Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

student, but when the organ arrived the parent refused to pay. As Hitchcock remembers,
the organ had already been delivered, so it had to be paid for somehow. Amherst’s
President Stearns took the full $5,000 cost of the organ (almost $100,000 today) from the
salaries of the college’s professors—Hitchcock did not remember entirely how this was
done without a professorial revolt. 84
The administration’s continued purchase of better organs might have been taken
as a sign that they were actively interested in the quality of music had not these
instruments not been acquired only when the administration thought it would involve no
financial burden to the college. The first organ was a loan, the second purchased through
donations, the third a gift, and the fourth was originally to be funded by a concerned
parent. Similar to the college’s very tenuous claim to Zuchtmann in its Course
Catalogues, the institution was happy to claim and accept musical improvements if they
were provided without cost, but was unwilling to take the step of actively seeking out and
paying for these improvements on its own.
Hitchcock and Handel: Music in the Academic Sphere
Although the faculty and trustees as a whole did not make music a priority, a few
individuals among them did. The first and most prominent among them was Old Doc
Hitchcock. Edward Hitchcock, Jr. had lived in and around the college for his entire life.
His father was Amherst’s third president, and after he had come of age Hitchcock
attended Amherst himself, graduating with the class of 1849. He showed much interest
in music while he was at the college, singing in the Chapel Choir and occasionally
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84 Hitchcock, “Recollections of E. Hitchcock begun March 6, 1902.” No records exist of the faculty’s
reaction.
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