Libby Van Cleve
Director
Photo by Robert Lisak
Libby Van Cleve is a scholar and performer with a specialty in contemporary American music. As Director of the Oral History of American Music Archive (OHAM) at Yale University, she has conducted numerous interviews with major figures in American music. She is the author of numerous articles, program notes, and liner notes; these writings are frequently generated from her interviews. Along with OHAM’s founder, Vivian Perlis, she is co-author of the award-winning book and CD publication Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, Yale University Press. Using materials from the archive, Van Cleve co-produced podcasts on Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thompson. She has served as Principal Investigator for numerous funding initiatives including OHAM’s prestigious Save America’s Treasures grant; OHAM’s newly created endowment, funded by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.; and numerous grants to support digitization of OHAM’s materials from The Grammy Foundation, The Amphion Foundation, The Virgil Thomson Foundation, and others. Complementing her work at OHAM, Ms. Van Cleve is recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary and chamber music for the oboe. She has recorded on numerous CD labels and is author of Oboe Unbound: Contemporary Techniques, Scarecrow Press. Van Cleve received her DMA from Yale School of Music, her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and her BA, Magna cum Laude, from Bowdoin College. She serves as adjunct faculty at Wesleyan University and Connecticut College.
Anne Rhodes
Research Archivist
Photo by Lindsay Flanagan
Anne Rhodes handles user requests for OHAM, as well as cataloging and maintaining the organization of the collection. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illionois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in Experimental Music from Wesleyan University and a B. Mus. in Voice Performance from Boston University. Rhodes is a classically trained singer specializing in new music and improvisation. She regularly commissions and collaborates with composers, and has premiered works by more than thirty composers, including Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton.
Vivian Perlis
Founder / Senior Research Scholar
Vivian Perlis is an historian in American music, specializing in twentieth century composers. She is widely known for her publications, lectures, and recording and film productions. On the faculty of the Yale School of Music, Perlis is founding-director of Oral History, American Music, a unique archive of oral and video-taped interviews with leading figures in the music world. This important collection of source materials is well known and widely-used by scholars, historians, broadcasters, and producers.
Book publications by Perlis include Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), for which she was awarded the Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society, and "An Ives Celebration" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). With composer Aaron Copland, Perlis is co-author of Copland: 1900 Through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's/ Marek, 1984), which garnered a Deems Taylor/ ASCAP award, and Copland: Since 1943 (New York. St. Martin's, 1989). Her most recent book, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, co-authored with Libby Van Cleve, includes two CDs and is derived from interviews in the OHAM archive. Publications by Perlis include numerous articles and reviews. 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.
Among honors and awards received by Vivian Perlis are: The Charles Ives Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972); a Grammy nomination for "Charles Ives 100th Anniversary" (1974); the Harvey Kantor Award for excellence in the field of oral history (1984); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987); and the Irving Lowens Award for distinguished scholarship in American Music from The Sonneck Society (1991).
