As I prepared the wiki page for the 1994 Tour of the Northeast, I couldn’t help but think about the upcoming itinerary that this year’s Virginia Glee Club has set for their Songs of Virginia tour, the 2010 Tour of the Northeast. Both itineraries had their outliers–1994 began in Knoxville, Tennessee, before a hell-for-leather bus ride up to South Hadley, Massachusetts. The 2010 tour begins innocently enough–Philadelphia suburbs up to Northampton and Wellesley, Mass., then back down to New York, then back into Virginia. Then there’s that massive detour up to Michigan.
Yes, Michigan. There are a few legendary gigs in Glee Club history, and being invited up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the second oldest still extant glee club (Michigan) in the US, along with the oldest (Harvard), will surely shape up to be one of them. Three of the seven oldest glee clubs in the country on one program should be news in and of itself. And the fact that the next president of UVA will be in the audience is just icing on the cake. The 440 Years of Song gig should be legendary. (As long as it doesn’t end with this year’s version of Jim Wiser going to “reason” with anyone, it should be a good afterparty too.)
I’m looking forward to seeing the group at the Wellesley gig on March 8. I hope to see a bunch of other UVA alums there too. After all, how many times do you get to hear Virginia fight songs among the Wellesley hills? Or do a brisk round of Alle psallite in the parking lot? (OK, maybe not the last one.)
Some new features on the Virginia Glee Club wiki. Pages have been added for selected Glee Club seasons which list the concerts, tours, and other events known for that season, and include information about the conductor and officers of the group, where available.
Some background: Thomas Jefferson is a Big Thing at the University of Virginia, the school he founded and one of only three accomplishments on his tombstone. When the 250th anniversary of his birth rolled around, there were a lot of stops pulled out to celebrate: Mikhail Gorbachev came to speak at the University, the Today Show did a remote from Monticello, Bill Clinton spoke at the Jefferson Memorial…
And Judith Shatin wrote a setting of the Declaration of Independence that proved what the Testament of Freedom had hinted: setting Jefferson’s writing to music was full of pitfalls.
The Glee Club had begun commissioning new works for men’s voices in the 1991-1992 season, and for Jefferson’s birthday we wanted something special. So our fearless director John Liepold reached out to his old professor and mentor Neely Bruce for a Jefferson-inspired composition. They decided that, since the Glee Club had already gone down the Jefferson words path with Testament, the smart thing was to choose texts that inspired Jefferson instead. Bruce selected ten texts from Jefferson’s Commonplace Book and set them to music that Jefferson might have heard in his youth, songs heavily inspired by the Sacred Harp and other shape note music. The result was Young T.J., a group of short settings that try to imagine what influenced the young Jefferson.
The Glee Club performed the whole work a few times that year, notably at our spring concert, and used a short set of the works on a number of occasions, mostly notably during our trifecta of performances on April 13, 1993. We began the morning at Monticello, shivering in the pre-dawn light on risers, and using Young T.J. to provide music for the commercial cutaways during the broadcast. I also remember standing at a urinal under Monticello next to Willard Scott, and of course Katie posing for pictures with Tyler Magill, Paul Stancil, Scott Norris, Denis McNamara, and Mitch Harris (above). We also performed portions of the work at the Jefferson Memorial for Bill Clinton and a capacity crowd (after a frantic drive from Monticello to DC at top speed followed by a sprint across the grass to get to the stage on time). A final performance at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond that night was the capper.
So, the lost recording. This page, linked from Neely Bruce’s publisher’s site, has a full set of recordings of all ten movements. When exactly they were recorded is subject to dispute–the page claims they were recorded at Monticello on April 13, 1993, but there’s no background noise and we didn’t have time to run and record everything that day, I don’t think. But they are unmistakably a document of the 1992-1993 Glee Club under John Liepold’s direction. And since none of Liepold’s recordings have ever been transferred to digital release (only three tapes, the 1991 Christmas Concert, a concert at River Road Baptist Church, and the Dove in the Hall recording surfaced from his time with the group through the summer of 1994), this is a nice present to have, even if it’s not available for download.
