10
January 5, 1922
Witmark “Hits” in British Pantomimes
M. Witmark & Sons received news by cable last week of the instant success of no less than three of its current song “hits” that are being featured in the annual Christmas pantomime at the Alhambra Theater, Glasgow. Usually the English pantomimes do not open until Christmas Eve or . oxinS Day (December 26), but the Glasgow pantomime is recognized as the pace-setter and its production earlier in the month follows as a matter of course. “Babes in the Wood is the title of the Glasgow pantomime this year and m the cast are those well known favorites in America— Dorothy Ward and Shaun Glenville. Miss Ward is sing-lng b?* “£roon«ng״ and Ernest R. Ball’s big ballad suc-cess, 111 Forget You; and Mr. Glenville is repeating on the other side the success over here of “Stand Up and Sing for Your Father an Old Time Tune.” The pantomimes in Great Britain—practically every city and town has one every Christmas season, running from four weeks to three months—are wonderful mediums for the popularizing of a song, and it is a foregone conclusion that the three Witmark numbers mentioned will be found featured in the majority, if not all of the forthcoming Christmas productions all over the British Isles. They will be published in London by B. Feldman & Co
MUSICAL COURIER
Schumann-Heink Booking for Next Season
Mme. Schumann-Heink, the contralto, whose engage-ments for next season are already taxing the geographic knowledge of her managers, Messrs. Haensel and Tones will fill in the month of October, November and December next with conceit dates in the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and the Middle Western states• January and February in North and South Carolina’, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, March in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado; April and May in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan.
Requests for the contralto’s appearance are so rapidly accumulating that some of them seem geographically impossible to book, so widely are they separated. Mme. Schumann-Hemk’s definite bookings already extend well into the season of 1922-23.
THE RELATION OF COLOR TO MUSIC
As Interpreted by the Clavilux, Thomas Wilfred’s Mobile Color Organ
Spanish Operetta Pleases New York
John Cort’s production of Penella’s picturesque musical play, The Wild Cat, began the sixth week of its popular engagement at the Park Theater, Monday. This romantic operetta is interesting large audiences nightly with its tense story, and the picturesque bullfight scene that closes the second, act. Senor Penella’s modern musical score is tull of vivid coloring and tunefulness. “The Wild Cat” is a decided novelty in the realm of operetta, for every line and word is sung or declaimed to music. The cast includes a number of fine singers, headed by Marion Green (of Monsieur Beaucaire” fame), Dorothy South, Sam Ash, Vera Koss, and Conchita Piquer, from Madrid.
Twenty Dates This ]VLonth for Flonzaleys
If the.demand throughout the country for the Flonzaley Uuartet increases beyond what it is today, it will be necessary that more months be added to the year and more days to the month if this demand is to be met. The activities of the quartet during the first month of 1922 is a sample of the number of engagements it will fill from now to the date of its sailing for Europe in April. From January 5 to 31 the quartet will fill twenty engagements that will take it into ten states. Such popularity reflects credit not only on the quartet but on the appreciation of the American public for the highest type of chamber music.
the changing color and the silent rhythmic motion, the nerves and the emotions are reacted upon through the sight in much, the same manner, that they are effected through the hearing by music.
In its broad outlines the new art of “mobile color” might be called visual music as our highly developed art of tone and rhythm is aural music. Mr. Wilfred’s system, however, does not include an association of certain musical tones with, certain colors. His compositions are in no sense interpretations in color terms of any musical forms. “Mobile color” can be called visual music in the sense that it appeals to the emotions and the aesthetic perception through, the eye in a rhythmic change of color and form, as music appeals to the same forces through the ear in a rhythmic change of tone and musical form. Or again, in the sense that “mobile color,” like music, depends for its
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SOPRANO
Metropolitan Opera | Company	|
Concert Direction	|
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Stanley Soloist with Harvard Orchestra
Following her appearance as soloist with the Harvard University. Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York, December 26, Helen Stanley was heard in Washington D C with the same organization on December 27, and on both occasions won from her audience enthusiastic expressions ot approval and from the critics praise of her voice and her art.
Mary Biffin Singing in New England
Mary Biffin, lyric soprano, is booked for a series of concerts in the New England states during the early part of this month. _ She will appear with Lionel Storr, bass-baritone, and will be heard in some interesting duets and opera excerpts.
actual life, its performance, more baldly, upon an instrument and an interpreter. A color composition is only as much in existence in. its score as a musical composition lives on paper. And just, as a Rachmaninoff prelude may suffer at the hands of an inexpert pianist, a color composition may be only half as beautiful or significant when played by a clumsy color-organist as it would be under the touch of a master.
