#Oberlin College Archives

[usnatarchives]

Mary Church Terrell

As we celebrate Black History Month, it’s a perfect time to honor the legacy of Mary Church Terrell, a pioneering civil rights and women’s rights activist. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863, Terrell was among the first African American women to earn a college degree, graduating from Oberlin College. She dedicated her life to fighting for equality and justice, making significant contributions to the suffrage movement and the fight against racial discrimination.

Terell’s commitment to civil rights and women’s suffrage was deeply intertwined with her work in the Black Women’s Club Movement. She served as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which advocated for voting rights and equal rights under the motto “lifting as we climb.” Terrell also played a crucial role in the founding of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and the National Association for the Advancment of Colored People (NAACP).

One of Terrell’s most notable achievements was her involvement in a successful lawsuit in 1950 that led to the desegregation of restaurants in the Washington, DC, area. Terrell’s writings, including “A Colored Woman in a White World,” and “What it means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” have left a lasting impact on the struggle for racial and gender equality.

To explore more about Mary Church Terrell’s remarkable life and contributions, the National Archives offers additional resources here:

A Portrait of Mary Church Terrell: A glimpse into the grace and determination of the iconic figure https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/mary-church-terrell

Blogs related to Mary Church Terrell: Delve into detailed articles that explore various aspects of her life and legacy Rediscovering Black History Blog. https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/

Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell with Alison M. Parker: A recorded event that sheds light on Terrell’s multifaceted activism, held on December 17, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQYQRKKBr0A&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.archives.gov%2Fresearch%2Fafrican-americans%2Findividuals%2Fmary-church-terrell&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.archives.gov&feature=emb_title

External: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/labor-love-restoration-ledroit-parks-mary-church-ee8xe/?trackingId=V7zIYQZE9YI5JgfRfOS4xg%3D%3D

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Gardner Calvin Taylor (June 18, 1918 – April 5, 2015) born in Baton Rouge was a Baptist preacher. He was admired for his eloquence as well as his understanding of the Christian faith and theology. He became known as “the dean of American preaching”.

He grew up in the segregated South of the early 20th century. He graduated from the Oberlin College School of Theology and began a lifetime of preaching and civil rights activism.

He became the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church, in Elyria, Ohio. He became pastor of the Beulah Baptist Church in New Orleans and his father’s former congregation, Mount Zion Baptist Church, in Baton Rouge. He became head of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ, the second-largest Baptist congregation in America, with 8,000 members, located in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The congregation grew to as large as 10,000.

As a young Minister, he was taught and mentored by The Great Reverend Dr. BG Crawley, AKA “The Walking Encyclopedia “ who was a Judge and Founder of The Little Zion Baptist Church of Brooklyn, N.Y.

He was the pastor of Concord for 42 years. More than 2,000 of his sermons are archived, and recordings of many of them are available in collections such as The Words of Gardner Taylor: 50 Years of Timeless Treasures and at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

He received 15 honorary degrees during his lifetime. He gave lectures and sermons at universities and churches all over the US, as well as in South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Denmark, England, Scotland, Australia, China, and Japan. He preached the pre-inauguration sermon in January 1993 for President-elect Bill Clinton at Metropolitan AME Church. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 9, 2000, awarded by President Clinton. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #kappaalphapsi

[oberlincollegearchives]

Edmonia Lewis and Oberlin College

The United States Postal Service has announced that artist and sculptor Edmonia Lewis will be featured on a Forever Stamp, the 45th stamp in their Black Heritage series. The stamps will be dedicated and go on sale on January 26, 2022.

Edmonia Lewis was born in New York or Ohio in 1843 or 1845 to a free Black father and Native American mother. Also known as Mary Edmonia Lewis, not much is known about her early life. Lewis attended the Oberlin Preparatory Department from 1859-1860, and the Literary Department (women’s course) from 1860-1862. Unfortunately, Lewis was accused of poisoning two of her white classmates with wine in 1862 (see “Spiced Wine” by Geoffrey Blodgett, Oberlin Alumni Magazine, February 1970). The case was later dropped after being represented by John Mercer Langston. Later, in February of 1863, she was accused of (later acquitted) stealing paint brushes and paints from an art teacher in Oberlin. Because of the incidents that Lewis was involved in, she was no longer allowed to continue in the women’s course and subsequently left Oberlin for Boston where she started a career as a sculptor. Lewis sculpted noted abolitionists, and is well known for using Italian style to depict Native American subjects.

