From Stoeckel to Hindemith: The Early Years of the Yale School of Music

Photograph of Horatio Parker

MSS 32, the Horatio Parker Papers, Gilmore Music Library

Horatio Parker and the Class of 1911

Horatio Parker

Horatio Parker was born in Auburndale, Massachusetts in 1863. He studied music with George Whitefield Chadwick and others in Boston, and with Josef Gabriel Rheinberger in Munich. An organist and conductor as well as a composer, Parker held a series of church jobs in Massachusetts and New York before being appointed to the Yale faculty in 1894. In 1904 he became the first Dean of the Yale School of Music, and he continued in that position until his death in 1919.
Parker composed a wide range of music, including many sacred works, a symphony, much chamber music and keyboard music, and two operas, one of which, Mona, was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1912 after winning a competition. He was widely admired as one of the leading American composers of his era, and he was also renowned in Britain, where his works were performed in the major choral festivals. His musical style is late Romantic; after his death, with the rise of modernism, it gradually came to seem unfashionable. For many years, too many writers dismissed Parker as the fusty old pedagogue who failed to understand the revolutionary genius of his most famous student, Charles Ives. But this caricature is unfair; Parker was a superb composer in his own right, and Ives benefited greatly from studying with him. In recent years, a number of scholars and performers have taken a fresh look at Parker and his music, and his reputation has begun to rebound.
 

Gounod Society concert program

MSS 32, the Horatio Parker Papers, Gilmore Music Library

Pars mea

Horatio Parker, "Pars mea," from Hora novissima. Abendmusik Chorus and the Nebraska Wesleyan University Choir, John Levick, conductor

Concert Program
Gounod Society
Horatio Parker, Conductor
Hyperion Theatre, New Haven
April 16, 1901  

Parker was a versatile musician who composed in a variety of genres, but he was particularly known for his sacred works, both for chorus and for organ. Of these, the most celebrated was his oratorio Hora novissima, a setting of texts drawn from De contemptu mundi by Bernard de Morlaix, a 12th-century monk at the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny. Premiered in New York in 1893, it was widely performed and acclaimed in the United States and in England. Perhaps no other work did so much to establish Parker’s reputation. He was appointed to the faculty at Yale in 1894, the year after the first performance.
The Parker Papers at Yale contain Parker’s manuscript of Hora novissima, but it is too fragile to include in this exhibit, so we have instead chosen to display the program from a New Haven performance of this work in 1901, conducted by the composer. This concert took place in the Hyperion Theatre, then one of New Haven’s main concert venues. It was located at 1032 Chapel Street. Woolsey Hall, where major choral-orchestral works are typically performed today, opened just a few months later, in celebration of Yale’s bicentenary.
 

Photograph of the Class of 1911, Yale School of Music

MSS 138, Portrait File, Gilmore Music Library

Photograph of the Class of 1911
Yale School of Music  

This photograph shows the Class of 1911 at the School of Music, along with faculty members David Stanley Smith, Harry Benjamin Jepson, Horatio Parker, Isidor Troostwyk, and William Haesche. All of the professors except Haesche now have archival collections at the Music Library.
Although they were barred from admission to Yale College until 1969, in the early 20th century women were already a major fraction of the students enrolled at the School of Music, which offered undergraduate as well as graduate degrees in that era. The five men seated in the middle row were faculty, so the students shown here comprise seven women and seven men. On the back of the photo is a note that supplies the names of all of the faculty, six of the male students, and only three of the female students. (The person who supplied the note indicated uncertainty about the name of one of the women.)
Back row (left to right): Allen Tanner, Josephine Brewster, unidentified, unidentified, Amalia V. von Woedtke, unidentified, Harry Ranks, unidentified, Walter Allen.
Middle row: unidentified, Prof. David Stanley Smith, Prof. Harry B. Jepson, Prof. Horatio Parker (Dean of the School of Music), Prof. Isidor Troostwyk, Prof. William Haesche, Clara Holman??
Front row: Louis de Vito, Louis Lupo, Joseph de Vito.