Word: davisons
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...imaginative man who sees things as they really are.... The imaginative man looks around and behind the self-evident facts, seeing them in their total setting, in all their implications: and in the end I am backing him, and not the realist, to come upon the truth." ARCHIBALD T. DAVISON...
...idealist is always prey to self compromise, dictatorial methods, and tactlessness. Archibald T. Davison, the reformer of American musical education, who died February 6, avoided these pitfalls, for he possessed shrewd but ever-tactful skill; a desire to lead men, not force them; and as well an uncompromising idealism...
...book Church Music that "it seems to me every time I have had what appeared to me to be a really perceptive or productive idea someone has promptly told me that it wouldn't work; that it was impractical, visionary." That supermarkets now sell classical music records demonstrates that Davison was both correct and influential, but he, the indomitable idealist still did not hesitate to attack popularization equally hard when its quality was inferior...
...major factor favoring Davison in his reform was the sober maturity of the veterans who returned from World War I impatient with the Glee Club's rowdiness. Another was the University Chapel Choir, for as Organist, he had control over repertoire. When at Christmas 1913 he introduced some Radcliffe singers into the choir, President Lowell warned him sternly not to do it again, but when the beautifully varied tone of a mixed chorus reappeared the following year, Lowell remained silent and thereafter supported Davison unswervingly...
...were the key to the Club's quality and to his educational aims. A short, strongly built man, he moved swiftly but unostentatiously on the podium, evoking the response he wanted rather by an expressive face and pair of hands than by the discursiveness he often condemned in conductors. Davison always believed that music could speak for itself and that explanation of contrapuntal technique or rhapsodizing on Schubert only frustrated that desire to sing which is natural to a well-trained chorus...