Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

A Beginning: The Doctor and the Warbler
After the graduation of the class of 1884, the Amherst College Glee Club found
itself in dire straits. The departure of its senior members had devastated the tenor section,
and no new tenors had come to their fall auditions. Desperate to fill their diminished
ranks, the remaining members made the decision to recruit from outside the college.
Their corresponding search throughout the nearby town of Amherst turned up only one
qualified man: William Pingry Bigelow, the son of the town physician. 1
Unbeknownst to
the Glee Club, and even to Bigelow himself, by taking on the young tenor the group had
irrevocably altered the future course of music at Amherst.
Though not a student in the college, and only fresh out of high school, Bigelow
soon developed a reputation among the student-body as a musical wunderkind—not only
had he been accepted into the Glee Club as a mere “sub-freshman” (already an
unprecedented honor), but he had also been selected as a member of the College
Quartette, then the most highly-regarded musical group on campus. With this head start
into campus life, Bigelow officially enrolled in Amherst in 1885. He paid his way with
his voice, earning a weekly sum of $10 as a singer in church choirs in neighboring towns,
and also receiving his share of the concert proceeds of the College Quartette. More than
just being a skilled performer, Bigelow exhibited a contagious passion for music, an
enthusiasm that caught the attention of several Amherst faculty members, among them
the president of the college, Julius H. Seelye.
Seelye and several other members of the faculty were already quite familiar with
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1 Howard D. French (Amherst Class of 1895), “Music at Amherst,” Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly 25, no.
1 (November 1935): 2 (the article is written in tribute to Bigelow on the occasion of his retirement from
Amherst College in 1935).
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