Ellen T. Harris

INTERVIEWER: So this is the MIT 150th Oral History Project with    Dr. Ellen Harris, and    I want to start out by asking you about the early years. So can you tell me where you were born, and    what it was like growing up there?

HARRIS: I was born in Paterson, New Jersey, but    moved when I was three to the smaller suburb of Glen Rock. So, this was       obviously a suburb of New York City. My father commuted into New York on the Erie Lackawanna, which he always referred to as the Weary Erie.    There were very good schools in Glen Rock, very good public schools. So I went to public schools all the way through. My older sister went to a regional high school, because Glen Rock was so small it didn't have its own high school at that point. By the time I got to high school they did. So I went all through the public high schools of Glen Rock. It was a wonderful education with that everyone had access to that quality of public education.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your parents. What did your parents do?

HARRIS: My father was a stockbroker,    and my mother was a mother -- stayed home, did a lot of volunteer work. She was very much engaged in    many community activities all of her life. And my sister and I, both of whom went on    into careers which she had not done, decided that we'd actually inherited a great deal from her because she was a manager. She basically end up running every volunteer organization that she joined.   

My father's background is interesting because    he had been sent off to high school to Andover, but then the Depression came. He was pulled out of high school and sent immediately to work for the family. My father never finished high school.    So it's very interesting that my sister and I both    were so strongly encouraged to go on to college and then we both got our PhDs.

INTERVIEWER: What role did music play in your home growing up? How did you first get interested in that?

HARRIS: Well, we were both    sent to take piano lessons. That was, I think, pretty much standard. There was also music in the public schools, which I still remember Miss Whitehouse from grammar school, and    the things that we did in school. We did a lot of singing mostly. And at home my father sang all the time. So we were frequently singing at home, just    snippets of songs to one another. And the tendency I now have to take anything that I hear as a cue for a song is something that I learned from my father. This is something that some people find funny and some people actually are irritated that I will break out into song    with the right cue line,    with very little notice. It just sort of happens. But that's very much my home life, and that was my father. My father said that he sang in choirs when he was in school, and that his choir director said to him, you don't--this is a quote, you don't sing good, but you sure sing loud. So I guess volume came from my father.   

Then through school, you know, began to participate in the school musicals, went to summer camp where there was a program when we did musicals, and increasingly took lead roles in the musicals, and started taking voice lessons when I was a senior in high school. And actually    went into New York City so that I took lessons from a teacher in New York City. And then there were the years of what do I do? Do I go to New York and study voice or do I go to college? And the voice teacher in New York said you go to New York and you study voice, and you study languages, and you get a coach, and you learn roles, and if you go to college it will ruin your voice. But the feeling was that you needed -- my family very strongly believed in education. And I think I also felt that it was just not possible to throw all my eggs into that basket. And I don't think I ever really felt that I had what it took. I think that to become a professional singer you, individually, have to believe that you have the best voice. The voice that everyone would want to hear -- that you cannot really have doubts. I don't think that you can harbor doubts and succeed in that field.

So I have to say, I just, I harbored doubts. I loved singing, but it didn't seem to me that I could really make it professionally. So college was a good thing. College was security. It gave me an education. It gave me a chance to do something if I didn't go on in singing, but then the same question came up. Then at the end of college, did I go on to a conservatory and study voice, or did I go on to an academic program and study something that was more    in the way of research in academics? I also at that point was a third possibility I was very interested in special education, because in college I had taken    a number of classes in psychology, and had been a research assistant in the psychology department doing    positive reinforcement training with mentally retarded children and teaching them music. And I was very interested in music as a therapy, but I ended up choosing academic research. I sometimes say I chose the field of the three that I could've chosen at that point in music that    was perhaps the least giving.

I think if one had gone into music therapy and worked with children, that that is a very giving profession. And if you actually succeed as a professional and can actually give your voice, it's also giving. But research is sometimes-- especially humanistic research-- I think frequently you do because you're driven to do it, and not really because the world is dying to read your research. It's very different I think from scientific research where in fact there frequently is a bottom line where there's a huge benefit.    As much as people may be interested in reading history, and there is a huge benefit to reading history, I'm not sure that musicology is as much of a gift. But I love it and so that's what I chose to do.

