a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston

About the Intelligencer

Many of us today rue the general decline in musical culture and literacy. In a small way we propose to reverse that trend with an online virtual journal and blog called The Boston Musical Intelligencer. If you have looked in the Boston Globe or Boston Phoenix calendars for guidance on what concert to attend, or looked in those papers for a review of a concert you have attended, you will no doubt share our frustration. Although what coverage there is in these papers is estimable, there is not enough of it. Due to  limitations of staff and ink, probably fewer than 10 percent of the area’s concerts are reviewed and probably fewer than one half are listed.

Our aim with The Musical Intelligencer is to list every classical music concert in greater Boston. We also intend to review as many as possible, especially those deemed most important and unjustly neglected by our editors. Our reviewers are to be drawn from Boston’s most distinguished musicians and musical academics under the leadership of Robert Levin. We invite participation from readers and experts.

Our modest undertaking could not have begun without generous initial support from The Harvard Musical Association.

Since its founding in 1837, The Harvard Musical Association has sought to advance the intellectual-musical life in the city. Among the Association’s accomplishments are the first professional chamber music series, the erection of the great Boston Music Hall, and the formation of the orchestra which ultimately gave rise to the Boston Symphony. HMA for many years also subsidized the most learned and influential periodical on classical music in the history of the U.S.—Dwight’s Journal of Music, which was issued from 1852 to 1881. No such periodical has existed since then.

F. Lee Eiseman, publisher

Our email: info [at] classical-scene.com

Editors and Contributors

Robert D. Levin, a world-wide acclaimed classical performer, composer, and musicologist, is professor of music at Harvard University, from which he received his A.B. magna cum laude with highest honors in 1968. In 1994, he was named Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities. Levin’s academic career combines teaching and tutoring, especially on keyboard instruments; conducting; and music theory, with an emphasis on the classical period. He has completed and reconstructed a number of classical works, especially unfinished compositions by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach. His Mozart completions, including the Requiem in D minor and the Mass in C minor, are considered his most important achievements. Levin is also President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig and Artistic Director of the Sarasota Music Festival.

Bettina A. Norton is a retired museum professional. She has published widely in her field, American historical prints, and in later years, was editor and publisher of The Beacon Hill Chronicle. She lives in the house in which she grew up, in Boston, and has been attending classical music concerts “since the waning years of World War II. “She is author of Edwin Whitefield: Nineteenth-Century North American Scenery , History of the Boston Naval Shipyard, Trinity Church: Story of an Episcopal Parish in the City of Boston, ‘To Create and Foster Architecture: History of the Boston Architectural Center, Prints at the Essex Institute, and over 60 articles. She also founded Hill House, the community center on Beacon Hill.

F. Lee Eiseman has been making important things happen in Boston for many years.

* * * * *

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist living in Cambridge. He grew up near Boston and received a BA in Music from the University of Rochester in 2007. He doesn’t think art is a substitute for life, but it should at least point people in the general direction. His website is www.adambaratz.com

Jeffrey S. Berman is Professor of Medicine at Boston University. He is also a clarinetist in the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and a member of several music boards in the Boston area.

Laurence E. Berman, retired professor of music, is also an active pianist. A graduate of Harvard College, from which he also received his PhD., he studied with Nadia Boulanger.

Dorothy Crawford, musicologist, is author of Evenings on and off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 and Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music (with her husband, John C. Crawford). Her latest book, Hitler’s Gift to American Music: Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California, will be published by the Yale University Press in Spring 2009.

Liane Curtis (Ph.D. Musicology) is President of The Rebecca Clarke Society, Inc., and Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy; and Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.  The collection she edited, A Rebecca Clarke Reader (2004), is the first book on this increasingly recognized composer.  She has taught at institutions including Wellesley College, Harvard, Ohio State University, and Brandeis.  As a music critic she wrote for Bay Windows (the leading New England newspaper of the GBLT community) from 1998-2004, and has also written for the San Francisco Examiner, Curve Magazine, Women’s Enews, and many other publications.  With the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail (on whose Board she serves), she worked to have Amy Beach’s name added to the 87 names of male composers that decorate Boston’s Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade.  It was unveiled in 2000.  Liane’s blog, Feminist in the Concert Hall, is at http://wophil.blogspot.com/

Lyle Davidson, composer, studied at New England Conservatory and Brandeis. He is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory where he teaches Solfege, 16th-century Counterpoint, and Music in Education courses.

