“We’re All in This Together”: Memories of Mity and the 1966 St. Olaf Band European Tour

“It’s here!” This note, with a big smiley face drawn on it, was in my mailbox at St. Olaf late in the first term of my freshman year in 1964. The smiley face tipped me off to the sender: Miles (known to everyone as Mity) Johnson, the St. Olaf Band director. The new alto clarinet had arrived, to replace a much older one I had been using up to this time.

Although I was not in the St. Olaf Band all four years, since I left snowy Minnesota in January of my junior year to study Spanish through May at the University of Vera Cruz in Mexico, being a member of this band is still one of the things I value most as I look back on my college experience here in Northfield. I ended up in New York,  but I had family who had settled in town and on my visits back, I would go up the hill to visit with Mity, who always remembered me and always eagerly showed me pictures he had on the wall of band members from my era.

“Here’s Renee in New York. She is doing so well, singing professionally there,” he would say proudly, showing a glamorous photo of Irene Gubrud, who had been our piccolo player and soprano soloist on tours. And we would reminisce about the June 1966 band tour to Norway, Denmark and Germany, only the second overseas tour of the St. Olaf Band. Our tour commemorated the 60th anniversary of the July 1906 trip to Norway of the all-male, 46-member St. Olaf Band, under the direction of F. Melius Christiansen (who, of course, gained fame as founder and first director of the St. Olaf Choir). This early band, which had a rousing reception all over Norway due to its skillful performances and the proud Norwegian heritage of St. Olaf, was the first American collegiate musical organization to undertake a concert tour in Europe. The 1906 band introduced Norway to the saxophone (and to baseball).

Luckily, we were not expected to show our ability with bat and ball. We were, however, expected to march in some of the cities of our tour, even though we were a concert band. It helped that some of us had been in high school bands that had marched in parades and Mity convinced us that our marching practices on St. Olaf Avenue before the trip would suffice. We even had a majorette in a glittery gold outfit who twirled a baton and was pictured under the headline “Svingende amerikanerinne” (“Swinging American”) in Stavanger, Norway. Our drum major was French horn soloist Ronald Sell, who went on to success playing with the American Symphony and as musical contractor for Broadway shows in New York. Ron is pictured with Mity in the Minneapolis Tribune of May 15, 1966, receiving a drum major’s baton of the 1906 tour from George Mohn, who had been a member of that band (and was the son of St. Olaf’s first president, Thorbjørn Mohn).

The souvenir booklet and a scrapbook I have kept all these years awaken other memories of our grand adventure. It started off with my first plane ride. Yes, really. I wrote my folks that the first leg from Minneapolis to New York on United “changed my whole perspective on the world!” The second leg on Icelandic Airlines was less thrilling. Due to weather conditions, we had an unexpected 1½-hour stopover at the Gander terminal in Newfoundland en route to Luxembourg and Germany. Already sleep-deprived, we were getting squirrelly. Then Mity, attuned as always to the situation, started whistling the “Col. Bogey March” and began to march around the terminal. We all fell into lines behind him, whistling and pretending to play our instruments, which turned the stopover into a fun experience.

After the first performance in the concert hall at Trier, Germany, I wrote home about the wonderful audience there, which “clapped and stomped like mad,” especially when the cornets and trumpets jumped up on the final strain of our encore of (what else?) Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The Trier newspaper wrote, “In spite of having just arrived, the members looked fresh and well reposed and the performance of the Festive Overture [Shostakovich] was therefore impeccable.” Our stay in Germany was highlighted by playing while on a cruise past castles on the Rhine River which was filmed for television broadcast throughout the country. The reviewer in Frankfurt wrote, “…they are not giving the impression of amateurs, but rather professionals,” “an unmistakably first-class and well-disciplined ensemble…The young soprano was quite outstanding.” 

As I look back on the list of music we prepared for Europe, I am astounded: 15 concerts works (from Bach to Mozart to Grieg to Schuman to Copland to F. Melius Christiansen’s “Psalm 50,” arranged for band by Mity), 12 marches (from Sousa to Meredith Wilson’s “76 Trombones”), 10 Broadway musicals and American folk music (including classics  “Porgy and Bess,” “West Side Story,” “My Fair Lady,” and “Sound of Music”), plus other solo and ensemble works and national songs of the countries. The program was adapted to our musical venues: from parks (Bad Hersfeld and Planten und Blumen in Germany), cathedrals (including Bergen and the remarkable 12th century Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim where we had a ceremony at the grave of B.J. Muus, founder of St. Olaf College), concert halls and music festivals including Harstad, in the “land of the midnight sun.” We played in a town hall in Odense, Denmark, and even marched and set up to play on a busy downtown Copenhagen street.

At our first stop in Norway, we were met at the Stavanger railway station by a band playing “Um Ya Ya.” After our performance in a spectacular concert hall, I wrote that our reception was “out of this world,” one of the largest turnouts for a concert that the city of 80,000 had ever seen. All four daily newspapers praised the band and one said, “The conductor, Miles Johnson, who managed the performance in an excellent way and showed himself as a brilliant instructor with a keen sense for everything that produces pure music, graciously turned the resounding applause over to his musicians.” We were rewarded with a boat trip through the magnificent fjords – I wrote I could almost see the trolls hiding along the shore.

In Oslo, Mity and Ron met with King Olav and we had receptions at the American Embassy and Town Hall. There was a parade downtown and concert in the Aula at the University of Oslo. Norway’s largest paper reported the band “played with catching freshness and a discipline that was worthy of being taken as a model. To director Miles Johnson must go great honor for presenting a band of such high standard.”

I checked the phone directory in Oslo and was pleasantly surprised to find 19 Hvistendahls listed there. On a day off, I visited Yngvar Hvistendahl in Tønsberg with whom my father had been in contact about Hvistendahl genealogy. Turns out my family is from the Danish branch, but Yngvar (a ship owner who had managed whalers) and his wife happily showed me around town and took me to lunch at their sailing club.

In Fredrikstad, Norway’s noted composer Egil Hovland praised the band’s interpretation of his work “Fanfare and Choral,” which he had composed specifically for this tour, saying, “To have the choral executed in this manner is like being lifted up to heaven.” After the Harstad Music Festival of North Norway, north of the Arctic Circle,  a newspaper wrote that Mity, “always smiling and relaxed,” stood in front of the band as a “living stimulus,” succeeding in having us “produce with grandeur.”  At the end of the concert, “the public refused to move from their chairs,” caught up in the excitement of the performance.

When the trip was over, Mity pronounced the whole experience “miraculous,” with not one bad concert despite the tiring pace. The 27-concert tour of our 77-member band had covered 8,000 miles from May 30-June 27. As Mity often said, “We’re all in this together,” and we carried it off, paving the way for trips abroad which have continued for St. Olaf Band members ever since.