Singing School Research Articles

Creative Music Making since the Time of the Singing Schools: Fringe Benefits

cation also stress the importance of fostering creativity in public schools.2 However, the history of creativity and creative music making in American education in the last 250 years constitutes a checkered and uneven road.3 Periods of growth in musical creativity in schools and communities have alternated with periods in which little formal creative activity occurred. It is the contention of this writer that the history of musical creativity in America mirrors the creative act itself. Musical creativity is at once fresh, original, and unpredictable, and as such it cannot be suppressed or easily legislated. Instances of creative activity in schools and the community spring up unbidden, guided by visionary individuals. Such instances often take place at the edges of the societal mainstream, sometimes funded by benevolent foundations or corporations. An historical tracing of musical creativity reveals familiar names and movements, as well as those that are relatively unknown and unheralded. If one could glean a

Seamus Heaney's "Singing School"

Seamus Heaney's "Singing School"

Heaney and Walcott: Two Poems

Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Ministry of Fear’, and Derek Walcott’s ‘Homecoming: Anse La Raye’, written within a few years of each other, bear some striking resemblances, which – together with their inevitable differences – illuminate the specific national situations from which their poetry emerges, and the differing ways each poet takes to negotiate or make the most of their particular histories. Heaney’s poem is the first in a sequence of six poems called ‘Singing School’, published in North in 1975; while Walcott’s poem first appeared in The Gulf and Other Poems in 1969 – both collections in which the pressures of local histories, and the demands of dramatic and immediate political events, are explicitly registered. In each case the poem is concerned with the difficulties caused, and the creative possibilities made available, by the distance between personal history and available poetic tradition – though this is a story told in a personal register, as autobiography, and told with varying degrees of ruefulness, sadness, and comedy. Both poems tell the story of the ‘growth of the poet’s mind’, and, indeed, Wordsworth is the explicit startingpoint for Heaney, whose poem systematically rewrites The Prelude, insofar as that can be done in a poem of such smaller compass. But Walcott also takes on one of the great poets and translates him into local terms – a project to be realised at much greater length some twenty years later with the writing of Omeros.

The Handel Society of Dartmouth

In the summer of 1807 there was little reason for President John Wheelock to be happy with the state of music at Dartmouth College. The Musical Choir, which used to be one of the highlights of commencement exercises, was practically silent now. Yet at Wheelock's own graduation, the first Dartmouth commencement 1771, the choir sang two anthems, one an original composition by Frisbee and Ripley, graduating seniors educated for missionaries among remote Indians.' In 1791 the Musical Choir gave a concert of vocal and instrumental music as a prelude, then opened the exercises with an anthem by John Hubbard, A.M. (Dartmouth, 1785), and concluded the program by singing Champlain by Samuel Holyoke, in a manner that showed the sublimity of their art. 2 The college even awarded musical reformer Holyoke an honorary bachelor's degree that day. For the next ten years the choir joined the other college clubs that presented individual oratorical days during commencement week. It gave a musical performance and heard an oration by a musically talented senior. And it kept abreast of new developments music. One of its number, a Mr. Crage, attended a singing school at Exeter, New Hampshire, directed by the contentious, opinionated reformer Andrew Law. Crage boasted to Law that he and the other Dartmouth students had begun to develop a taste for such music, and to be sick of the common kind.'3 As late as 1803 President Wheelock was given reason to be proud

Early Twentieth Century Singing Schools in Kentucky Appalachia

Early Twentieth Century Singing Schools in Kentucky Appalachia

The Educated Imagination

1. The Motive For Metaphor 2. The Singing School 3. Giants in Time 4. The Keys to Dreamland 5. Verticals of Adam 6. The Vocation of Eloquence

Ours Is a Singing School

How a skilled music consultant brought the joy of participation in music to teachers, pupils, and parents is told here by a school principal. Mr. Bolz was principal of the Paddison School, Norwalk, California at the time this article was written and first appeared in the November 1959 issue of “Educational Leadership,” Journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development of the National Education Association. He has since become principal of the Sparks Intermediate School, La Puenta, California, and his article is reprinted with permission from “Educational Leadership.”

A Singing School Series: C. C. Birchard & Co., RCA Victor Records.

A Singing School Series: C. C. Birchard & Co., RCA Victor Records.

“A Singing School”

“A Singing School”

A Singing School

A Singing School

Presto! From the Singing School to the May Musical Festival

Presto! From the Singing School to the May Musical Festival