The Story of Wellesley [45]
department, and Associate Professor Clarence G. Hamilton, courses in musical interpretation have been developed in connection with the courses in practical music. The first-year class, meeting once a week, listens to an anonymous musical selection played by one of its members, and must decide by internal evidence--such as simple cadences, harmonic figuration as applied to the accompaniment and other characteristics--upon the school of the composer, and biographical data. The analysis of the musical selection and the reasons for her decision are set down in her notebook by the listening student. The second-year class concerns itself with "the thematic and polyphonic melody, the larger forms, harmony in its aesthetic bearings, the aesthetic effects of the more complicated rhythms, comparative criticism and the various schools of composition."
These valuable contributions to method and scope in the study of the History of Art and the History of Music are original with Wellesley, and are distinctly a part of her history.
Among the departments which carry prestige outside the college walls are those of Philosophy and Psychology, English Literature, and German. Wellesley's Department of English Literature is unusually fortunate in having as interpreters of the great literature of England a group of women of letters of established reputation. What Longfellow, Lowell, Norton, were to the Harvard of their day, Katharine Lee Bates, Vida D. Scudder, Sophie Jewett, and Margaret Sherwood are to the Wellesley of their day and ours. Working together, with unfailing enthusiasm for their subjects, and keen insight into the cultural needs of American girls, they have built up their department on a sure foundation of accurate scholarship and tested pedagogic method. At a time when the study of literature threatened to become, almost universally, an exercise in the dry rot of philological terms, in the cataloguing of sources, or the analyzing of literary forms, the department at Wellesley continued unswervingly to make use of philology, sources, and even art forms, as means to an end; that end the interpretation of literary epochs, the illumination of intellectual and spiritual values in literary masterpieces, the revelation of the soul of poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist. No teaching of literature is less sentimental than the teaching at Wellesley, and no teaching is more quickening to the imagination. Now that the method of accumulated detail "about it and about it", is being defeated by its own aridity, Wellesley's firm insistence upon listening to literature as to a living voice is justified of her teachers and her students.
Indications of the reputation achieved by Wellesley's methods of teaching German are found in the increasing numbers of students who come to the college for the sake of the work in the German Department, and in the fact that teachers' agencies not infrequently ask candidates for positions if they are familiar with the Wellesley methods. In an address before the New Hampshire State Teachers' Association, in 1913, Professor Muller describes the aims and ideals of her department as they took shape under the constructive leadership of her predecessor, Professor Wenckebach, and as they have been modified and developed in later years to meet the needs of American students.
"Cinderella became a princess and a ruler over night," says Professor Muller, "that is, German suddenly took the position in our college that it has held ever since. Such a result was due not merely to methods, of course, but first of all to the strong and enthusiastic personality that was identified with them, and that was the main secret of the unusual effectiveness of Fraulein Wenckebach's teaching.
"But this German professor had not only live methods and virile personal qualities to help her along; she also had what a great many of the foreign language teachers in this country must as yet do without, that is, the absolute confidence, warm appreciation, and financial support of an enlightened administration. President Freeman
These valuable contributions to method and scope in the study of the History of Art and the History of Music are original with Wellesley, and are distinctly a part of her history.
Among the departments which carry prestige outside the college walls are those of Philosophy and Psychology, English Literature, and German. Wellesley's Department of English Literature is unusually fortunate in having as interpreters of the great literature of England a group of women of letters of established reputation. What Longfellow, Lowell, Norton, were to the Harvard of their day, Katharine Lee Bates, Vida D. Scudder, Sophie Jewett, and Margaret Sherwood are to the Wellesley of their day and ours. Working together, with unfailing enthusiasm for their subjects, and keen insight into the cultural needs of American girls, they have built up their department on a sure foundation of accurate scholarship and tested pedagogic method. At a time when the study of literature threatened to become, almost universally, an exercise in the dry rot of philological terms, in the cataloguing of sources, or the analyzing of literary forms, the department at Wellesley continued unswervingly to make use of philology, sources, and even art forms, as means to an end; that end the interpretation of literary epochs, the illumination of intellectual and spiritual values in literary masterpieces, the revelation of the soul of poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist. No teaching of literature is less sentimental than the teaching at Wellesley, and no teaching is more quickening to the imagination. Now that the method of accumulated detail "about it and about it", is being defeated by its own aridity, Wellesley's firm insistence upon listening to literature as to a living voice is justified of her teachers and her students.
Indications of the reputation achieved by Wellesley's methods of teaching German are found in the increasing numbers of students who come to the college for the sake of the work in the German Department, and in the fact that teachers' agencies not infrequently ask candidates for positions if they are familiar with the Wellesley methods. In an address before the New Hampshire State Teachers' Association, in 1913, Professor Muller describes the aims and ideals of her department as they took shape under the constructive leadership of her predecessor, Professor Wenckebach, and as they have been modified and developed in later years to meet the needs of American students.
"Cinderella became a princess and a ruler over night," says Professor Muller, "that is, German suddenly took the position in our college that it has held ever since. Such a result was due not merely to methods, of course, but first of all to the strong and enthusiastic personality that was identified with them, and that was the main secret of the unusual effectiveness of Fraulein Wenckebach's teaching.
"But this German professor had not only live methods and virile personal qualities to help her along; she also had what a great many of the foreign language teachers in this country must as yet do without, that is, the absolute confidence, warm appreciation, and financial support of an enlightened administration. President Freeman