By 1919 the club officers decided there was not enough time during rehearsals to sing "Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day" and determined to convert the Club into a genuinely ambitious choral organization. Davison agreed with the plan to separate from the instrument clubs and the big switch from "the Bullfrog on the Bank" to Bach was made.

The first reactions to the move were varied with some critics and alumni applauding Davison's guidance and others calling him an imposter, stating that the Glee Club was now a schola cantorum, devoting itself too seriously to ambitious music.

The decisive victory for Davison's new Glee Club came in 1921 when the French premier invited the Club to give concerts in France. The unprecedented European tour of France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany established the Club's worldwide reputation and earned Davison the Paume Academique medal from the French government.

Locally the Club gained prestige performing in concerts with the Boston Symphony and soloists Fritz Kreisler and Frieda Hempel. Meanwhile the Boston critics began to applaud Davison's new reformation in musical education. In 1926 Davison published "Music Education In America" which substantiated the fact that his achievements were not just "unusual stunts."

The book again stated Davison's old philosophy of music in schools: "The really worthwhile products of music education . . . are a love for the best and a will to participate in it."

That year Randall Thompson '20 announced that, according to a survey of all college music departments in the association of American colleges, "over a million copies of Dr. Davison's song arrangements in sheet music have been sold", and that bound volumes of these arrangements had found their way into 300 colleges.

In addition to this, Richard C. Cabot '90, at an address at the 75th anniversary celebration of the Glee Club, announced that 'public school music, church music, and the music produced when people sing round a piano at home--all these are now strongly influenced by the "Concord Series", for which Dr. Davison and Mr. Surette are responsible . . . bound volumes of this series have been sold in Switzerland, Mexico, Korca, England, Ireland, Palestine, and Canada."

Protests against the new Glee Club arose for the last time around 1926 when it refused to sing in the annual intercollegiate Glee Club contest because it considered the contest's prize song, which all competitors had to sing, "inferior music" and "sentimental mush."

Membership Increases

Commented Overseer Thomas W. Slocum '90: "I would rather have one sportsman than a thousand yellow-streaked Carusos."

The song, entitled "Lamp in The West" with music by Horatio W. Parker and words by Ella Higginson, began in this vein:

"Venus has lit her lamp

low in the purple west,

Breathing soft and mellow light

upon the sea's full breast."