When Benjamin Wheeler invited Charles Seeger to come to Cal to teach music, the university president promised the young professor $3,000 a year. He didn't promise him a place to teach it.
When Seeger arrived in 1912, he found, in the words of his biographer, Ann Pescatello, that "there was no real music department." The state legislature had hired one John Frederick Wolle to lead the orchestra in 1905. Wolle held classes in the Berkeley YMCA and the in the foyer of the Hearst Mining Building. When Seeger's classes got underway, the university offered him what he later called an "old, smelly house" on Bancroft.
Charles Seeger attends a Berkeley celebration in honor of his 90th birthday (c. 1977).
Rulan Chao Pian
The nascent music department's grim digs reflected the precarious position of the arts and humanities at Berkeley in the school's early years. The music department was first established to serve the extracurricular interests of students in the Department of Agriculture. Mining, industry, and forestry were seen as the truly important subjects to be taught.
Seeger set about to change all that. His rigorous approach to musical scholarship would set the tone for a department that would grow to be one of the world's leading centers for the study of music.
After graduating from Harvard in 1908, Seeger spent four years in Europe to train as a conductor. He loved the work but soon discovered he had started to lose his hearing. He did not go deaf, but he felt his ear was no longer sensitive enough for him to successfully lead a symphony. He turned to composing.
He also embraced progressive ideas about the history of music reinforced by the left-wing intelligentsia he encountered in Berkeley. Seeger questioned the "evolutionary" theory of music history taught at other American universities--when it was taught at all.
According to the prevailing dogma of the time, the music of Bach and Mozart represented the culmination of a process of perpetual artistic improvement. The "primitive" music of the ancients had evolved into folk music, which in turn evolved into the symphonic works of artistic greatness worth teaching at a university. Folk and popular music would die out, the theory went, as more were educated in the music they should be listening to.
From his first days at Berkeley, folk music played a role in what Seeger taught. His first music history class included a performance of folk songs in 17 languages from around the world.
But the classical repertoire would still provide the mainstay of the more rigorous curriculum Seeger worked to initiate, though with a revolutionary emphasis on the music as it was being performed in the present day. According to Pescatello, the structure of the music department Seeger proposed would "become the basis of all musicological study in America."
Seeger saw his approach to music as scientific. A university should apply a systematic approach to music history, theory, criticism, and performance--an idea music departments take for granted today.
Seeger also saw to it that the library start a music section that included books as well as scores. He vastly improved the quality of Sunday music programs at the Greek Theater that attracted thousands under his mentoring. He composed cutting-edge works often performed by students. The best-known may be his compositions for the Parthenia, legendary outdoor masques performed each spring by female students in the Faculty Glade.
By the 1915-1916 school year, a full-fledged department of music was enrolling hundreds of students in its classes. Seeger's seemingly boundless energy kept him busy composing, performing, teaching, and doling out course requirements for the new music major. But it also got him into trouble.
As the First World War engulfed the United States in debate, Seeger signed up as a conscientious objector. He grew more active in the International Workers of the World movement. His activities brought him into conflict with Dean of the Faculties Charles Gayley.1 Gayley was an Englishman, and thus ardently anti-German. Seeger left Berkeley for a sabbatical in 1918. In 1919 he resigned.
For the rest of his life, Seeger would continue to devote himself to music and scholarship. He led the music program of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. He would father seven children, including Pete Seeger, famed leader of the 1960s folk revival. And he would return to California, finally, in the 1950s, where at UCLA he helped establish the world's first formal program in ethnomusicology.
Seeger returned to Berkeley in 1977 for a celebration marking his 90th birthday. He mingled with young professors in the department he had nurtured, many of whom still teach at UC Berkeley today. He played music, attended conferences, and went to parties. Photographs from the event show an able-bodied man with a gleam in his eye, ready to live another 90 years.
Seeger died at his home in Connecticut in 1979. He was 92.
1 - Correction, May 3, 2005: The original version of the article incorrectly said that Gayley became university president after Wheeler. Gayley became part of a three-member administrative board that led the university after Wheeler's retirement while the Regents selected a new president. David Prescott Barrows succeeded Wheeler as UC President.
– Marcus Wohlsen