by
Herrold E. Headley
B.S., M.M., Ph.D.

An absorbing and immensely useful study for any serious devotee of 20th-century music, “The Choral Works of Arthur Honegger” began life as a Ph.D dissertation and has now been edited and revised for publication. Apart from the usual academic sources, the author draws on journalism, concert programs, pamphlets, interviews, and, uniquely, his own correspondence with Honegger’s widow and with others close to the composer. However, it is Headley’s gifts as a singer and conductor which breathe life into his insights and analyses of Honegger’s music and which make this far more than just an academic study. Erin Headley

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Herrold Headley

Herrold Headley earned a bachelor of science degree in music at Ohio State University and a master’s in music at Indiana University. He completed his doctorate in musicology at the University of North Texas under the guidance of a distinguished faculty that included the musicologist Helen Hewitt (of Odhecaton fame), with whom he studied. Hewitt was compiler of the first four editions of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology.

Headley’s first teaching position was at Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth. He became professor of voice at the University of Arkansas in 1951, where he took over the direction of the choruses and had abundant opportunities to conduct many major choral works and tour with the university chorus. In 1959 he moved to Southern Illinois University’s new development at Alton, Illinois (now a large university at Edwardsville). There he founded the 150-voice Chorophonic Society, which in only its second year was invited to sing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the St. Louis Symphony, an invitation extended every year after while Headley was director.

In 1963 Headley was called to the University of Maine to become head of the music department and professor of music, and to occupy the distinguished Sprague Chair in music. He introduced the first music degree program there, and in less than four years had set up an enviable and solid academic and performance degree program, a new music building and library, a university chorus and orchestra, and a highly skilled faculty whose members gave recitals on a regular basis at home and throughout the state. His entrepreneurial skills took him to New York City to audition and engage renowned artists for his newly created large-scale concert series. This not only benefitted the student body, but also thousands of people from the community and from all over the state, many of whom would otherwise never have experienced such music-making. The university president said of him, “Herrold Headley has done more for music at the university and the state of Maine than has happened in the last 100 years.”

Over his career, Dr. Headley’s choruses appeared with the St. Louis Symphony, St. Louis Municipal Orchestra, Corpus Christi Symphony, Tulsa Philharmonic, and Dallas Symphony Orchestra in major works: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Haydn’s Creation, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Verdi’s Requiem and others.

Having finally retired from teaching in 1984, Herrold Headley subsequently mastered the art of celestial navigation and then spent several years sailing the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean while writing for the Waterway Guide. He also completely revised and updated the seventh edition of the Primer of Navigation by George W. Mixter (W. W. Norton), the most authoritative text on the subject.

As a true Renaissance man, Headley has had his hand in the fine arts since his youth, in painting, ceramics and design; his full-time interest now is rare-book restoration and fine bookbinding. He and Ruth Ball Headley were married in 2002, and live active lives in retirement in Camden, Maine.

Ruth, too, has a fascinating musical background of her own which is relevant to the Honegger theme. She grew up in Munich in the 1920s, 30s and 40s in a thoroughly exciting musical atmosphere. Her father, Heinz Ball, was a Wunderkind and became a distinguished concert pianist. He was a favorite student of Max Reger, who would often ask Ball to play compositions too difficult for the master himself. Her uncle, Hugo Ball (also a fine pianist), was a writer and co-founder of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916.