Transcript of the conversation, September 6, 2024

Nancy: This is really a thrill to be talking with both of you together because I haven't seen you guys since the last reunion, even though we've talked. I’m just so grateful that you wanted to get together and share with us your music experience, collectively and individually, and what that has meant for you through all these years. So I'm going to just start off with the question: How did you each first get interested in music and in singing?

Fred: You go, Tony.

Tony: OK. Well, my mother was a voice teacher/piano teacher and had a wonderful friendship with Fred's mother, who also was involved in a in a big way in the music in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Fred and I grew up just 10 minutes from each other. We were members of different churches but at the same time, I want to say, when we were eight years old in 1961, we started singing in a boys choir in our respective churches. That was our official introduction to choral singing.

Nancy: Cool!

Fred: So the boys choir experiences, Nancy, are very, very rich and very educational in terms of getting you started in the world of music. I went to this church called Saint Mary's in a town called Ardmore, PA, and Tony—what was your church’s name?

Tony: The Church of the Good Shephard in Rosemont, which is very close by.

Nancy:  Fred, do you want to tell us about how you guys first connected, how you first met each other and started your friendship and your first experiences singing together?

Fred: Absolutely. Tony and I went to a prep school, Episcopal Academy, located outside Philadelphia, and we were very fortunate to be involved in the bigger program there, the glee club. But then there's smaller groups called the Academy 13’s—a capella groups where you develop very close bonds with your cohorts. I think Tony would agree, and I was very fortunate to be with him in that experience as well as the larger group. This is when we were in 10th grade—I went to Episcopal in 10th, Tony was a lifebird at Episcopal and I was a new kid on the block. I might mention, among his other great qualities, [Tony is a] very warm and inclusive person so I felt immediately at home in the musical scene of Episcopal.

Nancy:  Very cool. Now what about when you went to Williams? We just talked about this a little bit before this Zoom. I didn’t know anything about it; I was all wrapped up in my own freshman year stuff, but Tony, tell us what your launch into freshman year looked like.

Tony: No sooner had we gotten through the first week of classes at Williams [that] we found ourselves singing in the in the Williams College Choral Society. Unbeknownst to us, there had been a 10-year project that the music department under Ken Roberts had launched that came into reality the fall of our freshman year.  I think Fred and I were two of the seven freshmen that were able to join the Williams College Choral Society and in so doing, in the heart of the fall semester, we took a week and went to Detroit, MI, to sing a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra that included just an incredible piece by Prokofiev called Alexander Nevsky. It was an amazing experience: we sang two concerts in what then was the new Ford auditorium in Detroit under the baton of Sixten Ehrling. No sooner had we returned from that trip that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra came to Williamstown and was in residence for two days. We sang the same concert in Chapin Hall for everyone in the Williamstown area. The very following night after that concert, we all ended up singing in Carnegie Hall in New York, and the following night became the first collegiate chorus ever to sing in the John F Kennedy Performing Arts Center. And this all happened, I believe, in the first two weeks of November. So Fred and I, you might say, had a particularly busy fall because the first five or six weeks while we were students at Williams, we were intensively learning this Prokofiev Nevsky piece

Fred: In the Russian language.

Nancy: And you were tutored, right?

Tony: Nicholas Fersen was a longtime faculty member teaching Russian at Williams. Ken Roberts brought him in on several occasions to work with us on the pronunciation of the of the Nevsky. But it was an amazing experience.

Nancy: Wow. So Fred, Tony mentioned that you guys saw each other at some function in November or something…

Fred:  Over Christmas, yeah, and I think that [according to] my recollection and Tony's recollection, we sort of looked wide-eyed and said “How are we ever going to top this in our musical life, much less [our] broader life?” And it really was one for the ages, Nancy, just amazing.

Tony: We did continue to sing together in the Choral Society as well as the Chapel Choir that would perform at regular holiday times in the Thompson Chapel. So that was again a wonderful experience, the fact that we got to share that together for all four years at Williams.

Nancy: Fantastic. Then you graduated, you began the rest of your [lives]. So in a nutshell. because you both collectively have been singing a little bit together and individually, why don't you tell me a little bit about the mingling of your friendship and music in the last 50 years.

Fred: Just a little thing like that, right!  

Tony: I was just going to say that Fred spent five years in New York right after we graduated and I spent nearly that amount of time down in Richmond, VA. Then we both found ourselves back in Philadelphia. I joined the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia, the oldest amateur singing men's group in the country, and Fred joined the Tonics.

Fred:  I was fortunate to be one of the founding members of The Tonics that started in 1990. Tony and I shared that experience for a few years—in the mid-90s.

Tony: It’s an acapella singing group that was founded by a Yalie and is still going strong. They’re now in their 34th or 35th year.

Fred: Prior to that, Nancy, I wanted to say simultaneous with Tony's singing in the Orpheus Club, I was involved with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, which is a very old and prestigious part of the fabric of Philadelphia. I was very fortunate. Then I sang with the Choral Art Society of Philadelphia after that, in the latter part of the 1980s. Tony knows those groups very well right.

