All Roads Lead to Rome

At last, the Glee Club obtained a quasi-independent governing status. We had brought the name of a provincial college into prominent European concert venues. We were no longer the "Why do you want to go to England? Why don't you go down and sing in a fraternity instead? They need some culture." (thus said one of our former presidents of the college)

One of the powerful national musical organizations had invited me to be on its governing board - the Intercollegiate Music Council (all the male glee clubs in America). During the fourth meeting of this crew, I invited the annual seminar to be held at WPI, which they accepted. That meant that we were to host the professorial staff of various colleges in America, and the following glee clubs: Amhert College, Cornell University, Union College, Harvard University, University of New York, and Appalachian State University - all in concert. I had gotten permission for an unusual event, and that was to invite the WOMEN of Regis College to join in the Friday night concert in a Bach cantata with WPI. The concerts were at Trinity Lutheran Church and Mechanics Hall. The Friday night concert was so damn long, and the seats so hard, that the cocktail hour afterward was mobbed! Everything went smoothly except for the Saturday night concert. WPI got up to sing after Cornell and the University Glee Clubs, when I directed the first down beat to the pianist - and NOTHING happened. I looked at the grand piano, and signalled to begin again - and again, nothing happened. Minasian, the president of the club and the pianist, looked back at me from the keyboard with a blank stare. So I walked over to the keyboard and said, "Do you think we can begin now?" At which point he said, coming out of his reverie, "Oh, sure!" After that, all went well, and John Palmer brought the house down with two minutes of standing ovation for his high B in the Russian folksong "Yonder". Of course. When I announced we were not going to sing "The Demon of the Gibbet," by Hindemith, which Harvard had planned to sing, that drew loud boos from Harvard, seated in the audience, with equally loud yells of "shut up!" from Appalachia State. I thought this was very funny, so I started to laugh. Needless to say, when Harvard sang, they did very well, and didn't they know it.

The years progressed, with five tours to England, recordings, local concerts, women's colleges, and much wine and much beer (until the State Legislature said no-no), then came the mighty question "Do you want to go with us to Rome, and we want an answer now-now-now!" That was Regis College. The men took their time at it because we wanted to know, who's going to run this thing? Ted Dysart, the tour manager of the glee club, decided that the agent, European Incoming Services, could be dealt with. Regis had a tendency of demanding and being obeyed. However, the manager of European Incoming Services was a wonderful Italian woman who didn't care what women demanded, and would listen to Ted - and Ted had a way with words. WE WOULD GO TO ROME! Arrangements were done, money was paid, and we were off - but the music! I chose the Vaughn Williams Mass for Double Chorus because Regis, what with their alumni chorus also going, numbered some ninety women, and we were about forty-five men. That meant we could split into double chorus and soloists. There was only one thing wrong: some of the soloists could not count. The soloists from WPI included Dr. Richard Breed (first winner of the Clifford Greene Award, the Glee Club alumni award), who was a very accomplished tenor, and thank God for that! When a soloist couldn't count four, and put in eight or nine beats instead (in concert!), Breed and Scott Stoddard, the bass, would break this impasse by coming right in. After two concerts of this, I had lost my voice from yelling in desperation. HOWEVER, the tour did include Sunday Mass in the St. Peter's Basilica, and an audience with the Pope the next Wednesday. At the end of the audience, he called the choir forward, and the Vatican assistants got us all lined up. His Holiness approached us and came right to me with the Regis conductor, Shiela Prichard, by my side; after my greeting of "Good morning, Your Holiness,", he said to me in English, "Where are the men?" To which I replied, "Up in the back," and I pointed to them. He said, rather wistfully, "Ah. A minority." That was followed by pictures and more introductions... a very kind and saintly gentleman is this pope.

Concerts were at St. Paul's Within the Walls, the American Episcopal Church in Rome, St. Lawrence in Damaso, and the wonderful basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. That concert went very well; the two monks who were to guide us sat through the concert and Dysart noticed that when we chanted the Gregorian, "Jesu, Dulcis Memoria," and then sang the Vittoria polyphonic setting of it, the two monks left their seats and ran forward to hear it. I guess it was the competition which they rather enjoyed. During this tour, there was a whole other bus of people who were just touring with us. Oftentimes, there were other tours to various Italian locales. The one most enjoyed was the tour to Pompeii, where the guide was not only explicit, but funny. The tour of the newly-excavated antique wine shops, sex shops, outdoor theatre, villas, temples, and the wine merchants' house (where one fresco depicted a scale where a part of one's body was placed on one side of a scale and an equal amount of gold on the other side - I hate to suggest that this was a prize for the biggest winner). On the way home, Ted Dysart had arranged a fringe benefit: first-class seats for many of us - how he did it, I shall never know, but t'was wonderfully done! The next memorable concert tour of the Glee Club was perhaps the finest: that to Prague - 1999.

Why the Czech Republic? Answer: because we'd never been there. Dr. Weeks had just come back from a tour with the Concord Orchestra to Prague, and mentioned the wonderful tour agent and accomodations and audiences that they had experienced. Well, with a tribute like that, could we not say, "Let's go!"? Everything he said was true. The agency supplied us with splendid accomodations and concerts. We contracted our own plane reservations. We also included an insurance policy for "cancellation of concert arrangements," due to a prior aborted concert tour to Ireland (the tour agency ran off with the money from Wells College and WPI).

Prague is a marvelous city, both old and new, with both beautiful, medieval architecture, and Communist-era gray, dull, concrete architecture.. The agency supplied us with a bright young man with fluent English as our guide. Further, he was a splendid baritone with a degree in music. The opening concert...

This year has brought us cooperation with our usual colleges and the Smith College Christmas Vespers, which is always a big concert at Smith. Our tour to New York City with Wells and our own women and orchestra provided us with a surprise - an audience of over four thousand people in St. Patrick's Cathedral. When I turned around and saw all the pews filled, people standing in the aisles and throughout the back, I couldn't believe there were so many people there. This January, the men prided themselves on two concerts of the Busoni Piano Concerto with the Concord Symphony Orchestra in Concord. The Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer published a review of the concert in glowing terms. At the IMC convention at Rutgers on the Fourth of March, Jamison Marvin, director of the Harvard Glee Club, remarked to me, "I understand you did something rather unique with the Concord Orchestra." So, the word gets out.

125 years ago, this college encouraged its students to participate in a wonderful experience - the use of the body to sing. The early governors and faculty of the college would have been delighted to see this flowering of a singing organization. Where to in the next millenium? The former male colleges of America seem to have gotten over the necessity of having "a large, mixed chorus," because they are now co-educational. As Harvard, Amherst, and Cornell prove, it is easier to retain a women's glee club, a male glee club, and a mixed chorus, than it is to have a generic mixed choir. Colleges such as Wheaton, Vasar, and Skidmore tried this path of only a mixed chorus, and succeeded in having only a rather lame group. I hate to say this, but my own alma mater, Yale, has the same problem. To paraphrase our school's president, it has just another of the many "vanilla" mixed choruses in America. The success of the WPI Glee Club and singing organizations began with the spirit of the undergraduates, and remains still in the spirit of the present undergraduates, both male and female.