Music

In 1968, Vivian Perlis, a research librarian at Yale, knew that she needed to talk to Julian Myrick. A man who had spent his life in the insurance business was not the most likely of musicological sources. But Myrick’s business partner had not only been significant in the field of life insurance, but was also one of the most important figures in American music history: the composer Charles Ives, who had died 14 years earlier.“He was writing music at the time when I first knew him,” Myrick recalled to Perlis, in a Southern drawl. “He worked very hard at it, but people couldn’t understand it.”Myrick was only the beginning of what became Perlis’s landmark resource, celebrating its 50th anniversary this season: Yale University’s Oral History of American Music. Over the following years, Perlis sought out more of Ives’s friends and acquaintances. “I searched for the oldest and most fragile Ives survivors and often found myself in hospitals and rest homes waiting for an aged Yale classmate or Ives relative to wake from a nap to tell his story,” she would later recall.She even tracked down the barber who cut Ives’s hair: a man nicknamed Babe, who hadn’t known that his patron was a composer but did remember that Ives once yelled at him to shut off the radio. Perlis assembled these and other recollections into a groundbreaking 1974 book, “Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History.”Charles Ives: “You know, Babe? Your work reminds me of mine”Yale Oral History of American MusicFor the most part, the Oral History of American Music, known as OHAM, has focused not on insurance salesmen or barbers, but has instead gone straight to the source: living American composers, who sit for interviews that can last many hours. The archive has grown to encompass recordings of around 3,000 interviews with major voices in American music.“When you talk to people, they have this sense of their own value in a way that they haven’t before,” Libby Van Cleve, an oboist and the director of OHAM, said in an interview in January at her office at Yale. Perlis died last year at 91; Ms. Van Cleve became director of the oral history project in 2010, when Perlis retired.Ms. Van Cleve still frequently conducts interviews with composers, one of her favorite parts of the job. “My husband used to joke, ‘If you weren’t a musician, you’d be an investigative reporter,’” she said. “If I meet somebody new, I’m always asking a lot of questions.”Perlis, with a similarly inquisitive temperament and an elegant presence, made it her life’s mission to record the voices of American composers. She conducted many hours of interviews with Aaron Copland; after he saw the transcripts, he realized they could form the basis for the book he always meant to write, which became a two-volume autobiography. More