HISTORY OF MUSIC AT BOYS TOWN:
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BOYS TOWN COLLECTION OF SACRED MUSIC
(This paper was delivered at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, March 24, 1990, as part of the ceremonies for the
presentation of the Boys Town music collection to the university.)
Should you think the above assigned topic an easy one for me to essay, you
would be quite wrong. The nature of the subject, I fear, suggests a cross
between an apologia and an obituary, both of which tend to be self-serving.
Indeed, presenting this paper before so many earstwhile colleagues is
accountably akin to a clip from Thornton Wilders's "Our Town." For many of
you, however, it may seem strange that any child-care institution should be
suspected of having a history of music or a music library of any
significance (still, there was the orphanage which Gregory the Great
established at the Lateran for the education of future members of the
choir, and the orphans of Vivaldi's Pieta in Venice): a notion reflected by
Thomas Day in a 1978 "Commonweal" review. "In the late 1960's," he wrote,
"a distinguished German musicologist and a no less prominent member of a
pontifical institute of music made a grand tour of the United States. Near
the end of their trip they reported to a friend that they were appalled by
most of the liturgical music they heard, whether it was folk or what was
passed off as traditional. They did admit, however, that they were deeply
impressed by the music they heard in, of all places, Boys Town, Nebraska."
That music was a strong and perhaps unusual part of the Boys Town fabric
cannot be said to have been an accident. It was apart of what some people
have called the Flanagan dream. Father Flanagan was neither musician,
athlete, craftsman nor scholar, but he desperately wanted, and had an eye
for, excellence in all fields. In the very beginning, 1917, he acquired the
voluntary services of Omaha's first-class, black musician, one Dan
Desdunes, to teach a little band. By the time Desdunes died, in 1929, his
band would sport photos with John Phillip Sousa, Paul Whiteman, Calvin
Coolidge and God-known-who. He also wrote a piece which is perhaps the
original item in the Boys Town music library. It was a song called
"Dividends of Smiles," and it was a part of a 1927 drive to pay off the
mortgage on the Home. "Buy bonds of happiness," it ran, and it may well be
that smiles were the only dividends those bonds ever paid.
The band eventually sparked a whole series of road shows which included
singing, elocution and all sorts of juvenile theatre. These have sometimes
been labelled money-collecting ventures, but that is a dubious judgment.
The most ambitious of them, an instrumental and choral extravaganza that
went out on the Oprheum circuit in the mid-thirties, went broke and had to
be baled off the road. They were certainly valuable PR however, and that PR
was already well-placed by the time MGM came along with Spencer Tracy and
Mickey Rooney. I have always suspected that unnumbered little old ladies
who hadn't seen a movie since "Birth of a Nation," went to see "Boys Town,"
because for more years than they cared to recount, they had been depositing
quarters and nickels and dimes in the green metal "Homeless Boy" coin boxes
that could be found on friendly counters all over the country.
But neither PR, nor finance, nor any fool notion of therapeutic underlay
Flanagan's vision of the place music might have in his Home. It is true
that he liked to show his boys off, and he could be cranky if they didn't
show well, but that was secondary to the substance of what they had to
show. He wanted for them every fine thing other boys had and more. He
wanted to enrich them, and "rich" was the adjective he customarily used to
describe what he judged to be good music. When a degree of the excellence
he envisioned was achieved, he would say: "Hah--and they told me it
couldn't be done!" I have an interesting letter which he wrote to Walter
Brown of the Columbia Concerts organization around the time of the choir's
first national tour in 1946. "When I was a little boy in Ireland," he
wrote, "at the college (Sligo) there were some of the older boys who were
studying for the Church...who would make fun of other boys who would go to
choir, which was given vocal training by a very famous voice teacher who
came to the college several times a week." All that showed, he said, was
that they were suffering from an inferiority complex, and he would not
tolerate anything like that at Boys Town. (A school-mate at the same Sligo
college was John McCormick, whom he often visited backstage years later,
cautioning him, among other things, about his drinking.) The population of
Boys Town was never so large that one might not be at once a state boxing
champion and a bass, a quarterback and a tenor, an Olympic miler and an ex-
soprano.
If, apart from the Dan Desdunes period, the early history of music at Boys
Town is one of fits and starts, that was the fault not of interest of
vision or will, but of growing pains that seemed endemic to the larger task
of corralling sufficient forces to contain an idea which kept surpassing
itself. Although teachers came and went, the idea of music as part of the
Home was never lost sight of. As far back as anyone could remember, a boy
might avail himself of piano lessons from Winifred Flanagan, a sister-in-
law, and one of only a couple associates of the Omaha A.G.O. I would guess
that had funds been at hand, a music hall, with its accompanying
educational facilities, would have been as much a part of the Flanagan plan
in 1928 as it was in 1948.