INTERVIEWER: And there's certainly been a benefit to your students.

HARRIS: I think so. I feel very strongly that students benefit enormously from studying music, and that from kindergarten, pre-kindergarten through college and beyond there is a very real sense, that I have-- I don't think I'm alone-- that students who study music gain enormously from that. And not because they necessarily want to be professional, but because through the study of music they learn discipline, they learn the advantage-- well, the necessity actually of iterative learning. That you need to do something over and over again in order to master it, and that sometimes that can be tedious. But even if it's tedious, it's the way forward. And I think at MIT we see this very much in our admissions process, where some extraordinary percentage of our students come with very high musical background, very high level musical backgrounds. I think it's somewhere in the 65-70 percent of our incoming students present an extremely high level background in usually music performance.

INTERVIEWER: Isn't there a sort of a connection between math and music?

HARRIS: Well that's what everyone says.    When I'm on an airplane and people ask me what I do, and I say that I teach music at MIT, and inevitably there is the [SIGH] there's music at MIT? Always.    My tendency basically to cut the conversation off a little bit    is simply to say, oh you know, that math and music thing. Which satisfies almost everyone. Which is very interesting, because I think very few people can actually discuss what that means. Now music has a mathematical basis. We talk about    the way in which    notes    have specific    qualities to them, and there are mathematical proportions involved, an octave is in the ratio of 2:1, and a       fifth --the interval of a fifth is in the ratio of 2:3. And so there are all of these mathematical proportions    that    we talk about. Of course acoustics is--    has its physical properties as well. Not convinced that our response to music has anything to do with that, and I'm not really convinced that when someone performs, or even when someone composes, that mathematics is at the center of that activity.

INTERVIEWER: Now I guess what I thought was the case was that people who were skilled in math often tend to be skilled in music. That either it was a part of the brain--a similar part the brain where the processing was done.   

HARRIS: It is often said that people who are really skilled in math are frequently very skilled in music, and we do see this. The opposite of course, is not always true. You cannot say that people who are skilled in music are likely to be very skilled in math.    Although that's true in some cases,    I think it's more a one way street.

INTERVIEWER: So, tell me about your dec-- what made you decide to go to Brown and then the University of Chicago?

HARRIS: Well, when I was    thinking about college, and my sister had gone to Mount Holyoke College, and there was--there was no pressure on me, but there was a sense that women's colleges were some of the best colleges. And so I did look at a number of women's colleges in the area. But    I didn't really want to go to a women's college. I didn't really want to go to a very big school. And I became very interested in coordinate colleges.

And there were some    coordinate colleges in the New England area.    Brown with Pembroke, and I, when I went to school, I applied to Pembroke College. I did not apply to Brown. Brown and Pembroke had separate admissions, and so I went to Pembroke. And Pembroke did not grant degrees, it was not like Radcliffe in that sense. I got a Brown University degree, and of course I had Brown University professors,    but I went to Pembroke and I lived at Pembroke. Pembroke was very important to me as a women's community, and I liked very much having a women's community while I was in college. But I liked very much having a women's community in a co-educational environment.    Because Pembroke was significantly smaller then Brown, actually the admissions process was more stringent. So by and large the Pembrokers did better than the Brown students, because there were fewer of us. This of course did not help with dating, but we did help advise a lot of the Brown students.

INTERVIEWER: The odds were good for dating.

HARRIS: The odds were good, as long as you got the right 1/3 of class, right?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HARRIS: And I looked at other coordinate colleges, but I was very interested in Brown. I liked Brown. I liked Providence. I liked the size of the city. And I think I--really I think at Brown is where my intellectual curiosity was awakened. I think    through high school-- I've always said that I was a good do-bee. You know, I did what I was assigned, I did my work on time, I frequently thought that I got good grades because I did what was expected of me. So I really didn't have any sense of intellectual prowess, but rather doing the homework that I was assigned.

