a Fulbright to go study music in France. But if he hadn’t said that to me, if he hadn’t sort of said, “You know it would be okay. You could do this.” I think if he hadn’t done that, I don’t know what would have happened, but I don’t think I ever would have turned to music as a profession.

What led you to your current position, and what does your position entail? 

My whole professional career has been teaching as a faculty member in colleges. But at the beginning of it, I was mostly associated with and identified with and teaching what they called early music or historical performance—the performance of older music using historical principles. I started doing teaching like that when I came back from France and went to graduate school at Harvard. I got involved in being a church organist, and from there I got involved in being the conductor of a large community choir north of Boston. And then I got involved running a summer music festival for ten or twelve years, a sort of big music festival with a fairly big budget. I could do whatever I wanted to, so I did all sorts of cool early music things. We did baroque operas, we did medieval liturgical dramas, we did Viennese ballroom…

Where in the country?

It was in a place called Castle Hill in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a great big palace overlooking the sea built by Mr. Crane the millionaire from Chicago. The property is now owned by a land conservancy called the Trustees of Reservations. On that property, which had beautiful outdoor spaces, we built a little theater in what used to be the barn. We used various outdoor spaces and indoor spaces to recreate entertainments of various kinds from times past, and I engaged people from the United States and Europe to come and be a resident orchestra. So, I got some experience being sort of an impresario, and conductor, and harpsichord continuo player, and all that sort of thing. Partly as a result of that, some of my university teaching moved over in that direction.

When I had my first academic job teaching at Wellesley College, it was a series of sabbatical fill-ins. I did three successive one-year jobs, and then it got converted into a real assistant professor track. I ran their early music ensemble for quite a long time. From there, I moved to a job running what was called the Five College Early Music program. There are five associated colleges in Western Massachusetts: Smith, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire College. It was a sort of consortium. They decided that if they pooled their resources, they could have an early music program that served all five of the colleges, even though none of them had the resources to do it individually. So I was hired to create and run the Five College Early Music program. My next job was to be the first director of the historical performance program in the Oberlin Conservatory. 

That’s quite strong though, isn’t it? I didn’t know its inception.

Well, they had been doing early music at Oberlin for a long, long time. It’s a very famous summer program called the Baroque Performance Institute that’s been going on for twenty-five years or so. What they hadn’t had was an official named degree program in historical performance during the year in the conservatory. So the idea was to bring in one more person, that was me, who would coordinate the efforts of all of the people who were already there, and we would create a master’s degree in historical performance, have undergraduate courses, and all that kind of thing. Which is what I did, all while doing musicology. I had been teaching music history courses in all of these places and researching and publishing articles and books on my musicological field, especially, which is really early medieval music. I remember when Harvard posted an ad for a position looking for a musicologist in medieval music. I remember looking at that while I was at Oberlin and thinking…gee, if I played my cards differently, maybe I would be in line for that job, but I won’t apply because everybody thinks of me as being the early music guy. So I didn’t apply for it. But the head of the search committee at Harvard called me up. By that time, I was serving as the dean of the Oberlin Conservatory in addition to running the early music program. He said, “Tom, we’re trying to cast the widest possible net, and we noticed that you’d done some medieval music. Would you mind just sending in your CV, and I’ll throw your hat in the ring, you never know.” So I did. I would not have applied for the job if they hadn’t asked me to, and I got the job! I don’t know how that happened because I wasn’t there when they decided who to hire, but they did offer me a job, and I took it. I was there for many years, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was interesting though, when I went to Harvard. I swapped a job in which I did my scholarship on nights and weekends, and my day job was a music job, for a job in which the music was nights and weekends, and my day job was doing musicology. I missed the active engagement with music and musicians that I had in my previous jobs while I was at Harvard. Now I’ve retired, and for the moment, at least, I go down to New York and teach at the Juilliard School in their early music program. 

Wonderful.

It’s fun to teach. It feels like a homecoming, going back to teaching musicians in a music school, which I enjoy. Because there’s a challenge for teachers in that, it seems to me, in a music school, it’s not at all clear why you have to have classroom courses…They’d rather be playing bassoon scales. So the question is, “Why do I need to take these theory classes? Why do I need to take these music history classes?” And if you’re the classroom teacher, you’ve got to convince yourself that you can look ’em in the eye and say, “You will be a better musician if you take this course.” And if you can’t say that, and if you don’t believe that, then they shouldn’t be taking the course. They should be practicing their bassoon scales. It’s a challenge that you have in a music school that you don’t have in a university. 

What kind of misconceptions are there about your job? Do you prefer to be called a music history professor or a musicologist?

Well, musicologist always sounds like some kind of unpleasant medical specialty. It sounds rather pretentious, and I think a lot of people don’t know what it means, so when people next to me on the airplane say, “What do you do?” I say, “I teach music, but I teach the history of music, not the scales.” Because usually when you say you teach music, people assume you are a piano teacher or something like that. But I don’t mind the word musicologist as long as no one’s being pretentious about it.

I belong to the American Musicological Society, and I publish in the journal of the American Musicological Society and stuff like that. I have no objections to it. But art historians don’t call themselves “artologists” and literary historians don’t call themselves “literologists,” so I don’t know where we get off calling ourselves musicologists. 

On the other hand, you could argue that there’s far more to it than music history. There’s all sorts of aspects of the study of music as a scholarly discipline that are not historical in nature. But it used to be mostly history and mostly older music. The field has changed a lot in recent years, and it seems to be more about the cultures of the world and about the role of music in various social and cultural movements.