By 1948, however, there were many programs in place, and others starting,
to utilize such a facility. It is sometimes said that I started the Boys
Town Choir. (For that matter, it is often said that Flanagan started it--
they have seen that fetching picture of him faking a song with his boys.) I
did not. I inherited a group which, though its number was declining, formed
a willing and pliable foundation to build upon. There is a play-by-play
statistical account of music at Boys Town in a doctoral thesis prepared by
Mildred MacDonald and accepted by the University of Colorado, and we may
leave detail to it. I will only relate that over a long period the
department served a large segment of the population. A variety of courses,
available throughout a three semester arrangement, encompassed two bands,
string instruction at individual and quartette levels, piano students
enough to occupy two teachers, obligatory public school music at the
primary level, forays into what was then call "music appreciation," music
history and Gregorian chant, and concert, repertory and chancel choirs.
The latter, comprising some 200 boys, came near as we reasonably could to
the choir school idea. Because of scheduling difficulties, church and
performance obligations, all of which sometimes tended to be raided by
others' priorities, Flanagan had early on allowed that I asuume
responsibility for the home supervision as well as the instruction of my
wards. The Home was anyway growing so that it needed to be broken into
manageable divisions. There were at first four and then eight in all. Each
had its share of glory, its winning politicians, all-state athletes and
intra-mural champs. It should be said here that Monsignor Nicholas Wegner,
who succeeded Father Flanagan in 1948, was quite as supportive of all this
as was his predecessor. A ready host to prestigious musical events, he
might also be about the only adult in attendance at a beginniner's piano
recital.
The collection of sacred music is understandably bound up with the
fortunes of the choir. I remember its beginnings more clearly than I do the
years of gradual acquisition. We had, I believe, only a batch of spanking
new copies of the "St. Gregory Hymnal," which Winifred Flanagan, the
sister-in-law, had recently installed, and small number of copies of the
"Liber Usualis," which I had begged and borrowed from classmates, who, I
was pretty sure, would never use them again, when the Joslyn Art Museum
invited us to do a vesper service marking its tenth anniversary. It was to
be our first public appearance and I had ordered a quantity of items from
C. C. Birchard, Boston. When the order didn't arrive, the secretary to the
Home's penurious purchasing agent volunteered: "Father, you'll never get
that stuff, unless Birchard gives it to you." I took the matter to
Flanagan, and that was the end of any music budget problems, and, in a
sense, the beginning of this library.
For the library grew, to begin with, with our needs. And our needs grew
with our own musical growth. I had to grow too--I even had to grow into the
depth of the first Christmas present Flanagan gave me, December 1941, when
I had only known him six months. It was a first edition of Gustave Reese's
monumental "Music in the Middle Ages." How on earth he hit upon it, I have
no idea. Our first needs were, in the nature of things, liturgical ones,
and it would be awhile before we grew from the "St. Gregory Hymnal" and my
own background in late 19th and early 20th century Caecilian fare and
ersatz male-voice settings of Palestrina to a sure foundation in Gregorian
chant, authentic polyphonly and the exciting new contemporay church music
that was then just over the horizon.
Our concert tours, with which we were engaged each fall (starting in 1946
and for some thirty years thereafter) would also figure in the library
picture. There is no call to bother you with the vagaries of all that
travel which took us pretty much to the ends of the continent, to Havana
and Tokyo. It was not something that we had particularly set out to do--
national hearings having been restricted to seasonal network radio--but one
cold January day, Columbia Concerts sought us and signed us up. Though we
were occasionally viewed as a travelling social experiment (the "New
Yorker" declared that we exhibited the best team-work of the season) we
were mostly accepted, for weal or woe, as a bona fide musical group. I
remember with particular warmth Glenn Dillard Gunn writing in the
"Washington Times-Herald" of our Faure "Requiem:" "The interpretation given
this masterpiece must be listed with the significant events of the season."
(Ours were the first blacks to grace Constitution Hall. I was told that
Columbia's intelligence was that the DAR was not about to fight Flanagan.)
And years later, Seth Bingham in the old "American Organist:" "Something
exquisitely fresh and clear was heard in Town Hall. It came from the finely
balanced ensemble nationally known as the Boys Town Choir."
