Music at Harvard: Neither Craft nor Art; It Combines Display, Arrogance, Delight

The great ecological paradox of Harvard music, however, is that in spite of this interdependency and what one would expect to be the common bond of mutual interest in music, many musical groups are guilty of exclusiveness, lack of cooperation, and even open animosity.

Like any other rarified circle of existence, Harvard music has its own jargon and names to be dropped: HRO, HGC, HRMC, Sanders, Paine, Holmes, and HG&SP, to name a few.

Proliferating jargon is a good indication of the bewildering variety of musical organizations, clubs, societies, performing groups, concert series, and auditoria that make up the Harvard musical world. As any musically inclined freshman will tell you, the newcomer to Cambridge is faced with a wide variety of opportunities to express himself in music and, especially at certain times of the year (early December and May) a plethora of musical events to attend.

Each of these is enticing in its own way, but involvement in everything would be impossible.

Ptolemaic Universe

The Harvard musical world resembles a huge unwieldy Ptolemaic universe--full of irregular and continuing spheres and orbits. The sphere closest to the center is the one containing the musical Leviathans: The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the Harvard University Band and the Harvard Glee Club (with its somewhat dependent satellite the Radcliffe Choral Society). These are the big prestigious organizations; they involve the most people and are the first to attract the attention of neophyte musicians. They are the only musical organizations enjoying anything like official status. Like all extracurricular activity here, they receive no operating support from the University, but their conductors are appointed and paid by the University.

Just outside this sphere hovers the University Choir. Like the Glee Club, the Choir is led by a University-appointee, in this case Mem Church's University organist and choirmaster. Its members are for the most part paid, making it something of an anomaly in the context of Harvard music (although less so as more professionals are employed in extracurricular activities). Some of its members, however, are "volunteers," participating as they would in any other organization.

The Houses

The Houses are the next major sphere of musical activity. Leverett comes closest to the inner sphere of the big auspicious organizations. Its chief claim to fame is its Opera Society which as Yearbook 331 puts it, "has become the most active producer of large-scale musical events among the Houses." Its major effort this year was a highly successful production of The Marriage of Figaro, mounted with the aid of professional singers and instrumentalists and a $4500 budget.

Quincy and Winthrop also produced "large-scale musical events," although of a rather different sort. Musical comedy is a convenient object of musical condescension around here, but Quincy and Winthrop constitute an oasis of adamant naivete in the desert of general sophistication.

Beyond the world of musical stage productions is an entirely different sphere of musical activity: the world of the House concert. Here the music is produced on an entirely different scale, concentrating on solo recital, chamber music and, at largest, chamber chorus.

The principal lights of this world are Adams, Dunster and Kirkland, which remain active throughout the year. Dunster features Sunday afternoon sightreadings in the library to which anyone with an instrument and a music stand is invited. At Kirkland, the proximity of dining hall and junior common room has inspired a successful series of after-dinner concerts designed to fill the gap between dinner and an evening at the movies.

Then there is the outer sphere of the Harvard musical universe: the Graduate Chorale, radio station WHRB, the Gilbert and Sullivan Players, the Bach Society Orchestra. The Graduate Chorale is a totally voluntary, no-auditions-required group designed to put a little enjoyment and art into the lives of library-bound grad students.

WHRB and G&S are both quasimusical organizations, the former almost by definition because it's a radio station and not a performing group, and the latter because it is ensconced in its Castle Adamant at Agassiz, and it tries to be musical and dramatic Establishment at the same time.

The Bach Society Orchestra is in a class by itself. Unlike the HRO, it is organized and conducted entirely by students. It is a chamber-sized group, usually performing music suited to its dimensions and wisely refraining from competing with the much larger HRO on its own terms. Nonetheless, it does have to draw from the same pool of musicians and attempt to attract the same audience, and is constantly struggling to maintain itself alongside the more prestigious HRO. When the HRO is up, the BSO is down and vice versa. Since the advent of James Yannatos as conductor of the HRO, the Bach Society has had to play underdog.

Not Exclusive

The various musical organizations and activity centers are not as mutually exclusive as they may appear. In fact, there is an immense overlapping of musical personnel, especially orchestra instrumentalists and choristers. There appears to be a Harvard musical repertory company whose members simply appear in different permutations and combinations for each musical event.

The great ecological paradox of Harvard music, however, is that in spite of this interdependency and what one would expect to be the common bond of mutual interest in music, many musical groups are guilty of exclusiveness, lack of cooperation, and even open animosity. The HRO is famous for its possessiveness with regard to personnel, resisting their involvement in any other organization or activity. Equally famous is the hauteur of the Glee Club which, as one member put it, is as much Club as it is Glee; or of WHRBies who walk around wearing "Mozart Forever," and "Back to Bach" buttons but who never deign to attend concerts, in the apparent belief that music produced by plastic discs and dials and buttons is superior to that of live performers.

Perhaps the most flagrant case is the Harvard-Radcliffe Music Club. Considering the near-universal interest and participation in musical activity at Harvard, there is really no need for an organization with as catholic pretensions as a title like that would indicate. At this point, the Music Club is little more than the administrative arm of the Bach Society Orchestra. In the face of the existence of another orchestra and a spontaneously active musical community, the Music Club this year sought to justify its existence by assuming a character of unbearable insularity and a more-musical-than-thou arrogance that was entirely unjustified, unnecessary and possibly even harmful to the organization.

