The Class of 1876, 1874.

      PART ONE:

      The Early Decades of the “Singing College”

      Daniel G. Harriman of the class of 1864 wrote a song called “Greeting Glee” especially for a trip described as follows in the 1940 edition of the Wesleyan Song Book:

      In the summer of 1862, the first regular Wesleyan Glee Club started afoot from Middletown for a trip to the White Mountains. The manager, Henry L. Dickinson ’62, traveled a few hours ahead of the Club, making quick arrangements for lodging and concert hall at each evening’s stopping place. The final concert was given on top of Mt. Washington.

      What a scene! A mere thirty years after the founding of Wesleyan, the elegantly-clad Glee Club is seen wandering on foot to the White Mountains, before the construction of Interstate 91 or the production of automobiles. Everywhere the singers stopped, people were glad to offer them food, lodging, and a concert hall to hear them sing. The foundations were being laid for the mythology of “The Singing College.” Decade after decade, the singing young men ascended not just Mt. Washington, but the heights of the academic song world, winning the national intercollegiate championship back to back in 1926 and 1927. Also two years in a row, 1962 and 1963, Richard Winslow’s men, combined with the Smith College women, went off to Mexico, courtesy of the State Department.

      This heritage of song has largely faded from memory, but remains literally engraved at Wesleyan in the form of the plaques on the steps of North College. Everyone passes them by, and no one seems to notice them. A cleaning, specially done for this book, makes them more passably photogenic than before, though the names remain obscure to the Wesleyan community today. It is so striking that only songwriters are celebrated in so prominent a place on campus. No football heroes, debaters, presidents, or professors grace the steps.

      The Glee Club was hardly the only outlet for undergraduate vocalizing. At all kinds of college events, the students raised their voices in song. Unfortunately, it is only the men we hear about; there is very little trace of women’s musicality in the period from 1872–1912 when Wesleyan was a coed college. The boys were always singing, it seems, since there were so many ritual events in the calendar for the couple or few hundred lucky members on campus each year. Below, a few choice examples of frolicking and solemnity evoke the importance of music at Wesleyan in the early decades, before the arrival of multicultural music and gender balance changed so much of the local resonance.

      North College plaques honor Wesleyan songwriters, 2008.

       THE GLEE CLUB WORLD

      What were the boys singing, when not atop Mt. Washington but back in the Chapel? The program for November 19, 1869, illustrates three kinds of pieces: college songs, classical music favorites—often from opera—and light fare. In a wry Wesleyan way, the composer of “Viva la Wesleyan” is given—misspelled—as “unbekannt,” German for “anonymous,” just as Pat Molloy’s solo is ascribed to “umlaut,” the German double-dot sign over o and u. “Johnny Schmauker,” sometimes given as “Johnny Schmoker” in programs, looks like a German parody number of the type popular in that era. Whatever it symbolized, the song began its life at Wesleyan. According to an 1869 account in the Western Collegian, “‘Johnny Schmoker’ was first brought before the American public by the Glee Club of the Wesleyan University, Conn.”

      In today’s a cappella age, opera seems a surprisingly large part of the repertoire of choice. In 1869, arias were popular music, widely distributed in the sheet music that most people kept in their homes as part of the common American habit of friends and family singing around the piano.

      The reviews for the concert at the Tremont Temple in Boston speak eloquently to the fame Wesleyan’s Glee Club had secured by 1884.

      Glee Club program, 1884.

      Glee Club program, 1869.

      In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Record rates the group as “positively the best,” an opinion seconded by the Newark Advertiser. The yodeling of Mr. G. D. Beatty, which he repeated numerous times on demand, was typical of the age. Traveling troupes of Swiss and Tyrolean Alpine singing families crisscrossed America as early as the 1850s.

      The 1869 “Grand Union Concert” of the Yale and Wesleyan Glee Clubs, offers a rare chance to size up choruses side by side. This benefit concert featured solo and joint numbers, again with many German and classical items, as well as what we might call “novelty” pieces, such as “Solomon Levi,” a very popular song we would certainly ban as anti-Semitic today. The bundling of a Spanish, Chinese, and probably Balkan (“Fatinitza”) number speaks to other versions of ethnic and international stereotyping. What “The Pope” said about Catholicism is left to our imaginations. The second-half opener, “George Washington,” rounds out the standard sampling of popular styles of the day, which always included the theme of patriotism.

      The transportation is as eye-catching as the song list. One could simply take the train from Middletown to New Haven and back, and $1.00 would cover both ticket and transportation to and from the stations. Sometimes the old days were actually more convenient.

      The Wesleyan students probably expected to come out on top in this Connecticut choral rivalry. Back in 1873, the Argus contentedly made this observation:

      We clip the following from a Meriden paper: “We were somewhat disappointed at the singing of the Yale club,

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