A tuned-in savior
When Rachel Vandagriff, a graduate student from California, arrived at Harvard’s Music Department a few years back hoping to write a dissertation on the work of contemporary music champion Paul Fromm, Harvard officials pointed her to a stack of boxes once housed in the music building’s basement devoted to his foundation. Thinking there were only half a dozen boxes there, she soon realized there were more than 50. Subsequently, graduate student researchers unearthed, scattered in places like Houghton Library and the Harvard University Archives, a trove of material, including printed scores, letters, financial records, concert programs, photographs, reel-to-reel tapes, LPs, typescripts of lectures, and interviews connected with one of America’s foremost supporters of new music. “I give her credit for figuring out that all of that information was on our doorstep, was in our backyard, so to speak, and we didn’t even know about it,” said Anne Shreffler, Harvard’s James Edward Ditson...