Tag: virginiagleeclub

Catching up with history

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.

In the meantime, I note that I neglected to note my appointment as the official historian for the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association. So what’s next? More news soon…

The first UVA glee club

Grab bag: free press and old records

The Virginia Glee Club in the 1930s: the Tin Can Quartet

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This post is one of an ongoing series on the history of the Virginia Glee Club.

Today, I heard something that hasn’t been widely heard in about seventy years: a recording of members of the Virginia Glee Club made in 1933.

Prior posts in this series have focused on the period from the 1890s to the early 1920s. (For a reminder: 1871, 1893, 1894 and the 1894 tour, 1906, 1910, 1912, 1916-1921, and a survey of directors from 1878 to 1989.) The trail of historical evidence about the Club goes a little cold in the 1920s–perhaps because the Club became, during this period, a full-on curricular option under the direction of the first head of the newly formed Mcintire Department of Music, Arthur Fickénscher. Things … quieted down a bit. There’s no indication of more musical theatre performances and precious little press coverage, aside from a performance at the creation of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923.

In the early 1930s, things changed, and as so often with the group, it happened with a change of director. Fickénscher grew up in California but was tied to the European tradition, having both studied and taught in Germany; his successor, Harry Rogers Pratt, was a colorful man who was all American. In the 1930s the Club started reaching out again: performances at various high society gatherings at the Greenbriar (1932) and Hot Springs (1933, 1934, 1935),  performances in New York for the Club’s 50th anniversary in 1936, and a much publicized tiff with Wagner in 1939, in which the boys of the Club on the eve of world war refused to sing the original words of the final chorus of Die Meistersinger and its praise of the German masters of the art of song.

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…

Grab bag: The bad and the good of UVA

Grab bag: New open source from Apple, new Glee Club CD

Review: Virginia Glee Club Live!

glee_club_liveVirginia 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 Club history 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.

The 1910 Virginia Glee Club: found, one director

I may have found a missing link in the Virginia Glee Club’s history prior to the 1920s, when it became a part of the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. As I’ve written before, the Club disbanded and reformed pretty frequently in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and we have evidence that the group came back together in 1910 following a hiatus of no more than four or five years. Now we know who led the group then–and it was a professor, not a student. (See my prior post on student directors of the Glee Club for some of the history there.)

A new volume of Madison Hall Notes, the journal of what was then the UVA branch of the YMCA, is on Google Books. In Vol. VI No. 7 (Oct 22, 1910) and Vol. VI No. 11 (Feb. 11, 1911) we read of the newly (re)formed Virginia Glee Club under the direction of Professor M.S. Remsburg. Hopefully I’ll turn up some more information on Remsburg and the efforts to rebuild the Club as more information from this era comes online.

Virginia Glee Club: the musical comedy years

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No, that’s not a typo, and no, I didn’t post the wrong picture–at least, not if the attributions in the Holsinger Digital Collection at UVA are correct. Today’s stroll down history lane with the Virginia Glee Club covers an era in their history which is, perhaps justifiably, forgotten–their days as a musical theatre troupe.

To understand how a group founded on moonlight serenades, that eventually became a serious musical organization, spent time in the footlights with greasepaint and drag clothing, it’s helpful to go back to the re-formation of the Glee Club in 1910. At that time, the Glee Club, after a few years without any qualified student direction, reconstituted itself, responding, according to University historian Philip A. Bruce, to the disbanding of the musical theatre group the Arcadians. Through contemporary eyes, it’s easy to read this as meaning that the students from that group of musical players saw the error of their ways and became serious choral singers. Apparently not. Instead, this incarnation of the Virginia Glee Club appears to have arrived to fill a market void and spent at least some of its time doing real musical theatre.

