15
MUSICAL COURIER
June 14, 1923
TWICE TOLD TALES
are the ones that spell success for the recitalist and concert singer.
Jerome
SWINFORD
Baritone
has the unique record of return bookings in 85% of the cities where he has once sung.
Local managements engaging Mr. Swinford (often without having heard him sing) thus have the assurance that they are presenting to their public an artist which that public will re-demand.
MR. SWINFORD APPEARED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN BUFFALO on the evening of April 30th,— following, and on the same course with, three leading American baritones. The Buffalo public, by its plaudits, signified its eagerness to hear Swinford again, and the Buffalo critics retold the tale their literary confreres recorded before them in the other cities where he appeared.
MR. SWINFORD WAS THEREFORE IMMEDIATELY ENGAGED FOR THE NATIONAL AMERICAN MUSIC FESTIVAL, on October 4th next.
Bits of the TALES Retold
Buffalo Courier, May 1, 1923.
A VOICE OF GORGEOUS QUALITY AND A COMMAND OF STYLE THAT BESPEAKS EXTENSIVE CULTIVATION—ONE OF THE MOST ARTISTIC SINGERS THAT HAS APPEARED HERE—SANG WITH SUPERB DIGNITY AND VOCAL BEAUTY—HE AROSE TO A THRILLING CLIMAX.
Buffalo News, May 1, 1923:
TONE OF RICH TIMBRE—FREE, FULL, VITAL, AND OF SATISFYING UNIFORMITY—HIS INTERPRETIVE SENSE IS THOROUGHLY ARTISTIC—BEAUTIFULLY SUSTAINED, ORGANLIKE TONES.
Buffalo Times, May 1, 1923:
VOICE IS A SPLENDID ONE, DEEP AND RESONANT—INTELLIGENT AND MUSI-CIANLY—A FINE BREADTH OF STYLE AND AUTHORITY OF DELIVERY.
Buffalo Express, May 1, 1923:
HIS SPLENDID VOICE HAS THE MELLOW RICHNESS AND FULNESS OF A GENUINE BASS—FINELY SCHOOLED-SINGS WITH A FINISH OF PHRASING, A FULL-THROATED, EFFORTLESS PRODUCTION, A MASTERY OF THE SUBTLETIES OF EXPRESSION THAT MAKE HIS SINGING AN ARTISTIC DELIGHT.
Universities and Colleges are showing particular interest in Mr. Swinford’s fee for next season. His next university recital occurs on the Artist Course of New York University on July 5th next.
Management: JEROME SWINFORD
254 West 100th St.	New York
Riverside 9567
ETHEL GROW ON AMERICAN PROBLEMS
American literature is compared to the literature of Europe.
And that brings us to another point made by Miss Grow. In American literature the short story magazine has served to give our young writers their start. It solves their problem right from the first by furnishing them a market. The short story magazine, and the newspapers, which give pen artists routine experience, just such routine and just such a market as our young American artists must have if they are ever to develop, the point being that we can never know what sort of musical talent we have in America until the American field is open. Miss Grow does not believe that any really great individual American talent can be developed on foreign nourishment nor on foreign ideals, any more than any great American writer would develop properly if required always to imitate the style of France, Germany or Italy, and to have his finished output judged by comparison with the very best of the Europeans. It is not that the Europeans are better. They are different. They could no more make successful American works than we could make successful European works—successful, that is, as an American self-expression.
It is in order to help furnish a market and an outlet for the American that Miss Grow is giving her American programs. She has made a deep study of American song litera-
© Underwood & Underwood.
ETHEL GROW
ture and has selected her programs from the works that most appealed to her, setting songs together so as to. provide variety and progressive interest. And she fully believes in repetition. Not to sing a song just once and imagine that she has done the composer a great favor by doing so, but singing a song over and over in successive recitals until people get it in their heads. For familiar things are the things we like best in music.
Miss Grow finds John Alden Carpenter a perfect example of the beginning of a return to American tastes. His attitude towards the child, as in the Perambulator, and his humor in theKrazyKat and some of his songs are thoroughly American. And this return to American taste, in whatever direction it comes, will bring the American back to the point where music becomes a part of his life, not an exotic amusement. It will in time become real self-expression.
As for the imitation of European forms, Miss Grow says there is no more reason why we should not find a new form to suit ourselves in music than there was in our architecture. Where there is a demand there will always be a supply. When the demand came for the skyscraper we did not say “we cannot” or “we must make these things to suit Europe.” We went ahead and made them to suit ourselves, and Europe is now beginning to copy them. And there are thousands of other things, familiar objects of the household, that are also strictly American in design; and in popular music we have already invented a new form, simply because the foreigner did not interfere, was not consulted, and because there was a market for it.
Genius depends upon demand and recognition, a market. When we offer our musicians that, we will suddenly discover that we have geniuses among us who will express America for us just as our authors, our architects and our popular composers have expressed America for us. The Washington Heights Musical Club is working with Miss Grow to further these ideals. Gradually the American public will get in line and will rise above the popular kind of music and reach out for serious American musical expression. That is the solution, and it is up to the individual to get behind and push.
F. P.
Schwarz and Damrosch in Unique Recital
On board the steamship Mauretania on its most recent trip eastward a combination of unusual distinction, Joseph Schwarz, the Chicago Opera baritone, and Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony, gave a joint recital for the benefit of the seamen’s home. Needless to sav this was their first, last and only joint recital, unless they should again happen to be on the same ship at some future time. Mr. Damrosch appeared “at the piano,” and Mr. Schwarz gave a varied program of arias and songs with his most distinguished accompanist so far.
