And perch my tongue
On twigs of singing, rather high . . .
Emily Dickinson
who sang in the Chorus at Mount Holyoke
(Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and Alfred Leete Hampson. Little, Brown & Company.)
Miss M. Lyon
Dear Friend [wrote the Honorable Daniel Safford from his home in Boston, December 10, 1842], I have ordered the Pianno's sent to the Depot this evening. . . . They are both in one box, which should be kept the right side up and handled with care, there is also in the box, a small package, & a bonnet for Lydia Edwards. . . .
Yours very affectionately,
D. Safford
Already, in 1842, there was enough interest in piano practice at Mount Holyoke to call for a 'lot shipment.' It is to be hoped that Lydia Edwards's bonnet was of sterner stuff than certain headgear mentioned in an early Springfield Republican advertisement of 'Fashionable Satin beaver Bonnets for Ladies and Misses, among which are . . . Black, White, Purple, Blue, Brown, Claret, Pearl, Green, Orange and Drab, the foundations of which are warranted Fine Fur - not Muslin or Millinett, the mere Shadow of a Shade.'
No mere 'shadow of a shade' could have been trusted in the same box with two 'Pianno's.'
These pianos were not Mount Holyoke's first provisions for music. In a letter written two days after the Seminary opened, one of the first pupils told her sister about some of the benefactions of Deacon Safford: 'He has presented us with a piano and when it is put up I expect to spend a little time daily upon it but I do not see where I am to find it.'
The final 'it' in that sentence refers to time. Time is usually 'it' in the game of musical education.
Because of Miss Lyon's determination to keep away from the 'Ornamental Branches,' piano instruction is not offered in the earliest catalogues. But in the announcement of 1845-46 there appears this note: 'Instruction is given in vocal music. . . . Those who have attended to instrumental music can have the use of a piano a few hours in a week. Regular lessons are also given to those who especially request it.'
This is the catalogue that preceded the one in which the name 'Emily E. Dickinson' appears - not with a 'poem and a cream-whip' but in the list of students. On the same page with Emily Dickinson's name we find Amelia Jones of Springfield, later Mrs. George L. Stearns, who has left us this memory of the autumn of 1847, when Emily Dickinson and her classmates entered Seminary Hall:
Again we see them, a flock of newcomers, as they crowd into the hall for opening exercises, some comely and graceful, and some destined to win admiration by their shining virtues and talents. We mark one modest, pale-faced maiden crowned with a wealth of auburn hair. Who could have divined that Emily Dickinson's brain teemed with rare notes that would ring through the land?
Mrs. Stearns goes on later with a story about another 'E.':
E. was my friend and schoolmate in early youth, and together we entered the Junior class at Mount Holyoke Seminary. After our novitiate and before our studies had become of engrossing interest, we began to feel our limitations and fear lest 'in many things we offend all.' The dignity of our senior roommates was a restraint upon us. We had been singers in our respective churches at home, and now were pining for our choirmates and rehearsals.One day E. came to my room, singing-book in hand. 'I can stand it no longer,' she said. 'Come with me.' We took the road to the ferry as the most sequestered, and having walked our required distance, we ventured to delay in the spaceway - the broad spaceway bounded by the horizon. Then perched upon the topmost rail of a fence, we opened the book and our mouths, drew the diapason stops of our vocal organs, and sand tune after tune - long metres, short metres, halleluja metres, et id omne genus - chants, rounds, fugues, anthems, etc. etc. carrying two parts, and by snatches three or four, as the score demanded. We sang and sang till the valley rang with our hymns of lofty cheer. Our only visible auditors were two cows that had been quietly feeding in the pasture near. They were too well-bred to obtrude with double-base bellowing or with horn accompaniment, but they ceased their cropping and stood in silent amazement at the unusual sight and sound. We had found a remedy for depression, repression, suppression, and oppression, and no two maidens returned that day from open-air exercise more exhilarated than we. The seminary choirs were ere long arranged for regular practice which was the tonic and safety valve we needed.
It is pleasant to think that some of our first unaccompanied singing of anthems was done by 'E.' and Amelia from a fence on the Ferry Road.
As time went on, chorus work was required of everyone who could sing at all. There was a chorus and a 'semi-chorus.' Those who sang well were put into one chorus; those who sang less well in another. Only those who could demonstrate that they were tone-deaf were excused. Some of the alumnae still remember a student in the early nineties who, though possessed of a well-trained voice, decided to pose as one without musical ear. When her voice was being tried she obviously did her best to hit the notes, but always several tones away from the pitch. Only a fine actress and an accomplished musician could have made such a thorough-going demonstration. She got excused.