The College Archives does not hold a personal paper collection for Edmonia Lewis, but we do have a pencil drawing, pictured above, located in our Paintings, Prints, and Drawings collection. This drawing was done by Lewis for Clara Steele Norton (Oberlin College A.B. 1862) upon her announcement to be married to Judson Cross (enr. 1855-1862). This drawing is sometimes referred to as A Wedding Gift or Untitled Drawing of Urania. (See “A Wedding Gift of 1862″ by Marcia Goldberg and William E. Bigglestone, Oberlin Alumni Magazine, June/July 1977).

We also have a variety of articles and other secondary sources on Edmonia Lewis. Please contact the College Archives if you would like to know more about Edmonia Lewis and her fascinating artistic legacy.

[oberlincollegelibraries]

Born on May 10, 1886 to Harry and Helen Rogers in Grand Junction, Michigan, Faith Helen Rogers, graduated from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music in 1907. She seemed to have been joined at the hip to her older cousin, Ruth Alta Rogers. 

Like Faith, Ruth was born in Grand Junction, and both their parents moved to West Superior, Wisconsin sometime in the 1890s. Their parents must have been well to do, as both households employed maids from Sweden or Norway.  And, just like Ruth, Faith studied piano at Oberlin and taught music after graduation. Neither of them ever married. 

Faith was quite popular at Oberlin.  She was elected most musical by her classmates at the senior outing. She gave many recitals during her years at Oberlin and was often sought after to give instrumental support to voice and other performers. She did the same after graduation, the most notable as an accompanist to Alice Sjoselius, a well-known soprano, who gave a three city tour of Minnesota during the summer of 1912. Her talents were noted. As a prelude to an expected performance at Cornell University in 1908, one newspaper called her “one of Oberlin’s most brilliant pianists.”

In 1918 at the peek of America’s involvement in World War I, Faith  enthusiastically joined the war effort as a member of the Y. M. C. A.  entertainment troupe. She set sail for Paris, France in October 1918 but never made it there.  She caught influenza on the S. S. Espagne and died of pneumonia. She is buried in Bourdeaux, France.

To learn more about Obies’ involvement in World War I, visit our Military Service in World War I digital collection.  

Photo credit: Oberlin College Archives

[jomiddlemarch]

AU Meme: Mary Phinney/Samuel Diggs, College AU? Please and thank you!

Mary Phinney and Sam Diggs met in King 203, the only two freshmen in Professor Nicholson’s section of Math 329; within a week, the juniors and seniors had dubbed Mary “Rings” and Sam “Fields” and had stopped grousing about letting newbies in. It was over Oberlin’s celebration of Pi Day, specifically over the last piece of shoofly pie and the battle for the last bite, that Rings and Fields became something more. They would have been just two nerds in love, except for the dreams. Mary called them “funny” and Sam called “just plain weird,” their peculiarly shared, peculiarly vivid dreams of Mary’s great-great-great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth and Sam’s similarly vintaged ancestor Samuel, both Oberlin alums, Class of ‘45. 1845. Were they truly dreams—or something else? Evidence of reincarnation, of ghosts? Or of a shared psychotic break? It didn’t seem like there was anyone to confide in who wouldn’t think they were lovesick, overtired or high, at least until legendary archival librarian Bridget Brannan came across them one night in the stacks.

“Took you long enough,” she said, her tone so practical and annoyed they couldn’t help sharing a smile of pure relief.

[clarencewardartlibrary]

Mail Art: Harley Terra Candella

Harley, Terra Candella Mail Art Archive, unprocessed maquette

Harley also know as The Painter of Unicorns was an artist who came from a background of painting and would later join the mail art movement. As a mail artist he mainly produced Artistamps but he also produced numerous other types of mail art as well. He would be set on the path towards mail art in his childhood when he was around the age of 8 or 9. During this time period he became avid stamp collector and by 16 he had decided to be an artist.  By 1975 he had combined his two passions, creating a local “post office” (“Tristan Post,” named for his son) with its own stamps, based on Harley’s paintings and collages. The following year he was given catalog for an exhibition of “artistamps” at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.  Harley sent the curator, Jame Warren Felter, some of his work and became part of the Mail Art movement.

