in training, like the members of an athletic team, and followed rigid rules about being in bed at a certain hour, about not smoking within three hours of a concert, and about not drinking at all from one end of the trip to the other. The glee club set forth on its trip, and the surprise was tremendous. Many a graduate in many a city came to the local concert expecting that it would be a social occasion, and found instead that it was a musical occasion —of an entirely new sort. To the everlasting credit of the Harvard graduates it must be said that most of them perceived at once that what the club was doing was worth a hundred "Bulldogs on the Bank." When the conductor of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra invited Davison, during the intermission of the Cleveland concert, to bring his men back the next year to sing with the orchestra, and when other critics who knew what they were talking about showed the same sort of spontaneous enthusiasm, the majority of the graduates knew that it was up to them and their friends to adjust themselves to the new situation and to give the club their full support.

From that time on it was comparatively plain sailing. Joint concerts in Boston with artists such as Fritz Kreisler and Frieda Hempel added to the organization's local reputation. A second vacation tour to a number of cities in the East and Middle West proved strikingly successful. The French Government invited the club to visit France during the summer of 1921, friends of the university and of American music contributed the necessary funds, and the expedition was made by sixty singers. They visited not only France, but Switzerland, Italy,

and the occupied area of Germany, and the foreign critics added their praise. In Cambridge one began to notice that more and more the undergraduates took the new rôle of the glee club for granted and looked upon it as one of the established assets of the university. Here and there a voice was raised in objection to the continued use of the name "glee club," and the argument was brought forward that the club was sailing under false colors, and ought frankly to call itself a choral society; but when members of the club replied that the glee is really a splendid old form of choral music and that from the point of view of the carping etymologist they had as much right to the name as any glee club of the conventional type, the opposition weakened. Some observers lamented that the genial old college songs were to be dropped out of undergraduate life entirely, but regained their composure when they heard that Davison, by organizing singing contests among the men in the various freshman halls and by arranging for glee-club concerts of light music on spring evenings in the college yard, was making the good old songs familiar to more men than ever before. The glee club is now also planning to publish a new collection of Harvard songs, reviving many of the older favorites that are falling into disuse, in an effort to encourage general college singing.

Recently the precedent set at Harvard has begun to have its effects elsewhere. "If the movement spreads," wrote Daniel Gregory Mason not long ago, "it is not too much to say that it will in a few generations transform our entire musical life. To set young people to making good music for themselves is fundamental. It is placing

something else, something better, in that vacuum that nowadays rag-time, jazz, and the 'canned music' of mechanical instruments rush in to fill."

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Before one generalizes, however, about the chances of doing elsewhere what is being done at Harvard, one should note one or two outstanding facts. The first is that the new movement at Harvard developed gradually. Because, when the time came, the glee club changed its policy almost overnight, there is a danger of overlooking the fact that the thing could not have been done-the proposal would have been hooted down-unless for more than ten years Davison had been slowly laying a foundation. After all, there is much truth in the theory that undergraduates are essentially conservative. The only thing that the theory of undergraduate conservatism overlooks is that when, with proper preparation, a change is made in undergraduate institutions, presto! a new tradition has been established, and one which the new generation of undergraduates will cling to as desperately as it clung to the earlier tradition. The Harvard Glee Club is already a tradition.

Another thing which one must bear in mind is the quality of Davison's leadership. He is not only a skilful conductor; he is a man inspired with a faith in the ability of young men to grasp anything that is really vital and true, and in the compelling power of good music. Can there be anything, he argues, more misanthropic than the common opinion that men of education and intelligence, at what is essentially a romantic age, cannot be made to enjoy the best that music has to offer?

If that is the case, the musicians might as well shut up shop. Davison claims that he finds college students almost ideal material to work with. They know how to think for themselves; they have enthusiasm and the power of application. And they know a really good thing when they see it. If the musicians, says Davison, lament that good music is not appreciated, in nine cases out of ten that is because it is badly performed. Perform it adequately, says he, and it will find an enthusiastic public in the colleges and everywhere else. The secret of Davison's success is that he has this faith, and that through the force of a dynamic personality he has been able to implant it in others.

The quality of the individual voices in the glee club is not unusual. Davison does not waste time searching for Carusos or Scottis in the university. He is content with what he calls a "homogeneous mediocrity of tone." He says that particularly brilliant or powerful voices are more of a problem than an asset; they stand out above the rest of the voices, and are likely to mar the total effect. Any man who can make "a human sound," who has not a "file-like voice," as Davison puts it, and who can learn to sing a scale accurately and hit a given note when it is played on the piano is material for him. In the autumn he has about two or three hundred candidates for the club, most of them undergraduates, some of them students in the various graduate departments. For six weeks he trains these men in one large body. Then he breaks them up into quartets and puts them through trials. If they show promise, he keeps them; if he finds they have n't learned anything, he lets them go with advice. When

the first concerts of the year come along, the number of men has been cut down to a hundred or more. Half of these men are probably veterans of the preceding year; the rest are new material. Then comes the most rigorous period of rehearsal for the big concerts of the season.