And at Brown what happened was that I really began to get interested in intellectual issues for their own sake, and not just for finishing the homework assignments. And this was at a time when Brown had a rather strict curriculum. It's a very different school today. It's before all of the curriculum change at Brown. And we had    what at MIT we call general institute requirements. We had specific requirements    that    we had to take, and we had specific majors, and we had a special program we had to go through, and there was a good deal of diversity in the program. So    general education requirements as well as a major. And I don't know how I would have done at Brown once the curriculum became completely free. It would have been a very different experience, and I think you had to be prepared to go in and create something for yourself, and I'm not sure that when I graduated from high school I was perhaps ready to do that. But I can't relive it, so I lived what I lived.

INTERVIEWER: So did that-- did the sort of awakening of your intellectual prowess-- I mean, is that the reason you wound up at the University of Chicago?

HARRIS: Well, when I decided that I wanted to go on in musicology, I spoke to the professor at Brown, who was the man with whom I had done most of my musicological work, professor Ivan Waldbauer, and we talked about possible schools, and he strongly suggested the University of Chicago. And I also had a very good friend who was going to the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration, and so it-- without spending a lot of time on this, this looked like a good opportunity to go where my girlfriend was going -- that we could room together, that I could apply there, and it all worked out. So    it was done rather quickly. My own children applying to graduate schools, and the number of applications, and the hoopla that admissions now is. It was very different.

And I applied, I had to take entrance exams, I took the entrance exams. I was accepted.    I was initially accepted,    because I applied very late, that is I made this decision very late, so I applied very late, I was accepted, I did not get any fellowship. But what I was able to do -- this is again another period -- I was able to get a National Defense Education Act loan, NDEA loan,    and I don't think they exist anymore. But after my first year, then I was taken on into fellowship, which is also very difficult today. Today generally speaking you get the fellowship at the beginning or you don't get it at all. So I was very lucky, and I think times were easier somewhat at that point.    But I didn't apply to any other graduate schools. That's the only graduate school I applied to.

INTERVIEWER: Let me ask a little bit about your passion for music. Is there a way to articulate what role it plays in your life? What it does for you ?

HARRIS: Well, it's changed I think over time. I don't sing anywhere near as much now as I used to. And so my work in music now is primarily the research that I'm doing. I always sing for my students. My students are a captive audience, so they always get my singing, but I don't sing professionally or semi-professionally at this point.   

For so many years, singing for me was perhaps what made me feel more alive than anything else. There is a sense singing, the making of music with your own body. There is no instrument, there are no keys to press.    You simply have to do it with your own body. It's probably closer to dance than other kinds of music, in the sense that your own body has to create it. And therefore there's nothing to hide behind between you and an audience. You have no piano, you have no instrument, you know, you have no cello in front of you.    And you need to communicate directly with an audience in order to make that sound.

Singing, I think like athletic activities,    involves a way of using your breath. A way of breathing, a way of learning to invigorate with your breath, your body. And to take in--there is, I mean the word inspiration is, you know breathing in, and I think when you breathe in a way to allow yourself to sing, to fill your lungs, your whole upper body with air and then create with that a sound that simply moves out from you and fills the space in front of you,    it is as exhilarating as anything I have ever done. And there are times when I did it well,    I was as ecstatic as I, perhaps, have ever been.   

After coming to MIT one of the great perks that I have ever gotten in my life was the opportunity to sing with    the Pops. And I don't know if I had chosen a professional career if I ever would have gotten to that level. So    it was just one of those things where    I felt a circle close. That if I had gone, if I had had a professional career, if I had made it to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it would have been the very highest level of professional singing. And here I had taken a very different route, had really not earned this at all, but was given an opportunity to sing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Pops.

And I sang songs from "My Fair Lady," right? Not opera, not high level classical music. And John Williams was conducting, and I had in my life sung with many orchestras and many student orchestras. I had sung with MITSO, the MIT Symphony Orchestra, but I'd never sung with an orchestra of the caliber of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or with a conductor of the caliber of John Williams. And I don't know what I thought to expect, but when we rehearsed and I stood on the edge of the stage at Symphony Hall, and the orchestra started up, the sound that rises up behind you, and envelopes you is so extraordinary and so qualitatively different from anything I had ever experienced.

