MUSICAL COURIER 20 April 26, 1923 THE BEST OF NEWS! It is the best of news that comes from the National Federation of Music Clubs with regard to the prize awards in this year’s competitions. Only three out of ten classes of prizes offered for musical compositions by A merican composers have been awarded. Only three out of ten! That is surely the best of news. Are we, indeed, coming at last to a period of discrimination in our mad rush to make America musical? It certainly looks as if the Federation were giving us a jog in the right direction, Good news, indeed! For untold years we have had prize upon prize presented by well-meaning enthusiasts and, no doubt, equally well-meaning juries, so anxious to make some kind of an award that they would give the prize to the “best,” however worthless that “best” might be. ' | |; •.;I Nothing has led to greater discouragement than this habit we have fallen into of giving something for nothing. Hell, so it is said, is paved with good intentions. A good portion of it must be paved with American prize-winning composition. What utter futile waste it has been, all this prize giving! The real composer needs no prize offer to induce him to set his thoughts on paper. Those who would like to be real composers but lack the talent or the technic or both, would also be likely to write on and on, prize or no prize. But the prize results always in giving undue prominence to our unworthiness. Whether the winning compositions were written merely with the hope of bringing home the bacon, or were written because the composers believed in themselves and thought that they really had something worth while to say, matters not at all. Their works were mostly worthless, and, under ordinary circumstances, would have been unheard-of except, perhaps, in a narrow local circle. Instead of which they were crowned with good gold coin and the name of the crownee broadcasted per A. P. to the four corners of this “square” little earth of ours. Then people listened to the first (and last) performance of the prize work, and wondered how on earth it could have taken any sort of prize, and who on earth the judges could have been, and what sort of works the losers were, if the winner was so bad. But a new order of merit is dawning. Compositions, to win prizes, must have real value. The Federation competition was selective. The winners were Carl Venth, Irenee Berge and Joseph J. McGrath. We congratulate them! Who the losers were we do not know, but we congratulate them also. For they have had the best lesson that can come to a composer: the lesson of rejection. However well they may have done, they will do better next time. Probably when each one of them looks over his own losing work in the privacy of his own mind he will understand perfectly why it was not awarded a prize. Let those losers compare their lot with the lot of the host of past winners, who were raised to the seventh heaven of hope only to be cast down into the valley of despair by the world’s failure to confirm the award of the judges. This writer actually knows of disappointed, disgruntled old men and women whose lives have been practically ruined by some such award; not, indeed; always a prize award, but an early success, an early promise of some sort, that failed to materialize, and left them thinking and thinking, brooding and brooding, unable to accept their fate or even believe in it. Few people have the force of character to turn quietly and steadfastly to other things. Few people have the honesty to look themselves squarely in the face and acknowledge that for once Lady Luck set the crown on the wrong head and then snatched it off again and wandered heedlessly on her devastating way. It is to be hoped that the example of the Federation will be followed by other prize givers, that the standard set by the Federation will become a national standard, that no work may hope to get a prize in any competition but a work that is not only technically perfect but truly inspired, not the best of a bad lot but the equal of the public’s favorites. on the Danube, while the merry melodies of Franz Lehar, Leo Fall, Oscar Strauss, et al, will keep on echoing through the air. “Vienna Week” indeed! —-4>------- So that no mistake is made now or hereafter, let it be stated authoritatively that the men who were pioneer fighters for the cause of Wagner in America were Theodore Thomas, Leopold Damrosch, Henry T. Finck, James G. Huneker, Otto Floersheim, and Marc A. Blumenberg, the last three of the Musical Courier. ----------- Why do even strong men wear such a look of sorrow in New York this week, and why has desolation fallen here upon office, shop, factory, bank, school, hotel lobby, street and avenue, pressroom, park, and restaurant? You don’t know why? Grand opera at the Metropolitan closed its doors for the season last Saturday evening. Only baseball, horse racing, tennis, golf, and open air prize fighting will help to tide the average citizen of New York over his summer of sadness and his sense of deep personal loss. -------- Along in the springtime all of us are entitled to guesses as to what the Metropolitan repertory will offer in the next fall season. H. T. P. of the Boston Transcript has heard of several things that we had not. But, as Mr. Gatti promises his usual announcement before he leaves for Italy, on May 10, we will wait in patience for the official news, only venturing to say that we have a small amount of hard cash to back our assertion that Fedora will be among the season’s offerings and that the cast will be headed by Marie Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli and Antonio Scotti. -------- The MacDowell Colony fund is gradually piling up, though not with the speed which its many friends would like to see. An especially interesting