Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

It is rumored that President Seelye is going to have a professorship of music
established in the college before a great while. I certainly hope so for until within
a few years music has been at a comparatively low stand-point. 54
Although Seelye would never actually appoint such a professor, the very existence of this
rumor seems to have solidified the idea amongst the students that the college should
endow such a position. A year later another article, more explicit than the previous,
turned the matter towards the college:
When now our alumni are bout to return again to Amherst we have a word to
whisper in their ears. The college needs a regular professor of music, and
consequently money to support him. […] There is somewhere in the curriculum,
just where nobody knows, a so-called course of lectures on music which we
presume might be highly beneficial to the student. 55
This article has several interesting features. First, it is addressed to alumni, not to
trustees. The author apparently assumed that once the funds appeared, the trustees would
need no further convincing: “What we need is money; when we get that we know our
trustees will do the rest.” His trust in the trustees may have seemed at the time to have
some substance. Ever since Zuchtmann had appeared at the college, Amherst had taken
the opportunity to include him in its yearly Course Catalogue (essentially a college
publicity booklet listing instructors, courses, and terms of admission) as the college’s
official “Instructor in Vocal Music.” 56
This, of course, was a highly inaccurate inclusion,
as the college administration had no hand in hiring Zuchtmann or in paying him for his
services. The administration clearly thought it would be beneficial for the college’s
image to include him—beneficial enough to essentially lie in the college’s publicity
material. Zuchtmann’s inclusion may have suggested to students who knew that
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54 Russell M. Little, letter to a friend written on 7 October, 1877. Russel M. Little ‘1880 Alumni
Biographical Files, ACASC.
55 The Amherst Student (15 June 1878): 194.
56 Zuchtmann is listed as such from the 1877 to the 1883 Course Catalogues, online at:
clio.fivecolleges.edu/amherst/catalogs/. Accessed 7 December, 2012.
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