|
 |
|
The Frost School of Music was founded in October, 1926 by
Bertha M. Foster as a Conservatory of Music at the University
of Miami. With its start in the middle of the Jazz Age, in a city
of 100,000 at the southern end of Henry Flagler’s East Coast
Railroad, the Frost School has survived over 80 years of
change
and growth to become a national leader in music in higher
education.
In the 1920s, our nation was rollicking with flappers, automobiles,
radio and other technological innovations, Al Capone and
organized crime, Louis Armstrong, John Philip Sousa, Charles
Ives, and much more. This time of boom and crash following
World War I, the "war to end all wars," defined the culture of
Miami and its promoters – especially George E. Merrick, the
founder of the City of Coral Gables.
|
|
South Florida’s land boom climaxed in the mid-1920s, as
Merrick was bringing his plans for the new city of Coral Gables
to fruition. Right from the beginning, his planned community
would contain a private university that would attract northerners
and serve as a bridge to the Caribbean and Central and
South America. One of Merrick’s backers, James Cash Penney,
pledged $200,000 toward a school of music in honor of his
wife, Mary Kimble Penney. Part of that gift was to be $75,000 to
endow a professorship, an inducement to Bertha M. Foster, a
graduate of the Cincinnati College of Music, which ultimately
encouraged her to bring her Miami Conservatory into the project
as the new university’s school of Music.
On September 17, 1926, catastrophe struck. A devastating hurricane
hit the city, and Coral Gables and the new university were in shambles
before they even had a chance to begin. Foster’s hopes and dreams
for a school of music at the new University of Miami faced not only
the usual problems inherent in human ventures, but now she had to
deal with a blow from nature. Merrick went broke and J.C. Penney’s
pledge for the fledgling school of music turned to dust in the wind
and took Foster’s endowed chair along with it.
|
|
Not to be discouraged, Foster and
22 faculty members and 25 college
music majors began classes just one month later, on October 15, 1926
in the old Anastasia Hotel, which had been recently remodeled to become
the temporary home of the University of Miami. The Anastasia Building,
as it came to be known, was the first of many so-called temporary
buildings on campus whose term of service went on for a decade or
more.
|
Bowman Foster Ashe, a kindred spirit to the indomitable
Foster, the music school’s first dean, was the first president
of the University of Miami. He held that position for over a quarter
century. Ashe and Foster were the two pillars on which the University
of Miami began its existence and on which its fate rested for many
years thereafter.
Lithuanian native Arnold Volpe, who had studied at the St.
Petersburg Conservatory with Leopold Auer, came to Miami in
1926 at the bidding of Foster and Ashe. He founded the
University Orchestra and led its first concert on March 6, 1927.
Volpe’s daughter, Cecilia, comprised one-fourth of the
University’s first graduating class in 1927.
The University of Miami opened in the fall of 1926 with two
academic units: the Conservatory of Music, and the College of
Arts and Sciences. In addition to Foster and Volpe, the first faculty
included three piano professors, two in music
education,
two in voice, and one in cello. The Conservatory
also had three
art professors and one each in dance and expression. From the
very beginning, the UM Conservatory had programs in applied
music, music history, music theory, and music education. Volpe
conducted the orchestra and Robert E. Olmsted conducted two
glee clubs. |
| |
 |
| |
The Depression years were hard for all involved with the new
university, and especially so with the School of Music. The institution
was in such dire straights that it could not afford to pay Volpe’s
salary in 1931. Volpe went to Kansas City, where he founded the Kansas
City Conservatory (now the University of Missouri-Kansas City) before
returning to finish his career at the University of Miami, from 1934-1940.
|
| |
One of the School’s stars during the later years of the
Depression was Carl Ruggles, who taught composition from
1938 to 1943. Ruggles was a noted composer of ultra-modern
music who came to Miami to visit his son, a University of
Miami student, and ended up staying to teach for five years. He
wrote several arrangements for the University Band and six
brass students performed one of his original works, Angels, at
a University Band concert in April 1939, the same year the
School became an accredited member of the National
Association of Schools of Music. |
| |
 |
| |
|
As the nation entered World War II, the
University of Miami underwent many significant changes. Foster’s
vision for the School of Music was becoming a reality when she retired
in 1944. She was succeeded by Joseph M. Tarpley, who had played percussion
in the first University Orchestra. He served not as dean, but as Secretary
of the School of Music, until John Bitter joined the school as Dean
in 1950. |
| |
The University Band, which endured a rocky time in the 1940s,
stabilized when Fred McCall began his 23-year career as bandmaster
in the fall of 1948. This began the development of the famed "Band
of the Hour," named after Henry Fillmore’s march, the Man
of the Hour. Fillmore was an ardent supporter, friend, and benefactor
of the band. Under McCall’s leadership, the band program grew
rapidly and traveled to El Savador and Guatemala, giving concerts
and earning great acclaim. Fillmore became increasingly devoted to
the University Band and to Fred McCall. The present Fillmore Hall,
dedicated in 1959, was a result of his dedication and generosity.