I have said to many people it must be the closest thing that I have ever come to surfing, because I simply sang on the top of that wave of sound. I mean it really was a wave that came up behind me, and my feeling was at that point, you know unless you were really, really bad, that that wave of sound would lift you. I mean literally lift you up and carry you forward, and have you do your best. And the other thing about John Williams is that his control of the orchestra was a 100 percent. So I could do anything I wanted in terms of playing with the tempo, or holding a note, because he had absolute control of the orchestra, and whatever I did the orchestra was there. And frequently when you sing with a student or a non-professional orchestra, basically you need to follow the orchestra because there's no way they can follow you. So if they get rolling along, you just had better be at their tempo.    But this was an extraordinarily different experience at the BSO, and a night I will never forget, absolutely never forget.

INTERVIEWER: That's a fabulous description of why it was unique.

HARRIS: Yeah. It's just -- the feeling that I got when that sound came up, and then of course the night of the performance. And you walk out on stage and Symphony Hall is -- sorry, I constantly go back and forth between Orchestra Hall and Symphony Hall because I'm in Chicago and Boston. But Symphony Hall-- full, absolutely packed-- and of course it's MIT night, so everyone on the floor is in a red jacket. I mean it's the most extraordinary thing to see, from the stage, and you walk out, and you feel the love, because it's not a foreign audience. They're happy to see you there, and you really don't have to prove a great deal. But you feel that sense of excitement and anticipation. [INAUDIBLE] and then John Williams picks up the baton, and that sound starts that you've heard at the rehearsal. And you don't have to think. You just live in the music at that moment. Just extraordinary.

INTERVIEWER: So, you're singing less now. You're doing more research, but what is it that you get from the research end of this?

HARRIS: Yes. Well the research -- well first of all, I mean one loves learning about music. I love music, so when I learn about music, when I feel I understand the music, that makes me happy--    but there are elements of the research that I'm doing now. I'm doing a lot of research on legatees and Handel's will. I do a lot of research on the music of George Frideric Handel. George Frideric Handel is a composer that everyone feels they know, but we actually know almost nothing about his private life.

And I realize some years ago that Handel's will, which is a very important document that everyone's known about for a long time, that of course he left all sorts of bequests to people. He left bequests to friends, he left bequests to other musicians, to family back in Germany. But no one had spent any time studying any of this. So I decided I wanted to find out who all these people were in his will, especially the people whose names we didn't know. And they turn out to be people almost all of whom lived in his neighborhood and with whom he socialized. They were not musicians, nor were they his patrons.    They really were, to a certain extent, neighborhood friends. And studying the lives of these people as opposed to Handel-- I mean it's a way of getting at Handel obliquely. But has taken me into research areas that I had never been before.    It's a kind of genealogical research, and it's more history than it is music or music analysis.

And so the places that I'm going in order to study this -- I'm spending an enormous amount of time at the Public Record Office in London, where I'm looking at legal documents and various legal suits, and reading depositions, and just a wonderful set of depositions from Aleppo, where one of-- well a brother of one the legatees had been sent as an apprentice to the Levant Company, got into an altercation in Aleppo,    actually was threatened with    Sharia law, which would have meant    ultimately his death. But the Levant Company paid the fee that got him out of this, but in order to get all of the information that was necessary they actually had to take depositions from the Dragomen, who are the interpreters for the British Levant Company, who were writing all of their depositions in Italian, so that I read these Italian depositions and find out about this altercation where I really do think this man was at fault, and    worlds open up. I never expected in my career that-- studying the music of Handel that I would be transported to Aleppo in the 18th century, that I would read all these original documents. I mean these are all original, these are the documents that were written in 1730.