Mary Wallace Davidson has directed the music libraries at Radcliffe, Wellesley, Eastman School of Music, and Indiana University. She now lives in the Boston area.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in early 20th-century music.  A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1967), he is professor emeritus of music at Tufts University.  In 1997 he edited the /Altenberg Lieder/, op. 4, for the new edition of Alban Berg’s complete works, and wrote the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of /Harmony/ by his teacher Walter Piston.  In 2004 he published  /Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on his Music/ (Pendragon Press)

John W. Ehrlich, founder and Music Director of The Spectrum Singers, has been active as a singer and conductor in the Boston and Cambridge areas for more than thirty-five years. Son of a concert pianist and a microbiologist, Mr. Ehrlich was born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and prepared for higher education at Grosse Pointe University School and the New Hampton School. He studied music and conducting while attending the Hartt School of Music, Trinity College, and both Harvard and Boston Universities. His teachers were Robert Shaw, Gregg Smith, G. Wallace Woodworth, Nathan Gottschalk, and Vytautous Marijousius. Also a singer, Mr. Ehrlich has sung with Hartford Chamber Choir, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Cambridge Society for Early Music, John Oliver Chorale, Boston Baroque, Cantata Singers, and Boston’s Emmanuel Church choir. For eight seasons he was Music Director of the Master Singers of Worcester. This is Mr. Ehrlich’s 29th season as Music Director of The Spectrum Singers.

Leslie Gerber was born in Brooklyn in 1943 and graduated from Brooklyn College with a useless degree in Creative Writing. In 1970 he started Parnassus Records, which publishes classical recordings and formerly sold used and rare recordings. He has written for The American Record Guide and Fanfare, and “Performance Today,” and reviewed well over 1500 classical CDs for Amazon. Currently he writes for Classic Record Collector and for the Woodstock Times. He was “Classical Music Director” of WDST-FM, in Woodstock, New York, from 1980 until 1991. He produced the series “The Grand Piano” for WMHT-FM. He has written program notes for CBS Classics, RCA, for his own Parnassus label, and for the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. He also writes and performs poetry. His writing website is here. He lives in Woodstock, New York, with his companion of 25 years, Tara McCarthy, herself a successful and prolific writer of educational materials.

Christopher Greenleaf is a veteran recording engineer who collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant

David Griesinger is a physicist who works in the field of sound and music.  At Harvard, he worked as a recording  engineer, learning the tremendous importance of room acoustics in recording technique. After finishing his PhD in Physics (the  Mösbauer Effect in Zinc 67) he developed one of the first digital reverberation devices, which eventually became the Lexicon 224 reverberator. He also is the designer of  the LARES reverberation enhancement system. His website is   http://www.davidgriesinger.com/

Brian E. Jones, music director and organist of Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, for 20 years, now holds that post at Old South Church. He was director of the Dedham Choral Society for many years.

Robert Kirzinger, annotator and lecturer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the past 10 years, is also a composer.

Mark Kroll, a harpsichordist well known to Boston music audiences, has toured extensively as performer, lecturer, and leader of master classes in Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He has an extensive discography and list of publications. He will performing a recital and give a week of lectures and master classes at the University of Medellín, Colombia in April, and I am the keynote speaker and performer at the Hummel Festival in Bordeaux, France this May.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. He is a composer and practicing attorney, and was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Seth Lachterman lives in Hillside, New York. While dividing his past academic career between music (composition and musicology) and mathematics, he has been a principal at Encore Systems, LLC. He regularly writes for Berkshire Review of the Arts and writes for BMInt in a collaborative venture.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University. Seth Lachterman lives in Hillside, New York. While dividing his past academic career between music (composition and musicology) and mathematics, he has been a principal at Encore Systems, LLC. He regularly writes for Berkshire Review of the Arts and writes for BMInt in a collaborative venture.

Rebecca Marchand is a native Californian with a New England soul and enjoys wearing many musical hats as a musicologist, music history professor, mezzo-soprano, occasional blogger, and avid concert-goer. She is on the faculty at Boston Conservatory and Longy School of Music.

David McMullin is a Boston-based composer whose works have been performed by major ensembles in the United States, Europe and Asia. With degrees from Yale (BA) and NYU (PhD), he teaches music theory at New England Conservatory, directs the New England chapter of the American Composers Forum, and serves on the executive board of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Steven P. Marrone is a Professor of History at Tufts University.  Once trained in voice, he sometimes still yearns for the life of a musician.  His scholarly specialization lies in medieval and early modern Europe.

