Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

students of any class, rather than just Juniors and Seniors, to join the choir, although he
did not ease any of his policies. This change seems to have had the desired effect, and
membership in the choir rose to more acceptable levels.
Tired of being limited to teaching students to read music and sing, in 1863 Paine
petitioned the administration to allow him to give a full course in harmony and
counterpoint, citing his earlier lectures as the necessary precedent. The college
acquiesced, and a non-credit course on the subject was officially offered to the student
body the next school year. Perhaps due to the outbreak of the Civil War, enrollment was
quite low: six students took the course in the Fall, and only one in the Spring. The course
was taught only for one year, before being quietly removed from Harvard’s course
listings.
Without any full courses to teach, Paine threw himself into his duties as musical
director. The 1865 commencement day ceremonies, held just after the end of the war,
provided Paine a perfect opportunity for a grand celebratory performance. At the
morning church services during the commencement Paine directed a 60-voice choir and a
26-part orchestra (both made up of current students, alumni, and members of the Harvard
Musical Association) in a selection from Bach’s cantata Ein’ feste Burg, two pieces from
Cherubini’s Requiem, a Gloria from his own Mass, and finally a re-harmonization of the
psalm-tune staple Old Hundred, now with orchestral accompaniment. The concert was
deemed a great success. Dwight, who attended the performance, wrote:
Will they after that experience, longer ignore the claims of Music among the other
“Humanities” which they are ever so ready to endow within the halls of Alma
Mater? And shall the College go a-begging even for the means of putting the
Chapel organ in repair, so that it may be fit to second the efforts of such a man as
! 98!