The Mail Art movement originated sometime between the 1950s and the 1970s. And while what makes something Mail Art isn’t set in stone there are common characteristics. In general the common thread between every type of Mail Art is that it was usually exchanged between artists through the mail and communities of these artist were often formed around this exchange. A smaller art form within the Mail Art movement is the Artistamp which is a stamp produced and designed by an artist. The Artistamp originated some time around the 1950s in its earliest form and began to come into prominence as an art form in 1982 when Thomas Michael Bidner began work on his Standard Artistamp Catalogue.                                                                                        

[Harley, Sleeve 038]

[Harley, Sleeve 021A]

[Harley, Sleeve 046]

[Harley, Sleeve 017, detail]

Terra Candella (Land of Light), Harley’s imaginary country, replaced Tristan Post during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Imaginary counties where another characteristic of mail art that sometimes appeared. Mail artists have a number of reasons for choosing to create fake countries. Some do it to further develop their own stamps by giving them a place to come from while others only start creating stamps as a way to flesh out an imaginary country they had already made. Some notable examples are the aforementioned Terra Candella created by Harley, Canadada created by Ed Varney, Doo Da created by Ed Higgins, and Tui Tui created by Robert Rudine otherwise know as Dogfish. Donald Evans is another notable example however he created an entire world with well over fifty countries instead of just one. 

In the 1980s Harley traveled and met numerous other mail artists from around the world.   He curated his first large mail art show at Spaces Galley in Cleveland which is still in operation today. 

Harley came to Oberlin in 1965 for a two-year graduate assistantship in studio art and was a resident for 30 years.  In 1987 the Allen Memorial Art Museum held Corresponding Worlds, the first major museum exhibition of mail art and artist stamps. Harley help organize this exhibition which attracted mail artists from across the country and abroad.Below are four Artistamps produced by Harley to commemorate the event.

[Harley, Sleeve 037]

The Oberlin College Libraries purchased the first half of the Harley Terra Candella Mail Art Archive (1975-1995) in 1995 when Harley moved to the west coast.  The second half of the archive, covering (1996-     ) was purchased in [year].   

His mail art and mail art from 1600 other artists can be viewed at the Clarence Ward Art Library by scheduling an appointment using this link http://www2.oberlin.edu/library/forms/formofspecoll_art.html. More information about Harley can be found through his website by following this link http://www.terracandella.com/index.html.                                                    You can also find more information about Harley on his son’s website by following this link https://www.themachineryofhappiness.com/

[schlesingerlibrary]

Remembering civil rights activist, author, and historian Sue Bailey Thurman (1903-1996). In 1926 Thurman became the first African American to earn a BA in liberal arts and music from Oberlin College. She later served as national secretary of the YWCA where she established the first World Fellowship Committee. Thurman also played a critical role on the Archives Committee of the National Council of Negro Women, and was a founding editor of the Aframerican Women's Journal. For a list of specific issues held by Schlesinger Library see HOLLIS catalog: http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990013051910203941/catalog. To learn more about Thurman’s numerous accomplishments, see Women of Courage: an exhibition of photographs based on the Black Women Oral History Project by Judith Sedwick; sponsored by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1984.

[uncgarchives]

Clarence Cameron White (b Clarksville, TN, Aug 10, 1880; d New York, June 30, 1960) is among the most famous African-American composers and concert violinists. He began his violin studies in his youth at Howard University with Joseph Douglass, grandson of Frederick Douglass. He continued his studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, but left to accept a teaching position in Washington DC before his graduation. In 1903, White became faculty at the Washington DC Conservatory, a music school devoted to the education of African-American classical musicians. He would leave this position to continue his studies in Europe under Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Michael Zacharewitsch, and Raoul Laparra. White also taught at West Virginia State College and was music director of the Hampton Institute in Virginia. He authored two pedagogical works for violin.

Given the Jim Crow laws of the time, White performed most extensively in the northern states in the US. His wife, pianist Emma Azalia (Hackley) White frequently performed as his accompanist. As a composer, White’s style is considered Neo-Romantic, drawing upon themes from African-American spirituals and diaspora music. His operatic compositions were performed both at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House. Among the awards White earned during his career are two Rosenwald Fellowships, the Bispham Medal (1932) for his opera Ouanga, a Harmon Foundation award, the Benjamin Award (1955) for his orchestral Elegy, and two honorary degrees.

The primary Clarence Cameron White archive is held by Howard University, but the UNC Greensboro Special Collection & University Archives has two pieces composed by White, “Fantasy on Negro Tunes for Cello and Piano, op. 67" dedicated "in friendship to Kermit Moore," and the photographed piece, “Poeme for Orchestra.”

[clampart]

Pipo Nguyen-duy | (My) East of Eden

March 14 – April 27, 2019

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 14, 2019 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Artist Talk: Saturday, March 16, 2019 3:00 p.m.

