Allen McHose

INT: And Dr. McHose before you came to Rochester you received a degree of a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Franklin & Marshall College[1]. Uh, what caused you to make the change from the seemingly drastically different disciplines; that is going from chemistry to music.

AM: Well, I think probably it wasn’t in Lancaster where I decided to go into music after graduating from Franklin Marshall. I went to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to teach in the parochial schools of the Moravian Church and work on a master’s degree in chemical engineering at Lehigh University. And while in Bethlehem I lived at the Chi Phi fraternity on the river campus – Lehigh University campus. And became interested in the in meeting the students and the faculty at the University of Lehigh, and to make a long story short, they knew about my having been the director of the the glee club and instrumental groups at Franklin & Marshall my senior year. They invited me to revive the musical activities on the Lehigh campus as sort of extracurricular. And under those circumstances I became the the director of the Lehigh Glee Club and instrumental ensembles. And incidentally, in the, among these people in the ensembles at Lehigh was a very close friend of mine whom I knew in a summer resort of previous years, who was the brother of Edna Phillips, the harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra [Mmhmm.] for many years.

INT: Yes. Mmhmm.

AM: And he was an electrical engineer and I was working on a master’s degree in in chemical engineering.

Close to the end of the second year that I was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the President of Lehigh University called me in his office and really put the cards on the table, if you want to put it that way. He said “Mac I’m very much interested in what you’ve been doing for the musical activities on our campus. And if – how would you like to get a degree in music? And as soon as you get a degree in music, I can offer you a job here at Lehigh University.” Incidentally, many years later the position that was offered to me at Lehigh University was William Schempf, who is now Colonel Schempf at West Point and who received his Ph.D. at the Eastman School some years ago[2].

INT: Um. 

AM: I took up President Richards’[3], . . . comments concerning the possibility of going into music and I called him about a month later and told him that I felt that I’d like to do this. And so, to make a long story short, I finally decided that the best school to go to, which could give me the type of background I would need at a school like Lehigh University which was really purely a technical school at that time was the Eastman School of Music.

INT: And you came there in what capacity?

AM: I came there as a student in 1925 and finished my bachelor’s degree with an organ major in 1927.

INT: And then you immediately began to teach there.

AM: Uh . . . right before I graduated, uh-Dr. Hanson[4] encouraged me to stay at the school and work on a master’s degree, and he gave me a teaching fellowship in the Department, The, of Theory. And at that time, it was under the direction of Melville Smith[5].

INT: Mmhmm. Well being one of your former students in Music Theory, [chuckles] um, I can attest to your great ability as a teacher. An-and it’s always been a a source of wonder to me how you find – how you found the time to write the number of textbooks that you have and still maintain the degree of the teaching skill for which you were famous. An-how did you do this?

AM: Well, it was quite a number of years after, [clears throat] uh, I was made the Chairman of the Theory Department that I began to realize that I had perhaps something to offer in theory. Don’t forget that I had probably one of the greatest group of colleagues to work with that any any chairman of a department could have had in Ruth Tibbs[6], Elvira Wonderlich Wayne Barlow[7], Don White[8], and, uh-Burrill Phillips[9]. These people were extraordinarily devoted to teaching; they were likewise interested in in developing new procedures and so forth.

Perhaps the most important thing in in the early days of my chairmanship was to develop, uh-an accurate record of the achievement of every student in the school who passed through the Theory Department. At the time when I retired, I would assume that I-I must’ve had at least a record of the achievement of every student who passed through the Theory Department, which would number way over two, three thousand.

INT: Hmm. 

AM: Much of this became extremely valuable information because I was able to to develop, . . . processes where I could tell, --Dr. Hanson that Mr. X might not be able to ever pass the dictation courses in, in the, in the Theory Department on, repeat. Whereas in a case of another c-type of students – Y, let’s say – it was able-I was able to tell Dr. Hanson I believe that on a review of the whole freshman year, he could possibly, pass the requirements of the Theory Department.

INT: And I’m sure the process of teaching this great number of students you evolved, systems and and methods which made it possible for you to write the texts that are now being used throughout the country.

