What was it like to be present at the first performance of a great work of music? Thomas Kelly offers an inside look at his"First Nights" course, one of Harvard's most popular and enduring institutions.
Thomas Kelly has been a Professor of Music at Harvard University since 1994 and served as the chair of the Department of Music from 1999 to 2005. Professor Kelly teaches the popular undergraduate course First Nights: Five Performance Premiers, which examines five musical premieres as significant moments of cultural history. His main research interest is in medieval chant, where he has identified and published an important repertory of early chant from southern Italy.