Tag: virginiagleeclub

2009 University of Virginia reunions

3563704058_78b7d3c02d_o

I returned yesterday from an extended weekend attending my 15th class reunion at the University of Virginia. It was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun, though not necessarily because of the reunion itself.

We started the weekend on a rocky note, driving through pouring rain through Connecticut and New York before it finally cleared away when we got to New Jersey. Lisa and I drove on solo the next morning and made it to Charlottesville about 3 pm. I had grand plans of catching up with a few folks in town but was exhausted by the drive and we punted, managing only to have a few drinks at Michael’s Bistro and to get over to L’Etoile. Okay, so that wasn’t such hardship. In fact, Friday was a pretty amazing date, the first we’ve had in quite a long time.

Saturday was a more structured day. This year I went in with the expectation that we would go to a few things that interested us and otherwise spend most of the day with friends. And it worked out that way, kind of. We did hear Julian Bond speak about the connection between civil rights, changing demographics, and the evolution of R&B and rock music–an unexpected but pleasurable discussion with an old professor, if not perhaps as consciousness raising as some of Bond’s past lectures have been.

Then it was lunch, which was unpleasant. The Big Tent was raised over yesterday’s muddy grass, our claustrophobia was in full swing, and we retreated to a stone planter near the Small Special Collections Library to eat our hot dogs (good) and hamburgers (overcooked). A slow stroll around Grounds followed, during which I snapped the majority of the photos from this trip. We sat in the Rotunda for a disappointing class panel, but the real unexpected jewel was sitting in the Shannon Garden along the west side of the Rotunda. Named for Edgar Shannon, who presided over the University during its most turbulent period since the Civil War during the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a fittingly tranquil place that I had walked past many times before but never appreciated until the weekend. (The picture above shows the colonnade that Stanford White added during the post-fire renovation of the Rotunda to create what became the Shannon Garden.)

The reunion part of the weekend was the least successful, primarily because the 15th reunion is not too well attended for a lot of folks, and partly because I didn’t sign up for enough fun activities. (Lesson learned: will sign up for wine tasting next time.) But we had a great time catching up with Greg, Bernie, Anne and the other folks from the class that were there, and the reunion left me wanting to go back in five years and do it again–which I suppose is the goal of all good reunions.

Virginia Glee Club history: Harrison Randolph

harrisonrandolphExploring some of Google’s new search options a week ago bore surprising fruit, as I discovered enough about the first named conductor of the Virginia Glee Club, Harrison Randolph, to write a Wikipedia article about him. There has long been little publicly available information about Randolph, aside from a mention in Philip Bruce’s 1921 five volume history of the University of Virginia and his presence in the archival 1893 Glee Club photo that also features the author of the “Good Old Song.” The liner notes to the Club’s 1972 recording A Shadow’s on the Sundial place him as the organist at the University Chapel, but otherwise he seemed doomed to fade into obscurity.

However, when I did a news timeline search for “virginia glee club”, I turned up some hits in the 1890s that I hadn’t seen before. In particular, one 1894 report in the Atlanta Constitution gave me quite a bit more information about Randolph and the boys of the Glee Club than I had seen previously. In this case, the description of Randolph as an “instructor of mathematics” made me go back and look deeper into his biography, and I turned up a fuller biography of him in a 1920-era volume that says that he left Virginia in 1895 to go to the University of Arkansas, and then in 1897 to the presidency of the College of Charleston, where he spent nearly the next 50 years.

It appears, despite his accomplishments, that the directorship of the Glee Club was not then without its perils; the Constitution gives a glowing description of his intellect, then drily notes, “To him has been allotted the awful task of directing the Glee Club.” Even allowing for the “amazing,” “awe-inspiring” sense of the word, one still feels the pressure of the world on Randolph’s young shoulders, particularly looking back at his 1893 photograph. Born the same year as the Glee Club itself, he looks at the age of 22 smaller and more exhausted than those around him in the publicity photo. Is it any wonder that only two short years later he fled to the relatively safer world of academia?

For those with patience, I’ve added the text of the original 1894 concert review article; it provides a rare glimpse at the mechanics of how the Glee, Banjo, and Mandolin clubs worked together and gives thumbnail biographies of each member.