AM: Uh, that’s . . . possible but I think proprietary to that is the fact that in the in these various tests I was just – received a l-I just received a letter, just a few days ago, from a school telling me, how did you devise that entrance test of yours in which you don’t ask them to, uh uh, define anything but you detect their oral capacity before they enter your course. And I think that this is one of the greatest tests we developed where we were able to find out whether a person might be able to do well, and of course that became the basis for our sectioning of the freshmen theory, which we had nine sections aa-and ten sections classified as tops we we called Ones, 2As, 2Bs, and Threes. The Threes contained people that we had to do a great deal of extra outside work with through the innovation of the teaching fellowships which was the next step. That’s where we trained a great many theory teachers. And many of these people are now theory teachers all over the country. One of the best of ones known probably for his textbooks would be a fellow like Robert Ottman at North State Texas Teachers College[10].

Now, [clears throat] uh, I experimented during this particular period up to 1940 to ’42 with the use of a lot of different textbooks. It was very curious how this worked out. I I’m started out with Goetschius[11], whom I still thought was the real theoretical scholar of the of the country. Then I became interested in Rimsky-Korsakov’s book on harmony[12] and tried that out for a year. Then went back again to, um uh-Goetschius, and then I became interested, through research and reading journals on the relationship of the use of the-theoretical materials as they control stylistic emphases. And this is when I got started, then, on the contrapuntal harmonic technique of the eighteenth century. Now this took eleven years to put together.

INT: Wasn’t Goetschius’s premise approximately the same as that?

AM: No no he wasn’t. The textbooks were all based on a teacher-pupil lineage sort of process. And I had a a number of master’s degrees investigating teacher-pupil lineage. In other words I I wanted to know where Chadwick[13] came from. I wanted to know what Goetschius’ background was. Uh, and this was a fascinating and extraordinarily interesting, uh uh, study. This evolved eventually into three or four doctoral theses on the whole historical development of theoretical treatises in France, uh-Germany, Russia, and so forth.

INT: Hm. Uh, well look, when you were a, among other things, a a music theory teacher and I was, when I was in the Eastman School of Music, a clarinetist. Um, now playing the devil’s advocate here the-why should I study theory if all I want to do is play clarinet?

AM: Well, I presume it goes back to, uh uh, the . . . the influences that of my reading, which, um uh, probably, uh . . . made me-uh, come to the conclusion that there are certain areas of musical training where all the applied music, uh uh, majors need to-uh, have some basic information. Um, I assume probably that Rameau[14] was one of my first big influences. I, I really studied Rameau from A to Z. And his idea was that the music of his time, that, um uh, a melody couldn’t exist written by a contempo-by his contemporaries without a sense of harmonic background. Consequently, there was an interrelationship between the horizontal and the vertical. And, uh uh, this-this influenced me tremendously.

Uh, then I also took an eclectic point of view in that who knows, as a theory teacher, whether you haven’t got an embryo, uh uh, composer in your group, uh . . . or arranger or whatnot. Um, is he going to be only limited to just playing his own instrument or is he be-he going to become interested. And I think the educational, uh. . .

INT: Well, do you think that–

AM: – point of view there is is “give him a little bit more than just playing his instrument.”

INT: Well, the – I I I guess this is what I was going to ask. Do you know that, uh um, the study of the theory of music . . . is, uh . . . or would be of advantage to an instrumentalist? And if so, why?

AM:. . . Well, I think that probably why why I feel that the so-called courses in in the “putting together” of music, uh . . . had to be based on something more than just pure theoretical information. Uh, it seemed to me it had to be tied into style. And that’s why I became such an enthusiast on style, because I began to discover that the theoretical tre-treatises were only adding up innovations of new material but didn’t really show how that was invol-how this material was involved in in the art form itself. So consequently I-I came to the conclusion that that a stylistic point of view was the important thing. Now this presents a tre-colossal problem because there are so many different styles and how you’re going to get all the styles taught in one in one academic course of four years or a graduate school, even.

INT: When is this going to, uh um, how is this going to help me as a clarinet player?

AM:. . . Well, it seems to me that that as a clarinet player, if you had to contrast Mozart with a with a rhapsody, you’ll have two two points – you’ll have two musical points of view quite remote one from the other. And that – it would seem to me that if the the chances are that the clarinet student would know an awful lot about Mozart but when he started to play the clarinet rhapsody he would suddenly discover that he’s in a sort of different harmonic, melodic formal atmosphere. And if he didn’t know something about the style and what Debussy was trying to do, he he he might be lost for a long time. And this brings up the point, then, um . . . the thing that I tried to do when I wrote the contrapuntal harmonic technique was to develop not only the knowledge of the period at the time of Bach but also to p-to present tools to the student so that when he picks up a piece that’s foreign to him, he can approach this composition with some basic tools that already reveal to him how Bach put his music together. Which would enable him to break apart and find out what this compos-the the ne-the contemporary composer’s trying to do.

