Early History
In June 1853, Eben Tourjée, at the time a nineteen-year-old music teacher from Providence, Rhode Island, made his first attempt to found a music conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. He met with a group of Boston's most influential musical leaders to discuss a school based on the conservatories of Europe. The group included John Sullivan Dwight, an influential music critic, Dr. J. Baxter Upham, president of the Harvard Musical Association, and Oliver Ditson, a prominent music publisher. The group ultimately rejected Tourjée's plans, arguing that it was a poor idea to open a conservatory amidst the nation's political and economic uncertainty that would lead up to the American Civil War.
Tourjée made his next attempt in December 1866, when he again met with a group of Boston's top musicians and music patrons. Among Upham, Ditson, and Dwight at this meeting were Carl Zerrahn, a popular Boston conductor, and Charles Perkins, a prominent arts patron. In the thirteen-year interim, Tourjee had founded three music schools in Rhode Island, and this time was able to win over his audience. The men agreed to help Tourjee, and The New England Conservatory officially opened on February 18, 1867. It consisted of seven rooms rented above Music Hall off Tremont Street in downtown Boston. In 1870 it moved to the former St. James Hotel in Franklin Square in the South End.
Read more about this topic: New England Conservatory
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)