On one of those halcyon afternoons that make spring at Cal an impossible time to get any work done, take a procrastinator's walk past Morrison Hall. Listen for a ghostly ringing that suffuses the air with bells, just at the edge of hearing. Lie down in the grass. Breathe.
Or head into Morrison for a glimpse of one of the few great gamelans outside of Indonesia. The UC Berkeley music department actually owns two of these massive Javanese ensembles of drums, bells, and zithers. Gamelans require several players to create the hypnotic sounds heard rising out of Morrison throughout the week.
UC Berkeley students perform on the Javanese gamelan at Morrison Hall.
Marcus Wohlsen
The UC Berkeley music department marks its 100th anniversary this year. The California state legislature had no inkling of gamelans--or jazz, hip-hop, or samba, to name just a few of the genres tackled by department scholars in recent years--when it appropriated $6,000 in 1905 to pay the two-year salary of a single music professor to lead the campus orchestra.
Today Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Brahms still form the foundation of the UC Berkeley music curriculum. But in 100 years, the academic study of music in America has changed dramatically, opening doors to new kinds of music and new methods of study. Much of that change began at UC Berkeley.
"We always were on the interdisciplinary cutting edge," says Richard Taruskin, a longtime professor of musicology with the department.
Taruskin himself embodies the best of the intellectual crosscurrents of tradition and innovation that shape the study of music at Berkeley. His six-volume The Oxford History of Western Music, published late last year, runs over 4,000 pages and was 13 years in the making. Covering the 1,200-year history of what its author calls "literate music"--music that has been written down--Taruskin's magnum opus stands as the most exhaustive survey of the classical music canon ever penned by a single author.
Yet it hardly follows the contours of a conventional music appreciation survey. The social forces and historical events that shape music are nearly as important to Taruskin as the music itself.
"Berkeley is a place where you go to study music in context," he says.
And not just classical music. Undergraduates can immerse themselves in African drumming or jazz improvisation. Graduate students have studied more kinds of music than most listeners even knew existed, from Hindi folk music and Asian-American jazz to French modernism and the use of early music in contemporary pop.
The department's openness to a broad range of musical genres can be traced back to its earliest days.
Charles Seeger arrived on campus in 1912 to teach music at the invitation of President Benjamin Wheeler. Seeger is well-known as the patriarch of a famous American musical family that includes his folksinger son Pete, his composer wife Ruth Crawford Seeger, and daughter Peggy. But musicologists know him best as the father of ethnomusicology, the comparative study of music of different cultures (see sidebar).
While Seeger's truly pioneering work in the field would come later during a stint at UCLA, he planted its seeds in Berkeley. He favored a systematic, scientific approach to music history that took the field beyond mere taste-making and into the arena of truly rigorous historical scholarship. During the 1913-1914 school year, he taught the first full course in musicology ever offered at an American university. He inaugurated courses in composition, orchestration, and music appreciation, which laid the groundwork for the multifaceted course of study later formalized by Albert Elkus, department chair from 1937 to 1951.
Today, undergraduate majors in the department do coursework in every major area of music scholarship, including ethnomusicology, music history, theory, and composition. All must participate in some form of group music-making, whether it's the chorus, orchestra, or the gamelan. Undergrads also enjoy access to "an almost conservatory-like curriculum in musicianship," says department chair Anthony Newcomb. They learn to sight-sing and take musical dictation. All get individual instruction in voice or an instrument.
According to Newcomb, performance is more heavily emphasized at UC Berkeley than in any other music department at a major American university. Even graduate students must study performance to earn their degrees.
Professor Bonnie Wade says the department's integrative approach has been the key to the success of its graduates.
"We're not splintering the music department into competitive groups of people," says Wade, also a former dean of the College of Letters & Sciences.
Among its distinguished graduates, the department boasts composers Terry Riley and LaMont Young, who took music in radical new directions with their electronic compositions in the 1960s. Current San Francisco Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman earned his master's degree from UC Berkeley, as did Chronicle critic emeritus Robert Commanday. Berkeley Ph.Ds staff the music faculties at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and nearly every other major university across the country.
Some also stick around. Grammy-winning harpsichordist Davitt Moroney earned his doctorate in musicology from the department and now teaches there. He also serves as University organist.
According to Professor Emeritus Joseph Kerman, organs became a fixture at UC Berkeley thanks to a professor who endowed a fund in the 1930s. By the 1950s, Kerman says, the fund had grown large enough to purchase the 12 organs now scattered across the Berkeley campus.
Kerman himself has been a fixture in the department since 1952. He served as chair from 1961 to 1964. A leading Beethoven scholar, Kerman has also helped raise the stature of the department in the public eye with his frequent articles for The New York Review of Books and other national magazines and newspapers. Kerman has watched the department evolve over the years from one focused almost exclusively on Western classical music to one that embraces queer theory, world music, and Madonna.
Kerman himself helped usher in these changes. His book Contemplating Music made a splash in the 1980s, calling the field of musicology "too stuffy."
Sitting outside Morrison Hall, which opened along with the adjacent Hertz concert hall in 1958, Kerman fondly recalls an old student of his who wrote his doctoral thesis on Mendelssohn but as a professor now lectures on history of rock to full auditoriums at the University of Minnesota.
"Attitudes change," he says.
But he believes today's students still gain much from studying the classical repertoire.
"I do think that stuff is important," he says, smiling, of the music to which he has devoted his life's work. "It's good to think about."
– Marcus Wohlsen