INT: Uh, I’d like to go now from your reputation as a famous teacher to one as an administrator. And I’d like, uh-I was wondering as an associate director of the Eastman School of Music you were probably closer to Dr. Hanson the director than any other person as far as administration of the school goes. Um, what was that relationship like?

AM: Well, I think this, uh uh, your question is a little bit twenty-five years to thirty years ahead of how it all started. Apparently, Hanson-Dr. Hanson felt that, that I had ideas that could be funneled into various areas of of the school outside the Theory Department. Uh, one person said to me one time, you know, “Mac,” he says, “you are sort of a George Wedge[15] of the Eastman School.” And this reminds me of the anecdote claiming that in the old days, uh um, Frank Damrosch[16] used to say “Well, if we’ve got a problem, let George do it.” Or, “Let him see whether he can find out a solution to some problem and let him report to us.” And, back as far as 1931 – I would hazardly date, as a guess – Dr. Hanson used to ask me to, uh uh, do some things for him. And this gave me administrative organization to be able to see how and to to be able to analyze the problem that he might have had.

For example, I think the first one was the secondary piano for the orchestral players and singers who were of low grade, in which he asked me to, um uh, see whether he c-we can’t solve this secondary piano de-problem. F-he was dissatisfied with the fact that they that everybody was taught the piano just as if he were going to be a as if he was going to be a virtuoso. And this isn’t the kind of piano that Dr. Hanson felt was was necessary for the orchestral player. Of course, this is a national, um . . . problem right now and it still is being in the process of developing. Uh, he asked me whom I thought could do the job best and I picked on Harry Watts[17] as the person who would . . . seem to me to have the the the right point of view. And immediately we set up the piano class department with Harry Watts as as director and I acted as a sort of a supervisor, and once I thought it was going along the way Dr. Hanson wanted it to to develop I reported to Dr. Hanson that, uh uh, I felt that this job is done.

And I’ve had a lot of jobs of this type. Um . . . the Voice Department was a problem. . . And he put me in charge of the, the selection, on-as in part of the Admissions Committee, and also to advise him as to whom voice students should study. And, uh uh, this was a mechanical problem, as well as a pure musical problem because Dr. Hanson was trying at that time to see that there was some first-class, uh . . . diversity given the entering voice students, so that not one teacher would get all the voice students, and they could be [chuckles] could be nicely distributed among the major faculty.

Um, I remember in ol-in the old days we he said [clears throat] “Let’s cook up a a-s a study of seeing whether we can develop pitch recognition of some certain notes.” And with the aid of of our entrance test and the C short tests, which we still used as a basis for some of our analyses. We selected a group of students of diversified applied music interests and also of more or less some degree of what we thought was talent. And for a whole winter, every morning before the student went to school, I was at the Eastman School at 8:30; they came to my room, and I would every five seconds first five seconds of every minute, I would play middle C. [laughs] And they were allowed to study, they were allowed to do anything else but to the next minute I played middle C.

INT: Do you have pitch recognition?

AM: [laughs] Me?

INT: Yeah.

AM: [laughs] No, but I actually got better. [laughs] [continues laughing] Uh, the result was rather interesting. Uh, we found that at the end of the study that some of the students who did not have ri-pitch recognition – not very many of them – but who had not, really began to develop pitch recognition.

INT: Hm.

AM: We found that some could re-could recognize C. Uh, we found that the the fiddlers, for example – string players began to associate A to C, quite they none of these people, remember, had any pitch recognition at all.

INT: Yeah.

AM: And then there were some who did – who showed no improvement.

INT: Did, uh –

AM: What’s what.

INT: Did you ever in this process, um . . . test, um . . . an instrumentalist, uh um, that didn’t have, uh uh, not a concert pitch instrumentalist but let’s say a hornist or a clarinetist –

AM: Oh, the transposing instruments.

INT: Yeah.

AM: The clarinets and horns and so forth.

INT: Yeah. And find out whether they had a recognition of pitch on their own instrument?

AM:. . . Uh, basically I think that the majority of them, um uh, had what you might-uh, call a concert pitch. Uh, they knew, for example what the actual pitch was although the note they were reading was a transposed note.