Susan Miron, a harpist, has been a book critic and essayist for the past two decades for The N.Y. Times Book Review, The Wall St. Journal. The American Scholar, Partisan Review, and many other newspapers and literary magazines. While she wrote on a wide range of subjects, including music, her specialty was East and Central European literature. She holds Masters degrees in both harp performance and Judaic Studies. Susan has recorded two CDs of harp and voice music, and two recent CDs devoted to her transcriptions of the keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti. She has performed for thirty-two years with her favorite chamber music partner, her husband, violist Burton Fine.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

Elizabeth Morse, principal harpist of the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra and formally principal harpist of Rhode Island Philharmonic, is on the faculty of Williams College.

Eli Newberger studied music theory and reviewed classical music for the Yale Daily News. Performing music, he wrote in “Medicine of the Tuba” in Doctors Afield (Yale University Press, 1999), helps him to care. That chapter and other writings on music and medicine may be found on his website, here.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge, and was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and Chairman of the Department at U. Mass Boston for the past 15 years, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award in Teaching and the Chancellor’s Distinction in Teaching Award. Also a composer, he lives in Watertown.

Elizabeth Perten is a doctoral student in Musicology at Brandeis University and also is pursuing a Joint MA in Music and Women’s and Gender Studies. She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, with a BA in Music. Elizabeth’s research interests include 19th century piano music, music criticism, women in music, historiography and the 19th century composer’s role as music critic and its subsequent effect on music history.

Larry Phillips studied music at Harvard, the Montreal Conservatory, and at New England Conservatory. In 1974 he was a prizewinner at the International Harpsichord Competition in Bruges, Belgium.

Richard Pittman, founder of Boston Music Viva, is also conductor of the New England Philharmonic and the Concord Orchestra. He is a recipient of an ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award.

Laura Stanfield Prichard is the Director of Fine Arts for the Arlington Public Schools and a member of the music faculty at U Mass-Lowell. She is a regular pre-concert speaker for Boston Baroque, the Berkshire Choral Festival, and the San Francisco Symphony.

Michael Rocha is a self-described “long-ago” music teacher, a long-time music enthusiast and pianist, and short-time Web designer: http://www.cobaltocumulus.com. He graduated first in his class of 2,800 from UCLA, and with an MA in Meteorology from MIT.

Seda Röder is a young concert pianist from Istanbul who performs in the United States and in Europe. She is currently a piano instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a teaching assistant and Fellow at Harvard University, where she is conducting research on “Piano Music in Vienna in the context of Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg.

Gillian Rogell, a violist, is chair of the Chamber Music Department of the New England Conservatory School of Continuing Education, and also teaches at NEC Preparatory School, the Rivers School Conservatory, and Walnut Hill School. She is the creator of the award-winning DVD, “At the Heart of Chamber Music” which was aired on WGBH TV and won two “Telly” awards. She maintains a private chamber music studio in Brookline. (www.MusicAlchemy.net)

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

David Shengold A Philadelphia-based arts critic, David Shengold has written for Opera News, Opera (UK), Opéra Magazine (France), Musical America Online, Playbill and Time Out New York among many other venues. He has contributed program essays to the Metropolitan, New York City Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Covent Garden and Wexford Festival programs and lectured for the Glimmerglass Festival and Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre. Educated at Amherst and Berkeley, he has taught courses on opera, literature and cultural history at Oberlin, Mount Holyoke and Williams Colleges. He trained and performed with Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA and has been a Guest Critic at the Chautauqua Festival

Marvin J. Ward holds a Ph.D. French/English in Medieval Studies (UNC-CH), A former editor of professional newsletters and former officer/board member in various professional and cultural organizations, he is also a singer in choruses, former announcer for a classical music radio station, former board member of presenter and performer organizations, former classical CD store buyer and salesperson. He co-founded Classical Voice of New England, serving as its President and Founding Executive editor.

Janice Weber is a member of the piano faculty at Boston Conservatory. Her latest CD, “A Cascade of Roses: Piano Bouquet” will be out on Valentine’s Day.

Geoffrey Wieting holds Bachelor’s degrees in organ and Latin from Oberlin College and a Master’s degree in collaborative piano from New England Conservatory. Currently, he sings in the choir of Trinity Church and accompanies the Boston Choral Ensemble under Miguel Felipe.

Christoph Wolff is Adams University Professor at Harvard University. Born and educated in Germany, he studied organ and historical keyboard instruments, musicology and art history at the Universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and Freiburg. His website is here.