Although Yearbook 331 characterized Leverett House as home base of Harvard's musical Establishment, there really is no musical Establishment. Instead, there are five to a dozen groups competing for the privilege. The Glee Club is as much a final club as a music-making organization. The HRO cannot attract many of the best instrumentalists who maintain that their time is better spent practicing privately than rehearsing with the orchestra. By now the "Harvard-Radcliffe" Orchestra has adopted a policy of beefing itself up with players from other colleges and from the conservatories.

The arrogance and pretension of Harvard musicians would be unimportant were it merely a by-product of ambitious and talented people's leading active and successful musical lives. The problem is that arrogance is not a by-product by the system's primary source of energy. It is the stimulus for many of the projects conceived and executed by musicians here and implies a basic flaw in the manner in which music is approached.

This can be most readily seen in the phenomenon of Harvard musical stage productions. Since Cosi fantutte at Leverett two years ago, there has been a steady escalation in the size and difficulty of productions. Last year there were productions of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. Mozart's Don Giovanni and Britten's The Turn of the Screw: this year it was hard to decide whether to be more impressed by Leverett's production of The Marriage of Figaro or the Bach Society-Music Club concert performance of Fidelio. The more ambitions these projects become, the more time, money and professional assistance are necessary to carry them off. Sometimes one of these works is lucky enough to get the intensive study and careful preparation is deserves, as in the case of Figaro. Occasionally, however, rehearsal and recruitment of performing forces are left to the last minute, with the result (as in Fidelio) that much of the performance is little more than intelligent sight-reading.

This demonstrates on a grand scale a problem with all musical activity here -- opera, symphony and chamber music alike. In the rush to make his mark on the music scene, the Harvard musician tends to aim high, choosing to perform works guaranteed to get him one up on his fellow musicians and impress the dickens out of the general community. Very often there is more interest in the idea of the thing rather than in obtaining the best musical result. All too often one gets the impression the projects' progenitors had one of those "hey-wouldn't-it-be-fantastic-if" bull sessions and then didn't know what to do with the music once they had decided to perform it.

Liability of Intelligence

Music is one area in which the Harvard undergraduate's well-advertised intelligence is, in a certain sense, a liability. The typical musician here is bright, attentive and clever enough to sight-read and/or fake his way through almost any part that is put in front of him. These are assets valuable in any musician, but the Harvard undergraduate often commits the grave error of depending on his native intelligence and talent to get him by, rather than using them as a tool for achieving a fuller understanding and more meaningful performance of the music. The typical musician performs in as many events as he can, leaving himself little or no time to practice.

More than neglect, there is a positive disdain for anything that smacks of professionalism: training, preparation or the patient and painful mastery of the literature, difficulty by difficulty. The Harvard musician thinks he is above all that, and sees no reason why he should not tackle the most difficult works at the start. He's knowledgeable and versed enough in recordings to know which pieces are considered the best and the most difficult and it's hard for him to see how anything else would be worth his while.

This attitude results primarily from the peculiar position of the Music Department in relation to the welter of musical activity in the College. In spite of the fact that the conductors of the big musical organizations have positions on its faculty -- and of the two or three professional recitals spon sored throughout the year, or the occasional venture as impresario made by its Pulitzer prize-winning composer-conductor, Leon Kirchner--the Music Department has earned the reputation of being "anti-performance." This may or may not be true of individual members of the department, but it is justified as a view of the department as a whole.

Three-Fold Failure

The failure of the Music Department is three-fold: to be the kind of department that attracts secondary school students seriously interested in studying music in college; to act as the center of, or even take an active part in, the musical life of the college; and to attract the most exciting musicians as concentrators. This has led to the peculiar situation in which it is considered ignominious to concentrate in music, and the categories of "musician" and "music major" are almost mutually exclusive. If someone is a flutist and a physics major or a 'cellist and concentrator in history and literature, he's really an ace. But if he concentrates in music, he is in grave danger of losing whatever musicality he might have had in the first place. The Harvard musician's aversion to the idea of intensive study of music as a necessary prelude to prelude to performing is thus only half arrogance and disdain: it is also fear--which the music department is directly responsible for fostering.

Thus Harvard music suffers from serious problems of definition: Is it the work of serious musicians or dilletantes; of professional or amateurs? Is the scope of its activity intramural or entrepreneurial on a community level? Does one first decide a project, then, proceed to flush the woodwork of the Boston community to find performers capable to executing it or does one tailor one's ambitions to the resources more immediately at hand, including oneself?

Let there be no mistake: an incredible amount of good music is produced at Harvard--moving, meaningful and exciting music. Participation in musical activities is immense, and most of it is sincere and wholly admirable. Enthusiasm and native musicality are hardly ever lacking, and programs often exhibit an ingenuity and esprit that would be hard to find elsewhere. Leverett's Fall Bach and the Beatles production and the Music Club's all-Ives concert are prime examples of music here at its intelligent best.

The undergraduate musician is extremely conscious of the public eye, if not the public ear. He seems at all times to be out to impress, to make people gasp, "Look at all that boy is doing! And he's only a student!"

In the long run, music at Harvard is neither a craft nor an art--it's a pastime. A bit of display, a large dose of arrogance as well as a helping of pure delight in making sound out of a printed page: these are the ingredients in the Harvard musical loaf. There are those who would rather eat cake, but in any case there is little danger of starvation