Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn as a Community Resource | Page 14

People and Happenings
Music, Musicians and
Mount Auburn
The Friends of Mount Auburn presented a
special music event in Bigelow Chapel on June 20 featuring
Soprano Jean Danton and Pianist Thomas Stumpf. During
the hour long concert, Ms. Danton, a soloist with Handel
and Hayden Society, Oregon Bach Festival, Boston Baroque
and the Boston Pops Orchestra, and Mr. Stumpf, who has
performed across four continents and appeared with the
Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Boston Pops Orchestra and
numerous other ensembles,
celebrated some of the
notable poets and com-
posers now buried at
Mount Auburn. Their
program featured poetic
verse set to music and
included the works of
poets Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Julia Ward
Howe, Amy Lowell and
David McCord. The
program also included a
wonderful and crowd-
pleasing performance of Edward Ballantine’s “Variations on
‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’” by Mr. Stumpf (Mary Sawyer
Tyler, the inspiration for the poem, is buried at the Cemetery).
Program notes, written by musicologist Steven Ledbetter,
helped to explain Boston’s literary and musical circles and
how these collaborative works between poet and composer
came to be. The wine
reception following the
concert allowed concert
attendees to mingle and
chat with the musicians.
What began as a single
concert to celebrate the
works of composers now
buried at Mount Auburn
during our 175th An-
niversary in 2006-2007
Musicologist Steven Ledbetter (left), and
has since become an
soloist Jean Danton (right) with Mount
annual event. While
Auburn’s Bree Harvey.
preparing for that first
concert in June 2006,
Ms. Danton uncovered a wealth of material composed by
figures now buried at Mount Auburn. So much, in fact,
that it could not all be used in one program. Ms. Dan-
ton and Mr. Stumpf have since prepared two additional
programs for the Cemetery. As has been the case with the
previous two concerts, some of the pieces performed this
June were uncataloged works discovered by Ms. Danton in
the archives of the New England Conservatory that have
been performed or heard for the first time in decades. With
even more discoveries, there is no doubt that Ms. Danton
and Mr. Stumpf will join us again in the future to celebrate
some of Mount Auburn’s musical figures and continue to
bring this music back to life.
Musicologists all agree that Boston’s most lasting impression
on the cultural identity of the nation was its importance in
establishing American music in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Many of the individuals who helped to define
Boston’s musical life and establish the city as the epicenter
of American music—including composers George Whit-
field Chadwick (1854–1931), John Knowles Paine (1839–
1906), Arthur Foote (1853–1937), and Mabel Wheeler
Daniels (1878–1971)—are now buried