"Play Games, All Sorts"

And she has continued to command respect. Brodhead, who succeeded Arlin as chair of the music theory department in 1976, says that over the years the collective faculty members have looked to Arlin as the department’s "senior mentor."

Arlin has been instrumental in bringing several Indiana graduates to Ithaca’s music theory department, including associate professor Marjorie Porterfield and School of Music dean Arthur Ostrander. (Arlin, Porterfield, and Ostrander later worked together with Charles Lord, another Indiana graduate and former assistant professor of music at Ithaca, to coauthor the music theory text Music for Analysis: A Collection of Excerpts and Complete Movements.)

"Mary was very instrumental in convincing me that this would be the right place for me to come in my professional career," says Ostrander, who joined the music theory department in 1971 when Arlin was chair. "Mary is a person who is willing to take on responsibility in service for both the School of Music and the College as a whole. Whenever there’s a need for committee work, she is always willing to pitch in."

Arlin herself joined the faculty as an instructor of music theory in 1966. She is known as an expert music theorist who remains an active performer, playing viola with the Binghamton Symphony; an accomplished scholar who restored an unpublished concerto by Michael Hayden to the repertory in the early 1970s; an officer in several professional organizations, including the Music Theory Society of New York State; frequent presenter at professional conferences (this semester she has traveled to Denver and Atlanta to give papers and serve on panels); and author of all the program notes for Ithaca College Concerts — the school’s series of guest performances — during the last 30-plus years, a daunting task that few members of the School of Music even realize Arlin tackles.

"She doesn’t just sit down and write, ‘So-and-so wrote this piece in 1893 and it features violin and whatever,’ " says concert manager Debra Vialet ’73, M.M. ’78. "She actually spends time at the library, getting scores for each of the selections. If we don’t have them, she’ll go over to Cornell and pore through their library. She goes through the pieces and analyzes them; it’s a real project. She is very thorough. The people who perform for our concert season are major artists, and many of them have come up to me after their appearances to say they have learned things from Mary’s notes about the pieces they’ve just performed! I know of several artists who want her to write notes for them: that’s how much the artists appreciate what she does. She’ll write notes for our own faculty performers, too, when they ask. I should add that reviewers frequently lift her material."

Arlin also manages the school’s calendar Web page and is a popular source of information for everyone from librarians to prospective students to visiting alumni. "Mary is the kind of teacher who is in her office seven days a week," says McHenry. "She’ll be there at eight in the morning and she’ll be there for the concert at night."

Indeed. Maura Stephens, editor of this magazine, tells this story: "One night last year I was working late and ran across a question I couldn’t answer by using the usual reference tools. I was pretty new, but I knew enough to go to Mary for historical IC information. So I figured I’d leave a message on her voice mail and she could get back to me in the morning. It was 2:00 a.m. and I rang her phone. I was dumbfounded when she answered, as perky as Mary Poppins. She knew the answer to my question, of course."

If she never seems to sleep, Arlin never seems to age, either (witness the photos). Recently a 1976 alumna came to a concert in the Whalen Center and stopped in to see Arlin in her new office. After she left she was heard to say, "What is it with Dr. Arlin? She looks exactly the same as she did when I was in school."