|
| |
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, radio and recordings were
having an impact on music at the University of Miami. Station
WLRD began to broadcast the University Orchestra’s nightly performances
in the University cafeteria. In addition, the music education program
grew and by the mid-1950s, the School of Music boasted a local chapter
of the Music Educators National Conference.
|
| |
|
| |
By the 1960s, the University of Miami was growing rapidly. In
1963, the second year of Henry King Stanford’s term as president,
enrollment at the University was over 14,000. Expansion
of students also meant expansion of facilities, and numbers of
faculty and programs. The Arnold Volpe Building opened in
1954, followed by the Albert Pick Music Library Building in
1957-58. Henry Fillmore Hall opened in 1958-59, the Bertha
Foster Building in 1960, and the Nancy Greene Orchestra
Rehearsal Hall in 1961.
Fabien Sevitzky served as guest conductor of the UM Orchestra
in 1959 and became its permanent conductor in 1963. A highlight
of this period was when comedian and television star Jack
Benny appeared with the Orchestra in a benefit concert in 1962.
Studio Music and Jazz at the University of Miami had its origins
as early as the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fred Ashe’s
extra-curricular jazz ensemble gave way to a Phi Mu Alpha big
band, which became a curricular offering under William
Russell’s leadership in 1962-63.
Glenn Draper joined the UM as director of choral activities in
1960, and immediately organized a popular music vocal ensemble,
the "Singing Hurricanes," that entertained troops stationed
in Europe in the summer of 1961 and that reached a national
audience with a performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in the
mid-1960s. |
| |
William F. Lee III, formerly the chair of
the music department at Sam Houston
State University in Huntsville, Texas,
became the School of Music’s third
dean in 1964. He immediately initiated
a seven-year plan for the School that
included new undergraduate courses in
sacred music, conducting, and music
therapy. He initiated music forums, lectures
by guest scholars and composers,
sessions on career development, and
the concept and practice of juried
examinations in music performance.
Lee also expanded graduate music programs,and hired additional faculty
members to meet the needs of increasing
enrollments and burgeoning programs. |
|
|
| |
By 1978, under Lee’s leadership, enrollment had increased to
607 undergraduates and 183 graduate students, and the School
offered ten undergraduate degree programs with the additions
of music merchandising and music engineering technology (the
first of their kind in the country), music therapy, studio music
and jazz, accompanying, and musical theatre. The graduate division
offered master’s degrees in music education, applied
music, theory and composition, musicology, conducting, music
therapy, accompanying, music librarianship, jazz pedagogy,
music merchandising, jazz performance, and studio arranging
and producing. New Ph.D. and D.M.A. programs were also
added during these boom years. |
| |
Physical facilities grew to accommodate the incredible growth
of this period. By the time Lee left the deanship in 1982, enrollment
had topped 825, and the school had developed a host of
new undergraduate and graduate programs, raised about $18
million, added four new buildings, and constructed a major
addition to the Foster Building.
In 1974, the School helped the nation celebrate the centennial
of Charles Ives’ birth. In a concert and symposium on the campus,
Frederick Fennell led the University Orchestra in a performance
of Ives’s Fourth Symphony, and F. Warren O’Reilly
spoke on the significance of Ives and his music. |
| |
 |
|
|
“The arts play a vital
role in the life of a community,
and music in
particular is a unifying
force that transcends
age, race, and culture.
Miami is our home, and
Patricia and I wanted to
create a legacy that
would enhance and
sustain the school's
important work,” said
Dr. Phillip Frost.
In 2003, Dr.
Phillip and
Patricia Frost gave a
landmark $33 million
gift to name the
School of Music, the
largest gift ever made
at the time to a university-based
music school in the
United States. |
