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- Founding - Old
Sem - Name - Women
- First Graduates -
- King Chapel - Physical
Education - May Music Festivals
- OCAAT -
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Cornell Oratorio Society
conducted by Charles Adams, 1900.
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Cornell's earliest public celebrations embraced music
no matter how slim the budget or how homemade the instrument. When
the cornerstone for College Hall, Cornell's second building, was
laid on July 4, 1856, college officials insisted on rounding up
a band. Mount Vernon heard its first drum ever -- an instrument
made from sheet stove pipe iron and untanned calfskin that was played
with such exuberance that it broke midway through the program.
Forty-three years later the first music festival west
of the Mississippi was born at Cornell. May Music Festival was the
brainchild of Charles Adams, head of the college's Conservatory
of Music, and for the next decade would draw dozens of legendary
performers to King Chapel. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed
62 times at the festival. The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Aaron
Copland came in 1970. The Houston Symphony conducted by Andre
Previn came in 1969. Through the years King Chapel has reverberated
with Handel's "Messiah" and Saint-Saens' "Sampson and Delilah."
In the early 1900s performers who came to Cornell
to offer culture in the cornfields were handed buckets when nature
called and sometimes had to play around sniffing canines who trotted
on stage. The public crowded inside King Chapel and sprawled on
the lawn outside and wore formal clothes for the social occasion.
Some years the air was nippy and the rain ice cold. In 1962 a bolt
of lightning killed the lights as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
played. Undaunted they kept going, playing in the dark from memory.
The advent of rock'n' roll put a dent in student attendance.
In the 1980s the festivals offered more ensembles and fewer solo
recitals. Jazz artists like the Woody Shaw Quintet and the Stephane
Grappelli Trio have since played the festival. In 1998, Cornell
hosted the 100th and final May Music Festival, headlined by the
Duke Ellington Orchestra. What a way to go.
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