A quick post from the depths of Virginia musical history tonight. As part of a lot of miscellaneous University of Virginia memorabilia I got from eBay recently, I got an unusual item: a University of Virginia songbook that was handed out at football games. (Scans of the whole thing are available on Flickr.) This particular instance dates from 1911, and probably from the November 4 game against Wake Forest. (The attentive among us will note that in 1911, six games into the season, Virginia was 6–0, while the uncharitable will note that the games were played against Hampden-Sydney, William and Mary, Randolph-Macon, Swarthmore, St John’s, and VMI.)
Football songs? Sure. All those fight songs and team specific songs that appear on Songs of Virginia really were current at one time, and sung at games. Even “Oh, Carolina.” (“They can manufacture rosin, but they’ll never, never score.”) Almost as much fun are reading the ads, for a bunch of businesses that are no longer around (the Jefferson Shaving Parlor, anyone?) As the house ad in the back exhorts, “remember the advertisers,” indeed.
The book was published “for the benefit of the University of Virginia Band,” and I suspect that—aside from contributing the text of “The Good Old Song” and maybe others—the Glee Club had nothing to do with the book, as all evidence is that the group was on hiatus in 1911. But it’s still fun to look at, and to imagine the modern attendees of Scott Stadium swaying as they sing 115-year-old words to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” never quite realizing the depth of the tradition that they are, however inadvertently, keeping alive.
I’m going through the backlog of blog posts I have about Club history and translating them into articles on the new Virginia Glee Club Wiki. It’s going to take a while, but slowly but surely things are getting filled in. This week I created new articles on J. A. Morrow and the Virginia Music Festival (referencing past posts here).
I’ve also had some time for new research. Today we spotlight four previously unknown directors of the Virginia Glee Club. None of them, as far as we can tell, served for a long period of time, but all had unique contributions.
Cyril Dadswell (ca. 1906). Dr. Dadswell was one of the individuals who turned up when back issues of the Cavalier Daily (and its predecessor College Topics) showed up on the Google News archives. Dadswell was the director of the Dramatic Club, also known as the “Arcadians,” and his vision for Club seems to have been shaped by dramatic considerations, with a stated intention to focus on light opera. That Club was a second focus after the successful Arcadians might have been one of the reasons that Club diminished in visibility (or disappeared entirely) between this time and M. S. Remsburg‘s renewal of the group in 1910.
Erwin Schneider (ca. 1917-1918). A naturalized German citizen, Dr. Schneider was an associate faculty member who appears in the University of Virginia Bulletin as a piano and violin instructor in the summer school program. There was a good deal of enthusiasm about his directorship in the fall of 1917, but the timing could not have been worse for him as the whole University was about to buckle down to support the war effort the following year. There’s no further information about his connection with the group, and indeed no news about Club at all, until Fickenscher took it over in 1920 with the beginning of the Music Department.
Henry Morgan (1947-1948). Morgan was a UVA music professor who was acting head of the music department and Glee Club director in 1947-1948; my best guess is that he took over while Stephen Tuttle was on sabbatical with his Guggenheim fellowship. Not much is known about Morgan’s directorship, save that he conducted the ninth annual Christmas concert in 1948.
James Dearing (1974-1975). Dearing was like Morgan, a UVA professor who took over directorship of the Glee Club during another’s sabbatical, in this case for Donald Loach while Loach was on sabbatical in Italy. We know a bit more about Dearing, though: he had a good deal of involvement with Virginia choral music, including directing the University Singers and founding the Virginia Women’s Chorus.
I was especially pleased to find the information on Dearing, as it shed light on a period of Club history that we know very little about, and it came from an alumnus who commented on the wiki. It should go without saying, but I’m always grateful for the contributions of other alums to this project. Keep ’em coming!
I’ve been busy recently, in my capacity as historian of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association, launching the next stage of the Virginia Glee Club history project: the Virginia Glee Club Wiki. Currently at 29 articles and growing, the wiki is intended as an authoritative repository of all sorts of Glee Club history.
Why a new wiki? There’s a lot of material that is relevant to the Glee Club’s history (biographies of lesser known Club members like J. A. Morrow, tour information, newspaper clippings) that does not meet Wikipedia’s standards of notability. I also felt it was important to have a more topic centered approach to presenting information about the group’s history than I can do with this blog. Finally, I wanted a platform that other Club folks could contribute to.