And by musical theatre, I mean drag. The photo above, taken by the Holsinger photographic studio on April 4, 1916 (note the date), is attributed to the Glee Club with a question mark, as if to say, “No way!” Alas, other documentary evidence says “Way!” I have in my possession a copy of the April 1, 1921 edition of the Yellow Journal, the University’s anonymous satirical newspaper, in which a reviewer describes a performance of the Glee Club’s April Fools show for that year, “The Visiting Girl”:

“The Visiting Girl” presented by the University of Virginia Glee Club, John Koch, president, director and chief actor. Jefferson Theatre as an April Fool joke, April 1, 1921. We last saw this show in December and later we saw it in Richmond during February. If it hasn’t improved, and we doubt whether it has improved, we advise you not to go to see it. … The chief attraction of the show is Jack Parrott as a girl and John Koch as a rube. Jack plays his girl’s part very well, though he is a bit awkward. The girls’ chorus looks about as much like a bunch of girls as a litter of pups does. …

I could write it off as satire, but then there’s the ad in the back pages of the paper (the ads, while written to be funny, all are for real products or events):

TO-NIGHT

University Glee Club

IN A MUSICAL COMEDY

Suggestion: Why not cut out the “musical”?

Suggestion: They might cut out the “comedy” too.

The YJ’s hostility to the performance is partly a put-on (they spend the whole issue carping about class issues, and there’s “no one notable” in the Club), but the event is all real. It may well have been an April Fools tradition, judging from the dates of the evidence points, but the events were clearly real.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out other photos from this era in the Holsinger archives. Yeah, the Glee Club did some of their “musical comedy” in blackface. I guess this isn’t surprising in a group doing musical comedy in the South in the early 20th century, but it’s still sobering to realize that the Glee Club really was of its time.

Student directors of the Virginia Glee Club

I uncovered another student director of the Virginia Glee Club this weekend, poking through the New York Times archive. It got me thinking about how the group’s governance and musical direction has changed over the years and how large a role students have played in its direction.

Virginia is not unusual in having had students conduct its Glee Club. Princeton didn’t have a professional conductor until 1907, and the Harvard Glee Club invited its first professional conductor, Dr. Archibald Davison, in 1919. But the Virginia Glee Club is unique in having returned to student and other non-faculty conductors as a consequence of its separation from the UVA music department.

Most of the students who conducted the group are doomed to anonymity, but a few have names that have been recorded, even in the earliest years of the Club. I suspect that more could be found were someone to go through and comprehensively digitize the old University of Virginia Magazine (hint, hint). Some of the students went on to lead interesting lives. Here’s a snapshot of four of them.

John Duncan Emmet (ca. 1879-1880). One of the Club’s first directors, Emmet was there during Woodrow Wilson’s first year at the University, the 1879 – 1880 season. Wilson’s presence earned Emmet immortality, as the New York Times dug into Wilson’s student past to uncover a few gems about the Glee Club:

The [University of Virginia] Magazine contains several humorous descriptions of the reception accorded the Glee Clubbers on their serenading expeditions. A pert comment on the editorial page of one issue is typical of the many to be found in the files: “Painfully do we record the last unhappy adventure of the unhappy Glee Club. Most lamentable was their failure! Wrapped in sweet sleep the serenaded slumbered peacefully on, unconscious of the frantic efforts of the serenaders. We can only wish them better success next time.

Emmet graduated with his medical degree in 1880, and went on to bigger and better things, serving as the chief gynecologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital and founding the American Gynaecological and Obstretrical Journal. Emmet was the grandson of Dr. John Patten Emmet, professor of chemistry at the University, and namesake of Emmet Dorm.

Harrison Randolph (ca. 1893-1894). I’ve written about Randolph before. The only student director named by University historian Philip A. Bruce, Randolph went on to the presidency of Charleston College.

John Amar Shishmanian (ca. 1904-1905). Shishmanian is a little bit of an enigma. His leadership of the Club is attested by a 1905 Atlanta Constitution article about the Club’s concerts there: “The clubs are now undergoing bi-weekly rehearsals under the leadership of Mr. Shishmania [sic], the winner of the southern intercollegiate oratorical medal last winter.” Digging deeper, we find Shishmanian’s accomplishments as an orator attested in John S. Patton’s Jefferson, Cabell and the University of Virginia,which preceded Bruce’s account and is packed with all kinds of trivia–including a list of Jefferson Society medal winners. Shishmanian, who was registered with the University from Lexington, Kentucky, was a graduate student in law, having finished his BA at the University of Kentucky. The October 1903 Alumni Bulletin was a little more forthcoming about his origins: “an Armenian resident in this country, has entered as a student in the course recently established leading to a consular service certificate.”

He was the president of the Jefferson Society in 1905, and was also awarded the medal for oratory in that year. He is attested as a speaker at the honorary initiation of Virginia governor Claude August Swanson into the Delta Chi fraternity in 1905 or 1906. He graduated in 1906 and went west, joining the firm of Barbour and Cashin, before going east, eventually far east, joining the faculty of Robert College in Turkey.

Michael Butterman (1989-1991). Butterman is better known to modern Glee Club members, serving as joint conductor of the group with Cheryl Brown-West in the first season after its separation from the University, then taking over as solo conductor in 1990-1991 during the 120th anniversary year. Butterman was a grad student at the time, and left in 1991 to head to Indiana University in their conducting program. He’s now conducting the Boulder Philharmonic and the Shreveport Symphony, and is director of outreach for the Rochester Philharmonic, according to a 2007 Boulder Daily News interview.

The Virginia Glee Club disbands — in 1912

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This week’s Virginia Glee Club history post comes a little late, but better late than never because it sheds light on an interesting chapter of the Club’s history—its apparent, and apparently intermittent, disappearance in the years between 1905 and 1915. Thanks to a new item that has turned up in Google Books, and which I finally got a photocopy of today, I think we can piece together a fairly decent timeline.

We can piece together the history from a few scraps of evidence. First, UVA historian Philip A. Bruce, who wrote the history of the University’s first hundred years, alluded to the Club’s troubles between 1905 and 1915:

…no play was offered in 1910-11. This fact led to the revival of the Glee Club, an association which had disbanded in 1905. A mass-meeting of all the students interested in music was held; a new vocal and instrumental club organized; and rehearsals at once began. This club was composed of twenty members. It gave two concerts in Cabell Hall and four beyond the precincts. Choruses, quartets, and vocal and instrumental solos, were skilfully rendered. This association failed to re-form in 1912-13 and 1913-14, as the result of the absence of an experienced and attentive director and manager.

We know that the group was still active in the fall of 1905. A letter written on October 29, 1905 by Sue Whitmore, the mother of a University of Virginia student, mentions her enjoyment of hearing the Glee Club perform.

We also know that the Club was around in January 1914, from photographic evidence (above). Then, in 1915, the group was “reorganized” and “trained scientifically” by Professor A. L. Hall-Quest.

But what happened to the group between 1905 and 1914? What did Bruce mean that it “failed to reform”? He laid its failure to succeed on poor leadership, but on what evidence? Here’s where the new discovery sheds some light.

In early October of 1912, the following notice appeared (and was reproduced in the Alumni Bulletin, series 3, vol, 5):

We, the officers of the University of Virginia Glee Club, in consideration of the disadvantageous circumstances under which the afore-mentioned club has operated within the past three years, do officially declare said club disbanded, believing that by so doing an ultimate success may be achieved along another line. (Signed): Roger M. Bone, president, Robert V. Funsten, vice-president, Vaughan Camp, secretary, C.A. McKean, treasurer.

(Thanks to the fine folks at Special Collections for sending me a photocopy of the bulletin.)

So now we have a timeline:

  • In late 1905 or maybe early 1906, the Glee Club disbands.
  • In 1910, the Club reforms, responding to a musical vacuum left by the demise of the Arcadians, a musical theatre group, and struggles for a few years with inexperienced musical and logistical leadership.
  • At the beginning of the third season, in October 1912, the officers of the time disband the group temporarily.
  • At the beginning of the fall 1913 semester, the group re-forms (though the photo is dated January 1914, the re-formation must have happened in the fall—the odds of getting so many young men into matching suits for an official portrait in less than a month are probably no better then than they are today).
  • In 1915, the students connect with a professor, A. L. Hall-Quest, who has connections to the Princeton Glee Club tradition and who sets them on a sturdier footing.