And I've spent time at the House of Lords Archives looking at original documents there. Spent an enormous amount of time at the Bank of England. And the original documents there are some of the most beautiful that I have ever seen.    It does remind me a little bit-- I mean it's more than a century earlier, but it's Dickensian. I can't help when I look at these documents of thinking about Cratchit    and all of his poor scribal work and his freezing hands. But the volumes at the Bank of England are -- [VISUAL DISPLAY] you can see this, right? They're this big.    I don't know, what's that about two feet high, about    maybe    14-15 inches wide, and they are often as thick as six inches. Huge bound leather volumes with leather handles on the backs of them to pick them up. And every account is meticulously, I mean meticulously    included in these volumes so that you have --    you go and you see George Handel, and you know, you see all of the account information and how beautifully and meticulously these accounts are kept. Double bookkeeping, so you always find it in two different volumes. You find--    all of the deposits are shown in two different places, and the debits in two different places, and everything is cross referenced. And    the time I've spent there has been very exciting. Their archive is --    you have to make a reservation to go. They have about four places to sit,    and then these volumes start appearing. You have to do something with these volumes.

So there is a sense in working with materials like this, of    solving a mystery, of getting data that actually creates a picture that you didn't have previously. That in some ways by doing this research that you're creating an image that didn't exist, and that-- I mean in the sense that I said that musicology in research is not as much of a giving profession, which I think it probably isn't as things like music therapy. I do feel that by creating these images around Handel, of giving some sense of what it was like in the 18th century, that is something that is precious in its way.

INTERVIEWER: What is it about Baroque music that you think that attracted you? Why did you pick that type?

HARRIS: That's probably hard to say. I mean, I can say what I love about Baroque music. I like Baroque music because    first of all I find it-- and Handel's music in particular-- extremely    communicative. I think that Handel is capable of    taking an emotion in a text and simply creating it, creating it so that the audience when they hear that music actually feels that emotion. I think it's one of the extraordinary powers of Handel's music that there is this kind of emotional empathy that results from listening to it. When Handel is happy, it's very hard not to be happy. I actually play pieces for my students    where Handel is in a very jovial mood, or where he actually writes a piece about laughing, and you can get students laughing. They'll just start laughing back at the music, because it is so happy. And you can actually play music which is so sad and so heartbreaking that you can just watch the audience just fall into that    emotion, that sense of being overwhelmed with heartbreak.

And I think there are very few composers, I think who actually can communicate as quickly and as clearly as Handel can with his music. Now I talk about music in this emotional way, and anyone, if I were talking to another musician, they would automatically you know, move into 19th century or Romantic music and say, you know, well, why not 19th century music, which is known for that,    in a way that Baroque music is less known for that. And I think one of the reasons that Baroque music is for me is because, as opposed to Romantic music, Baroque music has an underlying rhythmic drive, that it sets up a dance meter and doesn't let go of it. And there is that feeling of that rhythmic patterning, which I love. And Romantic music is very emotional but very specifically does not have rhythmic patterning. And so there is a great deal of interruption and change. Whereas when you're listening to a Handel piece or to a Bach piece, usually the motor rhythm gets going. At the beginning you know what you're going to get. And that's part of the way in which, for me, the music actually comes forward and helps to communicate what it's doing is with that motor rhythm, which can be very slow, but still has a pattern to it. And then against that pattern, there is a huge amount of flexibility in the way the music is performed. And the music needs to be performed with flexibility against the beat, and also with the addition of ornamentation, which is improvised.   

The bass pattern of a Baroque piece is never fully notated, so that all of the harmony has to be realized at the harpsichord from what you see in the other parts, so that there is a kind of an improvisational jazz quality to Baroque music, which then leaves music absolutely in the classical field, in the classical and Romantic era, where everything is written out and very explicitly notated. So in the Baroque era    and with Handel I find this combination of sort of jazz improvisation and a kind of motor rhythm with this emotional content which I find overwhelming. People would argue with me. I mean people will argue different periods. But that's what I find in Baroque music.

INTERVIEWER: Well that's a good-- that's a good transition, because I'd like to talk about    what you think your contributions have been to the study of Handel and about your book--    Handel as Orpheus, which had all sorts of mixed reviews. Not mixed reviews, but there were people who--    reacted very strongly to it in ways that maybe you didn't expect.

HARRIS: My book Handel as Orpheus,    which was published in 2001,    is a book that was almost 30 years in the making. Its primary focus    was the cantatas of Handel, and he wrote more than a 100 cantatas, mostly in Italy, and these were the works that were the least known of his. People had studied his operas, had studied his oratorios, had studied his concertos, had studied his keyboard music, had studied his large orchestral music. And most people who know anything about music knew all of these genres in which Handel wrote. They knew some of his operas, they certainly knew some of his oratorios-- at least Mesiah if nothing else.    They probably knew his water music, maybe his fireworks music. I mean you go right down the list. They probably knew a good deal of the different kinds of music that Handel wrote. The cantatas were unknown completely, and yet were a very important part of what Handel was writing early in his career, and it was something that when I finish my dissertation at the University of Chicago, which dealt specifically with the pastoral, which therefore encompassed a lot of the cantatas because a lot of the cantatas have pastoral texts. I had thought, well this is really something that I need to work on.

And so from the time of my dissertation I did work on the cantatas. I published a lot of articles on the cantatas. I worked with the original manuscripts.    I did a lot of work on dating. When you date a manuscript,    you're actually looking at things which are not musical frequently. You're looking at the kind of paper, you're looking at watermarks, you're looking at the way the staffs are laid out on the page.    Because in the Baroque era,       the music would usually be set up for the composer by a scribe, and the scribe would use something that's called a rastrum.    Maybe you've seen this in a school situation on the blackboard, where you have five lines and you pull the chalk across the blackboard. Well if you're going to set up a page of music, you need to put musical lines on the paper. You don't buy it printed in the 18th century, so someone has to line the page. And the rastra from the 18th century were frequently in multiples, so that with one handle you could pull across a rastrum that had maybe four or five musical staves on it. It's astonishing that they had the steadiness of hands to do this, and that they could do this with quills and ink. Just something that I can't even begin to imagine today, you know, dipping it into an ink alley, picking it up. I don't know how you sort of keep it from dripping. Start it neatly, and then pull evenly so that you get 20 or 25 lines perfectly inked across the page with no smudges. I don't know how long it took to learn how to do this. But these pages were set up so that you could-- you can actually judge, to a certain extent, the date of paper by looking at watermarks, looking at these musical staff lines, and so forth.

So I worked in that way to date some of the cantatas and so forth. Progressed, did a lot of analysis of the works, looked at the musical styles. And then I had-- my sense was that all the cantatas were written between, about when Handel got to Italy say in 1706, and the opening of the Big Room Academy of Music in London, when he began dedicating himself to opera, which is 1720. And I accepted that for years, because that seemed about right. But there were a few cantatas that came between 1720 and about 1723, and I always felt they were just sort of outliers, not really important to this chronology, because 1720 seemed such a good date. And literally I had one of these eureka moments. I kept looking at the date 1723 and saying, why did he keep writing cantatas until 1723? You know, why are there these outliers? And I suddenly said, oh my goodness, it's when he moved into his own house. Handel moved into a house in 1723 on Brook Street in London and he lived in that house the rest of his life. So the period of time in which the cantatas were written from 1706 to 1723, is the only period in Handel's life where he made his living and moved in and out of houses of his patrons. And it became very clear suddenly to me that all of this was private music, that is music written for his patrons, that it was music that in some ways he was singing for his supper. He would create this music to be performed in the salons, the palazzos of his patrons. And once he moved into his own house, he never had to do that again, and once he never had to do it again, he didn't.

