Thomas Kelly

Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard University, where he served as chair of the music department from 1999 to 2004. In 2005 he was named a Harvard College professor in recognition of his teaching of undergraduates. Before coming to Harvard, he taught at Oberlin Conservatory, where he was the founding director of the program in historical performance and served as acting Dean of the Conservatory. He also taught at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts (Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachuetts), where he was the founding director of the Five College Early Music Program. From 1972 to 1979 he taught at Wellesley College. He was a visiting scholar at King’s College, Cambridge (1976-77) and a Professeur invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (1998).

Kelly attended Groton School, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Two years in France on a Fubright grant allowed him to study organ at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and the Royal Academy of Music. His graduate study was at Harvard University.

He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French Republic and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy in Rome. He has held awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. His book The Beneventan Chant was awarded the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for the most distinguished work of musicological scholarship of 1989. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005.

In addition to performance and conducting connected with his teaching, Kelly was the
artistic director of the Castle Hill Festival, the director of the International Early Dance and Music Institute, and the music director of the Cambridge Society for Early Music.