Notes on some gentlemen songsters, with an aside on "antique and toothless alumni"

Let ev'ry young Sophomore fill up his glass,He-ta-i-roy Chairete,And drink to the health of our glorious class,He-ta-i-roy Chairete.

Recognize the song? No? Try it to the tune of "Vive l'Amour." Still no glimmer? Okay, it's a Dartmouth song, circa 1868. For some years right after the Civil War the rafters of Dartmouth Hall rang to many a lusty, and no doubt bibulous, rendition of it by undergraduates.

An exhibit entitled "Dartmouth in Song" mounted this fall at Baker Library reminded us not only of such deservedly forgotten ephemera as "Let Ev'ry Young Sophomore" but also of Dartmouth's long and unusually rich musical heritage. No college, surely, is more abundantly endowed with memorable, singable songs than ours. Drawn from the College Archives, the exhibit not only documented the activities of the Handel Society and the Glee Club but the genesis of a few of the famous songs of the College as well. For its text it drew heavily on a three-part article by the late Harold F. Braman '21 in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE in January, February, and April 1963.

Together the Braman article and the exhibit demonstrate that song has been in Dartmouth and Dartmouth in song for a very long time. At the first Commencement, August 28, 1771, the four candidates for degrees sang an anthem composed by one of them and set to music by another which, President Wheelock reported, "met with universal acceptance by great applause." And though entirely apocryphal, the legend still persists that three early Indian students sat down under the Old Pine with pipes lighted and sang some verses beginning "When shall we three meet again?" In 1606 Shakespeare wrote the same words for the alumni of Cauldron College.

Chief among Dartmouth songsters, of course, is Richard Hovey '85. As the exhibit made clear, however, Hovey was a poet, not a musician. His lyric poems set to music by divers other hands constitute at least three of our most durable songs: "Men of Dartmouth," the "Hanover Winter Song," and "Eleazar Wheelock."

In response to the offer of a $100 prize by the Dartmouth Lunch Club of Boston, Hovey composed the poem "Men of Dartmouth" in 1894. In 1896, prompted by another $100 competitive prize, offered this time by the Trustees, music for the poem was composed. A letter in the exhibit recorded Hovey's professional objections to the process being followed: "The whole principle of competition in these matters of art is radically wrong," he wrote. Nevertheless the contest continued, a prize was awarded, and the poem was set to an undistinguished tune with so simple a melodic line that, as the composer wrote, "antique and toothless alumni with no voices could pretend to sing at alumni reunions." Not until 1908, when Ernest Martin Hopkins '01 persuaded Harry Wellman '07 to try his hand at it, was the present familiar music to the alma mater composed.

His ruffled feelings apparently somewhat mollified, Hovey was persuaded to compose the "Hanover Winter Song" in 1898 in return for a $50 commission offered by Edwin O. Grover '94, a co-editor of the first College songbook (.Dartmouth Songs, 1898). The music, also commissioned, was by Frederic Bullard, a notable musician but a graduate, unfortunately, of M.I.T. The songbook contained several additional Hovey songs, the most unmistakably and genuinely Dartmouth being "Eleazar Wheelock." Again at the request of Grover, who reputedly paid another $50 for it, Hovey wrote the poem in England in perhaps early 1894, and the music was subsequently composed by Marie Wurm, a friend of Hovey's and the only woman - so far - to figure prominently in Dartmouth's history of song.

"Dartmouth's In Town Again"? "Dear Old Dartmouth"? "Dartmouth Touchdown Song"? Though they did not figure in the library's exhibit, all were composed by members of the classes of approximately the first two decades of the 20th century. Of the genre now commonly called the fight song, the new tunes and lyrics signified a change in college music. What happened, as Braman points out, was "not merely a Dartmouth renaissance. It was happening all over the collegiate realm. Gone was the 'hymn' type with its ivied walls, love and faith undying. . . . Let's get out in the open air, for 'victory or die' at Harvard, Fordham, Wesleyan, and Wooster." The lyrics to one of the more durable of them, "As the Backs Go Tearing By," were paraphrased from a popular martial tune of the time, "When the Boys Go Marching By," by John Thomas Keady '05, an ail-American at Dartmouth.

Braman records that in 1934 even President Hopkins had a go at writing a college song. Called the "Dartmouth Challenge Song," the words were submitted anonymously to Edward H. Plumb '29, who set them to music, and the song had its premiere at Dartmouth Night in the fall of 1934, when Hopkins' authorship was publicly announced. Dissatisfied with his handiwork, the author himself suggested that the song be consigned to merciful oblivion. This occurred, and the President returned to the less demanding task of running the College.

And then in 1931 a brilliant young English professor fresh from Oxford and a Newdigate Prize outdid them all. At the urging of his close friend Hopkins, Franklin McDuffee '21 succeeded in putting into words the Platonic essence of Dartmouth. The composer of the score, also specifically selected by the President, was Homer P. Whitford of the Music Department. The eulogist at Franklin McDuffee's memorial service said it all: "The delicacy of the images in which the sights and sounds of Dartmouth are reflected by the music of Professor Whitford's score do not convey the lusty vigor of 'her sharp and misty mornings, the clanging bells, the crunch of feet on snow ... the crowding into commons . . . the splendor and the fullness of her days.' But these are forever recorded in the words. The music is more in harmony with the softer phrases of the song . . . 'the long, white afternoons' - 'the twilight glow' - 'the soft September sunsets' - 'those hours that passed like dreams' - 'the long cool shadows floating on the campus, the drifting beauty where the twilight streams.' "

And, one may add, "the gleaming, dreaming walls of Dartmouth." These are the images that are forever and anew miraculously builded in our hearts.