Miss Musa HALL – beloved music instructor
Miss Musa Hall (left) with student Elva PERRY, at rear of main building about 1912-13.
Miss Musa & Music
From an office-studio just off the stage in the southwest corner of the old Hall-Moody building, Miss Musa HALL dominated campus musical activities from first to last.
Her department antedated the school itself and may be traced to 1896, when she began teaching with one pupil. Her class numbered nine in 1897, 23 in 1898, 27 a year later, and 34 in 1900 when Hall-Moody opened . Miss Musa then joined the resident faculty – and brought her pupils with her. By 1904 she and two assistants, and later there were a number of others who taught piano, and two who taught violin.
Before 1927, Miss Musa’s department had taught more than 700 students, about 100 of them men and boys.
Music was the core of the Fine Arts and strategic part of life at Hall-Moody. Quartets, “bands”, and vocal ensembles thrived. Recitals, operettas, concerts, and chapel music were routine events. The Hall-Moddy Cheerers, a girls’ chorus, performed from 1921 on. Earlier, in 1915, Miss Musa’s college quartet sang temperance songs around the county for a gubernatorial candidate. “Stage work” was required in the music curriculum, and attendance at concerts was encouraged by the fact that, in the earlier days, at least, they offered occasions to bend the rules against week-night dating.
School catalogs from the twenties avowed that the purpose of music at Hall-Moody was not to make “finished artists”, but to make students “better in the home life, happier in the business life, more attractive in the social life, and more useful in the Christian life.” The 1927 yearbook describes the sounds of the “unfinished” artists – the drum-fire of the piano artillery, the helpless cries of the beginning voice pupil which came from Miss Musa’s corner, but also lists the numerous protegees who were themselves teaching music all over West Tennessee
When Hall-Moody closed in 1927, Miss Musa once again moved her base of operation, this time back into town to a studio on Mechanic Street (Now University), and continued to carry out her mission. She was, as the last yearbook said, the Alpha and Omega.
