PROFILE

For thousands of the College's graduates and hundreds of its present students the only route to knowledge in music is that mapped out by Professor Archibald T. Davison. They are those who took Music 1, a course Davison started in 1935 and has taught ever since. For others, 'Walter Piston, Randall Thompson, and Leonard Bornstein among them, he was a teacher. But to that first group--majors in history, or chemistry, or elementary French--he laid out a path previously uncharted and provided an experience of lifelong value.

That is the way Davison likes to think about his course. "I'm not worried about how many facts they learn here," he says of its students. "The most important thing about Music 1 is what it means to them ten years from now."

This is his forty-first year of teaching in the University. In fact, except for one year of study abroad, Davison has been here since he entered as a freshman in 1902, the fall after his graduation from Boston Latin School. He started out teaching harmony and counterpoint; one year later he was appointed University Organist and Choirmaster, a post he held for the next 30 years.

During Davison's career as choirmaster President Lowell asked him to give a course in choral music and, little by little, Davison went mere into history in all of his courses.

But Davison wanted to help the non-concentrator, the man who could take no music courses because he could not met the requirements. "My great interest," he explains, "is in the man who has to start from scratch." At the time, 1935, the type of course he 'planned--with emphasis on music with historical background--was not common in colleges, although preparatory schools had some like it.

When classes began, the music faculty, which had expected less than 50 students, was inundated with 300. "It was appalling," Davison reports. Since then, the plan of the course has changed little.

Since its start, the course has been a particular vehicle for Davison, even to today when the examinations are based almost entirely on detailed section material. At ten each Tuesday and Thursday morning he walks onto Paine Hall's stage. He is a short, amiable man who smiles behind his glasses. Soon, however, the spectacles are off, for he continually gestures with them, most especially when the music pleases him. And somehow, with his words--spoken softly in a nearly English accent--and gestures, he gets across his love, appreciation, almost veneration of good music. One of his generation of students described him: "He is not satisfied with merely teaching; he inculcates."

Of course, Davison is still teaching departmental courses, a graduate seminar in research and, once every few years, a class in notation. Besides the many famous musicians he has taught, every single member of the present staff is one of his students. "And it is almost embarrassing the number of distinguished men who are products of Harvard training" he says.

While he does think "every human being should be able to find his way around in the literature of music," he is no believer in compulsory music--"Music must be like religion," he explains," "It should be free. "For example, I'm dead set against setting a child down at the piano and forcing him to learn."

After forty years of teaching, he was expected to retire last June. In answer to annual rumors of his retirement, he says, "I admit there is such a thing as being too long on one job. But I have to other plans right now. You know, one's wife is a good judge of things like that--I'm going on." So these who might rightly worry what Music 1 would be without Professor Davison can leave off worrying awhile.