Glee Club singing with guitars and mandolins came into favor when these instruments were taken up everywhere as symbols of undergraduate delight. An alumna of 1893 remembers commissioning the College errand man to bring back a guitar string from his shopping trip in Springfield. He jotted down the errand on his memorandum, but later came back without the string for the guitar. When asked about it he said he had written it down carefully on his shopping list: 'Gita string.' But when he got to Springfield, he had forgotten that this meant 'Git a git-ah string.'
On Sundays, no official choir was necessary, because the students attended the white-steepled church on the South Hadley green. There, many of them seated in the high gallery that they called the 'Turkey Roost,' they sang with the rest of the congregation but never alone. A conventional college choir was not in demand until both the church and the original Seminary building had burned to the ground.
Then, when Mary Lyon Chapel was nearing completion, came the question of an organ. And with that question, into the picture of Mount Holyoke College stepped the figure of Mr. William Churchill Hammond.
Since almost forty graduating classes of Mount Holyoke students have had musical training under his baton, the alumnae, it seemed to me, would enjoy a word or two directly from Mr. Hammond. And so, looking as much like a reporter as possible, I stepped in after choir rehearsal one afternoon to ask Mr. Hammond if he would give me an appointment.
He saw me coming.
'That,' said he, pointing me out to Miss Tillinghast, 'is one of my old choir girls. What's her name?'
Miss Tillinghast acted as my sponsor; the appointment was arranged; and now with Mr. Hammond's kind permission I shall present my report. It concerns first the story of his own interest in music; second the beginnings of his interest in Mount Holyoke; and third, one or two of his ideas about training a college chorus.
The first public performance of his musical career was a vocal offering. He and a group of other little boys had to sing a Christmas piece at a Sunday-School concert. The place was decked with evergreens of a variety sometimes irritating to the human respiratory tract. To quote Mr. Hammond exactly, 'Christmas odors make me sneeze.' The little boys, all but hidden in evergreens, sang bravely on: but at the end of each stave of music there was antiphonal sneezing by William Churchill Hammond, not called for in the score.
That was the first public performance. But the first music Mr. Hammond remembers hearing was the playing by the Hammond family's 'string band,' with Mr. Hammond's mother at the piano and his father and uncles rehearsing with her in the evenings at their home. Each family concert closed with the haunting melody that is now beloved by thousands of Mr. Hammond's audiences: 'White's Air.' They played it by ear, and the little boy of the family, listening, learned it by heart.
Mr. Hammond's first paid musical engagement was the task of pumping the organ in church. If you held this position, you did for the old-fashioned organ what the motor does for the organ of today, except for the fact that you were in greater danger of letting the wind die down.
His first official engagement as organist to a great organ was, as he says, a curious example of 'Providence or whatever you call these things that happen.' A fine new organ had been installed in Hartford. Mr. Hammond had gone down to take lessons on it. His teacher allowed him to go into the church for an hour or so before his lesson to play the organ and get 'warmed up.' One morning when he was practicing a group of gentlemen from the city of Holyoke walked into the church. They had heard of the new organ and had come to see it. They sat down in a pew to wait for the regular organist.
'I didn't look at them,' said Mr. Hammond, 'except that I was probably mad to think they had come in my practice hour. But one of them stepped up to me and said, "Won't you show up this organ for us?"'
Accordingly Mr. Hammond proceeded to 'show it up.'
After he had played for some time the committee began to confer. 'If we get any such organ as this,' said one of them, 'we haven't got anybody who can play it.'
Whereupon another committeeman pointed to Mr. Hammond and said, 'Get that fellow,' - much as Clarence Day's father said, 'I'll take that one.'
And since it was a committee with 'power to act,' Mr. Hammond was engaged as organist of the Second Congregational Church in Holyoke, his headquarters ever since.
One member of that music committee, Mr. William Whiting, was also a Trustee of Mount Holyoke College. When Mary Lyon Chapel was ready for an organ, Mr. Whiting consulted Mr. Hammond for advice about buying a three-thousand-dollar pipe-organ for the College.
'If you put a hree-thousand-dollar organ into that chapel,' said Mr. Hammond, 'you'll be making a terrible mistake. It will limit a music department at the College for thirty years. If they can't afford a fine organ, put in a grand piano and wait. You won't be able to get any organist to go up there and play on any little sewing machine.' Mr. Whiting, doubtless recognizing the limitations of the sewing machine as an object of worship, decided with other members of the Whiting family to give the College a fine instrument. When the organ was dedicated Mr. Whiting asked Mr. Hammond to give a recital; and at the end of the recital he asked him to play 'White's Air.' Mr. Hammond's recitals with the same concluding melody have been traditional ever since.
