2006 Founder's Award Recipient
Citation for Irving Forbes
Awarded at assembly on May 19, 2006

Irving Forbes—Throughout your 27 years on the faculty, you exercised a legendary zeal for bringing music to everyone. You did this with a winning style, boundless energy and an infectious love for your craft in all its variations. Exeter was enthralled. Through your example, thousands of Exonians gained a new or fuller appreciation for the sheer pleasure of making music.

In 1959, you arrived at Exeter as a part-time instructor in any and all wind instruments, from the piccolo to the tuba. Over time your job grew to include directing the glee club, choir, band and orchestra, in which you often played bassoon or bass, and you served as chairman of the music department from 1971 until you retired in 1987. During your time here, Exeter opened its first music building and then quickly outgrew it. The number of specialists teaching instruments and the number of students taking private lessons more than tripled, and opportunities for music to be played and heard on campus increased as well. You championed giving academic credit for advanced study of an instrument, better integrating adjunct music teachers on campus, and ensuring that students with the inclination to pursue music had time to do so.

You were equally concerned about educating those who had little or no musical background. To that end you applied your irresistible enthusiasm to all-school sing-alongs in Assembly and to music appreciation classes after which students could be heard humming all the way to the next class. You built a strong and happy department through your respect for your colleagues as musicians and teachers and through making music with them. This included gatherings at the house on Pine Street where you and Margery accompanied all kinds of music making on your two grand pianos. The joy and positive energy you brought to the music department remain precious legacies of your tenure.

On campus, you were a refreshing antidote to stuffiness. You proudly wore the first turtleneck allowed as part of the faculty dress code and when asked to list any works you had published, wrote, “I shall perish before I publish.” When your concerns about the school’s pianos went unheeded, you humidified the music building yourself by sloshing buckets of water over the floor. For faculty talent shows you rode your bicycle across the Assembly Hall stage while seated backward on the handlebars. In the music building, you would burst into practice rooms to remind students about a rehearsal or invite them to come to orchestra practice just to witness an amazing musical moment as written by Stravinsky. We loved the unexpected moments you created for us. When teaching the bassoon, you would thump your gut like Tarzan thumping his chest and announce, “Support is what you need!” And support is what you gave on all frontiers, from the genuine smile and warm hello you offered every student on the path to the truly helpful advice you gave the many who brought you their private troubles. You had an obvious respect for your students and a knack for nudging them into new waters at just the right time. Most important, you modeled a way of being that was utterly authentic. One former student writes, “Irving undertook every task with humor, humility and a manly vigor, and this was an inspiration during a time when music was not considered as worthy as required sports were for the shaping of character.”

You made your mark at Exeter in other ways as well, including as a beloved cross-country ski coach who threw snowballs at your students and as an architect of the trails in the Academy woods, many of which you developed with your own hands on your own time. Yours was a voice of compassion, especially toward students in difficulty, and you consistently gave of yourself beyond the call of duty. When you retired, Principal Stephen Kurtz wrote, “Your contribution to the Academy is, in my mind, second to none.”

Irving Forbes, music still captivates us through the program you nurtured so well for 27 years. In recognition of your long and devoted service to Exeter, you were named Wheaton J. Lane Professor in the Humanities in 1981 and received an Excellence in Teaching award from the Brown Family Fund in 1987. Today, it is our distinct pleasure to present you with the 2006 Founder’s Day Award.

 

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