ClampArt is pleased to announce “(My) East of Eden,” Pipo Nguyen-duy’s second solo show with the gallery.

While working as a Guggenheim fellow to document Vietnamese war amputees in 2012, Pipo Nguyen-duy began working on “(My) East of Eden” in the Mekong Delta. This project is the artist’s attempt to reclaim his childhood memories of growing up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Beyond serving as the means to tell his stories, Nguyen-duy intends for these images to address issues such as legacy, hope, and regeneration. Working with rural Vietnamese children in school uniforms, the artist created portraits and staged photographs reminiscent of 19th-century British landscape paintings where the environment and its inhabitants coexist in harmony. Against the backdrop of landscapes that bear the physical scars of war, “(My) East of Eden” is a celebration of the resilience and beauty of humanity. Forty years after the war, the once destroyed landscape with school children provides the perfect environment for photographs addressing regeneration, hope, history, and legacy. The uniformed kids placed in the idealized landscape without the presence of adults signify the beginning after the end. In one image a boy emerges from the lush landscape, while in another a boy and a girl lit by an ethereal light sit tranquilly by a duck pond that was once a bomb crater. These seemingly comforting images are in contrast to a photograph of school children playing war games and another portrait of a boy submerged in water as a drowning victim. With this body of work Nguyen-duy endeavors to weave a complex and multilayered narrative about the delicate attempt to rebuild a decimated paradise.

Pipo Nguyen-duy was born in Hue, Vietnam. Growing up within thirty kilometers of the demilitarized zone of the 18th Parallel, he describes hearing gunfire every day of his early life. He later immigrated to the United States as a political refugee.

Nguyen-duy has taken on many things in life in pursuit of his diverse interests. As a teenager in Vietnam, he competed as a national athlete in table tennis. He also spent some time living as a Buddhist monk in Northern India. Eventually Nguyen-duy earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics at Carleton College. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as a bartender and later as a nightclub manager. Finally, Nguyen-duy earned a Master of Arts in Photography, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, both from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque.

Nguyen-duy has received many awards and grants including a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography; a National Endowment for the the Arts; an En Foco Grant; a Professional Development Grant from the College Arts Association; a National Graduate Fellowship from the American Photography Institute; a Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission; a B. Wade and Jane B. White Fellowship in the Humanities at Oberlin College; and three Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council. He participated as an artist-in-residence at Monet’s garden through The Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Artists at Giverny Fellowship; as an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California; and participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program.

Nguyen-duy has lectured widely and his work is part of many public collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He is currently a professor teaching photography at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

For more information and images, please contact info@clampart.com, or visit the gallery website.

© Pipo Nguyen-duy, Boy with Plane, 2012, Archival pigment print

© Pipo Nguyen-duy, Circle, 2013, Archival pigment print

© Pipo Nguyen-duy, Girl by the River, 2013, Archival pigment print

© Pipo Nguyen-duy, Mekong Flight, 2013, Archival pigment print

© Pipo Nguyen-duy, Boy in Water, 2013, Archival pigment print

[oberlincollegearchives]

This Week in Oberlin History: The Dedication of Second Congregational Church

Many people know of First Congregational Church, but did you know there was a Second Church as well?

In May of 1860, over 100 members of First Congregational Church split off to form Second Congregational Church. The Oberlin College Trustees agreed for the Church to be placed on College property on West College Street in exchange for Oberlin students being able to worship freely on Sundays.

151 years ago on October 23, 1870, Second Congregational Church was dedicated and remained in the building on West College Street until 1920, when First and Second Church combined and worshiped in Finney Chapel until renovations could be completed in the First Church building on Main Street.

The College purchased the building in 1927, removed the steeple, and used the building as the home for the Wright Zoological Laboratory until 1959. The building is no longer standing and now Bibbins Hall, part of the Conservatory of Music, stands on the corner of West College Street where Second Congregational Church once stood.

[oberlincollegelibraries]

To Katharine!

When Katharine Wright fell in love with Henry Haskell and married him in November 1926, the event was bittersweet. Bitter because the brother, with whom she had shared most of her life and love, declined to attend her wedding, distraught that she had chosen connubial bliss over sisterly devotion. The story is told that Orville Wright refused to speak to his sister for two years until tragedy humbled him.

The man Katharine chose to marry was an Oberlin classmate, a man with a brilliant career with the Kansas City Star.  Described as having a "high standards of taste and literary merit"  as well as being "politically honest", Henry J. Haskell rose through the ranks of the Star to become one of its owners when he and five others bought the paper for $11,000,000 at the demise of the original founder William Rockhill Nelson in 1915. 