The 'vested choir' as we know it made its first appearance at Miss Woolley's inauguration. The decision to have choir-costumes was made at the last moment, too late to buy cottas for all the girls. One of the alumnae in charge of the procession, Mrs. Martha Houston Dyer of the class of 1899, worked so hard and so fast borrowing cottas from choirs in Boston, Hartford, and other points of call that Mr. Hammond ever after called her 'Mrs. Cotta Dyer.'
Later Miss Woolley and Mr. Hammond worked out the College Vesper service, and the choir of more than two hundred voices became a notable institution. Twenty-five years ago we heard that a traveler from England said the two things that impressed her most in America were the giant redwood trees of California and the Mount Holyoke Vesper Choir.
'I've trained children's choirs,' said Mr. Hammond, 'and I know what they can do. I've had mixed choirs of trained voices, and I know what they can do. But you get a choir of college girls, two hundred or more of them, around the ages of seventeen - eighteen - twenty - and if you manage them properly there isn't anything else just like it. They are capable of taking in a fine shade of an idea and making it sing. But you can't scold them, and you mustn't ever frighten them. You mustn't force their voices. But when they are at their best tonally, with their mentality and suppressed emotion and a little extra training, they have something extra to give - only they have to work for it.
'You can have a singing club without working - very nice - sing "Sweet and Low" - very pleasing - nice social thing like fanning yourself. But get a choir of girls really working and it's an entirely different matter. They are capable of the sweetest and most ethereal tone, but unless there are a good many of them the tone isn't resonant. People have criticized me for having such a big choir. "What are you trying to do?" they say. "Have half the college in the choir?" But I say you've got to build the quality up with numbers. I'm not picking out just a few exceptional voices. I've found so many people who wanted to sing - they flock here to trials - a hundred and twenty-five freshmen in the choir this year, all the work purely voluntary. And I say to them, come on, if you're interested and can sing, come on. You're what I want. Training choirs is like having a great organ with a hundred stops - and three or four of those stops the most unusual thing you ever heard. When you've got those steps, you want to use them, but you mustn't overdo it.'
Mr. Hammond's practice has always been like his theory. Does anyone remember a certain choir rehearsal when he was working very carefully with the senior choir on the Vesper phrase, 'Grant us thy peace'? The 's' sound at the conclusion of that phrase had been ragged, and he had asked us to sing the response once more, for perfection of that final syllable. With the greatest precision and concentration we were singing it, and just as we came to the critical 's' sound, somebody sneezed.
'That's right, that's right,' exclaimed Mr. Hammond. 'Be sure to do it that way every time and it'll be all right.'
With memories like this in my music satchel, I asked permission to visit one of his choir rehearsals of today. He did not need to scold the singers, or frighten them. But he did have some remarks every now and then to make about the music. Often he stopped the choir in the middle of a measure.
'Those bars are like Hamlet,' he would say. 'Sing them with the same authority.'
'Look at that word "glorious." You sing it as if it were a little bit of a thing; feel it a little more. Don't make it sound weary and knock-kneed. Make it Glorious - but that doesn't mean I want you to yell. . . . That's it. Do it that way and you'll establish yourself at once with your audience.'
'Wait a minute. You skipped a stitch there.'
And again, 'You sang that whole stanza right straight along as if it had been written in thirty-eight-four-time. Give it more of a beat.'
And in the middle of a gleeful old part-song he brought them up with a round turn. 'Ladies!' said he, 'this piece will be new to the audience. They won't understand the name "Sophia" in that line unless you sing it with a little extra touch. Put an extra touch on Sofia, as if it were your own name.'
He still addresses the choir girls as 'Ladies,' just as he used to of old. In the middle of the rehearsal a crew of noisy ski-jumpers tore through the corridor outside with such a clatter that the choir jumped and looked around. 'That's all right, ladies,' said Mr. Hammond soothingly. 'Don't mind the ladies out there.' And he waited a moment until the 'ladies out there,' whooping and slamming, had cavorted away.
It is quite a lesson to all 'temperamental' spirits to see an artist who has trained young persons for more than forty years without ruffling his own happy disposition toward his choirs. That is one of the secrets of Mr. Hammond's ability to stir the obscure song-strings of the human instrument. He provides a clear untroubled atmospheric condition for the best vibrations, and then he hits things up with a skilled controlling touch.