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The rehearsals are mostly held in the early evening, at the Paine Music Building at Harvard. If you would see Davison in action with his men, go to one of these rehearsals. In an ordinary recitation-room you will find a hundred men or so sitting in chairs of the modern classroom type, each chair equipped with a large flattened arm for a book-rest. The men are singing from mimeographed sheetmusic. In front of them, at the end of the room, is a slightly raised platform before a blackboard. On the platform stands a grand piano on which an undergraduate plays the accompaniment when needed, and next to the piano stands Davison, beating, or rather waving, time with both hands as the music of a swinging chorus by Handel fills the room. A smallish man of thirty-eight, solidly built, with light hair and keen blue eyes, he is the personification of electric authority. In front, just below him, sit the tenors; farther back in the room, the basses. As you slip into a seat at the rear of the room, you hear, cutting through the deep, swelling tones of the chorus, Davison's sharp voice:

"Now 's your chance! That's it! Good! first-rate! This is a bad place; look out for it! That's the way, basses! Eyes! eyes!"

Then suddenly he claps his hands. "Bad attack!" he shouts. On the

instant the chorus is broken off in the middle. "Let's have that over again." A wave of his hands, and the men have somehow picked up the song again a few measures back. few measures back. You notice that Davison never has to consult a score; he knows every note of each part of every piece. "Now watch it! That is good!" And so the chorus swings on, with compelling rhythm. Again he breaks it off. "Let me hear you first basses alone on that." For a moment the first basses sing their part alone, and all eyes are on them. "There's a curious buzzing sound there," says Davison, and, a moment later, "That 's not an octave you 're singing; that 's a twenty-third: an octave is just eight notes, you know," and then, as the tenors and second basses join in a laugh at the expense of the first basses, comes Davison's sharp rallying voice again: "Now I want to hear the other parts. He who laughs last, you know."

Always he emphasizes rhythm. Every attack must be perfect in its timing, every phrase as if sung by one man. Now he stamps the rhythm with his foot as he feels the men losing time. Now he breaks off the song again.

"Basses, I did n't get a decent entrance from you. Did you make it?” A chorus of mingled "Yes" and "No." "All right." And they are off again.

Sometimes he himself sings as he leads them; sometimes, when he finds their singing unexpressive, he acts out the song before them. The singers come to the phrase, "How can you be so spiteful?" and Davison shows them how the word should be almost snarled. "Speye-teful!" he shouts as he stops them, and the men sing the phrase over again with a new vigor of expression. Every minute he keeps them on the

alert. One moment they are laughing as he chides the first tenors: "Anybody who swallowed a whistle in his early youth barred out of that piece," or as he calls to them, "There's a d in good: don't sing goo-will. Let's have it again!" The next moment the mood of the roomful of men changes as Davison changes his tone. But his sway over them continues. Humorous or serious, he holds them in the hollow of his hand.

The rehearsal draws to an end. The men are getting a little tired.

"All right now," comes that cutting voice again, "last piece-'Glory to God in the Highest.' Everybody up." As one man the chorus rises to its feet. "Are you ready? Unbutton your vests! Now!" Before you know it he has given them the note, his upstretched hand drops, and the glorious music of Pergolesi's swinging hymn of praise rocks the building. Now loud, now soft, with perfect rhythm and enunciation, the chorus sweeps through to its tremendous conclusion.

"Going well, gentlemen. If it goes as well as this to-morrow, we 'll have a good concert." And all at once the room is full of men heaving into their overcoats, talking, crowding to the door; the rehearsal is over; in groups of two or three the undergraduates stroll down the hall and go their separate ways.

The men enjoy it; of that there is no question. For Davison has succeeded in making great music the vital thing to them that it ought to be to all of us who have in us the rudiments of musical appreciation. He has removed from it the curse of the highbrow, the dilettante, the poseur. He has shown undergraduates that the

possession of such human qualities as a sense of humor is not incompatible with the most intense artistic enthusiasm, and that musical performance and appreciation can be made the most natural thing in the world for ordinary people of ordinary ability.

"I wish," said Davison to me once, "that people would realize that we look on the glee club not primarily as an artistic organization doing an unusual stunt, but as an educational movement." And he told me about an incident that happened a year or two ago when the club was making a concert tour during the spring recess. One night after one of the concerts the men had to wait for some time at a little railroad station for their train, which was delayed. "I found a bunch of them sitting on a baggage-truck singing, with one fellow leading them," said he, "and they were n't singing musical comedy stuff; they were trying one of their glee-club pieces. They were n't doing it for me; they did n't know I was there. know I was there. They were doing it because they liked it. That gave me more satisfaction than anything that has happened in a long time."

The movement is already spreading. Princeton, the University of California, Leland Stanford, Columbia, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are experimenting with genuine choral singing, and other colleges will probably follow. The influence of the Harvard Glee Club has made itself felt in choral organizations outside the colleges as well-organizations of business and professional men. The movement will be gradual, and here and there it may fail, but it cannot entirely fail. The extent to which it succeeds in enriching American life will depend on the vision of the men who lead it.