Katharine was Henry's second wife. His first wife, another Oberlin classmate named Isabel Cummings, died in 1923. Sadly, Katharine's marriage to Henry lasted less than four years. In a twist of fate, Henry became ill and was scheduled to have surgery in Minnesota.  Katharine naturally accompanied him to Minnesota only to catch a cold, which later turned into pneumonia with complications. She died shortly afterwards in March 1929.  Henry recovered and would marry for a third time in 1931. However, he immortalized his relationship with Katharine when he commissioned a signor Petrilli to carve a replica of Verrochio's Boy with a Dolphin as a tribute to her. 

The fountain, erected in the summer of 1931, sits near the Oberlin's Allen Memorial Art Museum. It is a perfect tribute to a woman who was instrumental in cementing her brothers' destiny in aviation history, a woman who became Oberlin College's second female member of the Board of Trustees, a woman who was comfortable in the presence of world leaders as much as she was in teaching Latin to children in the Dayton public schools. To Katharine!

For more images of the Katharine Wright Haskell Fountain, visit the Oberlin College Archives’ Campus Views Collection.

[wobc-fm]

TECH 350: Digitizing and Archiving WOBC

Words by Natalie Mattson

This semester, the TECH 350 class has undertaken the challenge of cleaning out WOBC to digitize and archive important findings. Comprised of many WOBC staff and board members, there is much enthusiasm from the class to produce something that will not only document the station’s history but also with the hopes that this project will continue growing with the future of WOBC. There has been quite a broad range of discoveries: from a letter addressed to future station directions written in 1959, to a Soviet News segment from 1990. The documents that we’ve found have not only given us more insight into the history WOBC, but also the history of Oberlin. Some of my personal favorites that we have found include air maps that display the proposed air frequency of WOBC and other surrounding stations. 

WOBC proposal to FCC for expanding the service contour from the late 1950s. 

Current Service Contour for WOBC from FCC website.

Some of the maps were highlighted with color, while others were in black and white. Our class has also compiled a whole folder that consists of complaints sent to WOBC, from unhappy staff members to the college we used to share the frequency with, and most consistently, the FCC. We came across a petition that WOBC had created in the late 1980s, urging people to support WOBC broadcasting the hearing of the Oberlin 59, which was a group of about 60 students protesting Oberlin’s investment in South Africa. This petition was necessary due to FCC guidelines requiring WOBC to stay impartial on political matters; the petition was pages long and filled with signatures of students and faculty at the time. There were even some familiar names to us, mostly of faculty who are still in the Oberlin area. TECH 350 is working to collect stories from previous members of WOBC to provide context and paint a clearer picture of the documents we have found. WOBC constantly changes based on the people involved, and this class has been a great way to catalog the character of the station throughout the years.

[dk-thrive]

Hold it. Don't move. That's you forever.

God snaps your picture: don't look away - this room right now, your face tilted exactly as it is before you can think or control it. Go ahead, let it betray all the secret emergencies and still hold that partial disguise you call your character. Even your lip, they say, the way it curves or doesn't, or can't decide, will deliver bales of evidence. The camera, wide open, stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years or so - after that you have become whatever the veneer is, all the way through. Now you want to explain. Your mother was a certain - how to express it? - influence. Yes. And your father, whatever he was, you couldn't change that. No. And your town of course had its limits. Go on, keep talking: Hold it. Don't move. That's you forever.

- William Stafford, “Archival Print” in Field Issue 40 (Oberlin College., 1989)

[clarencewardartlibrary]

The Bacon Arbor

Less than a block down North Main Street, just past the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the Clarence Ward Art Library, sits a giant clump of foliage known to many as “that big tree outside the Allen”. Unruly but inviting, the European Weeping Beech tree’s winding branches and leaves form a canopy around its trunk, which is scored with the initials and names of Obies past.

Despite its sage-like appearance the tree is relatively young compared to much of the Oberlin College campus, having been planted in 1954. The Bacon Arbor is the wooden structure constructed to help protect the tree; it contains a plaque; here is an excerpt:

The Bacon Arbor

You are under the canopy of a European Weeping Beech, fagus sylvatica pendula. The Bacon Arbor, which protects the beech, is dedicated to Carl Bacon ‘28 and his wife, Charlotte Bacon who gave to Oberlin College the plantings surrounding Hall Auditorium.