The wiki is still in its early days, but already there are some interesting directions emerging. I’ll highlight some of the new articles over the next few days.
A nice Christmas present from the Googlemind: if not a complete run, then a pretty good sampling of the full archives of the Cavalier Daily and its predecessor College Topics, the long standing student newspaper of the University of Virginia.
The boon to a researcher of the University (or the Virginia Glee Club) cannot be overestimated. Just in a few minutes I found:
A 1906 audition notice, stating the intention of the director to focus on “light opera”. Wonder how that worked out
A 1916 concert review of a performance of the Glee and Mandolin Clubs under A. L. Hall-Quest, including full program listing and roster
A missing link from 1917 of the Glee Club’s history between A. L. Hall-Quest and Arthur Fickénscher–and a new director’s name, Dr. Erwin Schneider
the 1936 predecessor of the (apparently late lamented) Concert on the Lawn, directed by Harry Rogers Pratt, who cast it as an event open to participation by townspeople and students and noted “Baying, booing, and bellowing will be allowed. ‘Sweet Adeline’ will be sung as often as the demand warrants.”
If Google News’s presentation of archival newspapers leaves something to be desired (I find it much more difficult to manage searching through a single issue than with the UVA library’s search interface), there is still a real treasure trove here, and not just on the Glee Club but on just about ever other topic.
There are two composers who pop up more consistently on recordings of the Virginia Glee Club than any other, across the years: E. A. Craighill, who is generally (though not completely correctly) credited with composing the “Good Old Song,” and J.A. Morrow, who composed the University’s official alma mater, “Virginia, Hail, All Hail.” The two songs are generally performed these days as one, and in fact they have more in common than their status as official or unofficial alma maters: both were composed by Virginia students who were apparently members of the Glee Club.
We also know that Morrow participated in other missions. The June 13, 1918 photo above, from the Holsinger archives, is one of a series of World War I photos taken by the studio. We don’t know what Morrow did in the war, other than the clue that he wears an Army uniform in the photo.
But there’s that one indisputable moment of fame: in 1923, his 1921 composition “Virginia, Hail, All Hail” won a contest as the best student alma mater song. No other official alma mater ever having been elected by the University, his work still holds a position of pride–even if none but attendees of Glee Club concerts will ever hear it.
I found more evidence tonight about the mysterious 1910 director of the Virginia Glee Club, M. S. Remsburg. Ironically enough, it came from the same source that gave us the information of his existence in the first place.
I was thrown off by a description of him as Prof. M.S. Remsburg. That may have been an honorific, but his real title was director, as in the director of Christ Church, Charlottesville, as I learned from the September 17, 1910 issue of Madison House Notes, the newsletter of the YMCA at the University at that time. Following the departure of Dr. Faville from the faculty, there was no other organist or music director at the University for chapel services, this being ten years before the foundation of the McIntire School of Music, and the university faculty voted on or before September 17, 1910 to reschedule chapel services so that Remsburg could cover them after Sundays at Christ Church.
A week later, Remsburg picked up directorship of the Glee Club, which appears to have been reformed out of thin air around that time. The audition notice on the 24th of September notes “It is hoped that a large number will turn out, because we ought to have a Glee Club at Virginia. Other colleges in the State have them, and we must have one also.”
The irony, of course, is that there had been a Glee Club just a few years prior, and had had one longer than any other school in Virginia. But an organization entirely run by students, with no membership or support that lasts more than four years, has no long term memory.
As for Remsburg, there’s no reference to him in subsequent years of Madison House Notes, and the increasingly plaintive recruitment notes for the chapel choir and lack of mention of a director suggest that the group was back in student hands again. But not for long; no choir practices are listed in the 1913 bulletin, so even the chapel choir was gone by this time. It took the arrival of A. L. Hall-Quest, and his taking direction of the dormant Glee Club and the chapel choir in 1914-1915, to rebuild it, partly with voices from the Glee Club.
