When the people of Waterville raised $100,000 at the beginning of the Great Depression to purchase land on Mayflower Hill to keep Colby College in their city, they demonstrated how much the support of the local community can do to enhance the educational mission of a liberal arts college.

They acted with such generosity because they understood how much a liberal arts college can do to enrich the life of the community.

If you have ever doubted either that the people of central Maine contribute to Colby’s success, or that Colby’s offerings enrich the cultural and intellectual life of the area, you should come up to the college the next time the Colby College Chorale, the Colby-Kennebec Choral Society and the Colby Symphony Orchestra join forces to perform, as they did last weekend, when they presented Franz Josef Haydn’s oratorio, “The Creation.”

Any time these three groups perform together, one can see — one can hear — that college and community together can produce a greater and more glorious music than either can alone. Both the orchestra and the Colby-Kennebec Choral Society include musicians from the area, and those musicians eagerly perform with Colby students, staff and faculty because they recognize that they all share the common desire and the shared purpose of creating outstanding musical performances.

These choral and orchestral performances, like all of the other concerts in the Music at Colby series, are free and open to anyone who wants to hear great music in live performance. If you have never been to any of these, you may be surprised to discover how many people from Waterville and the surrounding communities attend.

Last weekend’s performances of “The Creation” were uniquely powerful, however, because they marked the conclusion of Paul Machlin’s tenure as conductor. The Arnold Bernhard Professor of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Music, Machlin will retire at the end of the academic year after 38 years of teaching and conducting at Colby.

Between his skill as a conductor and the musicians’ desire to give their best efforts in the final production of his Colby career, Machlin elicited performances of astonishing power and beauty from the great chorus and orchestra under his baton. It didn’t hurt that the local performers were joined by three world-class soloists, whom one would normally have to travel to New York, or Boston or Europe to hear.

In addition, the text and music of Haydn’s “Creation” were entirely fitting to the occasion. First performed in 1797, “The Creation” sets to music texts adapted from Genesis and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” narrating God’s creation of the heavens and Earth. The soloists give voice to the archangels Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel, who relate the action; the chorus, like a host of angels, sing its joy and praise to glorify the works of God.

In a final section, two of the soloists sing as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In a duet joined by the chorus, our first ancestors give thanks and praise to God for the manifold gifts of his creation. In the magnificent final chorus, “Sing the Lord, ye voices all,” the choir and soloists together obey that imperative.

To those for whom Genesis counts as holy scripture, Haydn’s oratorio is literally worship set to music. The message in those words and in Haydn’s music, however, is universal. Whether the sun and Earth and stars and plants and animals and human beings are the handiwork of God, they are not our handiwork, and we should properly contemplate them with awe and wonder and gratitude.

In the same way, we should look back at the generous gifts of our benefactors and at the work of those who have built the institutions we now cherish with awe and wonder and gratitude.

Everything about Haydn’s music breathes order and harmony; unlike some modern works whose music is hard for untrained ears to appreciate, Haydn’s “Creation” has a pleasing, immediately accessible harmonic structure and delightful melodies. It sounds in the ears like an image of a perfect community of shared purpose and common dedication to noble and beautiful, and sacred, goals.

The generous people of Waterville could not, 80 years ago, have foreseen exactly how the college they were keeping in their city would grow and develop; but listening to the community performance of the “Creation” last weekend, I was sure that they would have been pleased.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American constitutional law and chairman of the department of government at Colby College in Waterville.