Father Reuter taught the joy of singing

The Reverend James B. Reuter, S. J., who passed away on New Year’s Eve, was my professor of Latin and English in my sophomore year, 1953-54, at the Ateneo de Manila. (To save anyone who cares the trouble of counting, I am now 76. Father Reuter was 96 when he died.) Father Reuter was not considered much of a teacher. His idea of teaching Shakespeare was to make us, his students, memorize or read lengthy passages from the great writer’s plays. It was not until much later that we realized that Shakespeare’s cadences had found their way into our own writing or speech. He also taught me the meaning and practice of the German word dinglichkeit, loosely meaning something tangible. This helped me always to infuse everything that I wrote or said with sensory imagery. However, it was my association with him outside the classroom that I remember most. I remember him, of course, in the way he honed the junior varsity athletes (JVs) into championship basketball and football (soccer to Americanophiles) teams by leading them on long runs around the then-new Loyola campus and thus building up their stamina and physical conditioning. But his deep passions were for the theater and the Glee Club. Not being good enough as an actor, I was on innumerable stage crews, from which vantage point I came to appreciate his attention to detail and constant struggle for perfection. It was in the Glee Club that I was most closely associated with Father Reuter. (I started singing as first bass, then moved to second tenor.) The Reuter Glee Club really was not the original Ateneo Glee Club, as many of us, including Reuter himself, liked to call it. There was an Ateneo Glee Club under the renowned Filipino basso, Jose Mossessgeld Santiago, before the Pacific War. Ours, therefore, was a revival of that Glee Club. It was in his Glee Club that I learned the joy of choral singing. There have been other versions of the Ateneo Glee Club after us. And there were other conductors after James B. Reuter. The members of those glee clubs were and are probably better musically or vocally than we were. They have circled the globe, while we were happy to sing in Batangas City or in Candon, Ilocos Sur. But we, an all-male ensemble, were unique, or at least we like to think so. However, let Father Reuter himself talk about this. In a piece that he wrote in 2008 and preserved and passed on by Rey Guevara (second bass), he noted:

“My ancient, medieval original Ateneo Glee Club has been singing with me since 1952, 56 years! And, so help me, they are singing better now than they did 50 years ago. . . Now, the songs that they love come from their minds and hearts, grown rich and mellow through the long years. I feel that their harmony comes from their deep friendship for each other. Their very souls blend together.”