Harvard’s offer of a position to Kirchner and his acceptance of it were somewhat unlikely—and potentially problematic. It was clearly possible that the match would be less than ideal in that Kirchner’s primary passions, composition and performance, were not accorded full stature either by the Department of Music or within the broad culture of the university. In 1961 Harvard offered the AB degree (with music concentration) and, at the graduate level, only the AM and PhD in musicology. Moreover, although Harvard had a long tradition of cultivating the historical and theoretical study of the arts, it had never been comfortable supporting their creation or performance. Roger Sessions, who attended Harvard from 1911 to 1915, told Edward Cone in 1966 that the “only trouble with Harvard was that in those days there was no thought of serious training for a professional musician. They were educating cultured gentlemen rather than musicians.” Admittedly, in the meantime, Harvard’s Department of Music had become rigorous about graduating professional scholars, but it had maintained distance from composition and especially from performance. Idealization of, and dependence on, the printed word and scholarship was too strong to allow these nonverbal aspects of music full academic citizenship. One of the central themes of Kirchner’s tenure at Harvard is thus the story of his gradual modification and enrichment of the study of music at the university.

When Kirchner arrived at Harvard, the Department of Music may already have been contemplating a change in the graduate curriculum, because during his first year Kirchner (with support from Chairman David Hughes and the other members of the senior faculty) succeeded in having the AM program divided into two sections, one for the history of music and the other for theory and composition. The actual course requirements were basically the same for both tracks, but composers were granted permission to substitute a composition in place of a written thesis. The doctoral program continued to be reserved for musicology. As the years went by, however, Kirchner realized that Harvard’s composition students, because they did not earn a doctorate, were not getting academic positions.