Incidentally, I stumbled across another Glee Club name in the Madison House Notes. J.A. Morrow, the author of “Virginia Hail, All Hail” (aka “Ten Thousand Voices”), is described as singing a solo with the chapel choir on October 10, 1916, under the direction of Hall-Quest. I’m still looking for further information about him, but it’s starting to look like he too, like E. A. Craighill, the author of “The Good Old Song”‘s lesser sung verses, might have been in the Glee Club. But that’s a post for another time.
In January, 1915, Professor Hall-Quest, who, during six years, had been in charge of the Princeton Glee Club, undertook to reorganize the old association [the Glee Club] and train it scientifically.
I’ve written about the troubled history of the Glee Club at the turn of the century before, but we didn’t look at the motivating actor. Who was Professor Hall-Quest? And why, after giving an illustrious account of his success, does the historian Bruce say little further about him in the five volume history?
Let’s start with Hall-Quest’s official biography, from 1917. Alfred Lawrence Hall-Quest was 36 by the time he was directing the Club in 1915. Before that he took degrees from Augustana College and from Princeton Theological Seminary and was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1903. Reading between the lines, he appears to have rambled: between ordination and 1914 he was associate pastor at one church and pastor at three, professor in philosophy and education in Westminster College, Fulton, MO, and “assistant in education” at the University of Illinois. He is listed as teaching the summer session at Illinois in 1914, then teaching the summer session at Virginia in 1915. That fall he was reconstituting the Glee Club and winning the hearts of students. From 1914 to 1916 he was associate professor of education, and by 1916 he was on the full faculty as professor of educational philosophy. It was in 1916 that his seminal educational theory work, Supervised Study, was published. By 1917 he had moved on to the University of Cincinnati. There he appeared to have stayed through the early 1920s until he made a move to the University of Pittsburgh.
Then: scandal struck in October 1924. Hall-Quest’s wife very publicly ran off with his best friend, and he granted her the divorce. This was grounds for dismissal from the University of Pittsburgh.
Hall-Quest landed on his feet, somewhat, at Milwaukee University, but left that position under a cloud in 1927 after public disagreements with the board of trustees. From there the trail goes a little dark, and we don’t know when or how he died. In 1940 he’s listed as an influential educator in The Swedish in America, and his writings on supervised study are still cited in educational theory today.
After all that, one wonders: how did he end up with the Glee Club in the first place? The evidence, drawn largely from the pages of Madison Hall Noteswhen that institution was still the home of the Young Men’s Christian Association, is that he helped reform the Glee (and Mandolin) Club as part of his larger work with Madison House. He had been “head organist at Princeton” while there, and in addition to the Glee Club was directing a chancel choir in 1916. So Club’s rescuing from obscurity and training in scientific principles appears to have been a happy accident. Hall-Quest had ambition and drive, and did a lot, but in the end he was just passing through Virginia. Though he refounded the group, he didn’t provide the stability the group needed to move beyond its year-to-year existence. That wouldn’t come until the 1920s and the establishment of the Music Department.
The Virginia Glee Club in concert at the 1947 Virginia Music Festival.
We’ve visited the Virginia Glee Club during their spa years in the 1930s, but what was the group doing in the 1940s? Part of that history, the group’s participation in the creation of Randall Thompson’s “Testament of Freedom” (dedicated to the group and composed in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s 200th birthday), is well documented. The postwar years find the group in a variety of settings, including preparing for the first Songs of the University of Virginia recording, but little is documented publicly except for one concert appearance at the inaugural Virginia Music Festival.
The Virginia Music Festival was started as an “experiment” in musical performances in the state–a non-profit organization bringing “the best in music to the Old Dominion.” Its founders included Dr. Meta Glass, president of Sweet Briar College, and Edward Stettinius, Jr., UVA alum, former secretary of state, and then-rector of the University. Performances were hosted in Scott Stadium at the University. In its first year, 1947, the “best in music” was three performances by the National Symphony Orchestra. In subsequent years, there were school band competitions and folk musicians (the latter program curated by none other than my distant cousin Bascom Lamar Lunsford). In 1949, its cofounder Stettinius died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of 49. After 1950, the Festival was no more, at least in this incarnation.