Tony: Then I joined a church choir, the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church choir in 1989 and enjoyed a tremendous experience in that choir over the years.

Nancy: You said that now it's been, what, 46 or 47 years with the in the Orpheus Club?

Tony: Yes.

Nancy: Now tell me a little bit about your acting too, because both of you have been thespians, and I want to hear a little bit about that too.

Tony:  Go ahead Fred.

Fred:  I was involved with Gilbert and Sullivan—I’m still a little bit involved but was much more in prior years, Nancy—Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Chester County, which is outside Philadelphia, and then there's an old group in Philadelphia called Savoy Company. I believe Tony's grandmother helped found that organization so [there’s] another connection [to] follow—it’s just amazing. I was able to be very involved in these two organizations and to have some nice roles, you know, performing the patter songs and all these other songs that people seem to get a kick out of when they hear G&S.

Tony:  I was going to say, in addition Fred and I were active in in a group called the Episcopal Academy players, which was made up of alumni, parents, and past parents at our alma mater. I ended up going back to work at Episcopal for 20 years and ended up in in several productions, I guess back in the 90s. Fred was also in a couple of those in the 90s and early 2000s.

Fred: One show, the great show “Anything Goes,” the big famous show, I was involved in that. It was also an amazing production directed by a very dear friend of ours named Bob Cronin. There's a connection with the Cronin name, as you know.

Tony: Bob graduated from Williams in 1969.

Fred: Huge Williams and Episcopal connection as well.

Nancy:  I'm going to put a quick plug in here for anybody who's watching this to go to ‘75Creates on our website and go to Fred Dittmann. You’ve got some recordings of yours, which are wonderful.

Fred: Thank you, thank you, Nancy. I appreciate that very much. thank you.

Nancy: We could keep going here, but I want to roll it together a little bit. I want you to each talk or a minute about what has music meant in your life, what has it brought you. Obviously, it's been a huge passion for both of you and it's been a glue in your friendship, but if there's anything else you want to add about what it brings to you, especially now as we're all older. Because [music] is wonderful, unlike some things like athletics because some of our bodies are kind of falling apart. They say that the hearing is the last thing to go, what can you say?!

Fred: So Tony, you go.

Tony: I guess what I would say is that singing has meant a great deal to me over the years, my mother having been a voice teacher/piano teacher who died when I was 16. I ended up working at the Curtis Institute of Music, one of the finest music conservatories in the world, for 15 years. There wasn't a day that would go by that I didn't think of my mom and just how proud she would be that I was involved there and surrounded by some of the most talented young musicians in the world. Singing, yeah, singing has meant the world to me.

Fred: I would just echo Tony's comments, Nancy, to say, well first of all, I'll get right to the heart of it:  it's cemented and bonded our friendship even more than would have already been the case. That is something that I'll always treasure for as long as I'm around, because Tony and I have that connection that will never go away.  It's just enough of another dimension or layer above. Also my mother, like Tony's mother, was a big music lover and when I was singing in the boys choir, I looked over and—this is not to be a saccharine or sappy—but I could tell that there was nothing that made her happier than to see her son going up the center aisle with the other boys, singing to the glory of God. I could just see the joy in her face. It was really amazing. So those are the kinds of things that you just never forget.

Tony: And I might just add that in addition to what we have done in terms of singing, Fred and I have made a point of getting to concerts together, whether it be at the Curtis Institute of Music or the Philadelphia Orchestra--

Fred: The Academy of Vocal Arts

Tony: The Academy of Vocal Arts where Fred has been an active volunteer for many, many years—for 30 years—and I've been to see Fred in his Gilbert and Sullivan productions and he's come to some of the major works that we've done at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Choir like the Gabrielle Faure’s Requiem and the Brahms Requiem. We're doing Maurice Durufle’s Requiem at 10:00 on November 3, 2024, which will be livestreamed at www.BMPC.org. So our lives have been really rich in music both in terms of our participating as choristers but also attending concerts together.

Fred:  So together and then supporting each other, Nancy, which I think is so important.

Nancy: Well, this has been lovely, and I know people are going to appreciate it as much as I have. I have one more question: as I recall in past reunions, often [during] the memorial services the choirs have sung. Are you guys going to be singing at any point on our reunion weekend that you know?

Tony: Not that I'm aware of right now, but that doesn't mean that it may not happen. I know that there was an alumni Chapel choir that used to come together at our reunions early on, Nancy. I'm not sure the logistics will allow that to continue to happen, but I'm certainly eager and hopeful that there will be opportunities for Fred and me to just sing, and with the others—many others—in our class who were part of the music program at Williams.

Fred: There's some talk in the wind about your question, so stay tuned, as they say.

Nancy: Fantastic. So great to talk with both of you, I look forward to seeing you in June and all the best with your music and all the other parts of your worlds.

Tony and Fred: Thanks so much Nancy, love doing it. Bye!