It is by bringing out the quality of free vibration, whether in full-voiced or muted passages, that he is able to keep his choirs from producing what he calls 'a forced tone.' A director of a men's chorus has a different problem. Once at a rehearsal of the Harvard Glee Club, Doctor Davison stopped his singers in full tilt to make a famous remark. 'Gentlemen!' said he. 'In this passage you are supposed to represent the cherubim. You sound as if you were representing a hardware concern.'
That is something that a feminine choir can never do. In fact, for certain kinds of music, a girls' choir eternally misses its hardware. That is why Mr. Hammond used to let us give an occasional concert with the men's voices from his Holyoke chorus; and it is the reason why the girls today give joint concerts now and then with singing clubs from the men's colleges. And yet, with the right music, with tone-volume pure as fresh air, and with what a newspaper critic from Hartford called 'the quality of bated breath,' a choir of college girls gives much the same sort of pleasure as a Corot landscape, or a veery thrush in high woods, or a clear light in early morning over the sea.
Once in a while they take an audience off its feet - literally off its feet nowadays, what with the new method of college girl applause. The college audience is not supposed to applaud at all at a carol concert. But this year, after the last carol had lifted higher and higher on its last lovely note and gone to heaven, there was a pause, and then the audience broke all rules. In the old days it was hardly possible for an audience of girls to give an impressive encore, but now they have a device. Lift your spiked heel from the floor. Lift your toe slightly as well. Then do a seated tap-dance - lightly, lightly, ladies - just with the slightest little kick to it, while to all appearances aboveboard you are merely clapping your hands. Let a thousand girls do this, and a performer knows they mean an encore. It does not sound in the least like stamping. Done on the broad floor of Chapin Auditorium, it sounds like a thousand woodpeckers tapping a mammoth tree.
On this particular occasion, Mr. Hammond rose and bowed with finality. Then the woodpeckers began. He rose again and tried to discourage them. He made the gesture that always stops a choir with its mouth half open in the middle of a syllable. He did everything except what Kreisler does to stop an encore - rub his arm. But the woodpeckers were incorrigible. The more Mr. Hammond tried to curb them, the more happily they thumped. It was like the famous time when he failed to pass his examination for a license to drive his car - his explanation afterward being this: 'I meant to step on the brake, but instead I stepped on the swell.' Similarly with that audience. Each time he tried to calm them down he stepped on the swell.
At last he inquired what carol they wanted repeated. The audience called for half a dozen in a breath. Meanwhile the carol singers had been gazing out into space like angels in a mural decoration from their banked position on the stage. They were used to getting encores in Philadelphia and New York, but never before had they seen their own classmates demanding repeats.
And so once more the hall was hushed, and the rare old French carol was translated again into a throbbing miracle of tone. Another followed, and another - it seemed as if the audience belonged in that hall forever without the slightest reason to go home. One remembered what Mr. Hammond had said when an interviewer asked a group of musicians what piece they would choose as the last music they would hear at the end of their lives. Ossip Gabrilowitsch said he would ask to hear Schubert's 'Unfinished Symphny.' And Mr. Hammond said, 'I'd ask for the longest piece ever written, in the slowest temp, and when it was finished, I'd ask for an encore.'
So we keep asking for encores - we woodpeckers - in our insistent applause with footnotes. The college music has been very lovely all these years. Remember Miss Julia Dickinson singing with us, three added lines above - her exquisite voice like a star high above the rest of the choir? Remember the Festival Anthem by Miss Tillinghast with the galleries full of choir girls on Founder's Day - and the Sunday morning choir with Miss Ruth Douglass, interpreting the absolute beauty of the Dresden Amen?
There is not room on these pages for all the footnotes that go with our applause. There is room only for one picture of an organ recital in Mary Lyon Chapel, on a night when the world outside was a tempest of storm. It happened that evening that the chief part of the program was music from 'Parsifal.' The Chapel was almost dark, and the storm blew against the high windows. There were only the lamps around the organ - the white of the pages of music, and the light gleaming on the organist's white hair. The massive chords of 'Parsifal' rose and widened and deepened, like the surge of thought in some great mind. The Castle of Amfortas would not have been too great for that organ music or too stately. The chords were superb enough to stand beside the storm. And then at length the closing of the book. And finally, without the book, 'White's Air, Traditional' - traditional at Mount Holyoke of many things we love: things about music and musicianship and quiet listening that we shall not forget, because at an impressionable moment in our lifetimes we learned them, as we learned our carol tunes - by heart.