I have vivid memories of our first appearance in Pittsburgh, at the Syria
Mosque. There was hotel strike in town and we were offered lodging right
here at Duquesne. I wish I knew the name of the priest who helped us bed
the kids down, or where precisely the sleeping arrangement was. I assume it
was somewhere near the chapel for our chores done, he looked at me and
said; "You look like you need a drink." He found a bottle but no glasses,
so we had our night-cap to vigil light. The next night, after the concert,
I was accosted by a priest who asked peremptorily why we had not sung an
encore--I guess I was still not feeling well--for the audience had expected
one. It was none other than Father Carlo Rossini. He confided that he had
really come to enjoy making fun of our endeavor, but that we really had
deserved to sing an encore, and he had already lost a lot of friends, and
maybe we should get acquainted.
Not that there were no down slips. The one I took least exception to did
not appear in print, but came in a series of letters from a redoubtable
Westchester matron:
First, you use your boys entirely too much. Change your program
to about three songs together, then two groups separately, then
a few together and so on.
Second, you make a complete boob out of your accompanist. He
just sits there and goes da-do and then you go on with the boys
to sing. Work out your program so that he plays the entire song
or if you just need a da-do then use a pitch pipe.
Fifth, the little dance was atrocious, and their hats were not
even clean...Your ending was great but how about "Holy God We
Praise Thy Name" either before or after, whichever is correct.
Tenth, why not give about twenty records as door
prizes--although I have never heard a record so I don't know if
they are good or not...In speaking with a friend she said the
whole concert was over my head and I said, "Why should it?"
The third thing that contributed greatly to the growth of the library, and
to ours, were church music workshops. This is my friend Dr. Bichsel's
territory, but I must allude to it insofar as it touches upon the library.
This too was not something we had set out to do. As it happened, the year
1953 marked the 50th anniversary of Pius Xth's "motu proprio" on church
music, and Clifford Bennet and his Gregorian Institute were unleashing
fifty workshops on mostly unsuspecting bishops and abbots. By that time,
officialdom agreed, we were in a position to run one of our own. It was a
project that continued for seventeen or eighteen years and eventually grew
into an ecumenical adventure. Searches for exemplary material quite
naturally enhanced our collection.
So the library was nothing that we set out to do either. Truthfully put,
it just grew up like Topsy, or little Eva, or whoever it was who grew up.
At bottom were the exigencies of vast repertoire--repertoire for study as
much as performance. Publicity which accrued both to the choir and the
workshops occasioned increasing contributions from publishers with whom we
did business, as did the editorial offices of "Caecilia," which for ten of
those years were located in our department. I must add that budgeting for
music purchases presented no problem, because there wasn't any budget. I
think Father Wegner didn't trust budgets. It was a day before multi-layered
bureaucracy and while he respected his colleagues judgment, he was also
still in a position to call a halt if things appeared to be getting out of
hand. Better an arrangement like that, he thought, than people padding
budgets so as to blow the surplus on frills (I recall running into him as I
came out of the De Santis music store one time when we were in Rome
together, and telling him that they had a complete edition of Palestrina in
there. "Why don't you go buy it?" he said.) Father Flanagan harbored a
similar feeling about contracts. He considered a request for one a personal
affront to his integrity. I only ever knew of two that were consummated.
Finally, there were many gifts, and some bequests, starting with valuable
chant materials left us by Father Joseph Pierron, who had studied with
Peter Wagner at Fribourg at the turn of the century. I would be remiss if I
did not mention Dr. Eugene Selhort of Eastman and the old Cincinnati
College of Music, Ben Grasso, once of Associated Music Publishers, Louise
Cuyler, musicologist, and Walter Buszin, sometime professor of liturgics at
Concordia Seminary and editor of "Reponse."
My topic requires of me a judgment on the "significance of the Boys Town
collection of sacred music." I have meant to demonstrate that such a
judgment hinges on the significance of the programs out of which it grew:
the choir and the workshops. The latter attested to a rather broad interest
in quality music in the decades preceding Vatican II--interest, it turns
out, which did not run all that deep. It also attests to a sizable array of
significant contemporary sacred composition of the same period, now all but
vanished from the scene. The choir, I hold, attested to the possibility of
a fine-honed musical and liturgical catechesis, to the possibility of
youngsters--they are men now--standing over against the giddy guardians of
the cheap. Everywhere, these days, it is suggested that it can't be done,
and I can hear Flanagan saying: "Hah, that's what they said." Father Finley
Williams used to say--in particular reference to the Roman Church, I think-
-that you can't legislate taste. Still the Church has an obligation to
establish canons within whose parameters taste can be created.