Remembering Steve Bognaski

I learned this morning that a Virginia Glee Club friend, Steve Bognaski, died two months ago on Valentine’s Day of a heart attack. He was 38, and left a wife and two children.

I’m kind of flabbergasted. Steve always was one of the most bighearted guys I knew, full of life, a dedicated singer, and capable of highly vocal joy. It doesn’t seem fair that he’s gone.

I count myself fortunate that I was able to meet up with him when I was in Charlotte in September 2007 for the iTSMF show. He was excited about his family’s upcoming move to Suffolk, Virginia. I am sorry I didn’t see him more often in the time since graduation.

Remembering Gilly Sullivan

UVA Today: Gilly Sullivan, Former U.Va. Alumni Association Director, Has Died.

If the worth of a man is measured in the impact that he left on the lives of others, Gilly Sullivan was the most important man I’ve ever known. He was dedicated to helping students at the University of Virginia and to ensuring that Mr. Jefferson’s principles of student self-governance were consistently upheld, and he was able to produce miracles in a way that no one else associated with the institution seemed able.

I had three separate interactions with Gilly. In one, he was the bearer of the news that I had won an alumni-sponsored scholarship that I didn’t know existed and had never applied for. In the second, he helped save the magazine that I had cofounded just an issue before when our business manager decided not to sell any ads and not to tell me about it.

In the third, which began before I got to the University and continued the whole time I was there, he was the guardian angel that helped ensure the survival of the Virginia Glee Club as an independent organization when the UVA music department wanted to subsume it into a mixed chorus. He did it by ensuring that the music department couldn’t claim any control over the Glee Club’s alumni-funded endowment, thus ensuring we’d have some way to survive without department support. He was similarly instrumental in helping the revival of the UVA Women’s Chorus.

I wrote a Wikipedia entry for Gilly a few months ago but never shared it with the broader world until this week; I wanted to dig deeper to find more information about the man. For all his influence, he left a remarkably small impact on the news world–a few articles around the time he retired and that was it. He deserved more praise than he got, but I think he knew how much of a difference he made to students like me.

A Shadow’s on the Sundial: initial notes

My copy of the Virginia Glee Club‘s 1972 record, A Shadow’s On the Sundial, arrived today. I haven’t listened to much of it yet, but a quick scan of the first few tracks on the first side and a review of the liner notes (transcribed) provide the following observations:

  1. This is a completely different group than the rough-hewn group from 1951 (or was it 1947) that recorded Songs of the University of Virginia. No monophony here, no vigorously gasping phrases, no mediocre baritones. Don Loach should rightly be credited with introducing the tradition of countertenor singing to the Glee Club, as evidenced in the first four madrigals, and for generally setting a high level of musicianship. When I joined the group, in the second year after he and the group parted ways, much of the musical philosophy of the group was still proceeding in the fundamental direction laid down by him.
  2. Only four of the Summer Songs, settings written by the group’s conductor David Davis of poetry by the group’s student business manager, Michael B. Stillman (class of 1963), are included on the recording—not included is the oddly funny “Little Polly Ethylene.”
  3. The record’s liner notes reveal the identity of the mysterious Harrison Randolph, who in 1893 broke it out of the Glee, Mandolin and Banjo Club and set it on its path of independent existence: he was the organist in the University Chapel.

More notes as I finish listening to the record…

Virginia Glee Club 1972 European Tour

Continuing this week’s back to school theme (hey, in the fall I get a little nostalgic for UVA), I did a little more spelunking through the broken Cavalier Daily archives and turned up a review of the Glee Club’s 1972 European tour. Check out Around the Western World in Eighteen Days: A Glee Club Diary, and marvel at the thought that college students could once visit the Hofbrauhaus on a University-sponsored trip.

The Virginia Glee Club: A Shadow’s on the Sundial (1972)

Having sung the title work, I’ve always been curious about the Glee Club’s 1972 recording A Shadow’s on the Sundial, not least because it financed their 1972 concert tour. I hadn’t been able to find any references about it other than a newspaper ad and a passing mention in Virginius Dabney’s history of the 1920s through 1970s at Virginia, but today I struck paydirt.