It’s tempting to imagine the Virginia Music Festival as a possible Southern incarnation of the Tanglewood Festival, but its small scale, lack of a permanent orchestra in residence, and lack of a musical education component render it just a curiosity of history, albeit one in which the Glee Club was involved. The photo above shows the Glee Club, resplendent in summer whites, on a temporary stage behind the NSO, accompanying Mona Paulee of the Metropolitan Opera in Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody. Unlike the northern glee clubs, the Virginia Glee Club did not often collaborate with major symphony orchestras (due in part to proximity issues), so this has to be counted as a high point in the group’s mid-century artistic history. In fact, between the association with Randall Thompson, this event, and musicologist Stephen Tuttle’s involvement in directing the group, this period was a high point overall in the group’s musical renown. Five years later Tuttle would be gone to Harvard University (and in eight he would be dead), and the group’s focus would be narrowed, for a while, to University audiences.
This is the season of Virginia Glee Club CDs. After a long drought, Frank Albinder’s years as director are finally documented with not one, but three new recordings available now: Virginia Glee Club Live!, Christmas with the Virginia Glee Club, and Songs of Virginia. The latter disc is the most ambitious of the three, and is unique among recent Glee Club recordings for being a thematic recording rather than simply capturing the group’s repertoire at a point in time. The theme: songs of the University of Virginia, as documented through old recordings, sheet music, and books, and running the gamut of the group’s existence.
The recording project won a Jefferson Grant in April 2008, and the group has been at work since researching and recording the songs. The provenance of the songs is extensive, with some performances echoing the 1947-1951 recording Songs of the University of Virginia, some later songs (such as “Vir-ir-gin-i-a”) that were documented in 1972 on A Shadow’s on the Sundial, and some that are only known in published form, for instance from the 1906 Songs of the University of Virginia songbook. The earlier Songs recording is the most prominent touchpoint, with “The Cavalier Song,” “Rugby Road,” “Hike, Virginia”, “Yell Song,” “The Good Old Song,” and “Virginia, Hail, All Hail” all reprised, five with accompaniment from the Cavalier Marching Band as in 1951. The remaining tracks on the original recording, including the Eli Banana and T.I.L.K.A. songs and “Mr. Jefferson’s favorite psalm,” were wisely discarded in favor of more interesting repertoire.
The rest of the repertoire includes some of the more interesting selections from the 1906 songbook, including “The Orange and the Blue,” “In College Days,” “Here’s to Old Virginia,” and “Oh, Carolina!” (in an updated arrangement), as well as other fight songs and alma maters (“Virginia Chapel Bell” and the “Rotunda Song” are especially touching). Lyrical authenticity is kept–football songs that refer to the University’s ancient and quiescent rivalries with Princeton and Yale keep their original references, rather than being updated to reference more modern opponents. (It was regular practice when I sang in the group to substitute Maryland for Carolina in the lyrics of “Just Another Touchdown for UVA.”) The liner notes are thorough and well illustrated, featuring a fewphotos that have appeared on this blog, albeit without explanation–see my earlier notes on why the Glee Club wore dresses in 1916, and how the old Cabell House was tied to the Club’s birth. My hat’s off to the students and director of the group for their research–though I am credited on the liner notes, the only direct contact I had during the process was providing some scans of the cover of the Songs of the University of Virginia record that weren’t used.
So enough about the repertoire–how’s the recording? In a word, wonderful. Dusty old songs like “Oh, Carolina” are given sharp new readings that ought to stir up the UNC rivalry (imagine singing “See the Tar Heels, how they’re running/Turpentine from every pore/They can manufacture rosin/but they’ll never, ever score” in Scott Stadium today!), while more familiar standards like the “Good Old Song” and “Virginia Hail All Hail” are made more potent by being put in the historical context of the song. Perhaps one minor quibble is the balance–melody lines in the second tenor and baritone are sometimes overshadowed by more prominent high harmonies–but this is a small point in the scope of things.
Bottom line: if you are an alum of the University, you ought to own this recording. And Alumni Hall ought to be giving copies out at Reunion.
I’ve been busy, which is of course no excuse, but there are going to be posts forthcoming. I received my long-awaited copy of the Virginia Glee Club’s Songs of Virginia today in the mail, along with a new Christmas CD from the group, and notes on both will be forthcoming. I was tickled to get a credit in the Songs of Virginia booklet, presumably for the digging and research I’ve been doing about the group’s history.