At that point, it became clear to me that in order to study the cantatas, one had to understand his patrons. And one had to really study his patrons to see what was written where. And this led me into       historical and cultural investigation, and led to results that I hadn't expected, which involved sexuality. So that it became clear that not only were some of his patrons bisexual, and almost always when we're dealing with homosexuality in the 18th century it's bisexual,    but that some of the cantatas or many of the cantatas could really be understood in that light, in that bisexual, homosocial environment. And so the book that I wrote ultimately dealt with that, dealt with that very explicitly. Talking about homosocial, homoerotic or homosexual    attributes of the cantatas that Handel wrote. I did not -- I mean it was not an attempt to out Handel, nor can I say anything about Handel's sexuality, because I have no idea what he did or did not do, and I still have no idea what he did or did not do. But I do know that a lot of the cantatas come out of a homosocial environment in which homosexuality was accepted. For many people, or at least for some people, associating Handel in any way with homosexuality was so horrifying, because he is thought of as a religious composer who has written perhaps the most important Christian work in Messiah, and that you did not want to tar him with    the idea that he even associated with any kind of homosocial culture.

Well this is totally ridiculous. I mean, this is just ridiculous. First of all, we don't know what Handel did. Secondly, even if we did it would not affect the music that was written and the power of that music to affect us. Unless you're unwilling to accept this from someone who has had experiences --that are potentially different from your own.    People were-- some people were disturbed that the cantatas were described in ways that were homosexual or homosocial. The cantatas though never are explicit. I mean they're not erotic in that sense, and they are hidden. And so there's a kind of code to the cantatas, so that when you listen to the cantatas, you can't tell what the sex of the singer is, because it's not identified. And you frequently can't tell what the sex of the beloved is, because that's not identified either. And in Italian it's very easy to disguise that by simply referring to the beloved as beloved, or referring to the beloved's eyes, or whatever. So that in fact listening to the cantatas, you can have the beloved, the singer, be any sex you want it to be, pretty much so. And what I've tried to say to people, when they get very upset about this, is that really what the cantatas are about is human love, it's longing. It's about longing. They are never about sex. They're really about longing. They're about loving a person and longing for a person. And I see-- really human love, we can just accept that as a human quality. And I wish that everyone could. I wish that there really wasn't this big    hoopla about this.

I'm happy to say though that the book did win two very large prizes, so the response was not all negative, it just was a little hyper.    It did win the prize for the best book that year from the American Musicological Society. It also won the prize as the best book that year from the American Society for 18th Century Studies. So I was thrilled with that, because the sense was, you know it was the best book in music regardless of period, and it was the best book in 18th- century studies regardless of content, because of course there are many books in other fields in the 18th century. So    that got me passed a lot of the criticism.

INTERVIEWER: You never know what people are going to say.

HARRIS: Well it was all very strange, because the book was actually described in    Sunday Telegraph in London before it was published, and I was described -- my name was given correctly I believe, as Ellen Harris, and then    in the rest of the article,    I was described as Professor Ellis, which is a very strange amalgam of my first and last name. And I kept thinking that there was something Freudian going on in this, because of a connection to the famous sexologist Ellis, right at the beginning of the century.    But that became a joke, because then that got transmitted into all sorts of publications because this article got picked up on the wire, and then I became Dr. Ellis, at one point I became Dr. Ellen, which makes me sound a little bit like Dr. Ruth.

And    when I went out and spoke about the book,    frequently I was asked    what my own       sexuality was. Because people became very -- they wanted to know whether I was    pushing an agenda.    And I actually got emails asking me what my sex was. Are you a man or woman, because I can't tell the way your name is given. Because it was given as Dr. Ellen, Dr. Ellis.    And I have to say that no research I have ever done in my life have I gotten responses like that.    And I-- the really interesting part of it was the realization that the idea that research can be dispassionate, and that one can be totally neutral as an author, is obviously not so. Now we all know this to a certain extent. But if I had pushed that aside, it was certainly brought home to me. So that increasingly when I talked on the book, I ended up talking about myself.    And needed to, because the audience wanted to hear from me, who I was. And I'm an unlikely person, I suppose, to have written this book since you know I--I was a middle aged or older grandmother at that point, with you know a marriage that had lasted already at that point 30 something years -- it's now 40. And it--    there was no agenda, it was historical research. And that people see this as agenda because    they take it so personally, was a lesson for me I suppose. But    the height has died down some, for which I'm grateful.

INTERVIEWER: The world we live in. So you taught at Columbia. You were at the U of C. Let's talk about how you got to MIT.    What drew you to MIT?