I have not been sure, these past twenty years, whether those parameters
are in place. Cardinal Ratzinger rightly finds it astonishing that someone
as eminent as Karl Rahner can deduce from conciliar documents the practical
banishment of what, for the better part of two millennia, we have thought
of as sacred music. But one can be equally astonished at those who deduce
from the same documents only, or nearly only, the enshrinement of the music
and the language of the past. As a quondam consultant to the Vatican's
post-conciliar commission on the sacred liturgy, I have been aware of the
tensions that are not always solved in final drafts. Nor have commentators
on the subject generally served up a balanced view. Too often it is one
side railing against the other, unaware that both may be wrong. There is
not much question which side dominates the argument, but I think that the
Boys Town experience suggests that while Father Rahner and his kind may
well speak for themselves, they have no right to speak for the butcher, the
baker, and all those children for whom the treasures of the Church might
prove to be as indigenous as kitsch is for them.
The programs which produced the collection might have been a party to one
further development--again, not something we set out to do, but something
circumstances positioned us for. An adjunct of the final (1969)[1] workshop
was the founding of the Church Music Association of America. This was
accomplished by the merging of the St. Gregory Society of America and the
American Society of St. Cecilia, and the joining of their respective
journals, "The Catholic Choirmaster" and "Caecilia" into "Sacred Music." A
lot of leg work and good will had gone into the effort, and the hope was
that the new organization might prove to be a national vehicle for
implementing conciliar reform. Indeed, Cardinal John Deardon had asked
Father John Selner of the St. Gregory Society and myself to submit a slate
of competent musicians which he might form into an advisory board for that
purpose. Whether the CMA might have forestalled the unanchored efforts all
about us can only be conjectured, for despite an auspicious start and
forward looking initial convention prepared by Ted Marier in Boston,[2] it
was then and there summarily torpedoed--not be itchy scavengers of the
left, but by entrepreneurs of the right who seemed to me to be more
interested in embalming tradition than in building on it. The CMA is deader
than Marley's ghost.
In the end, the quality of our music will depend not so much on what the
council said or did not say about it, but on our definition of liturgy. It
is one thing to draw erroneous conclusions from the constitution on the
liturgy, and quite another to draw no conclusion from it all, but to insist
on something called amorphously "the spirit of Vatican II." Something which
often has no relation to Vatican II or any other, but which is unabashed
post-concil, and sometimes post-Church. If the idea is to wallow in
personal enjoyment of communal piety, if a cozy Sunday morning encounter,
set off with titillation "Polka Mass" to be followed by roast duck and
dumplings is allowed to pass muster as liturgy, one or the other. Just as
there is no use talking about ecumenicism if basic Christological positions
are bartered away.
"I would be an odd deception," writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, "if members
of the community, assembled to praise and honor God, were to have any other
purpose than perfect adoration and self-surrender: for instance their
edification or some other undertaking in which they themselves, along side
their Lord, who should be receiving their homage, become thematic."
Whatever we use as a vehicle does that perfect adoration and self-
surrender, it must be worthy, capable of carrying the worshipper beyond
aesthetics to the glory of God, beyond the beautiful to what he calls
divinely glorious. "Cult," said the oft-maligned Ratzinger, in a lecture on
priestly formation, "has to do with culture--the connection here is
obvious. Culture loses its soul without cult, cult without culture mistakes
its true worth."
My judgment about the significance of the collection and the rest? I think
it is significant simply because it was. There are those who have said that
I lived in a dream world, but it was a fetching dream. And the thing about
it was that it was alive. I keep thinking of Gilbert Chesterton's "Napolean
of Notting Hill." Notting Hill was the London neighborshood of Chesterton's
boyhood, and in the novel he fantasizes about re-capturing that treasured
plot. The effort fails, and at the very end a voice speaks out of the
darkness: "Notting Hill has fallen. Notting Hill has died. But that is not
the tremendous issue; Notting Hill has lived."
I rejoice today that for Duquesnes University our collection is.
MONSIGNOR FRANCIS P. SCHMITT
ENDNOTES
1 The Church Music Association of America was founded at Boys Town,
Nebraska, on August 29, 1964. For an account of that event see "Sacred
Music," Vol. 109, No. 2 (Summer 1982), p. 11-12. (Ed.)
2 The first convention of CMA was held in connection with the Fifth
International Church Music Congress, organized by the Consociatio
Internationalis Musicae Sacrae, in Chicago-Milwaukee, August 21-28, 1965.
The second national convention of CMA was in Detroit, Michigan, April 16-
19, 1968. The Boston meeting to which Monsignor Schmitt refers was the
third national convention, held April 1-3, 1970. Robert I. Blanchard
organized the meeting. For a detailed account of these and other events of
the conciliar reforms, see "A Chronicle of the Reform, Parts I-VII."
"Sacred Music," Vol. 109, No. 1,2,3,4; Vol. 110, No. 1,2,3. (Ed.)
