Music at Wesleyan. Mark Slobin
alumni play in New York clubs, enter music graduate programs, compose film scores, teach music in many contexts, serve as state arts council chairs, foundation heads, or simply carry the joy and knowledge of music into their lives as a liberal arts legacy. Wesleyan’s Music Department M.A. and Ph.D. graduates hold faculty positions across the U.S. and abroad, from Indonesia to India, from Africa to Australia, from Canada to Switzerland.
This book consists of two parts: pre- and post-1960s music at Wesleyan. I have been privileged to take part in nearly 20% of this grand musical pageant, and have greatly enjoyed assembling this brief account. It draws on images from Wesleyan University’s Special Collections archives, for which I owe a huge round of thanks to its director, Suzy Taraba; to University photographer, John Wareham, for scans; and to music doctoral student, Jorge Arevalo Mateus, for researching Argus files. Bill Burkhart was enormously generous with photos; and Olivia Bartlett made the great suggestion of cleaning the North College plaques, to which John Meerts graciously acceded. I would like to thank Suzanna Tamminen and Leslie Starr of Wesleyan University Press for their instant embrace of celebrating the Wesleyan musical heritage, and foundational figure Richard Winslow for his informative and witty forays into department history.
All illustrations originated at Wesleyan, either from Special Collections or Public Information, so there are no specific caption credits. Most historical citations are from the student newspaper, the Argus (which tended not to feature bylines), unless otherwise indicated. I would like to thank the present and former faculty and students who offered the reminiscences quoted below. I would also like to thank Alec McLane and Dan Schnaidt for enabling the rich accompanying archive of online Wesleyan music over the decades. Copious thanks also go to Michael Roth for his generous support of this project.
To listen to performances of music at Wesleyan, you may access a selection of audio files at the companion digital archive for this book at http:wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/maw_audio/
The Class of 1876, 1874.
PART ONE:
The Early Decades of the “Singing College”
Daniel G. Harriman of the class of 1864 wrote a song called “Greeting Glee” especially for a trip described as follows in the 1940 edition of the Wesleyan Song Book:
In the summer of 1862, the first regular Wesleyan Glee Club started afoot from Middletown for a trip to the White Mountains. The manager, Henry L. Dickinson ’62, traveled a few hours ahead of the Club, making quick arrangements for lodging and concert hall at each evening’s stopping place. The final concert was given on top of Mt. Washington.
What a scene! A mere thirty years after the founding of Wesleyan, the elegantly-clad Glee Club is seen wandering on foot to the White Mountains, before the construction of Interstate 91 or the production of automobiles. Everywhere the singers stopped, people were glad to offer them food, lodging, and a concert hall to hear them sing. The foundations were being laid for the mythology of “The Singing College.” Decade after decade, the singing young men ascended not just Mt. Washington, but the heights of the academic song world, winning the national intercollegiate championship back to back in 1926 and 1927. Also two years in a row, 1962 and 1963, Richard Winslow’s men, combined with the Smith College women, went off to Mexico, courtesy of the State Department.
This heritage of song has largely faded from memory, but remains literally engraved at Wesleyan in the form of the plaques on the steps of North College. Everyone passes them by, and no one seems to notice them. A cleaning, specially done for this book, makes them more passably photogenic than before, though the names remain obscure to the Wesleyan community today. It is so striking that only songwriters are celebrated in so prominent a place on campus. No football heroes, debaters, presidents, or professors grace the steps.
The Glee Club was hardly the only outlet for undergraduate vocalizing. At all kinds of college events, the students raised their voices in song. Unfortunately, it is only the men we hear about; there is very little trace of women’s musicality in the period from 1872–1912 when Wesleyan was a coed college. The boys were always singing, it seems, since there were so many ritual events in the calendar for the couple or few hundred lucky members on campus each year. Below, a few choice examples of frolicking and solemnity evoke the importance of music at Wesleyan in the early decades, before the arrival of multicultural music and gender balance changed so much of the local resonance.
North College plaques honor Wesleyan songwriters, 2008.
THE GLEE CLUB WORLD
What were the boys singing, when not atop Mt. Washington but back in the Chapel? The program for November 19, 1869, illustrates three kinds of pieces: college songs, classical music favorites—often from opera—and light fare. In a wry Wesleyan way, the composer of “Viva la Wesleyan” is given—misspelled—as “unbekannt,” German for “anonymous,” just as Pat Molloy’s solo is ascribed to “umlaut,” the German double-dot sign over o and u. “Johnny Schmauker,” sometimes given as “Johnny Schmoker” in programs, looks like a German parody number of the type popular in that era. Whatever it symbolized, the song began its life at Wesleyan. According to an 1869 account in the Western Collegian, “‘Johnny Schmoker’ was first brought before the American public by the Glee Club of the Wesleyan University, Conn.”
In today’s a cappella age, opera seems a surprisingly large part of the repertoire of choice. In 1869, arias were popular music, widely distributed in the sheet music that most people kept in their homes as part of the common American habit of friends and family singing around the piano.
The reviews for the concert at the Tremont Temple in Boston speak eloquently to the fame Wesleyan’s Glee Club had secured by 1884.
Glee Club program, 1884.
Glee Club program, 1869.
In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Record rates the group as “positively the best,” an opinion seconded by the Newark Advertiser. The yodeling of Mr. G. D. Beatty, which he repeated numerous times on demand, was typical of the age. Traveling troupes of Swiss and Tyrolean Alpine singing families crisscrossed America as early as the 1850s.
The 1869 “Grand Union Concert” of the Yale and Wesleyan Glee Clubs, offers a rare chance to size up choruses side by side. This benefit concert featured solo and joint numbers, again with many German and classical items, as well as what we might call “novelty” pieces, such as “Solomon Levi,” a very popular song we would certainly ban as anti-Semitic today. The bundling of a Spanish, Chinese, and probably Balkan (“Fatinitza”) number speaks to other versions of ethnic and international stereotyping. What “The Pope” said about Catholicism is left to our imaginations. The second-half opener, “George Washington,” rounds out the standard sampling of popular styles of the day, which always included the theme of patriotism.
The transportation is as eye-catching as the song list. One could simply take the train from Middletown to New Haven and back, and $1.00 would cover both ticket and transportation to and from the stations. Sometimes the old days were actually more convenient.
The Wesleyan students probably expected to come out on top in this Connecticut choral rivalry. Back in 1873, the Argus contentedly made this observation:
We clip the following from a Meriden paper: “We were somewhat disappointed at the singing of the Yale club,