There are a lot of bugs in the UVA library’s onsite access to digitized back issues of the student newspaper the Cavalier Daily, but you can get to the content by searching to find the article you want, browsing to the year that it was published, opening the file containing all the content for that date, and viewing source (the content is contained in the XML). For those who might not want to go through the hassle, here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared in the February 29, 1972 issue of the Cavalier Daily:

Profits from A Shadow’s on the Sundial, the Glee Club’s recent recording, will also go toward the tour. The record contains several traditional settings of English, French, and Italian madrigals, some of which will be sung in Europe. Two more serious works included are Francis Poulenc’s Lauds of St. Anthony of Padua, which the Club plans to sing in Padua, and Dietrich Buxtehude’s Cantate Domino, “Sing To God The Lord”.

“From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill” (two verses only) and “Glory, Glory To Virginia” combine in a pleasant medley, offering a sharp contrast to the above pieces. Also included among Virginiana are new arrangements by recent Glee Club directors of “The Good Old Song,”, “Virginia Yell Song,” and “Ten Thousand Voices.”

A recent addition to the collection is “Vir-ir-gin-i-a,” by Professor Emeritus of English, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Setting verses to a chorus by G.F. Handel, Professor Davis dedicated his new song on April, 1968, to the Jefferson Society. He sang the first performance of it on that occasion.

Portions of two other compositions that the Glee Club has come to regard as their own have been included. One is Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom which was dedicated to the Glee Club in 1943, having been composed for the Two Hundredth Birthday of Mr. Jefferson.

The other composition was written by former Glee Club director David H. Davis, entitled Summer Songs. The title of the album, A Shadow’s on the Sundial, is taken from the name of the concluding Summer Song in the group.

The album represents a lot of work on the part of the Club members. It seems the incentive involved has produced what many consider to be one of the best albums ever put out by the group. The album can be purchased for $5.25 at the corner stores, Newcomb Hall Bookstore, Stacy’s Music Ship, and HiFi House or through any member of the Glee Club.

With the group preparing to record a new album honoring the legacy of Songs of the University of Virginia, I thought the discovery of this description of Shadow was interesting.

Songs of Virginia redux

I got a little pleasant news in the mail over the weekend. Somehow I had missed the announcement that the Virginia Glee Club won a Jefferson Trust grant back in April to record a followup to Songs of the University of Virginia. I had previously been contacted by a current Glee Club member who asked questions about the old record, but hadn’t heard about the grant. Well done, guys.

The Fennell roast

Fennell, with iPhone and pipe, at the partyI had a bit of driving to do this weekend; I traveled from one Arlington to the other, from Massachusetts to Virginia, so that I could help Craig Fennell celebrate his impending nuptials. It was a great time, quite mellow as these things go. Lars Bjorn and his wife Erin were great hosts, and I got to spend time with quite a few folks I hadn’t seen in years (Kevin Dixon, John Duncan, Ananth Kadambi, Ben Johnson, Dan Roche, and even Guido Peñaranda) as well as some folks I hadn’t met (mostly the rest of Craig’s bandmates in Wonderjack, as well as his brother and sister). It was a great evening, and my only regret was that I had to drive sixteen hours (eight each way) to be there for only sixteen hours.

(It’s kind of funny that, even with gas at $4 a gallon, the car was still the cheapest way to go this weekend; $50 cheaper than Amtrak, $150 cheaper than JetBlue. I don’t think that will be the case for too much longer, though.)

Anyway, it was a great time and there was much reminiscing. I wasn’t in the VGs with Fennell, Dan, Ben, and Ananth, but had enough common experiences that we stayed up talking until late in the night about music. I’m looking forward to hearing the Imogene Heap cover that this year’s VGs did–we all passed around Fennell’s iPhone so we could hear parts of it, but I think it probably will sound better over speakers.

Hillary: Eleventh hour UVA session doesn’t help

diy Barack poster

Interesting choice of campaign destination for Hillary Clinton on Monday: she spent an hour with Larry Sabato’s PLAP 101 class at the University of Virginia (via the Tin Man). It appears, from last night’s election returns, that it didn’t help, since Obama swept Virginia (and Maryland, and DC) by a healthy margin.

What surprises me a little is the tone of the uncredited article in UVA Today, always the glossiest and least relevant of the on-Grounds publications. It reads like a campaign press release, gushing over how “poised and candid” she sounded.