Bruce overstated the hiatus by a year, based on the photographic evidence, but otherwise he was right on. The timeline speaks of an organization that was making it, or not, year-to-year, with little to no institutional support. That sort of existence resonates with my memory of the group between 1990 and 1994, with one difference: we had alumni who cared about the group enough to keep it afloat, and the Club guys of the early 20th century did not. There wasn’t a real alumni association, to speak of, until the first World War.

The next question, which will have to wait for another post, is: what happened after Hall-Quest left? He resigned in 1918, and Arthur Fickénscher didn’t take his job at UVa, and the directorship of the group, until sometime in the 1920s. But this answer might have to wait until I can get back to Charlottesville to do some real research.

Songs of the University of Virginia: the 1906 songbook

It’s Friday, so it must be time for some Virginia Glee Club history.

Before the first Songs of the University of Virginia album, there was the songbook. Compiled by A. Frederick Wilson in 1906 and featuring a combination of the still familiar (“The Good Old Song,” “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes”) and the unfamiliar (“The Orange and the Blue”, “Upidee,” just about anything else), there are some fascinating trends in the music. Certainly lots of drinking songs, two sung fully in Latin, and lots of fight songs where “old Eli” (Yale) and “the tiger” (Princeton) are the opponents.

And there is much that is destined to remain obscure: certainly I can’t imagine how to interpret the song “The Man Who Has Plenty of Good Peanuts,” with its verse “The man who has plenty of Pomp’s peculiar patent perpetual pocket panoramic ponies for passing examinations/And giveth his neighbor none /He shan’t have any of my Pomp’s peculiar patent perpetual pocket panoramic ponies for passing examinations/When his Pomp’s peculiar patent perpetual pocket panoramic ponies for passing examinations are gone.” But with the majority of songs containing four part harmony, and with many fight songs that could be revived, the book is definitely worth a download.

Yes, download–you can get the PDF from Google Books, since the book is out of copyright. So while you’re waiting to purchase the Glee Club‘s new album Songs of the University of Virginia, check out some of the historical precedents.

For incentive, here’s the foreward, in which credit is given to the Virginia Glee Club of the time for keeping the songs alive:

P.S.: This is one of the only sources I’ve seen for sheet music for “Upidee,” one of three songs mentioned as a Virginia favorite in 1871 just before the first appearance of the Glee Club.

Where was the Cabell House?

cabell house
The standard biography of the Virginia Glee Club traces their formation to the creation of a glee club at the University of Virginia’s “Cabell House,” which the group’s history calls the “Cabell House Men.” Inspired by my visit to the University this weekend, I went digging to find where and what the Cabell House was.

Jefferson’s original university design had 54 student rooms on the Lawn and a similar number on the East and West Ranges, holding somewhere between 150 and 200 students (assuming double residency for all the Lawn rooms except the Bachelor’s Row). So the growth in University attendance from 128 in 1842-1843 to more than 600 in 1856-1857 (figures from Philip Bruce’s History of the University of Virginia vol. III), combined with the lack of further dormitory space, led to a growth industry in Charlottesville boarding houses. One of these was the Brock Boarding House, later known as the Cabell House. Later called the “Stumble Inn,” the two-story brick structure, located on the north side of West Main Street between 9th and 10th, was ultimately razed. Today the block hosts a handful of businesses and a book shop and overlooks the train station on the other side of West Main Street.

The Glee Club’s formation wasn’t the only brush with fame the Cabell House had, however; it was also infamous as the site where John Singleton Mosby, later famous as the Confederate raider known as the Gray Ghost, shot fellow University student George S. Turpin.