Vivian Perlis
Vivian Perlis (1928-2019) was the founder and director of the Oral History of American Music (OHAM) project at Yale University. OHAM is known to be the preeminent project in the field of music dedicated to the collection and preservation of oral and video memoirs of the creative musicians of our time.
Background: While working as a reference librarian at the Yale School of Music, Vivian started a project of tape-recording interviews with those acquainted with the composer Charles Ives, a Yale graduate. Her work – thorough, methodical, and revealing – culminated in 1974 with the book: “Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History,” for which Vivian was awarded the Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society. Hailed “a vivid memory portrait of an enigmatic American composer, told in the voices of the people who knew him best.”
Following the Ives Project, it was evident that no systematic scholarly research was in progress to document creative musical figures by means of tape-recorded interviews and so it began.
In 1984 Copland: 1900 through 1942 was published. Perlis and Copland co-authored this “enduring record of an American maestro’s explosively creative coming of age.” Among her productions are recordings of the music of Leo Ornstein and Charles Ives, and television documentaries on Ives, Eubie Blake, Aaron Copland, and John Cage.