INT: Mmm-hmm. So they did have, uh uh, their–

AM: There there were times certain certain students who had never become familiar with with the actual, uh uh . . . thinking process, musical thinking process that, uh uh, that had trouble. I remember one horn player who was always a fifth off.

INT: Hm.

AM: And he was rated as a top one. We we worked with him a whole year to straighten him out so that he could, uh uh, do things properly.

INT: And this is fascinating, uh . . .

AM: Oh.  May I have my point real quick? [very mumbled]

INT: Yeah.

AM: I like to make one remark. When I was through with this test I went to Dr. Hanson and I said, “You know,” I said, “I think it’d be a good idea for me to get together with the Chemistry Department and the Medical School Research Department and see whether we can work out a serum in which when [laughs] a student came in to the Eastman School we could inject him with pitch recognition fluid.” [laughs]

INT: [laughs] Dr. McHose in addition to your many other duties you were for many years a director of the the Summer Session of the Eastman School. W-what were some of the innovations that you inaugurated during that time?

AM: Briefly I would say that all of the different projects that Dr. Hanson assigned me before I became director of the school had probably a very strong influence on on stimulating my imagination at the time I became a director of the of the Summer Session. At that t-uh, when I became director of the Summer Session we had relatively a-uh, a small session. I immediately analyzed the the faculty representation – I’m now thinking in terms of applied music musicology theory, et cetera – and the types of students that we were encouraging through our advertising program and reputation nationally. Um . . . and I studied these I studied the type of student that we had coming in, which of course was a person coming in for a refresher course, a person, uh uh, making up deficiencies in the music education field–

INT: Were all these, uh – excuse me – uh, were all these people, uh uh uh, local or was this, uh um, people coming from all parts of the country?

AM: Uh, we had a reasonably good national distribution in the summer. [Hmm.] Uh, only very few, however.

And, um uh . . . after I made this analysis I sat down with Dr. Hanson and we and I told him what I had in mind and he was quite a quite a [chuckles] swell guy in this way. He said “Mac,” he says, “I leave after graduation and I don’t want to hear anything about the Summer Session, and I want to-I want to come back to continue the following of the of the regular nine months’ program. And also if possible, I I wouldn’t like to have any problems develop in the Summer Session [laughs] uh, that I would have to hear upon my return.” I must admit that – and this is probably a little . . . strong – but in all the years that I was director of the Summer Session the director of the Eastman School never had one complaint registered in his office.

INT: That’s wonderful.

AM: Now, [clears throat] uh, one of-one of the big problems I had was to carry on the growing graduate program in the regular course. And I had to be sure that I had the instrumentalists there to take care of the doctoral musical arts program. Take care of the theoretical program and the and the o-and the music college program. So I immediately had to to work out procedures where I was able to service all of these different responsibilities because after all, the director of the Summer Session has to service the the year-round academic program that they offer. This was quite al-a challenge.

And so in order to be sure that I had, for example, the Orchestral Department serviced I proposed the formation of the Little Symphony Orchestra under the direction of of Dr. Fennell[18], which guaranteed that every one of the orchestral instruments could be presented as a as a course of private instruction. In order to do this – in order to give these men more work I got the idea of developing a program for the surrounding area of the school to enlarge the thes-the Preparatory Department[19] . . . give also these students an opportunity to play in an ensemble, so that we could have an orchestra in the Summer Session and a band in the Summer Session. And in a few years I selected-uh, Daniel Patrylak[20] who eventually became my assistant in the Summer Session to begin to contact all of the supervisors within a radius of of approximately thirty to forty miles around the Summer Session. And this had a very definite impact on the sudden growth of the Preparatory Department in the Summer Session. This all of course obviously required organization so that instrumental teaching would be on the the days that the band would perform–

INT: Yeah. Mmm-hmm.

AM: –and things of this nature. So under those circumstances we were able to to get the thing moving.

Then I began to become interested in the, um . . . in all phases of musical interests in the country from the educational and the operation of the of of schools and all of this area of potential instruction and that’s how I developed the Institutes[21]. I didn’t like workshops – the term “workshop.” And so I cooked up the idea of an Institute to give it a sort of an Eastman School flavor, [laughs] uh, something different from everybody else who was having workshops. Uh, I wasn’t able to completely eliminate the word “workshop,” [22] but I increased the the impact on the word “institute.” Now nothing like this had ever happened in the Ea-in the Eastman School. Um, as a matter of fact, I’m quite proud of the of the development of the Institutes and workshops of the Eastman School because many of them have been copied.

