Featured series 
Tag: Music
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Science & Tech
Physics for musical masses
Harvard physicist Lisa Randall is taking Paris’ operagoing public to the fifth dimension this month, working with a composer and artist to present an opera that incorporates Randall’s theories about extra dimensions of space.
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Campus & Community
Highlights from a memorable Commencement
On June 4, administrators sighed with relief at the weather, speakers went over their notes, and graduates congregated in black-tasseled flocks alongside a rainbow of professors in their own caps and gowns. Meanwhile, the Harvard Gazette staff fanned out across the campus on Commencement day to pick a rainbow of their own — colorful accounts…
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Campus & Community
Mohan Sundararaj of HSPH harnesses the power of music to heal
It was 1998 and Mohan Sundararaj was frustrated. A medical student at India’s Sri Ramachandra Medical College and the child of two physicians, Sundararaj was committed to his medical education but frustrated by the demands that kept him from his other passion: the piano.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard Department of Music announces $226,000 in fellowships
The Music Department’s Oscar S. Schafer Award is given to students “who have demonstrated unusual ability and enthusiasm in their teaching of introductory courses, which are designed to lead students to a growing and lifelong love of music.” This year’s recipients are David Sullivan and Karola Obermüller.
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Campus & Community
2008-09: A look back
As Commencement closes another chapter of the Harvard story, here is a brief backward glance at highlights of the year that was.
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Campus & Community
For the 20th straight year, the peal of bells will mark Commencement
A joyous peal of bells will ring throughout Cambridge today (June 4). In celebration of the city of Cambridge and of the country’s oldest university — and of our earlier history when bells of varying tones summoned us from sleep to prayer, work, or study — this ancient yet new sound will fill Harvard Square…
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Campus & Community
Sobering poems, more sobering oration mark PBK
Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter first met in 1781, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War.
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Campus & Community
Ten honorary degrees awarded at Commencement
Harvard University has conferred today (June 4) honorary degrees on 10 outstanding individuals: Energy Secretary Steven Chu, filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, author Joan Didion, religious historian Wendy Doniger, legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, immunologist Anthony S. Fauci, anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, engineer Robert Langer, musician Wynton Marsalis, and political scientist Sidney Verba.
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Campus & Community
Arts First fete takes center stage
More than 3,000 Harvard students take to the streets with the 17th annual Arts First celebration, one of the nation’s largest university arts festivals. More than 225 music, theater, dance, film, and visual arts events comprise the four-day extravaganza, which takes place April 30-May 3 across the Harvard campus.
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Arts & Culture
Performance rings old bones with sounds of ‘selection’
The Harvard Museum of Natural History’s galleries rang with music Tuesday evening (April 28) as the facility’s fossils made room for musicians performing seven original classical pieces written in honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”
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Arts & Culture
Sing a song of praise
From Puritan psalms to spirituals to Ellington and Coltrain, a Divinity School class explores – and performs – the sacred and musical.
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Arts & Culture
Sing a song of praise
Every Monday a small group of students gathers in Andover Hall for a sacred musical journey.
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Arts & Culture
Handel’s ‘Saul’ to be performed in memory of John Raymond Ferris
The Harvard University Choir and the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra will present Handel’s magnificent oratorio “Saul” on April 26. The performance is dedicated to the memory of John Raymond Ferris, University organist and choirmaster from 1958-1990, who passed away last summer.
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Arts & Culture
Seniors Buzney, Barron win Mellinger Award
Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) members Catherine Buzney ’09 and Christine Barron ’09 have been named recipients of the Rachel Mellinger Memorial Award.
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Arts & Culture
Yannatos retires after 45 years, concert planned
With music filling his ears, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) Conductor James Yannatos will retire after 45 years by giving his final concert on April 17.
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Arts & Culture
Creativity through cerebration
Contemporary composer Kay Rhie hasn’t had many watershed musical moments. The romantic ideal of a composer “deeply entrenched in creative epiphanies,” she admitted on a recent damp spring afternoon, is “not my story.”
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Arts & Culture
Scholar plucks composers out of the dark
Wielding a viola da gamba almost as tall as she, Laury Gutiérrez plays with the assurance and animation of a rock star. She is, after all, one in a select club of artists who hold a National Interest Waiver from the U.S. government, granted to noncitizens “who because of their exceptional ability in the sciences,…
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Arts & Culture
Aykroyd honored, student groups featured
Dan Aykroyd has got Cultural Rhythms and blues. As celebrity emcee of the 24th annual Cultural Rhythms Festival and the Harvard Foundation’s Artist of the Year, a bespectacled Aykroyd dazzled the audience.
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Arts & Culture
Dance, music, literature celebrate human rights
Human rights are all about history, politics, and the law — right? Not entirely. The arts have a role to play. Literature, music, dance, and other forms of creative expression often convey oblique stories of injustice and trauma. They also inspire humans to embrace the human rights implicit in every act of creation.
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Campus & Community
Elliot Forbes
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on December 9, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Elliot Forbes, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Forbes is well known for his revision and critical annotations of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven.
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Arts & Culture
Rubén Blades donates papers, recordings
He’s attained fame as an award-winning actor and musician, founded a political party and run for president of his native Panama and served as the Panamanian minister of tourism, but now Rubén Blades LL.M. ’85 will add another credit to his resume: Harvard College Library benefactor.
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Campus & Community
‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched
A new Web archive created by faculty, students, and librarians at Harvard brings original research on Leonard Bernstein and his Boston roots to the public for the first time. The material, which went live on the Web on Jan. 23, was collected during undergraduate seminars and over the course of an international Bernstein Festival at…
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Arts & Culture
A visit with musician Hans Tutschku
Up in the eaves of Paine Music Hall, professor of music Hans Tutschku is hard at work composing in a setting that would make Mozart’s head spin. The space is small but packed with equipment: computer monitors, eight loudspeakers, a turntable, and several mixers and synthesizers with enough levers to land a 747.
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Campus & Community
Dunster House composer-in-residence ‘Charley’ Kletzsch dies at 82
Charles F. “Charley” Kletzsch, Dunster House composer-in-residence for more than 50 years, died Jan. 15.
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Health
Art and science: Healing in harmony
What do Julie Andrews and Mozart have in common? And what links Hillary Clinton, Che Guevara, and Cameron Diaz? The former have absolute or perfect pitch; the latter are tone-deaf. How our brains differ to create these disparities was one of the subjects of “Crossing the Corpus Callosum,” a first-of-its-kind symposium held Jan. 10 at…
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Arts & Culture
Isolating creativity in the brain
How — exactly — does improvisation happen? What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process?
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Arts & Culture
Scholar asks: ‘How can we know the spectator from the dance?’
When Yvonne Rainer and her fellow dancers took to the stage in the early 1960s, their performances were like nothing American audiences had ever seen. First, there were no costumes. Performers wore T-shirts, casual pants, and sneakers. In place of elaborate leaps and twirls, the dancers engaged in everyday movements like running, climbing, and even…
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Campus & Community
Hailing an unfulfilled promise
Harvard marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Wednesday (Dec. 10), highlighting both the document’s power and its unfulfilled promise through theater, song, and ideas.
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Campus & Community
Making connections: A special evening for Harvard faculty
“The arts are something we all care deeply about, whether we are artists ourselves, whether we are social scientists, or whether we are scientists,” Senior Vice Provost Judith Singer told an audience of about 120 Harvard faculty of all stripes and ranks gathered at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.
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Campus & Community
In brief
FAS Supply Swap; HRO plays Weber, Yannatos, Mahler; New lab to open at HKS