Going back to the “Why should I take music history?” question—maybe especially working with the musicians at Juilliard who…they want to win a job, they want to play the violin the best they can, they want to play the Brahms Violin Concerto perfectly, and they’re happy just playing that piece every day…What gets them to play Telemann? What gets them to play these older pieces?

At the moment I teach two sets of people. One is the graduate students in Juilliard’s historical performance program. So they’re already convinced that they want to play early music. They already have a baroque violin, whatever it is. They already have a classical bow and a baroque bow, and all those things. So I don’t need to convince them of any of that. They want to be able to play baroque music better than anybody else. But there’s a lot that they don’t know. They know their baroque music; they know their Corelli trio sonatas, whatever it is. But there’s a lot of stuff they don’t know. They’re having a good time. They got interested in reading old notation. They said, “We don’t know anything about medieval music, we don’t know anything about renaissance music,” so I’m putting them through a crash course in musical notation, and we sight read stuff out of Renaissance and medieval manuscripts sometimes.

That’s great because sometimes when I learn about that, it’s sort of spoon-fed, and it’s just the modern transcription there. But reading from the original source and seeing the squiggles and deciding what that means…

It can be hard to do that. You understand that that’s stuff that musicians made for themselves and it works great. Then there’s another group. I’m teaching another group at Juilliard who are—it’s called a graduate seminar. And some of them are DMA students and some are master’s students, but they are actually all instrumentalists, so they’re doing advanced degrees but on instruments. They’re not musicologists. It’s the first time I’ve done that, so I don’t know how that’s going to work. The course is about studying premieres of five famous pieces in the past. We’re studying five premieres in the past. How do you find the primary sources that let you know what it was like to be there at the first performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony or Handel’s Messiah or whatever it is. And then each of them is going do a research paper on a twentieth-century premiere in New York City. 

Oh, I love this. I want to take this class.

So what I hope is that we’ll have a kind of history of music in New York in the twentieth century, done just on the basis of specific events. What it was like to go to a Boulez 2002 premiere? What was it like to go to the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in New York? What was it like to go to the premiere of Porgy and Bess, things like that? And students are going to have to write about the music and how the music works but also what was the venue? What else could you have done that week in New York? What was the place of music in New York in the 1920s? What was the place of New York in the musical world of the United States and the world? Stuff like that, trying to place these things in context. And they’re supposed to come up with this series of primary documents—reviews, letters—that they can find, any original conductor, performance materials if they can find them. So we’re actually going around to various places. I took a class last week to the Performing Arts division of New York Public Library, which is at Lincoln Center, and they have a very cool archive of all sorts of really neat things. They brought out all sorts of really neat things to show them how to do research in the New York public library, and next week we’re going to the archive on the New York Philharmonic to find out what kind of stuff they have…

What are some of the most exciting projects that you’ve ever worked on in your career, both as a musicologist and as a conductor ad hoc ensemble person?

Too many things to remember. One of my favorite pieces is a piece that I’ve had things to do with for many years. It bridges the performance and study—Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo. I don’t know if you know it. It premiered in 1607 in Italy. And I wrote a book called First Nights about premieres, and it’s the first chapter in that book. And I’ve been to Mantua and looked in the palace of the dukes where it was first performed, and it’s one of the pieces that I’ve performed in lots of different places. I did it in Oberlin, with students; I did it in my music festival. The first time I ever performed it was at Wellesley College where I didn’t know anything at all. But I learned a lot from doing that, and then I did it at Oberlin with the early music students, a lot of good kids. I did it at my music festival at Castle Hill with professional singers, and so on. So I’ve done it over the years in a bunch of different places.

I had a really interesting experience last year of touring with a group called Apollo’s Fire—they just won a Grammy just last year—who are a baroque orchestra based in Cleveland, and their director is a conductor named Jeannette Sorrell, who is a really good conductor. She does a lot of guest conducting with modern orchestras, but she wanted to do Orfeo. She asked me if I would give the preconcert lectures and come and perform and tour with them—they were touring around the country—and play second harpsichord and organ and regale and all that sort of stuff assisting her, and I said I would love to, and I did. And the thing is, the first time she ever played harpsichord continuo was when she assisted me at Oberlin twenty-five years ago in Monteverdi’s Orfeo. She said the first time she ever played, she remembered I said, “You just sit at that other harpsichord over there and play.” And she said, “What do you mean play?” I said, “Well, play the bass line, and if you think of anything else to play, play that.” She said, “The first time I’d ever played continuo, I had no idea what I was doing. I learned a lot by being thrown into the deep end,” so it was fun to join her twenty-five years later as her assistant. I got to play a lot of really cool instruments and had a wonderful time, and so I celebrated my seventy-fifth birthday on the road playing a piece that I started with thirty years earlier. So it’s a piece that’s followed me for many years, and I never get tired of. It’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

And is it one of your favorite things when some punk rocker shows up to music appreciation and then you start out with Orfeo, and they’re like, “Who is this? What is this?”

Yes. I love it. I try to make it clear at the beginning that the world is full of lots of cool music that you can study, just not in this course. That this is a course in which I’m going to show you my favorite pieces—I’m the professor, and I get to pick. But I’m not trying to privilege this music over any other kind of music, and I fully respect that there are a lot of musicians in this course who probably know their music a lot better than I know my music. But this is what this course is going to have, and here are some other courses you could take if you don’t like this. But I really love this, and if you’ll stick with me, I think you will too. I think you’ve got to do it that way rather than say, “This is the good music, and your music is the bad music.” Nobody’s going to respect you. 

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)