22 June 14, 1923 MUSICAL COURIER AN IRREDUCIBLE MINIMUM A shorter way of saying irreducible minimum might be desirable for an article like the following, but we have preferred to use the current expression of the scientists. Every man of science knows the value of simplicity in any mechanism. The more wheels and levers and axles and valves a machine has the greater is the chance of something going wrong and the more there is to wear out with constant friction. Yet the inexperienced youth and ignorant man are always impressed more deeply by a very complicated machine than by a very simple one. In musical composition it is likewise the rule that the young men try to be more complex and elaborate than their predecessors. They require more harmonies in the accompaniments of their themes and they employ a greater variety of orchestral instruments. How many of the young men composers ever learn that it is more difficult to be effectively simple than to be complex? It seems more natural to strive for the maximum of complexity than to seek the irreducible minimum of simplicity. Most of the ambitious young men composers would a thousand times rather compose a complicated, long and brilliant symphonic poem for an augmented orchestra to be played a few times in a concert room than to write a simple melody with a three chord accompaniment to be sold by the million copies and be sung and hummed and whistled all over the world for nearly a century. The list of those who have produced complicated marvels for oblivion is long. It would fill this page. The name of the man who wrote the melodies with the irreducible minimum of simplicity is Stephen Foster. Turn up your noses at this kind of stuff if you wish, oh potent masters of orchestral juggleries! Say what you will of him, but bear in mind that he won and kept the ear of the world. “That book is good in vain, which the reader throws away,” wrote Dr. Johnson a century and a half ago. That music is complicated in vain, which the public neglects, say we. Of course, we are guilty of no such foolishness as to say that composers should cease to write long and elaborate works for the best and greatest of our modern orchestras, and should busy themselves with music of The Old Folks at Home variety. We believe nevertheless that composers would find it exceedingly more difficult to win success with Foster’s irreducible minimum than to turn out more elaborate works than Richard Strauss ever attempted. --------- MENTAL DISCIPLINE We are indebted to the Committee for the Study of Music in Institutions for two pamphlets dealing with the above subject. One of them, Music in Correctional Institutions, is reprinted from the seventy-eighth annual report of the prison association of New York. The other, Music as a Means of Mental Discipline, is reprinted from the Archives of Occupation Therapy. Both are by Willem van de Wall, a native of Holland, for several years a harpist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and during the war a member of the Marine Band. Following the war he was assigned to work with music in hospitals for ex-service men under the direction of the War Camp Community Service. Some of the institutions where Mr. van de Wall has conducted his experiments are: State Hospital for the Insane, State Reformatory for Women, Workhouse for Women, Wayside Home, House of the Holy Family, and the Colored Orphan Asylum. No doubt this is an important work, but its interest is obviously therapeutic, not musical. No one, certainly no musician, will be inclined to minimize the importance of music both in health and disease. Perhaps, ultimately, these correctional studies may give us musicians a closer understanding of the essence of music, and perhaps even aid in an investigation of the laws of composition and interpretation. Meantime the studies will be of greater interest to physicians than to musicians. ----<$>-- WAGNER Says Pitts Sanborn, writing in The Nation: “The fact of the matter must be that Meyerbeer’s invincible flair for the theater, effective alike in the evil and the good of his scores, has endowed his operas with an enduring life in the theater.” Without doubt this is true, but our idea is that the principal reason Meyerbeer still lives and arouses such enthusiasm as his L’Africana did at the Metropolitan last winter, is because he assigns to the singers tunes that are both singable and hearable. Until the public is educated up to a point where it listens with its intellect instead of its ears (if it ever be educated as far as that) the world will continue to like Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Meyerbeer et al, better than Debussy, Strauss, Schrecker and others of the more modern ilk. ־• ׳« No modern artist except D’Annunzio has caught his imagination like Arturo the Great. Why, he asks, did America let this man go ? Why indeed ? IN MEMORY OF WEBER London’s Underground Railway is now celebrating its sixtieth year of its activities and calling upon the public to contemplate its wonderful development since 1863. But the general public is not likely to learn that one of the first stations opened when the line was built was on the site of the Roman Catholic Chapel, in Moorfields. This beautiful building was designed by J. Newman in 1817, and a book of views published a century ago describes it as one of the architectural glories of London. In 1826 the great composer, Carl von Weber, died in London, where INTERIOR OF MOORFIELDS CIIAPEL from which Weher was carried to his grave. (Photographic copy made for the Musical Courier by Clarence Lucas.) he had gone to produce his Oberon. His remains were carried into Moorfields Chapel for the last, solemn services before interment in the churchyard. Eighteen years later, in 1844, the coffin was removed to the family vault in Dresden, Germany. Eighteen years later, in 1862, the Chapel disappeared and the quiet graveyard was transferred elsewhere to make room for the great station of Moorgate, under which today the electric trains never cease running. The smoky, grimy, puffing engines, which first made this churchyard site an inferno of sound and fury, are almost as much forgotten as the Chapel in Moorfields, where the master of Oberon’s revels and the melodies of fairy land was consigned to the underworld of dust and ashes, ninety-seven years ago. C. L. ----<$>-- ENGLISH AS SHE IS RIT This gem is quoted from a circular being distributed by the managers of an Italian artist who “is born in Florence the 3d of November 1887 and from childood showed genial aptitudes to become, one day, a serious ad skilled artist. Pupil of the Royal Conservatoire of Milan, from 1898 to 1908, under the guide of the famous musician Professor and Knight Giuseppe Frugatta, he acquired, and greatly emancipated his musical sensibility. He took his degree in this great institution and went afterwards to get larger and more precious knowledge amongs the free teachers of intellectual Germany. “Young, distinguished and with a serious instruction he could, already as a child, boast of notable triunphs in literary, artistic and dramatic pastimes on the Milanese stage and, since a few years, through most brilliant debuts, his beautiful intelligence and conscient activity, he belongs officially to the number of joung bold artists who undoubtably can and will obtain esteem and consideration. The committee for the celebration of the Centenary of Franz Liszt, under the honorary presidence of His Excellency the Minister Credaro and of the Illustrious Maestro Knight Commander Giovanni Sgambati, wanted him as a member of the Executive board, to take part to such great artistic commemoration in Rome.” - ■