. Mr. Wilfred’s system is entirely his own; he composes in color and light forms, as a musician composes in tone and. musical form, building in a scientific progression to a given emotional climax. The color effects, light values and the development of the solo figures is thus scored so that an organ in. Chicago might play a composition which another organ in New York was playing at the same time; the same, effects, the same climax would be gained, subject to the individual interpretation. The harmony and counterpoint of color composing is as yet very primary, of course, and little bound by any set rules. Its intricacy will come with the elaboration of the art. As students will be taught to play the clavilux, so they will be taught the theory of color composition, which will gradually evolve its own laws. At present many of the loveliest effects of color light and form variation are wrought in spontaneous improvisation.
״ Thus, in their aesthetic physiology, music and the art of Mobile Color may be said to be inseparably related. But let it be understood that as music has stood alone for cen-tunes as an individual art, so “mobile color” will take its place as an individual art, needing no accompaniment nor interpretation in terms of anything but itself.
[We are indebted to the Neighborhood Playhouse for the following notice of the new Color Organ.—The Editor.]
The relation of color to music has been in recent years a question of. importance, to some degree a vexed question. In its more intangible sense, color has always been a part of music, of course—an integral and invisible element, yet scarcely considered in any important manner in the early history of musical composition.
Bach and his contemporaries were concerned with sound and form, with artistic expression through the intricate beauty, or the beautiful simplicity of united rhythm, form and tone—form, of course, as figured in rhythm, and tone, only separable from the two in a musical sense. The romance which is as indisputably found in the “pure music” of Bach as in the dramatic music of Wagner is a romance born of the union in blended beauty to one end of expression of rhythm, tone, and musical form, and does not depend for any of its effect on a deliberately worked out scheme of tonal coloring. Color there is, of course, in an elementary sense, spontaneous and unsconscious, and depending largely on the interpreter for its recognition.
As. music moved further away from set forms of expression it came to depend more and more on an aforethought plan of tonal coloring, a loose scheme which united tone and color without rules, which differed with the different practice of each composer, and with the emotional individuality of the interpreter and listener, but which was very much alive and in evidence and to be reckoned with critically.
It may be permissible to say that־ Schubert and Schumann were the first composers to develop the integral tonal color of music for a definite emotional effect—that musical color was carried to its heights by. Wagner, Liszt and Tschai-kowsky—and has reached its ultimate expression in Strauss and. Debussy. To take an obvious example, Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” is almost visibly silver, black and green, or again, Strauss’ “Salome” music is saturated with the dull gold, rich blues, and sultry crimsons of the East.
It remained for a Russian to carry the union of color and music to the point of actual visibility.
Even within short musical memories must lie the recollection of the performance in New York of Scriabin’s tone poem, “Prometheus.” Among the musical instruments of the orchestra was a strange instrument called a “luce.” It was scored as an orchestral instrument and treated by Scriabin as an integral part of his orchestra. Instead of playing sound, the luce played colored lights on a screen back of the orchestra.
This Scriabin experiment accomplished two things. It showed that color in association with music must for its most, genuine emotional effect be divined and not seen by the physical eye, and that color and sound in their actuality are two distinct sense elements, closely allied, but necessarily standing alone.
And now New York is about to see a performance with an instrument which plays color as an art quite distinct from music, yet more nearly the sister art of music than any other that we know.
Thomas Wilfred, a Danish poet and musician who is well known in Europe and America as a singer of folk ballads to his own. accompaniment on a sixteenth century lute, has been working, for years on a color organ, a mechanical instrument, which, under human manipulation, plays mobile color and form in rhythm. Mr. Wilfred’s invention has reached such a creditable and comprehensible stage of development that it is to have its first public showing on January 10 at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York.
The effect produced by Mr. Wilfred’s Klavilux is known as “Mobile Color,” an art of color and light in and for itself. His performance is divided into separate color compositions of definite emotional intent, in which colors, wonderfully soft, intense and smooth, change and blend in ceaseless motion and unbroken rhythm in combination with moving and developing light forms which he calls solo figures, of great beauty, grace and unfamiliarity. The performances take place in a completely dark auditorium; no surface or agency is visible and the color and forms reveal themselves apparently through a vista into boundless space.
The intellectual content of the art is inconsiderable wh»n compared with its emotional force which has power and a high ethic character, if one may connect ethics with anything so unmoral as “mobile color.״ By the magnetism of
Exclusive Management:
DANIEL MAYER
Aeolian Hall New York STEINWAY PIANO
Chilian Pianist
‘ONE OF THE BEST.”
New York Globe.
EREYES
ERNESTINE SCHUMANN«
ARTHUR LOESSER, Accompanist and Soloist
STEINWAY PIANO
Exclusive Management HAENSEL & JONES, Aeolian Hall, New York
Mezzo Soprano
410 Knabe Building New York
CLAIR EUGENIA SMITH
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