Music in a Small Town
Pooh Sprague listens to family friend Dr. Gene Chamberlin play the piano, circa 1954.
musical INfluences in Hillsboro, New Hampshire
My parents grew up in small cities, and first worked in New York City before relocating their young family to a town of fewer than 2100 people in rural New Hampshire. My mother loved musical theatre and opera, my dad symphonic music, a love encouraged by his favorite course in music history at Williams College. The composers he loved played nightly on the “Vick” (as we called our RCA Victrola), as music to lull the children to sleep. Both my brother Ray and I especially loved the Mozart 23rd Piano Concerto, which became part of our background noise for life. I can still remember each of the three movements on one side of a 78 rpm record, and the pause, scratchy noises, and then the “thunk” of the next side sliding down the spindle on the changer before the next movement commenced.
The piano exercises learned by the author at age six.
At home in New Hampshire music of all sorts was our background: arrangements for orchestra of theater tunes, and classical music: Bach, Mozart, Handel, and the hit tunes from the AM radio tuned to WBZ. Just before our move, our Grampy Sprague had given the family a Knabe console piano, and each of us three kids in turn began piano lessons at the age of six.
Ray and I began our lessons with one of the two piano teachers in town, Mrs. Berger and our Miss Porter. Miss Porter lived within easy walking distance of our elementary school, and we would go after school for lessons, then be picked up by our mother afterwards. It was she who introduced us to Middle C and the joys of John Thompson’s Teaching Little Fingers to Play, in which you worked your way steadily to a triumphant finale with “From a Wigwam”—both hands!! Youngest brother Pooh at this time was still a toddler and could listen but not reach the keys yet.
Sadly, Miss Porter died unexpectedly in my third and Ray’s first year, and I believe Mrs. Berger had a full pupil load. So our parents found an English gentleman who would teach piano at our house, which was ideal. I believe Wednesday was lesson day. Frank Heffer had worked for NBC in New York and retired to Warner, New Hampshire, when he began giving piano lessons. He was a tall, rangy man with a rumbly bass voice, to my recollection, and continued the John Thompson curriculum, but also allowed us to range farther afield. Our neighbor Birgit Baldwin made us a gift of a pile of her piano music, including a rare Breitkopf & Haertel edition of Beethoven’s complete Piano Sonatas (the plates had been melted during World War I, Mr. Heffer told me), as well as Chopin and Sibelius, and my Sprague aunts passed on the anthologies they’d worked with in the ’20s. It was easy to be diverted to work with the “originals” —my mother prized our learning the original compositions of famous composers, rather than simplified editions. Mr. Heffer was primarily an organist; as organs lack a sustain pedal, he played the piano rather heavy-handedly with hands firmly on the keys at all times and holding down the notes.
It was an era when piano lessons were part of most childhoods in Hillsboro. Community music was common, with amateur performances, church choirs, and a town band which boasted the longest continuous existence in the state. In our public schools, each classroom contained a reliable upright piano, and most (possibly all) of the teachers had some knowledge of the songs which formed every kid’s repertoire. These were often patriotic ditties, and our state song, “Old New Hampshire,” which we learned in fourth grade along with the names of the counties and the cities of the Granite State.
Isabel Butterfield Nichols, the district music teacher for Hillsboro-Deering in the 1950s.
The school district’s music teacher, Mrs. Isabel Nichols, was a gifted musician, accompanist, pianist, and conductor. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she supported music performance in not just HIllsborough but over time also in the neighboring towns of Antrim, Bennington and Peterborough. She visited our classrooms once a week, put on musical plays with elementary students, and staged Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with the high school. I’ve been a singer most of my life, and though we took Mrs. Nichols for granted in our early school days, I recall that she taught challenging choral repertory to the high school and was fearless in extracting good singing from all of us. I can’t remember very much about music in elementary school, but as I grew older I became aware of her influence. We began work on four-part choral singing in seventh grade and advanced through high school. Looking back, I realize that her achievements in such a small school district were miraculous.
She left our school around 1960 and was succeeded by Joan Brewer, a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire (which awarded conservatory degrees as well as baccalaureates in science and liberal arts). Joan was an able choral director but also an instrumentalist, playing flute and French horn but conversant with all other instruments. (There was no string program in Hillsborough at that time, although there has been since.) Hillsborough was her first teaching job after graduation from UNH, and as she was young, energetic, and pretty, she attracted a fair amount of male attention; that proved an advantage in helping to expand the tenor and bass sections in the chorus. She also was the first to form a school band, which delighted the townsfolk, and taught every instrument needed. She was enthusiastic, and after a predictably wobbly start the band members progressed rapidly. She also added solo and small ensemble performances to our concerts. By my senior year Ray had progressed rapidly on the clarinet, and performed the slow movement from the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in its original form with my piano-reduction accompaniment at our spring concert in 1962.
There were performances other than the curricular concerts, too. At Hillsboro-Deering it was traditional for the seniors to put on a cabaret in the fall, called “Club [fill in the year of graduation],” and all seniors became involved, bringing whatever talent they offered to the mix. My class sponsored a “Roaring Twenties” show at which I performed a highly suspect version of “Rhapsody in Blue” in a homemade flapper dress. Both my brothers had folk groups, and I’m sure those formed a part of their classes’ cabarets. Parents and schoolmates attended and sat at small tables in the gym/auditorium. I think refreshments were available.
I left Hillsboro-Deering that June, but I believe Ms. Brewer was there a bit longer, to be followed by Bill Chaplin, a Boston University graduate. My brothers tell me that he was not as strong in choral performance, but was a knowledgeable and inspiring instrumental instructor who greatly expanded the capacity and sophistication of the band repertoire. I am unsure if he had any successors as music director before Pooh graduated. I know that Mr. Chaplin had a major influence on both of my brothers.
The Advanced Studies Program at St. Paul’s School also influenced Ray and me. At that time the high church Episcopal boarding school required attendance at daily chapel, even of the public school students from all over New Hampshire who attended the summer program. Sunday service (Morning Prayer, also required) was choral. There were plenty of us who volunteered for the choir, and we worked from the green book of anthems found in so many Episcopal choir rooms. We also sang a couple of St. Paul’s specialties, including a wonderful Te Deum composed by former and just-retired (in 1961) choirmaster Channing LeFebvre.
Our choirmaster/organist, Norman Blake, was exceptional, and St. Paul’s main Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul boasted an organ with more than 3,000 pipes. Best of all, Mr. Blake often practiced in the mid-afternoon, and we were welcome to listen. I loved lying on the floor of the nave and just letting the music surround me. Once a summer, Mr. Blake would give a concert, and I think the organ concert was still on offer when at least one of my daughters attended the ASP years later (although Mr. Blake, alas, was no longer at St. Paul’s).