contribution came from the Junior MacDowell Club of Roselle and Roselle Park, N. J. The young folks, sixteen to eighteen years old, played a program of twenty-three of MacDowell’s piano compositions at a benefit recital specially organized to help the Colony Fund. Ethel Glenn Hier organized the concert and Ruth Deputy, contralto, graciously contributed a group of songs. A substantial sum was realized which is credited to the club in another column of this issue. The young folks set a splendid example to other clubs made up of boys and girls of that age—one that it is hoped will be followed. -------- Burlington, Vt., has an excellent symphony orchestra, according to competent critical authority, and its leader, Joseph F. Lechnyr, is developing it to first class proportions, both in point of numbers and in artistic achievement. At the January 28 concert of the organization there were excerpts from the Pathetique symphony by Tschaikowsky and works by Massenet, Ipolitov-Ivanov, etc. At the April 15 concert the program embraced compositions by Verdi, Mendelssohn (Italian symphony), Gluck, Bizet, Tschaikowsky, and Sibelius (Finlandia) and the soloist was concertmaster Harold A. Hazlett, who played the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Strikingly large audiences turned out for both concerts and manifested unusual enthusiasm. The press, public, and business organizations of Burlington are solidly behind their orchestra and with such civic encouragement and impetus the enterprise should flourish finely. It must never be forgotten that Meiningen, a tiny city in Germany, for many years had the best orchestra in Europe, which went on tour and stood winning comparison with the great symphonic bodies of Berlin, Vienna, London and Paris. -----®----- AMERICAN MUSIC? Iarecki’s string quartet, published last fall by the Society for the Publication of American Music, has recently been played in the composer’s native country. The press reports are illuminative. The Rzeczypospolita (Warsaw) says: “The frequent flashes of national feeling lend, in my eyes, a still greater value to the work. Without exaggeration we may say that our musical literature has received in this composition a heritage that is precious not only because of his Polish name but because of the Polish content of the work. In this spirit it was received by the audience. The second movement was liked immensely, moving by its dreamy, genuinely Slavic character.” The Slowo Polskie (Lemberg) says: “In spite of a spiritual relation to contemporary French music he preserves always his Polish individuality.” The work should now be rapturously welcomed in America, as we Americans are so slavishly devoted to everything that is thoroughly foreign! JV\USICAL(gVRIER U/eekly Review or Tfte Worlds Music Published every Thursday by the MUSICAL COURIER COMPANY, INC. ERNEST F. EILERT.................................................President WILLIAM GEPPERT.............................................Vice- *,resident ALVIN L. SCHMOEGER........................................Sec. and Treas. 437 Fifth Avenue, S. E. 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Copy for advertising in the MUSICAL COURIER should be in the hands of the Advertising Department before four o’clock on the Friday previous to the date of publication. Entered as Second Class Matter, January 8, 1883, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. THE MUSICAL COURIER EXTRA Published every Saturday by Musical Courier Company Devoted to the interests of the Piano Trade. New York Thursday, April 26, 1923 No. 2246 A man isn’t old until he begins to believe the critics when they say that none of the contemporary singers or composers are as good as those of other days. ־ — --- An expert restaurateur announces that there are 145 ways of preparing spaghetti. There are, however, only two known ways of eating it, the quiet way and the symphonic way. -----®----- Mayor Curley, of Boston, in his speech at the Chickering Centennial celebration there last Saturday, alluded to the celebrated composer of the Hungarian rhapsodies, as Lisztman. Nevertheless, Mayor Curley is an excellent mayor of Boston. -----#----- Marianne Hitschmann-Steinberger is a young Viennese artist with an imaginative trend of mind. Her series of musical etchings, three of which are reproduced in this number of the Musical Courier, are decidedly original and of quite unusual beauty in design and handling. -----—- On another page of this issue there is an interesting sketch of Arthur J. Hubbard, the veteran Boston voice teacher, who is this year to celebrate his thirtieth anniversary in the profession. Mr. Hubbard, hale and hearty, is pursuing his work as vigorously as ever and has a long and honorable list of artists of the first rank whom he has prepared for the profession, the best known among them being perhaps the two Hackett brothers, Charles and Arthur. The Musical Courier wishes him good health and a long continuation of his valuable cultural work. -----®----- Berlin is going to have a Vienna ( !) Music Week in June. The principal works will be Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (published by the Universal Edition) and Mahler’s eighth symphony (published by the Universal Edition). Besides these there will be performances of the Zemlinsky Lyrische Symphonie (published by the Universal Edition) and orchestral songs by Franz Schreker (published by the Universal Edition) as well as the first performance in Berlin of a passacaglia by Anton von Webern (published by the Universal Edition), a pupil of Schoenberg. Yes, Berlin is to have a “Vienna” week, and in the meantime Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Johann Strauss will continue to slumber quietly on in the Central Cemetery of the beautiful old Kaiserstadt