Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

e reconciled, —a proper subordination to the claims of the academic course, and
a high order of instruction in the arts themselves. The first is secured by allowing
no regular student to take more than one art study at a time, and by strictly
limiting the time spent in lessons and practice; the second, by adopting the highest
standard of taste in the instructions given and placing them under the direction of
accomplished masters. 116
Although the catalogue still encouraged students to take an "art study" at some
point during their time at the college, college administrators were clearly even more
uncomfortable with allowing those studies to become any sort of a focus. Music students
now faced more restrictive limitations on lessons and practice time, with an enforced
maximum of two lessons a week, not to exceed forty minutes of daily practice. Perhaps
in an effort to discourage students who wanted "easy" collegiate credit, students who
applied to take a music course in place of part of the normal curriculum now had to be in
good academic standing, and were required to spend some part of their time in the study
of harmony. The college believed that a worthwhile musical course was still possible
under these new restrictions:
There seems to be a prevailing impression that little can be accomplished for high
musical cultivation under such unusual restrictions; but experience proves the
contrary. A sound method, rigid economy of effort, and the disciplinary influence
of the College Course, have combined to produce the most satisfactory results,
and gone far to solve the problem whether a high aesthetic culture can be
successfully united with thorough intellectual discipline in the education of
women. 117
The fact that the institution felt the need to argue that one could learn music under
these reduced terms reveals stereotyped assumptions about both music and women’s
education. Music was something that distracted the mind, taking too much of the
student’s time to be worth studying in an institution aimed at creating a well-rounded
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116 Eleventh Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Vassar College, 1876-1877 (New York: S.W.
Green, 1869): 22.
117 Ibid, 23.
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