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Since the late 19th century, Rochester students have sung about “many fair and famous streams” as they give voice to “The Genesee,” Rochester’s alma mater. Most know it by heart.

But Jocelyn Trueblood ’66 keeps a copy tucked away in her genealogy papers. That’s because she is the great-granddaughter of its musical arranger, Herve Dwight Wilkins, who graduated from Rochester a century before her, in 1866, and became a church organist and music teacher in Rochester. He based the tune on an old English melody, and it has ever since accompanied the words of poet Thomas Swinburne, a member of the Class of 1892 who spent five years at Rochester but didn’t complete his degree.

Trueblood’s mother told her about the family’s musical history shortly before Trueblood left for college. Since then, she has read an account of Wilkins—written by his daughter, and her great-aunt, in November 1913, the year Wilkins died—from which she learned of his belief in the “expressive power of music as a vehicle and aid to worship.”

You could say it struck a chord. “I see music as an aid to meditation, to peacefulness within me, and in that way, I feel very connected to him, this creative force,” says Trueblood, who majored in English and minored in psychology. “I feel very grateful to him for passing that on.”

In 2009, she retired from a 30-year career in mental health in New York City. And now, as it has for years, music suffuses her life. For all four years on campus, she sang in the Women’s Glee Club, and she took piano lessons at the Eastman School of Music for credit. Now living in Tappan, New York, she continues to sing in a local choral group, although she says other members don’t necessarily share her reverence for timing, dynamics, and diction—a rigor honed at the University by Ward Woodbury Jr., the first director of music on the River Campus. She also once was directed in one of his own works by the legendary Howard Hanson—famed as a composer, conductor, and music educator, he led the Eastman School for 40 years.

“It’s a joyful seriousness,” Trueblood says. “I love to be in the zone and not thinking about anything but the music that’s in front of me.”

Her great-grandfather likely knew that feeling well, too.

—Robin L. Flanigan