Those of real innovation and importance, I would mention first the Music Library Workshop. We got some of the finest men in the country to be represented on the faculty and we and Ruth Watanabe[23] was the coordinator. It was it was so successful that within a few years, we had figured out that we had over seventy-five percent of all of the music librarians in the in the Music Library Association, [Hmm!] uh, connected with this, uh uh, project. Under those circumstances we began to realize that the smartest thing to do was to probably put it on an alternate year basis because the attendance might drop, or that we should move into some other areas of, uh uh, presentation.

Uh, the other Institute that I think the Institute which I think is the one of the most important ones that we developed was the Music Executives’ Institute[24]. I selected Dr. Earl Moore[25] from the University of Michigan as the coordinator of this Institute and instructed him that this was not to be anything but a national . . . uh, project. In other words, I discouraged the, the use of of University of Rochester and Eastman School faculty to participate in this. We went out to try to get the best men in the various fields in administration to participate in this, so that we would have a a strong tie-up with the National Association of Schools of Music. And I’m I was tremendously enthusiastic with the the development of of this project. Uh, we had way over in four years, we had way over two hundred people that attended the, the Institute. And we had, uh uh, for example, I’m quite happy – one regular member was Joe Nyquist in Albany, who now is the Commissioner of Education of the State of New York[26]. He thought it was one of the greatest things we we had started. And he stimulated, in his secondary position to Allen[27] encouraging, uh . . . people from the State of New York to attend this particular, um uh-Institute.

The, um . . . next Institute that I was very much instrumental in getting started was the Arrangers’ Laboratory Institute[28]. And much of the enthusiasm and the support of this stemmed from the, uh uh, support of of Emory Remington[29], who, uh uh, whether he told me or not, I don’t think it makes much difference. I like to say that Emory and I w-w-had thi-had this baby in our minds and we developed this. And the question was: whom do we get? Uh . . . I went to New York and talked with Mitch Miller[30] about this, who was then tops in TV broadcasting. And he thought it was a great idea, but the more I talked with him the less I saw eye-to-eye on what he how he thought this ought to be done. Uh, he thought that I could pick up any arranger around New York and set him up in a cottage on Canandaigua Lake and have him come up and give a couple of courses. And I could get them for peanuts in salary.

I came back from New York and the more I thought of this, the more I I thought that this is not the way to do it. I thought that I’d have to go big or not move until I saw the the-uh, my way clear to to do it. And I hit upon Ray Wright[31], who was then one of the orchestral conductors and chief arranger at Radio City Music Hall, later becoming the chief, uh uh, conductor and arranger at Radio City Music Hall. With the support of Ray Wright, who knew a great many arrangers in a specialized area this grew from a three-week program to a six-weeks’ program in which we had a sort of a preparatory three weeks along with a faculty like Hunsberger[32]  and, um uh, let’s see . . . Hunsberger and, uh–

INT: Manny Albam[33]?

AM: And Manny Albam-Alban. This turned out to be a very a very important, uh uh, addition to the school and gave it, in my opinion, superior artistic standards nationally. Uh, we were not we did not have cheap jazz. We didn’t this was top arranging and and top scoring for whatever groups we had. In in doing this I even participated in the thing to get it going. Uh uh, a serious theoretician, writing a a choral and and fugue on “Camptown Races” and, uh uh, a an arietta an aria for, um, on a theme of, uh . . . “Blues in the Night.” Things of this nature. I did this partially for fun but also, it seems to me at times a director has got to participate in in in a program that he that he creates.

I would also like to say that in connection with the fine support that I got from Emory Remington, I likewise had support from other people on the on the – in the school, especially at the University, especially, um, a man who is very familiar with the type of thing that I was trying to do and that was Jack End[34] connected with the . . [whispers “public relations” to Dr. McHose] Public Relations of the University. He himself is a graduate of the Eastman School, a fine arranger a composer, and ex-, most knowledgeable in the area of recording.

And this brings me then to the the point that in addition to the fact that we established and had an well-operating Institute Arrangers’ Institute, we began to move into the area of recording . . . which has now turned out to have its own particular workshop.

[Recording abruptly cuts off 47:20. Still has a little over seven minutes of blank time on the recording.]

Transcript by Eileen L. Fay (March 2014)