Carter, Ellington, Boulanger, Adler, Alekseyev

Benny Carter and Tom Everett preparing for rehearsal in Sanders Theatre. Carter taught a week-long seminar at Harvard in 1987 and performed with the Harvard Jazz Band several times.

Courtesy Office for the Arts at Harvard.

Benny Carter, "Myra"

It is hard to say which is more staggering: Benny Carter's musical versatility—becoming equally legendary as a multi-instrumentalist (particularly prominent as a saxophonist and trumpeter), arranger, composer, and educator—or his longevity. Carter was crafting the big-band sound with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra by the late 1920s, and won his final Grammy for Best Instrumental Solo in 1994.

More than a decade after performing with Carter during his two-day Harvard residency in 1988, the Harvard Jazz Band commissioned this piece in honor of Myra Mayman, director of Harvard’s Office for the Arts from 1973-2001. One of Carter's final compositions, the song illustrates Carter's inextinguishable creative force, even as it gazes back on his career, nostalgically channeling the mood of classic jazz standards. The music follows the meaning of the lyrics beautifully, offering a loving tribute to its subject and her sunny disposition.

Carter faxed his handwritten lead sheets to the band before its first performance, to be supplemented by a lead sheet arranged by Allen Feinstein, piano arrangement by Gene Di Novi, and 6-part vocal arrangement by Rob Opdycke. These scores come from the collection of Tom Everett, who founded the Harvard Jazz Band in 1971, soon after he was hired to direct the University Bands. Over the next 40 years, he shepherded the growth of jazz at Harvard, and amassed a significant body of scores, correspondence, photographs, and memorabilia.

Ellington demonstrating his lecture "Negro Music in America" at Harvard's Paine Hall in 1944.

From the Harvard University Archives.

Duke Ellington, arrangement of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "Stormy Weather"

By the time Ellington made his first recording of “Stormy Weather” in the spring of 1933, it was already a hit. Jazz Age audiences were familiar with Arlen’s song from multiple recordings (Arlen himself, with Leo Reisman’s orchestra; Ted Lewis; Frances Langford; Guy Lombardo; Paul Tremaine), and lucky New Yorkers could hear Ethel Waters’ show-stopping live performance, with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, in the 22nd Cotton Club Parade, a nightclub revue that swiftly earned the nickname “The Stormy Weather Show.” Historian Shane Vogel, in his article "Performing 'Stormy Weather'", argues that Waters's vulnerable, emotional interpretation represented a subversive act of African-American modernism amid the racially charged spectacle of Cotton Club revues.

Ellington made at least half a dozen arrangements of the song over the next thirty years. This score, in Ellington’s hand, notates a saxophone accompaniment to back the song's melody. At first, the thick, tumbling saxophone section evokes the title, a trace of the show's over-the-top stormy visual and sound effects that Waters pushed to remove. But the saxes' smooth contour and increasingly contained motion instead provides a delicate support for the instrumental soloists to channel Waters's moving sound.

Hover over the image to view annotations explaining Ellington's arrangement.

Nadia and Lili Boulanger in 1913.

Via Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Lili Boulanger, Cortège, arranged by Nadia Boulanger

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) composed the short piece Cortège​ in 1914 for French violinist and family friend Yvonne Astruc. The autograph manuscript has been lost, but the work survives in two versions published soon after Boulanger's death: one for violin and piano, the other for solo piano. The ceremonial procession suggested by the title is a joyful one, with Boulanger's cascading melody breezing over bouncing accompaniment.

During her first concert tour of the U.S. in 1925, legendary teacher, conductor, organist, and composer Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) performed selections from her younger sister’s works, including an arrangement of Cortège. Nadia's later U.S. tours also included lecture series and classes at institutions like Harvard and Radcliffe, reflecting her status as perhaps the most influential composition teacher of the 20th century (as seen in the careers of students like Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones, Astor Piazzolla, and George Walker).

This manuscript is another arrangement by Nadia Boulanger for solo violin and chamber orchestra. The full score is in Nadia’s hand; the parts are partly autograph, and partly in a copyist’s hand. While there is no solo violin part, markings in the score indicate it may have been used by the soloist. The arrangement perfectly captures and even extends the buoyant mood of the original with the twinkling, animated sounds of flute, celesta, triangle, harp, and plucked strings.

Guido Adler in 1927.

Photo by George Fayer, via Wikimedia Commons.

Guido Adler, annotated copy of Alexander Wheelock Thayer's Chronological Catalog of the Works of Ludwig von Beethoven

Guido Adler (1855-1941), a Jewish scholar, writer, and critic, taught at the universities of Prague and Vienna, and (among many other positions) served as general editor of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich from 1894-1938. After the Anschluss, Adler’s daughter Melanie attempted to bargain his library to allow them to escape Vienna, but her plan failed and Adler’s books were confiscated by the Nazis after his death in 1941. The items now in the Loeb Music Library were subsumed into the Music Library of the University of Vienna and eventually restored to his heirs as part of the University’s restitution project.

Adler’s library was a working collection: like this interleaved copy of Thayer’s Beethoven thematic catalog, many of the books and offprints are heavily annotated and corrected. Such avid study illustrates Adler’s place at the heart of the new discipline of historical musicology, which investigated pieces' construction, notation, and performance to discover the characteristic styles of different historical periods. Adler essentially founded the field in 1885 when he formally distinguished it from music theory, music aesthetics, music education, and "comparative musicology" (which aimed particularly to compare folk songs from different cultures, and gave rise to what is now known as ethnomusicology). This particular image shows Adler's annotation of themes from Beethoven's 23 Songs of Various Nationalities, including his re-transcription of the three Russian folk tunes, reflecting both historical and comparative impulses.

Cassette labels for Alekseyev's recordings, including "Niurba ohuokaia."

"Niurba ohuokaia," recorded by Eduard Alekseyev

From the late 1960s on, ethnomusicologist Eduard Yefimovich Alekseyev (1937-2021) worked tirelessly to document the musical culture of the circumpolar Sakha Republic. His collection includes field recordings and video of olonkho (epic song and recitative), ohuokhai (round dance), shamanic ceremonies, and mystery performances. Breaking down the barriers between music theory and ethnomusicology, Alekseyev extensively analyzed what he heard from the perspective of pitch and intonation, timbre, polyphony (multiple voices sounding at once), notation, and more, while also detailing folklore's role in modern culture and reflecting on the process of ethnographic collecting. One of his lifelong goals was to develop a theory of "anthropophonics," which studies how the human voice makes sound—from speaking to singing and everything in between.

Until the 1990s, the Soviet government suppressed publications about the rituals of indigenous cultures; Alekseyev’s fieldwork has helped to preserve these traditions, and digitization of the recordings allows us to share them with performers and researchers around the world. This recording of songs from the Yakut round dance was made in the village of Maar in the Niurba district on June 23, 1977, during a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Markhinskiy sovkhoz (collective farm).