WS Mason and the Formation of a Musical Community in Charleston, West Virgini
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 "He Knew That a Valley Was a Culture": W.S. Mason and the Formation of a Musical Community in Charleston, West Virginia, 1906-1956 Sarah E. Kahre Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MUSIC “HE KNEW THAT A VALLEY WAS A CULTURE”: W.S. MASON AND THE FORMATION OF A MUSICAL COMMUNITY IN CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA, 1906-1956. By Sarah E. Kahre A Thesis submitted to the College of Music In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Sarah E. Kahre All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Sarah E. Kahre, defended on June 27, 2008. Denise Von Glahn Professor Directing Treatise Charles E. Brewer Committee Member Michael B. Bakan Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the named committee members. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any researcher pursing an archival study is always dependant on his or her archivists. Without Dr. Lynn Sheehan, the former head librarian at the University of Charleston who combed the archives at that institution to find all the materials related to Mason’s career, this project would never have gotten off the ground. She and her assistant, Nick Homenda, were always patient and helpful with my questions while I sifted through materials in their reading room. Although I did not have the pleasure of working with them as closely, the staff at the West Virginia State Archives showed me the same courtesy and dedication they show to all the researchers who walk through their doors, no matter what their academic credentials may be. In a study such as this, useful information is just as likely to be stored in a closet as a library, and one finds that anyone can be an archivist. Two such “closet archivists” who provided very helpful information for me were Nina Pasinetti and Marcia Graves. Mrs. Pasinetti, the artistic director of the Charleston Light Opera Guild, graciously allowed me to not only view Leonard Stocker’s scrapbook but take it to my mother’s office so I could make photocopies. The meticulously constructed scrapbook is in excellent condition after sixty years, thanks to Mrs. Pasinetti and Louis Husson, who I unfortunately did not have the pleasure of meeting. When the staff of the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra was packing up their offices for the move to the Clay Center a few years ago, Marcia Graves, the assistant to the executive director, spotted a few old, hardcover books full of bound programs. Rather than throwing them out as something the office didn’t need, she tossed them in a box and found a corner of the new office in which to tuck them away. The books turned out to contain not only programs from the ancestors of the WVSO, the Charleston Civic Orchestra and Charleston Symphony Orchestra, but also a full season of programs from Mason’s orchestra. The WVSO does not officially keep records from as far back as those programs, so they are an invaluable resource not only to this study, but for any future researcher interested in the orchestra’s history. If only the world had more helpful packrats! There are three more groups of people who deserve my thanks: my teachers, especially Dr. Von Glahn, who educated me, my friends, who supported me, and my family, who raised me. Thanks! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables iv List of Figures v Abstract vi INTRODUCTION 1 1. AMATEURS AND COMMUNITIES IN THE MUSICAL LIFE OF THE UNITED STATES 3 2. WILLIAM SANDHEGER MASON: EARLY DAYS AND PERFORMING CAREER 9 3. THE MASON SCHOOL OF MUSIC AND THE MASON COLLEGE OF MUSIC AND FINE ARTS 30 4. CONCLUSION 47 APPENDIX A 54 APPENDIX B 55 REFERENCES 56 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 59 iv LIST OF TABLES 1. Population figures for Charleston, West Virginia, 1890-1950 2 2. Performers and repertoire from the programs of the Kanawha Musical Society 21 3. Performers and repertoire from the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, 1925-1926 27 v LIST OF FIGURES 1. William Sandheger Mason 11 2. Charleston, West Virginia, c. 1906 12 3. The Burlew Opera House 14 4. Cartoon of W.S. Mason, 1926 17 5. Photograph from W.S. Mason’s obituary 19 6. Advertisement for studio of W.S. Mason, 1907 31 7. Program cover for Pupil’s Recital, 1910 32 8. Advertisement for the Mason School of Music, 1910 33 9. 1206 Quarrier Street, first home of the Mason School 33 10. Charleston in the 1920s 35 11. Grace Martin Taylor 39 12. W.S. Mason in the 1930s 42 13. Matilda R. Mason 42 14. Mason College students, 1947 43 15. Charleston, c. 1940s 43 16. The Pirates of Penzance, CLOG, 1952 49 vi ABSTRACT There are many examples of small communities where members of the population took action to fill a cultural void; one is Charleston, West Virginia. A critical figure in the development of Charleston’s active performing community was William Sandheger Mason (1873-1941), founder of the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts. Both through the influence of his school and his own performing and conducting in the 1910s and 1920s, Mason established a taste for European art music in the rapidly growing city. Although most of the organizations he founded failed during the Great Depression, Mason’s school continued to influence the area well after his death. Additionally, Mason facilitated the successes of the organizations that serve the area today by establishing a base of both performers and concertgoers. vii INTRODUCTION Personal Statement This thesis is a testament to the power of procrastination. One day in the spring of 2006, I was avoiding working on my senior honors thesis by exploring my newest CD, the Kronos Quartet’s Black Angels album. The title work, a three-movement string quartet written in reaction to the Vietnam War by George Crumb, was my favorite twentieth-century listening example from my music history class the year before. Reading the liner notes, I finally recognized a fact that I’m sure had been presented to me at least three times already: George Crumb is a native of Charleston, West Virginia. As a native of South Charleston, West Virginia, which is one town down the Kanawha River from Charleston, I was startled to discover that this man whose music I’d found so compelling was from, essentially, my hometown. Curious, I immediately did what any budding musicologist would do: I Googled him. From the biography on his website, I learned that not only was Crumb born and raised in Charleston, he graduated from a school there called the Mason College of Music in 1950. I had never heard of such a place. Little did I know that while hiding from one thesis, I’d found another. As I began to work on my master’s degree, I kept my discovery of the Mason College in mind as a potential topic for a project down the road. That there had at some point been such a school in Charleston was fascinating to me. Although the city has many opportunities to hear wonderful live performances, the higher education possibilities in the area are fairly slim; the closest college-level music department of even a medium size is about an hour away at Marshall University. I had not been able to learn much about the Mason College from the internet, but I had determined that it was absorbed by Morris Harvey College. During my second semester at Florida State University I contacted Lynn Sheehan, who was the head librarian at the University of Charleston at that time, and asked if their Morris Harvey archives had any information about the Mason College. While I was home for spring break I visited the archives, and although they did not have much on the college itself, Dr. Sheehan showed me some of the material they had on the college’s founder, W.S. Mason. The more I read about what Mason did in and for the city of Charleston, the more I was struck by how deep a debt much of its musical community, and I, owed to him. Mason seemed to have founded not just a school, but the whole city’s performing community. As word about my project spread through my networks back home, I learned that many older community members remembered the Mason College with pride, but Mason himself seemed to have been forgotten by nearly everyone. I am very much a product of Charleston’s musical community, and I am confident that is in part thanks to various aspects of W.S. Mason’s legacy that I came to choose to pursue degrees in music in the first place. This project has been a personal one for me, and its relevance to my life has been clear to me from the beginning. I hope that this story will resonate in some way with other readers from other cities. An introduction to Charleston, West Virginia As this project is so centered on the city of Charleston, West Virginia, some information about the city and its general history may help the reader better understand the shape of the community. 1 The state of West Virginia was formed during the turmoil of the Civil War. The western counties of Virginia seceded from the Confederacy in 1862 and formed the Reorganized Government of Virginia, and then became the thirty-fifth state on June 20, 1863.1 The first state capital was in the city of Wheeling, but shifted back and forth between Wheeling and Charleston before finally settling permanently in Charleston in 1885.