Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Harvard as ad music in its official curriculum for a little more than a hundred years. In all that time the Music Department as had no other teacher so great as Woody. Yet his undergraduate training was not in music but in history. Perhaps it was this shift from one field to another tat accounted in part for his deepest concern: the musical education of the amateur, the non-specialist. Just as Talleyrand proclaimed that war is much too serious a thing to be left to military men, Woody was convicted that music is much is too important a thing...
Woody believed, too, in more than the importance of teaching people how to listen. He knew tat amateurs could be taught to make music--and make music well--through singing. As conductor of the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society for more than tree decades, e elicited a level of performance that made these institutions world-renowned--and he did this without any condescension to singers of concessions to difficulty. Despite the fact that he had, as a Harvard undergraduate, been turned down by the Glee Club for having a poor voice, he became the greatest choral conductor...
...Woody asked his friend the late great Lucien Price to address the Glee Club's annual banquet, Mentioning some powerful music, Price added, in that war year, "Although this world may be no great shakes, the future problematical, and no telling what may become of us, one thing is certain--so long as there is such music in the world, there is always that the world can do to us." Woody's career. right through our war-riven 1960's , was testimony to that view of music's potency...
Unshakeable was his faith in music. Unshake-able was his faith in youth. His students and singers, Woody wrote, "have strengthened my faith and given me my best moments." Reciprocally, we must add, woody gave untold thousands of us some of our best moments...
...join many other college generations in giving thanks for this supreme teacher, supreme conductor, supreme human being--G. Wallace Woodworth, James Edward Ditson Professor of Music, B.A., M.A., Mus. Doc., Litt. D. He was all of this--triumphantly. But most important, was Woody. His favorite novelist, Joseph Conrad, once wrote that "a man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reasons of respect or natural love." In Woody's case, it was both...