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DAVISON GOES TO EUROPE FOR YEAR'S SABBATICAL

KOUSSEVITSKY SAID IT WAS "BEST CHORUS IN WORLD"

When the Glee Club paid farewell to Dr. A. T. Davison '06 at its annual dinner at the Harvard Club on last Thursday evening the University was first generally apprised of the fact that Dr. Davison would be absent from Cambridge on his sabbatical next year.

Dr. Davison will leave next October for England and France. During his absence G. W. Woodworth '24 will conduct the Glee Club. Mr. Woodworth sang under Dr. Davison for four years and has acted as conductor on many occasions when Dr. Davison was unable to be present. He is considered one of the most promising of the young men whom the latter has trained at Harvard.

European Trip Added To Fame

When Dr. Davison first came to the University he found the Glee Club an ordinary college singing society. He has made it the most widely known and highly praised organization of its kind in the United States. Year after year Harvard won the intercollegiate singing competition, and year after year music critics heaped praises upon Dr. Davison's leadership. The Glee Club trip to Europe two summers ago was the culminating point of his growing fame when a national reputation was widened to an international one. Throughout Europe he and the Glee Club were acclaimed as they had been in America.

This year the accomplishment which has attracted more attention than any other was the Glee Club performance of Brahm's "Requiem." M. Serge Koussevitsky, Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said after the performance. "Harvard has the best trained chorus I have ever heard in any country of the world . . . . Dr. Davison with his Glee Club has done what countless musicians have only partially succeeded in doing; he has instilled into his singers real feeling for the music they work with."

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H. T. Parker '98, music critic, in a review of the same performance, speaking of the immense amount of preparation involved, said. "In such devotion will a musician, a man, a leader, of Dr. Davison's temper pursue such endless and exacting toll. Nobody calls it art, nobody names it uplift. . . .Self expression and release are the better words with Brahms of the Requiem for channel and Dr. Davison for steersman."

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