Music for Our Singing

An alumnus we know - one of that faithful band that tries to keep us up on what's going on out there in the wide wide world - dropped us a note recently, enclosing a clipping about "my favorite professor at Dartmouth way back" - Homer Whitford.

Professor Whitford was College organist, assistant professor of music, and director of the choir and the Glee Club from 1923 through 1935, before most alumni were born, but he is immortalized in the hearts of Dartmouth men and women through the new Class of 1981 as the composer of that most haunting of college songs, "Dartmouth Undying."

He is "trying to retire," the clipping said, so we called him up in Waltham, Massachusetts, to see how he was getting on with the job. "I have retired," the 85-year-old insisted in a 50-year-old voice, but only last year when he closed out 35 years as organist and director of musical therapy at McLean Hospital in Belmont. True, he has a few private pupils, he conceded, and does "some composing - although I should be getting over it." Cataracts and arthritis interfere with his playing, but he still plays two-piano for recreation. "You may be interested in knowing," he told us, "that at the present time I have two twopiano pals, one from the Class of '41, the other '79."

The College recognized Whitford's achievements with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 1966, citing him as one "who worked with many men but served one master, music." When he came up for Commencement, he was "quite taken with the Hopkins Center," in sharp contrast to music facilities in his day: Bartlett Hall, the basement of Webster for Glee Club rehearsals, and Rollins Chapel for the choir. On his one trip back since, he was impressed with the Glee Club, with women's voices recently added. And Homer Whitford is an uncommon judge of choral ensembles. It was under his leadership that the Dartmouth Glee Club won two of its three intercollegiate championships in Carnegie Hall, and he's been directing church choirs and other chorales around Boston ever since he left Dartmouth to take up further study at Harvard.

He particularly enjoyed hearing the Glee Club singing "Dartmouth Undying," a song that has lost its lustre no more for the composer than for the rest of the Dartmouth community - though he claims modestly that Franklin McDuffee's words make it what it is. "But the music matches the lyrics in quality," we protested. "Nice of you to say so," he replied.

After, say, Wheeler, Charming Cox looks like a million. Renée Diao likes it there.