Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

Chapter 2
A Wider Lens: Music in New England Colleges, 1830 to 1880
I. The “Feminine Arts”: Music in Women’s Colleges
The history of music in American women's colleges has been left woefully understudied,
even in the already limited world of academic study of music in American
colleges. 97
This fact is particularly confounding because many of these institutions
adopted music into their curriculums at a much earlier point than their all-male
counterparts. Much ado has been made of John Knowles Paine's appointment as the "first
full Professor of Music in America" at Harvard in 1876, but the same writers who have
celebrated Paine’s appointment seem to have conveniently forgotten that Edward Wiebé
held that title at Vassar in 1865. 98
At the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, later to
become Mount Holyoke College, vocal music had been taught since 1838, nearly
surpassing even the claims of Oberlin College, which had appointed an Instructor of
Sacred Music in 1835. The reasons for these broad oversights are not clear. In my work
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97 The few works that deal with collegiate music often either ignore women’s colleges entirely or give them
a very brief overview. Among the worst offenders are Rosemary Basham’s “The Development of Music
Curricula in American Colleges and Universities” (M. Ed. diss., University of Louisville, 1971), where the
author treats all women’s colleges with a single sentence; Maurice Faulkner’s “The Roots of Music
Education in American Colleges and Universities,” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1955), which fails to
mention a single women’s institution; and similarly Edmund Jeffers’s Music for the General College
Student (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944) explores early musical practices in many men’s institutions
but has little to say about institutions for the opposite sex.
98 This misconception is found in many overviews of American music, including The Harvard
Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 663;
Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1987), 341-342; and Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and its Business: The First Four Hundred
Years, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 349. Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western
Music: Music in the Nineteenth Century gets the issue technically correct, calling Paine the “first professor
of music at any American University.” While it is true that neither Oberlin nor Vassar were colleges
instead of universities, Taruskin’s use of the term implies he meant any general institution of highereducation.
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