Music: Glee High, Glee Low

“Every item was perfect! . . . . Everything was delightful!” cried exuberant Professor William Lyon Phelps one night last week as he left Yale’s Sprague Memorial Hall.* He had been listening to an “Old Timers’ Concert” of the Yale Glee Club, reviving popular college songs of the century past. The Howard twins had rendered an 1867 overture, “Wooden Spoon Lancers.” Tom Hewes, Class of 1910, had whistled “The Yellow Bird.” Another gentleman had yodeled. Carl Lohmann, secretary of the University, had sung Kipling’s “Fuzzy-Wuzzy.” And the Glee Club had rousingly performed such numbers as “The Pope” (“He leads a jolly life, jolly life . . .”); “Church in the Wildwood” (“No spot is so dear to my childhood”); “The Lone Fishball” and fine old “Tourelay” with its chorus: Tourelay, tourelay, With my fillaga desha, skinamaroosha, balderalda boom tadeay, Tourelay, tourelay, And the pride of the household is papa’s babie. Though few college gleemen now devote entire evenings to them, oldtimers’ songs are by no means dead. Alumni like them no less than does amiable Professor Phelps. And alumni tastes count when a glee club goes off touring, has auditoriums to fill. Yet one glee club has for years persistently set its face against such childishness as “Tourelay” and “The Lone Fishball.”

A hundred years ago respectable folk in Boston’s Jamaica Plain poked their heads out of their windows one night and saw a group of students valiantly attempting to serenade one of the young ladies of the town. The brand-new Harvard Glee Club was out on its first tour but the venture was unsuccessful. A band of rival suitors, hidden in the shrubbery, made vulgar noises with wind instruments, unhitched the Harvard boys’ horses so that the Glee Club had to walk back to Cambridge. During the next 25 years there was another short-lived Glee Club; then a third which was organized “to acquaint the College with good choral music.” Last week in Cambridge this Glee Club, in white ties and tail coats, gave a birthday concert which would have taxed the most experienced of choristers.

Responsible not only for the Harvard Glee Club’s prestige but for the way it has inspired other colleges to improve their musical standards is the small, baldish, square-set man who conducted last week, mouthing the music along with the boys, smiling approval after each number. He was Archibald Thompson Davison, organist and choirmaster at Appleton Chapel, who has been the Glee Club’s director for 21 years. He had been convinced that college boys could sing as artistically as professional choruses. Because of his candid, unassuming ways, his free & easy speech, the boys listened to him as they would to a football coach. For him they learned to sing in Latin, French and German, just as the music was written originally. They learned that good choral singing does not have to be exaggeratedly loud or soft, high or low. In 1919, to the distress of many an alumnus, they announced they were through with rah-rah songs. Financed by Banker Otto Hermann Kahn and Harvard alumni they took a European tour. Conductor Sergei Koussevitzky was so impressed that he invited them, with the Radcliffe Choral Society from across the Yard, to give choral works with the Boston Symphony.

With the Symphony for the last two springs “Doc” Davison’s singers have given Bach’s great B Minor Mass. With the Vassar Glee Club in Poughkeepsie this spring they made an. evening of Brahms’s German Requiem. Unlike most college glee club concerts, it was not a prelude to dancing. This week the Glee Club, again with the Requiem, is to help Dr. Koussevitzky celebrate the centenary of Brahms’s birth.

At last week’s concert in Cambridge, an oldtime Glee Club secretary hung on the conductor’s lectern the “shingle” which used to call gleemen to rehearsal 60 years ago. Scholarly Dr. Richard Cabot told of the Club’s history. Dr. Koussevitzky made a praiseful speech. The Club sang Bach, Handel, Palestrina and an ambitious “Dirge for Two Veterans” written in sultry, modernistic vein by British Composer Gustav Hoist who taught last year at

Harvard. In this they were assisted by members of the Boston Symphony, in polite reciprocity.

The Harvard Glee Club no longer takes part in the annual Intercollegiate Glee Club Contests. It disapproves of the programs. The Intercollegiate finals will be held this summer in Chicago as part of the World’s Fair celebration. Pomona’s college song, “Torch Bearers,” will be sung as a tribute to the 30 boys who traveled by daycoach from Claremont, Calif, to St. Louis last spring to win first prize (TIME, April 18, 1932).

* Dr. Phelps, 68, will retire next June after 42 years of teaching English, but will continue as a fellow in Yale’s Branford College.