I have to say I’m not surprised at all by the fact that the University Singers, rather than the Glee Club, got the nod to do the musical accompaniment, though. I can’t imagine a scenario in which this particular candidate would be OK with a men’s chorus accompanying her.

Oh, and the Barack Obama “Sweep” poster is courtesy the Do It Yourself Barack Obama Poster Site, which is based on this fantastic series of posters by Shepard “Andre the Giant has a Posse” Fairey.

The Good Old Song of … the Virginia Glee Club

Funny what you find when you dig through University archives. I was going through some old Virginia Glee Club photos tonight when I decided it would be a good idea to actually read the lists of names at the bottom. Some familiar names popped out (Ernest Mead, Harry Rogers Pratt), and then one (in an 1893 photo) that sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. E.A. Craighill…

Then it hit me. Here’s the guy credited with writing the lyrics to “The Good Old Song” between 1893 and 1895—in an 1893 Glee Club photo! The guy who wrote the freakin’ “Good Old Song” was in Club!!!!

Well, I was having trouble filling out the Notable Alumni section of the Glee Club article after Woodrow Wilson… now I’ve found Notable Alum #2.

Revised Glee Club record date: 1951

While doing some Wikipedia related research last night, I stumbled across something interesting. The record album Songs of the University of Virginia, which I’ve long thought was recorded in 1947 based on photographic evidence from the University archives, was apparently not released until 1951. How do I know this? From a 1951 Washington Post article, of all places.

If it seems funny that a Paper of Record would cover goings-on at the University, consider that the WaPo didn’t get that reputation until the time of Woodward and Bernstein. Prior to that, it was viewed as a sleepy society paper, and apparently not above covering the doings down Route 29.

Also interesting in the article was the following: confirmation of the 1871 founding date (the record was said to honor the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Glee Club); identification of the Beta Chi chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi (the “national honorary band fraternity”) as the sponsor—an organization that, as far as I can tell, isn’t on Grounds any more; and identification of Thomas Jefferson Smith III of McRae, Georgia, as the co-chairman of the project (with Jack Hardy) and president of the Glee Club at that time. Plus, apparently, the Music Department was resident in Minor Hall then, rather than Old Cabell.

But the main point of the article for me was its claim regarding the aim of the project, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

Many songs which should be a part of University heritage have been lost, some because they were set to popular tunes of the times and died out when the tunes were forgotten, some because a college generation is a brief time in the life of the school. Words to these songs can be found in university publications, but no one sings them because the tunes have been lost.

The famous “wah-who-wah” [sic] of the University’s alma mater is an example of these lost songs. Once it was sung; then all the band music for it was lost. Now no one knows the music, and it has become a yell, used chiefly at football games.

So “Songs of the University of Virginia” will preserve songs which otherwise might be lost in future years. The album will help alumni of present and future to recreate the days of “purple shadows” on the lawn.

The irony, of course, is that the album itself faded almost completely into obscurity too. Note the part about wa-hoo-wa—they are referring to the song about which the “Good Old Song” was written (no, the “Good Old Song” is not self-referential!), which is lost.

Virginiana, Wikipediana

I’ve been expanding my Wikipedia footprint over the past few months. Starting on the Virginia Glee Club page, my contributions now span articles on a few University presidents, the Raven Society, the Virginia Gentlemen, and even the Seven Society. Yes, editing articles on Wikipedia is a gateway drug.

So I made it formal the other day and joined the WikiProject University of Virginia. I don’t know exactly what that means but I suspect I’ll find out soon enough.

I’d welcome help from other University alumni or interested parties regarding any of these topics. For instance, there is damned little about the VGs online to use as reference material for discussion of this 50+ year old a cappella group, and I know they’re more notable than the Hullabahoos, who have a kick-ass article.

Glee Club nostalgia trip

Courtesy fellow VMHLB the Tin Man, the other version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, the audience participation version performed by the Virginia Glee Club. Some of the traditions seem to have gone away: there is no “Hens Suck Eggs” chant from the Four Calling Birds, for instance, and the traditional bum-rush of the conductor followed by champagne toast has been replaced by a skit that’s not really visible in the video. But you get some of the spirit of the occasion. And I was excited to see that it happened in Old Cabell Hall; there were some dire predictions about what was going to happen with hall availability this year that appear not to have come fully to fruition.

Enjoy: