History of Chatham-Hamilton Collaboration
The first records mentioning Hamilton College at all in the Chatham student newspaper date to the 1940s. The Campus Comments section of The Arrow on September 20, 1944 (shown to the left) contains a tongue-in-cheek comment on the lack of men at Hamilton College due to their service in World War II, as well as their absence at Chatham, which was then an all-women's college.
The Chatham Choir has a long history of collaboration with other men's choirs, among them Lehigh University, Franklin and Marshall College, Villanova University (then College), the Princeton University Glee Club, Washington and Jefferson College, Wabash College, and more. Precisely when the collaboration with Hamilton College Choir began is unknown, but judging from concert promotions in the student newspapers, it was not until 1964. To the right is pictured the Chatham Touring Choir, as it was then called, in the winter of 1963 with Lorenzo Malfatti.
These early years of partnership between the choirs—the 1960s and early 1970s—were also those with the highest frequency of collaboration. Some newspaper announcements for joint concerts with Hamilton are pictured below.
Carl Apone, music editor for The Pittsburgh Press in 1972, interviewed six Chatham students before the tour. He touched on a subject that might make eyebrows wag upon first viewing the photo album: love. He remarked that “the president of the Chatham choir a few years back married a Hamilton singer, and there are ‘some understandings’ among the present choirs.” Indeed, some photographs in the album show kinship between members of the choirs. Apone also remarked that the tour was a swan song for the collaboration between the Hamilton and Chatham choirs: Kirkland College was declared Hamilton’s sister institution in 1968. It ran independently for ten years, although heavily reliant on Hamilton for financial support, and finally merged with Hamilton as a co-educational institution in 1978. According to Apone, Hamilton “will have to curtail its visits to all-women college campuses. They will be allowed only one such trip next season. And they remained faithful. They voted to come to Chatham for a joint concert.”
Indeed, the history of collaborative concerts between the Chatham Choir and other institutions reflected the trend in higher education at the time: co-education. Since it was decades before Chatham became co-ed, the number of institutions with which the Chatham Choir performed concerts dwindled. The chart below shows the years that some popular collaborators began admitting women students.
