Willard Kimball: Music Educator on the Great Plains

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for 1991 Willard Kimball: Music Educator on The Great Plains Marilyn Hammond University of Nebraska-Lincoln Raymond Haggh University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Hammond, Marilyn and Haggh, Raymond, "Willard Kimball: Music Educator on The Great Plains" (1991). Great Plains Quarterly. 549. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/549 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. WILLARD KIMBALL: MUSIC EDUCATOR ON THE GREAT PLAINS MARILYN HAMMOND AND RAYMOND HAGGH Histories of American music are largely his remarkable vigor in the towns and cities of the tories of that part of the United States that lies Great Plains. 1 east of the Mississippi, especially of the eastern A reader browsing through the first few vol seaboard. H. Wiley Hitchcock in his Music in umes of The Etude, a music periodical estab the United States tends to dismiss the area to the lished in 1883, will find notices of positions west of such cities as Chicago, Kansas City, and available in western, southern, and southwest St. Louis as of little importance for American ern states through the Etude's employment bu music history, but because almost no research reau as well as regular advertisements of small has been done on the music of that area, he colleges and conservatories such as the Fort Scott has nothing on which to base his assumptions. School of Music in Fort Scott, Kansas. The For the researcher who troubles to look for it, Eureka School of Music in Eureka, Illinois there is ample evidence in the periodicals of the ("forty-five miles travel from Peoria"), also a late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regular advertiser, announced in its advertise that what Hitchcock calls a "cultivated tradi ment that its teachers are trained in the "re tion" in music existed and was pursued with nowned schools" of "Leipsic," Brussels, Paris, and "elsewhere."2 Musicians across the United States typically established "schools" or conservatories, usually Raymond Haggh is director and professor emeritus of the self-supporting and often associated with col University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music. As a leges or universities, in which various instruc college dean. a music educator. and a noted musicologist. tors gave vocal and instrumental music lessons he has unusual insight into the career of Willard Kimball. and which sometimes included classes in the Marilyn]. Hammond. a violinist and alumna of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music. served theory and history of music. The success of such as assistant to the director of the school and is now a schools, of course, depended heavily on the ad university librarian. ministrative talent and business acumen of their proprietors. Many musicians also established studios for private instruction in vocal and in [GPQ 11 (Fall 1991): 249-261] strumental music. 249 250 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1991 Affiliation of a "musical department" with a the instructional program of the university, al college or university was common by the end though that institution was only six years 01d. 3 of the nineteenth century, even in the plains Certainly Lincoln, itself a brand new city, states. In 1898 George Barlow Penny, Dean of had a remarkably active musical life in the first Music and Fine Arts at the University of Kan few decades after its founding. In 1889 a Mr. sas, described his own school and noted the and Mrs. O. B. Howell started a Nebraska Con existence of those at the Universities of Okla servatory in a building erected for the purpose. homa and Colorado. Of Nebraska he wrote that Among its faculty were the then prominent Lin the university, "although not yet having estab coln musicians Gustav Menzendorf, an emigre lished a school of fine arts, is doing splendid from Leipzig, and August Hagenow, a violinist preparatory work to that end along advanced and conductor. In 1895 the Howells left the lines." According to the Nebraska State Journal conservatory, and its faculty and patrons took of 18 January 1873, music was by then part of it over. The Lincoln College of Music was founded in 1892 and, according to newspaper listings, furnished concerts for four years. It ap parently failed at this point, for no subsequent notice of it appears in any of the local news papers. In the early 1890s two normal schools offered instruction in music until default in pay ment for pianos at one and a fire at the second put an end to these programs. Nebraska Wes leyan University, founded in 1888, had a mod erate-sized music department, and Christian University (later Cotner College) had a "mus ical department," but both these universities were located in what were then suburbs of Lin coln, and their activities are not well docu mented in the Lincoln papers. Union College, another sectarian suburban institution, began its music program in the 1890s. 4 ENTER WILLARD KIMBALL August Hagenow founded his own Hagenow School of Music in 1894 but sold it six months later to Willard Kimball, who had come to Lin coln to establish a "University Conservatory of Music." Kimball left a lasting impact on the University of Nebraska and the city of Lincoln. In this paper we have explored his career in some detail, for not only is he of interest in his own right, but he also serves as an example of how the leadership and influence of one man could focus and define the art of music in a mid FIG. 1. Willard Kimball, from Passing Tones, 1914, sized city scarcely a quarter of a century old. yearbook of University School of Music . Reproduced Kimball himself pursued a remarkably successful courtesy of Kimball Archive. career, one that gained him national attention, WILLARD KIMBALL 251 in a city far removed from any acknowledged the public and with other music teachers. Ac cultural center. Kimball's only rival in the re cording to the Des Moines Register: gion was George Barlow Penny of Kansas, who later moved to Rochester, New York, to join The influence for good, which a school of the institution that became the Eastman School music in connection with a regular collegiate of Music. S institution, has upon the entire attendance, Willard Kimball's first American ancestor, is something impossible to estimate. It can Richard Kimball, came to America from Suf never be anything but refining and elevating, folk, England, in 1634. 6 Like many New Eng and the friends of this college have reason landers, some of the Kimballs came west in the to be grateful to Prof. Willard Heinball [sic!], nineteenth century, and Willard was born in under whose efficient directorship this de Columbus, Ohio, 10 August 1854. His family partment, during the last nine years, has soon moved to Oberlin, Ohio, to provide a grown from nothing to a pupilage for the last better education for their children. At age sev year of over one hundred. 9 enteen, Willard Kimball went to Boston for two years of study before returning to Oberlin to Kimball was elected secretary of the Iowa graduate with highest honors in the Oberlin Music Teachers Association 22 December 1885 Conservatory's second class in 1873. 7 Kimball and reelected in June 1886. Both the associa went to Leipzig, Germany, for his graduate stud tion's newsletter and clippings from Kimball's ies with two internationally known musicians scrapbook show that he was writing articles and of the time, Oskar Paul, a music theorist and giving lectures on music history during this pe philologist, and Carl Reinecke, a composer and riod of his life. Like many musicians of his time, pianist. Kimball was quite uninformed about music of the first half of the eighteenth century, and in KIMBALL IN IOWA an article about Mendelssohn in the associa tion's newsletter, comparing earlier music with When Kimball returned to the United States that of Mendelssohn's time, he stated: "One in 1875, he taught for a few months at the hundred years ago the fugue was about the only Oberlin Conservatory but left in September for form of music written; everything was dry and Iowa (now Grinnell) College, where he "cre contrapuntal." According to an unidentified ated" a conservatory at the fourteen-year-old clipping, however, during a lecture on the school. His tasks included finding appropriate "progress of musical composition," Kimball space and securing equipment for music instruc "played several preludes and fugues from the tion, establishing a curriculum and a faculty, 'Well-Tempered Clavier'" and told his audience and initiating a regular series of concerts by "that next to the bible [sic] he revered the 'Well faculty and students. After a tornado "com Tempered Clavier. "'10 pletely destroyed" the college in 1882, it was In 1891 Kimball was elected president of the rebuilt with subscriptions from wealthy eastern Music Teachers Association. His presidential donors. By 1886 there were eight buildings on address proclaimed the superiority of German campus, and the conservatory occupied one of music and culture and ascribed it to the fact the larger ones. 8 that the German government had "fostered and Kimball's career in Iowa lasted for almost stimulated musical composition," giving Ger nineteen years, and the clippings in his scrap mans examples of the "most meritorious" music.

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