Glee Club First to Try Classical Music

A friendly, if one-sided, 18-year-old rivalry draws to a close Friday when G. Wallace Woodworth '24, Conductor of the Harvard Glee Club, and Marshall Bartholomew, Director of the Yale Glee Club, perform for the last time on the same stage.

After 31 years as Director, Bartholomew retires at the end of this season to be replaced by Associate Director Fenno F. Health, Jr. Woodworth has been in charge of the Glee Club here since 1934. Starting in 1924 he directed the Radcliffe Choral Society for 10 years.

Oldest group of its kind in the country, the Harvard Glee Club has always managed to keep at least one jump ahead of its New Haven brethren. Although twelve Eli juniors started a Yale Musical Society in 1813, not until 1860 did a real glee club appear. By this time the Harvard Glee Club was two years old. The club has given at least one concert every year since then, and met Yale's club once a year since 1928. That spring, even the Yale Daily News conceded that "Harvard had the better club . . ."

For the first fifty years of its life the glee club was an adjunct of the banjo and mandolin clubs. Professional coaches were hired to teach members to sing the "Stein Song" and "Down by the Stream Where I First Met Rebecca" and similar pieces.

In 1912 the University asked the conductor of the College choir, Archibald T. Davison '06 to fill the post. Davison accepted, on the condition--that he get no pay. Coasting on the brink of bankruptcy the HGC agreed. Their leader for 22 years, Davison was "Doc" to a whole generation of Harvard singers.

The new coach started to improve the quality of singing and introduced it to Palestrina and Mendelssohn. In 1915-16 the club surprised itself and its competitors by winning the Intercollegiate Glee Club contest with Vittoria's "Ave Maria."

In 1917 a new singing group appeared here--the Harvard-Radcliffe chorus, organized to illustrate Davison's lectures on the history of choral music. The chorus combined with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the first time in that year to present Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under the direction of Karl Muck.

Two years later came the revolution; the glee club realized it could no longer serve both Bach and the "Bulldog on the Bank." To the consternation of undergraduates an dalumni alike, the club, led by the late Mayo A. Shattuck '19 separated from the banjo and mandolin clubs and stuck to choral music. Critics applauded the group "as the finest chorus in Boston" and the B.S.O. invited the HGC to give another joint concert.

The HGC had left its college rivals behind; as one Chicago paper said, "The Harvard Glee Club offered a musical evening of genuine artistic worth and sang to a packed house. The Yale club giving a vaudeville program 'performed' in a house one third full."

In 1921 the club went to its first--and only--foreign tour. (Yale's club has taken five so far, the last one in 1948.) President Miller and of France invited 60 members of the club to pay a singing visit. The HGC raised the necessary $50,000 and sailed June 11 to begin a tour of 23 concerts in 13 French, Italian, and Swiss cities.

To help raise the standard of college singing, the HGC published a Harvard Song Book in the spring of 1922, but the Alumni Bulletin was still filled with letters calling for "good rough songs."

A New York paper in 1924 said that Bartholomew's policy called for singing standard works, but not neglecting informal college songs. "He is a great admirer of the work of the Harvard Glee Club, but does not intend to go so far in that direction, feeling there is something unique in a glee club's contribution to college atmosphere and spirit."

Prohibition caused Delcevare King '95 to object to a quartet singing Johnny Harvard ("Drink, drink, drink, drink, and pas the wine cup free . . .) as disrespectful to the law. The glee club quickly pointed out the quarter had no connection with it.

Rave Notices

From then until Davison's resignation in 1934 the club received almost uninterrupted rave notices. The Boston Transcript's headlines of the spring of 1933, however, were a glaring exception: "Dr. Davison makes the best of the present material in the soft, mild-mannered Harvard chorus." It was true, that Davison accepted practically all-comers in the club, "provided they can make a human sound and don't have a file-like voice . . ." He was content with a "homogeneous mediocrity of tone."

On hearing the Club's performance of Brahm's "Requiem" Serge Koussevitsky said, "Harvard has the best-trained chorus I have ever heard in any country of the world . . ."

When Davison was abroad on his 1926 Sabbatical leave, the biggest storm in the glee club's history broke. The HGC bolted the Intercollegiate Glee Club contest after objecting to the required program each club had to sing.

Davison cabled the club's resignation from the Intercollegiate Glee Club on the grounds that the selections were "silly sentimental mush" and not in accord with the dignity of any college contest. Chief offender was the prize song, Horatio Parker's "The Lamp in the West."

"Eliminate the sentimental mush or we withdraw!" Davison's ultimatum read. "The programms stands as originally submitted," ran the reply.

This was not the first time the HGC went esoteric. Davison had objected to the prize song in 1921, and only agreed to enter the contest that year on the understanding that future prize songs should have every contestant's approval. For the next three years Harvard essentially chose the song.

Although the other contestants approved of the prize song, Davison objected and requested that under the 1921 unanimity rule another number be chosen. The contest committee replied tersely: "The song was too simple to suit Harvard."

Reaction to the decision was immediate. The press was quick to point out that recently the HGC had not been winning the championships--in fact, it had finished seventh the previous year. One Boston paper attributed the withdrawal to "snobbish superiority." Calling the move "poor sportsmanship" the Harvard Club of Kansas City urged Davison to reenter next year.

Except for the one-man club in Singapore, all the other Harvard clubs soon followed suit. Alumni pointed out that an alumnus (Francis Pickernell '14) had selected the ill-fated prize song, which had been written by a Yale man.

In January of 1926 Thomas W. Slocum '90, former member of the Board of Overseers, objected to the HGC omitting "Fair Harvard" from New York programs "because the music was not of sufficiently high grade" and suggested the glee club call itself "The Harvard Gloom Club." Woodworth termed the omission "an unfortunate mistake."

Finally Davison quelled some alumni protest by stating that the term sentimental mush "was merely a press fabrication."

April 1, 1931 saw the dawn of another new era--the glee club went on the air in a broadcast for a philanthropic organization. Six years later the club broadcast a show to France by short wave.

Perhaps the club's greatest achievement came in the 1931 and '32 performances of Each's difficult Mass in B miny of which Boston critic H. R. Partewrote: "It was choral singing unsurpassed at Symphony Hall in this generation in matched in those days in America in for performance of the E-minor mass."

The HGC has added for innovations since Davison retired, except that new members are added only on the basis of vote and quartet trials to keep the membership down to 140, and strict training and 11 p.m. bed hours are no longer of served on trips. But the Glee Club has never lost its hierarchy; it boasts more assistant managers (20) than the football team.