Marshall’s New Essay Reflects on Her ‘Orgy of Musical Sustenance’: Boston Globe

Readers are receiving a sneak peak on The Boston Globe of Pulitzer Prize-winning Charles Wesley Emerson Professor Megan Marshall‘s upcoming book After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart.

Marshall’s essay is about her go-to radio station WHRB, and the Harvard student-run station’s trademarked “Orgy” of music during the two-week period at the end of each semester.

According to station lore, the Orgy, Harvard’s trademarked name for the play-a-thons, began in 1943, when a frazzled WHRB staffer took refuge at the station after a rough exam and spun all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row, flipping the 78s like so many shellac-resin pancakes. I’ll never forget my first — an all-Chopin affair that must have been in 1999, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death from tuberculosis at age 39.

Read more of Marshall’s essay on The Boston Globe.

Marshall’s collection of essays will be published in February by Harper Collins Publishers.