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A Note of History
As early as 1860, Davidson students were forming music clubs; a campus concert was one of the few social activities students enjoyed in the 1870s. According to Miss Cornelia Shaw, who wrote Davidson College; intimate facts, "jug bands" were a very popular post-Civil War music phenomenon. Because funding for instruments was scarce, students took to blowing into water-filled jugs. By 1890, students had formed a college band and the administration had hired Mr. Poole, an aspiring minister, to coach the glee club. He also taught free voice lessons. During 1896-97, Miss Gertrude Williamson from Charlotte taught mandolin and guitar; by the end of the century, students had formed a mandolin and guitar club. When funds from the newly created Duke Endowment first came to Davidson in 1926, the administration established a Fine Arts department. Ernest Cullum was hired as the first full-time music director, and in 1930, he taught the first music courses. "Realizing the importance of music in the life of a well educated man and in the curriculum of a liberal arts college, Davidson undertook a musical renaissance in the fall of 1933," stated James Christian Pfohl. Just twenty years old, Pfohl was hired as a part-time director of music and chapel organist. Pfohl established Davidson's music department, and under his leadership it grew to five members, including a glee club director, voice teacher, piano teacher, and assistant band director. Pfohl took the school band on tours and set them up on their own radio show, broadcast weekly to listeners up and down the Atlantic coast. He instituted a concert series and a Davidson fine arts festival. And by 1940, he had organized a small symphony orchestra in conjunction with Queens College. Davidson granted its first B.S. in music in 1941. During the 1940s, Davidson was one of a handful of southern liberal arts colleges that could boast of an established and respected music program, thanks to Pfohl's leadership. When Pfohl left in 1952 to devote himself full-time to symphony conducting, Donald Plott, who had been director of the Male Chorus, stepped up to lead the department. Until 1981, Plott provided stability for the music department. Under his direction, Davidson's Male Chorus became known as one of the finest singing groups of its kind in the country. From the fifties until the early eighties, four full-time faculty members taught classes and were responsible for leading ensembles and teaching individual lessons. In 1959 Davidson awarded its first music scholarship, and in 1961 the Cunningham Fine Arts Center was completed. Cunningham offered the music department a much-needed residence, with classroom, practice, and performance facilities shared with visual arts and theatre.
When the doors of Davidson opened to women in the seventies, the college faced change and opportunity; the music department was no exception. The Male Chorus resisted change, resulting in the formation of a short-lived, student-directed Women's Chorus. Instrumental ensembles, more willing to accept the new female musicians, immediately benefited from their talents. President Emeritus Sam Spencer '40, in office when coeducation began, says, "Soon integrated into all aspects of the department, women enriched an already vibrant program. They have continued to do so, as anyone at Christmas Vespers in recent years unquestionably knows." The late seventies brought an uncommon succession of misfortune and change to the music department. David Richey, college pianist and composer, died of a brain tumor in 1977. In 1981, Donald Plott, beloved conductor of the Male Chorus and chair of the department for nearly thirty years, died of brain cancer. Wilmer Hayden Welsh, Plott's successor as department chair, as well as composer and college organist, was forced to take early retirement in 1990, due to a serious hearing condition, tinnitus. In 1993, choir director Mary Nell Saunders, who had built a national reputation as a choral conductor before arriving at Davidson in 1989, also died of brain cancer. And, Jim Swisher, pianist-in-residence and an associate professor of music, who provided so many wonderful concerts in his eighteen years at Davidson, was lost to colon cancer in 1996. According to Bill Lawing '73, Millner Professor and department chair for fourteen years, "Each of these tragedies had short and long-term effects. A sense of stability was difficult to achieve. At the same time, each of these events forced the members of the department to redefine and reexamine the positions we were replacing." From tragic circumstances, the department emerged stronger and more diverse. Lawing, now in his twenty-fifth year at Davidson, says, "The music department today is the best it has ever been. And we are delighted that more than two hundred students are performing in ensembles and taking lessons on an ongoing basis, with an equal number taking music classes each semester. Music at Davidson is thriving."
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