Whittlesey, Orramel, 1801-1876

Music Vale Seminary, the first music school established in this country, was founded by Orramel Whittlesey in Salem, Connecticut. The date of its founding is given variously as 1835, 1836, and 1839. This discrepancy is attributed to what Orramel Whittlesey describes as the "modest beginning" of the school. It was a boarding school for young women from across the country known consecutively as Mr. Whittlesey's School, Salem Normal Academy of Music, and finally as Music Vale Seminary and Normal Academy of Music. The student body averaged eighty each year, reaching a peak enrollment of one hundred pupils.

The curriculum included both instrumental and theoretical studies. Lessons were given in voice culture, organ, piano, harp, and guitar, while the theory teaching included instruction in notation, harmony, thoroughbass, and the general laws of counterpoint and fugue. One student's mother even discusses her daughter's course in piano tuning in a letter. The courses were entirely musical, and although the school prepared its students to be teachers, it functioned like a music conservatory. Whittlesey writes, "Music is distinct from all other parts of a young lady's education ... there is not needed an intimate acquaintance with Botany or Chemistry ... Our aim is not to make merely superficial players, of those committed to our care, but thorough pianists, skilled alike in theory and practice." In fact, the school's motto (borrowed from William Pitt) was, "If it be that I have done so much, it is that I have done one thing at a time."

...