GEORGE SHERMAN DICKINSON
1888 - l964
On November 6 of this year, George Sherman Dickinson
passed away in his home at Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
where he had lived since his retirement from Vassar
College in 1953. Mr. Dickinson spent the greater part
of his teaching career at Vassar, where he was a member
of the faculty for thirty-seven years. For twelve of
these years he was Chairman of the Department of Music.
Before this, he had taught for six years at the Oberlin
Conservatory, where he had received the greater part of
his professional training. Oberlin College conferred
the honorary degree of Doctor of Music on him in 1935.
Mr. Dickinson was generally regarded as one of the most
distinguished teachers on the Vassar faculty, and his
activities during his long period of service here were
manifold; many of them continue to affect the course of
the work in music at Vassar in both direct and indirect
ways. He was personally responsible for planning, as a
whole and in detail, Skinner Hall of Music, which was
finished in 1931; and time has proved the soundness as
well as the constructive imagination of his planning.
In addition to his teaching, Mr. Dickinson was also the
Music Librarian of the College, and it is he who developed
the Music Library (which is appropriately named after him)
into one of the finest college libraries of music in the
United States. There are thousands of Vassar alumnae who
still remember him gratefully and affectionately as the
professor of Music 140, a course that he developed in
unusually effective ways, and which served as a model for
similar courses in other colleges and universities.
Mr. Dickinson was widely known for his scholarly writings
in the fields of music theory, music aesthetics, and music
as a subject of study in higher education. In his books
and articles in these areas he revealed a first-rate mind
at work, and whatever he treated was done so with origin-
ality. Like the man who wrote them, his books were keen,
forthright, and incisive. He left a completed manuscript
at the time of his death - A Handbook of Style in Music -
which will soon be published, partly through the aid of
the Salmon Fund of Vassar College. He was a man in love
with books, and he had concern not only for what the book
said but how the book said it; his hobby was typography,
and he personally designed many of his published works.
GEORGE SHERMAN DICKINSON (continued)
Those who knew Mr. Dickinson will never forget his intel-
ligence and forcefulness, his quick wit and humor, and
the essential kindliness of the man. Vassar is the richer
because this devoted teacher and able scholar chose to
spend the greater part of his active career here.
Carl Parrish