HARRIS: Well, I had been at Chicago about eight years I guess, I had been chair of the department.    There were some things about my work at Chicago that I didn't like, that I had talked to people about, and was getting no    response. And it was around this time, I mean this happens in one's career on and off, and nothing might have come of that except right around that time I got a letter in the mail which was just a -- I think a flyer of some kind announcing the position of associate provost in the arts at MIT. And I thought, oh that looks interesting. And so inquired to a colleague here in the music department what it was all about. And he told me basically what was going on and-- what they really were looking for was someone in the visual arts, and not someone in music. And I thought well, I may apply anyway.

There was a lot of discussion at this time about how to play the academic game, and things like playing hardball, right? If you're not happy with your position, then you need to go out and look for a different position. And I actually had a dean say something to me about that. You know, if you don't like it here, you know, go test your market value. This is the kind of thing that is really very distasteful, but does happen. Not just in academia. And so in some ways I thought, well this is-- I've never done anything like this, so, this looks interesting, I'll go see. But the realization that if you play hardball    you have to be willing to move. And I understood that, I understood the way the game was played, and so I came out to MIT. My parents-- well my mother, my father had passed away-- but my mother was still living in Cape Cod, and so I came out to visit my mother, and I met some people here at MIT, and Nan Friedlander was cheering the search committee, and    Nan and I hit it off immediately.

And I went back to Chicago and I said to my husband, I really like it. I really like it. It's a very interesting place. And I think that, you know, we have to take this seriously. And so I was invited back for an interview and then I ended up in the final three, and I came back for more interviews and the whole thing you know revs up after a certain point. Chicago suddenly realized that I was serious and that I might leave and, you know, revved things up. But ultimately, by the time I was offered the job here, it was simply what I wanted. I found MIT so exciting in the sense of it being a place that was willing to create a new position, to give the person coming into that position a certain amount of autonomy,    money to do something with, a sense of really being able to create something, a sense of working in the arts at an institution that believes in    entrepreneurship, and where in fact teaching the arts is different than at any place I had been.   

I think because of the engineering core of the Institute when we teach music, or when we teach visual arts, or when we teach writing, we teach doing it. We teach composing, we teach performing. We teach art making. We teach writing. We teach-- we give credit for all of these things. Music departments, generally speaking, at liberal arts institutions, do not give credit for performance. You need to go to a conservatory to get credit for performance, unless you come to MIT, because MIT is, in effect, a conservatory. It's a conservatory for engineering perhaps, but it's a hands on environment.

I, you know, I became very excited about the whole Mens et Manus    of the Institute. That the mind and the hand work together. Because I had always done musicology and singing simultaneously, this felt like home to me. Whereas in other institutions, there were times when I almost needed to hide the fact that I sang, because singing was getting, you know, it was not research, it was something else. And yet here the fact that I sang was enormously important to my interview. That I didn't just do research, that I wasn't just a humanist, but that I actually was something of an artist.    Who knew that my singing would become important in that way? But I think it did here. And so when I was offered the job, I simply said yes. I mean yes I wanted to come, I wanted to do this. I remember talking to John Deutch, who was then provost,    and saying to him, now you gotta make -- you know, I need to understand this. Is that, if what you want is someone to come in and say no, you need to find someone else. Because I'm not interested in moving to MIT just to say no. I'm capable of saying no, but that's not what I want to do here. I want to build something. And he said absolutely, and then you know talked about the ways in which he would help support that.    That was just exhilarating. It was-- wonderfully exciting and in fact I think we did a lot of very good work. I think a lot of things happened    that were wonderful for the Institute.    I am a little concerned that not all of it has continued, but I think that at MIT there is an opportunity for arts and engineering in particular. But also-- I mean it's much more an arts and engineering environment than it is in the Harvard sense arts and sciences. It is hands- on work. I think we can do things here that other institutions can't, and I think    that a lot of what has happened here has shown that. I think that the kind of art that is made here has shown that.

INTERVIEWER: So back at the beginning, how would you describe the state of arts at MIT when you arrived?

HARRIS: I would say fully energized and completely fragmented.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.