And now, we know, the group was branching out in other ways as well. As I trolled the catalog of the UVA library in search of more clues to the Glee Club’s past, I found a recording I had never heard of, by a group I had never heard of–the Tin Can Quartet of the Virginia Glee Club, on a 16″ aluminum transcription record from 1933. A further Google search for the group turned up exactly one reference to them–in a presentation from the preservation department at UVA. And a contact to the author turned up two MP3 files, all that could be recovered from the record.
I should note that this isn’t the full Virginia Glee Club. Instead, this barbershop group was “of” the Virginia Glee Club, in much the same way that the Virginia Gentlemen would start as an octet of the Club exactly 20 years later. And the repertoire isn’t Club repertoire, either–instead, the traditional barbershop songs “Aura Lee”, “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad)”, and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” take pride of place. But the harmonies are tight and the recording is quite good–just about as good as any recording I’ve heard from the pre-war era. I’m trying to resolve copyright questions to figure out if the music can be freely shared, but in the meantime I’m just kind of basking in the light of discovery. Update: The copyright on the recordings is owned by the University of Virginia, so alas no audio samples on this blog…
Oh, and the photo? The 1930s were also when UVA professor Ernest Mead was in the group as a student. And that’s Harry Rogers Pratt front and center. No photos are known to exist of the Tin Can Quartet, but I might have to drop Mr. Mead a note and see what he remembers…
Virginia Glee Club Live!, the first of this year’s new recordings from the Virginia Glee Club, is now listed on the group’s website and available for purchase through Paypal. I received a copy in the mail about six weeks ago and have had some time to listen and digest, and I can recommend this recording without hesitation.
After I published the recent series on early 20th century Glee Clubhistory and leadership and, um, performance practices, one of the members of the Alumni and Friends Association commented to me that each generation’s Glee Club is different, and I think that’s right. The 1910s group was as different from the 1890s group as the 1990s version was from Don Loach’s Renaissance singers from the 1960s and 1970s. If each group is different, Frank Albinder’s Glee Club is in unusually good shape. This is the best sounding Glee Club recording I’ve heard in a while. (Disclaimer: I didn’t hear all of the Paris live disc or of Bruce Tammen’s recordings.)
The new disc, as the name suggests, is a compilation concert recording over the past five years, spanning Albinder’s tenure to date as Glee Club director. The repertoire includes some “usual suspects” — “Brothers, Sing On!”, Chesnokov’s “Spaseniye sodelal”, “Ride the Chariot,” and the Biebl “Ave Maria” make appearances — as well as mini-sets of more specialized material, such as commissioned works and Virginiana. The focus on short repertoire makes the disc eminently listenable, and the performance standards are generally quite high.
A note on the commissions: The recording features the first appearance in Glee Club history of the group’s recent commissions, Lee Hoiby’s “Last Letter Home” and Judith Shatin’s “Jabberwocky,” in a set together with the Club’s 1991-1992 commission of James Erb’s male voices arrangement of “Shenandoah.” The Hoiby work, a setting of the last letter home from Iraq of PFC Jesse Givens, is given a sensitive performance, and Shatin’s “Jabberwocky” is the surprise hit of the recording, an adventurous and jazzy rollick through Lewis Carroll’s poem. Sadly, the Erb is one of the few low points on the disc. I remember all too well the many opportunities for a group to go flat in the first stanza, and the Glee Club doesn’t avoid them, ending the piece about a half tone low.
The Virginiana at the end, consisting of Loach’s arrangement of “Vir-ir-gin-i-a”, the “Virginia Yell Song” (which regained currency during my tenure with Club), “Rugby Road,” and the University’s alma maters, is sung powerfully and with gusto (and, unlike the 1972 recording, this version of “Rugby Road” includes one of the more scandalous verses). I look forward to playing it to console myself as the football team buries itself this fall (seriously: William and Mary???)
All in all, the piece is a great souvenir of a student group that is performing at a high level of competence. If the concert recording is this good, I can’t wait for the Club’s next recording, the Songs of Virginia collection.