Oberlin College is duplicating, as far as possible, the natural requirement of the Weeping Beech. Annually the tree is mulched with hardwood bark, and its own leaves are allowed to accumulate. This care mimics the development of forest litter, providing the tree with cool, moist, and fertilized roots in summer and a thermal blanket in winter.

The forest environment protects beech trees from wind and storm damage. When used as an ornamental tree, the Weeping Beech must be encouraged to retain its natural shape and balance. 

The Bacon Arbor was designed to direct pedestrians along a straight course while maintaining the natural balance of the tree. Moreover, the Arbor protects the Beech’s roots by restricting access to the mulched area. The Weeping Beech’s roots must grow in oxygen--rich, loose forest litter and consequently are very close to the surface of the ground. Were the mulch and soil underneath this shallow-rooted tree to become compacted, the tree would suffocate.

Despite the Weeping Beech’s growth since its planting in 1954 it is still very young and will continue to grow for many decades. 

Because of the Bacon Arbor and the paved walk and benches, people and the Weeping Beech can live in harmony for years to come, with the tree growing larger, and the pleasure of seeing it becoming ever greater.

1985

So who was Carl Bacon? According to the Oberlin College Archives, he attended Oberlin from 1921-22, going on to finance the creation of the Oberlin Inn and the landscaping around Hall Auditorium. He resided in the Inn during the 1980s.

After his wife, Charlotte, died in 1980, he donated funds to create the arbor in her memory; Carl himself died in 1988.

To this day, many are still drawn to the Weeping Beech and its welcoming canopy; Obies can be seen hanging out, reading, and even hosting a capella rehearsals in its shade. So, it’s safe to say that Carl got his wish.

Source: Bacon Arbor.  Architecture of Oberlin.  Oberlin College Archives 

[contrabassconversations]

561: College Audition Prep

This episode is a rebroadcast of one of those astoundingly complex projects that I love digging into! 

We’re featuring questions from double bass student Baylee Brown (still a high school student at the time of this recording and now a student at Boston University), which are answered by 27 noted double bass faculty members.  This idea was suggested by University of Texas at Arlington bass faculty member Jack Unzicker, who help design and execute this project.

A big shout-out to Baylee, Jack, and all of the faculty who took their valuable time to answer these questions!

Here’s the list of questions and the order in which they are covered:

What are the advantages and disadvantages to attending a conservatory vs. a university?

How many schools should I audition for?

What are some common preparation mistakes that you see auditioning students making?

Besides the bass teacher, what other factors should I consider when comparing schools?

Other than Performance, Music Ed, and Jazz, what other options are available for undergrads?

How early should students start preparing for their college auditions?

I am interested in auditioning at six schools; is there any flexibility in audition requirements that could help lessen the amount of combined repertoire for all of the schools?

How can I keep from getting overwhelmed by the audition repertoire requirements from the different schools for which I’m auditioning?

How do I ask for a lesson with the teacher for whom I’m auditioning? Do I pay them/ask about payment?

I play the German bow; how important is it that I study with a German bow teacher?

Learn more about each of the faculty members and their programs through the links below:

George Amorim - University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Andrew Anderson - Roosevelt University

Adam Booker - Appalachian State University

Jeff Bradetich - University of North Texas

Susan Cahill - University of Denver

Timothy Cobb - Juilliard School of Music

Paul Ellison - Rice University

John Floeter - Northern Illinois University

Diana Gannett - University of Michigan (emeritus)

Kieran Hanlon - State University of New York at Fredonia

Chris Hanulik - University of California, Los Angeles

Caitlyn Kamminga - University of Trinidad and Tobago

Douglas Mapp - Rowan University

Gaelen McCormick - Nazareth College

Leigh Mesh - Bard College

Orin O’Brien - Manhattan School of Music

Volkan Orhon - University of Iowa

Scott Pingel - San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Andrew Raciti - Northwestern University

Brian Perry - Southern Methodist University

Catalin Rotaru - Arizona State University

Tracy Rowell - Oberlin College

Donovan Stokes - Shenandoah University

James VanDemark - Eastman School of Music

Nicholas Walker - Ithaca College

DaXun Zhang - University of Texas at Austin

Learn more about over 100 other United States college double bass programs in our colleges guide!

  Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle!

Contrabass Conversations is sponsored by:

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Contrabass Conversations production team:

Jason Heath, host

Michael Cooper and Steve Hinchey, audio editing

Mitch Moehring, audio engineer

Trevor Jones, publication and promotion

Krista Kopper, archival and cataloging

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