John Charles Thomas “Stopped the Show”
John Charles Thomas sang in Providence recently, and the following letter received by Manager R. E. Johnston gives a short, “snappy” account of his success:
Dear Mr. Johnston:
Thomas stopped the show yesterday, and he was well entitled to do so. I have never heard him sing better.
He certainly is a marvelous artist, and we consider ourselves very fortunate to have had him for the symphony concert.
Cordially yours,
(Signed) Harvey Flint.
If any of our musicians are entitled to air their views ׳on America’s musical problems they are those who are -American musicians themselves and have behind them an .American musical ancestry. It is altogether impossible for ■anyone to look at the present without perspective, without :a personal knowledge of history, and make even a vague .guess as to our present troubles or the cause of them.
What are those troubles? Well, according to Ethel Grow, :they are all in some way associated with one basic fact, :the fact that none of the serious music we have in America :today is in any sense of the word a personal American .self-expression. It is not that the American public has Jailed music; music has failed the American public. Foreign music does not express Americanism. Some of it may ׳come near it, of course. Some near, some not so near, some :not near at all, some directly opposed. But none of it is actually us ourselves.
Look back at America of two or three generations ago before the beginning of the foreign invasion and you will see that music was not, for Americans, entertainments but spiritual nourishment. The “singing school” of those days was not a school for children. It was a school for grownups where they got, by making it themselves, what they needed in the way of the spiritual nourishment that music affords. And in those days, uncultured from our point of view, there was more widespread musical culture in America than there is today.
It was a day of small technical demands, but nearly everybody was in possession of that small ability such as it was. Everybody, almost, could take part, at sight, in the singing of part songs, or the singing of popular ballads. Think of that if you will, and think what a loss that possession has meant to us! F'rom being a generally musical people, a nation of music-makers, we have become a generally unmusical people, a nation of music-buyers. And who is more musical, the persons who make up our audiences, very few of whom could read even the simplest song-part at sight, or at all—or those ancestors of ours who attended scarcely a concert a year, but who sang and played and made their own music, not for public performance, not professionally, but for their own pleasure, as amateurs? There will be no two answers to that question.
What happened to destroy it, and who is chiefly to blame? Miss Grow says that the blame must not be laid at the door ׳of foreigners or managers but where it belongs, at the door ׳of the American professionals of those days who went abroad :to get their educations and came back so filled with the Ideal and the worship of foreign art that they could see ;nothing in our pigmy American efforts. They encouraged :the bringing of foreign art and artists to these shores, and, with the influx of the great virtuosi of the time, music gradually ceased to appeal to the average run of people as a spiritual nourishment for home consumption, but became for them a recreation or amusement with no more meaning in their lives than a three-ring circus, or a one-ring circus, or whatever sort of circus they had in those days. _ It became an outside thing, not an inside thing—an entertainment.
Gradually the sight-singing disappeared. The singing-school became a thing of the past. The small concert companies who used to travel about doing English songs and English ballad operas, whose audiences were made up from the singing schools, died from lack of support. The common people found themselves artificially repressed. The new music meant nothing to them, yet they had not the organization to oppose its influx. What they did is just what the common people always do—they simply withdrew. And so the foreign importation languished while the native art died. There was neither the one thing nor the other. The native art was opposed by the “cultured” musicians, both native and foreign, because it was not high art. But though this opposition killed off the beginnings of our native art and the art we had brought with us from England, it did not make foreign art successful. Even now we know what a struggle we are having getting support for symphony orchestras, operas, and the like.
So the democratic form of music was gradually given up for professionalism. Technic was too much stressed. Even Americans, who might have been supposed to speak to their own people, came back from abroad with such an exaggerated idea of the importance of technic that they had nothing to say. This was the result, largely, of_ the fact that they had such tremendous difficulty getting their technic. They had to work so hard for it that they forgot all else. The American public was thoroughly snubbed. No attention was paid to their tastes. As music became for them an entertainment, with no consideration either for their understanding or their taste, they naturally got the greatest joy out of spectacular things, speed kings, pyrotechnicians and high-note artists, which did not tend to educate the native in art, especially the native of British descent.
To understand this one must understand the British attitude. To the Britisher the oratorio stands above every other form of musical art. Miss Grow tells the story from her own experience. She says, always when she sang for French people, their comment was: “Very good, but no emotion.” That was the French point of view. But when she got to England she heard just the contrary: “Very good, but too much emotion.” When she was engaged to sing in oratorios she made a sincere effort to get the English point of view and understand the reason of it. And that reason, she found, was based upon the very thing of which we have been speaking, music as spiritual nourishment. Serious music was no more an entertainment for the Britisher than it was for the American until it became an import from abroad. It may be argued that the best loved oratorios in England were made by Germans: Handel and Mendelssohn. But both of those men wrote for the English taste and their oratorios appeal more strongly to the English than to the Germans. Foreign opera has meant no more to the people of England than it has to the people of America. It has always been supported ׳ by the wealthy, an exclusive exotic.
It is too late now to get rid of foreign artists and foreign art. We could not even if we would, and it is very doubtful if any such thing would be advisable. Yet we must try to get back some of our own culture, and the way to do it. according to Miss Grow, it to give our own composers and our own artists real encouragement. And by real encouragement she means not the sort they get now, but positive recognition in the home, in their home towns, by managers, clubs, audiences, opera houses, symphony societies. Nor should they be compelled to become European. They should, rather, be expected to express Americanism. Their art should not be compared with the art of Europe, any more than