Oral History of American Music
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| Abbreviation | OHAM |
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| Formation | 1969 |
| Location | |
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Official language
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English |
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Director
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Libby Van Cleve |
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Founder
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Vivian Perlis |
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Parent organization
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Yale University Library |
| Website | http://web.library.yale.edu/oham/about |
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Formerly called
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Oral History, American Music |
Oral History of American Music (OHAM), founded in 1969, is an oral history project and archive of audio and video recordings consisting mainly of interviews with American classical and jazz musicians. It is a special collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University and housed within the Sterling Memorial Library building in New Haven, Connecticut. It currently holds over 2,000 interviews with more than 900 subjects and is considered the definitive collection of its kind.
The creation of Oral History of American Music was a result of musicologist Vivian Perlis's research on the life of American composer Charles Ives, for which she interviewed sixty individuals who had known him personally. During the course of the interviews, Perlis recognized the need for a larger project that would collect and preserve the oral history of American composers, and began the OHAM project in 1969 with that intent. Perlis's interviews with friends, family and colleagues of Ives became OHAM's initial collection, and were later used in her 1974 book, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History, for which she received the American Musicological Society's Otto Kinkeldey Award—the first time it had been awarded either to a woman or for work on American music. In addition to Perlis's biography of Ives, the project's collection played an instrumental role in a number of other historical works: A Good Dissonance Like a Man, a documentary film about Ives;Aaron Copland's two-volume autobiography Copland: 1900 through 1942 and Copland: Since 1943, co-written with Perlis; and the book Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, co-written by Perlis and Libby Van Cleve. Perlis served as the project's director until she retired in 2010 and was succeeded by its current director, Van Cleve.
OHAM expanded through interviews conducted by Perlis, Van Cleve and others, as well as by acquisitions of recordings from scholars, radio producers, and concert presenters. Its largest component today is the Major Figures in American Music series, which primarily documents classical composers at varying stages in their careers. OHAM also holds five series of extensive interviews centered around specific persons and topics.
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