d have been occupied with hopes
rather than achievements. Not that it would be literally true to say
that music was wholly a negligible quantity in the homes of higher
education until the twentieth century, but the seat assigned to it in
the few institutions where it was found was an obscure and lowly one,
and the influence radiating therefrom reached so small a fragment of
the academic community that no one who was not engaged in a careful,
sympathizing search could have been aware of its existence. It was
less than twenty years ago that a prominent musical journal printed
the very moderate statement that "the youth who is graduated at Yale,
Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Amherst, Cornell,
or Columbia has not even a smattering of music beyond the music of the
college glee and mandolin club; and of course to cultivate that is the
easiest road to musical perdition." One who looks at those
institutions now, and attempts to measure the power and reach of their
departments of music, will not deny the right to the satisfaction
which their directors--men of national influence--must feel, and would
almost expect them to echo the words of ancient Simeon. The contrast
is indeed extraordinary, and, I believe, unparalleled. The work of
these men, and of others who could be named with them, has not been
merely development, but might even be called creation. Any one who
attempts to keep track of the growth of musical education in our
colleges, universities, and also in the secondary schools of the
present day, will find that the bare statistics of this increase, to
say nothing of a study of the problems involved, will engage much more
than his hours of leisure. Music, which not long ago held tolerance
only as an outside interest, confined to the sphere of influence of
the glee club and the chapel choir, is now, in hundreds of educational
institutions, accorded the privileges due to those arts and sciences
whose function in historic civilization, and potency in scholarly
discipline and liberal culture, give them domicile by obvious and
inalienable right.

=History of the subject of music in the American college curriculum=

The first university professorships in music were founded at Harvard
in 1876, and at the University of Pennsylvania at about the same time.
Vassar College established musical courses in 1867, Oberlin in 1869.
Harvard took the lead in granting credit for certain courses in music
toward the deg