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IGOR STRAVINSKY is announced as having been appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, for the 1939-1940 academic year. Though designated as a chair of poetry, this Professorship is awarded annually, without regard to nationality, to men of high distinction and preferably of international reputation in poetry, music, or any other of the fine arts. It is believed to be the first time a musician and composer has been chosen for this post. Stravinsky will live in Cambridge and give at least six public lectures.

 

MORE THAN SEVENTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS were the gross receipts of the Metropolitan Opera Company during its recent three day season in Dallas, Texas.

 

THE HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY of Boston, America’s oldest singing organization of real oratorio proportions, closed its one hundred and twenty-fourth season with I a performance of ”The Damnation of Faust” by Berlioz, on the evening of April 16th, in Symphony Hall, with Dr. Thompson Stone conducting. Gertrude Ehrhart, Boston soprano, was the Marguerite; Paul Althouse, Metropolitan Opera tenor, sang as Faust; Gean Greenwell, basso, was the Mephistopheles; and Mark Love, Chicago City Opera Company baritone, the Brander. The organization gave its first performance, Haydn’s “Creation,” in the Stone Chapel, on Christmas night, 1815, with Gottlieb Graupner conducting.

 

WHEN WALTER GIESEKING was soloist at a near-closing concert of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Dr. Eugene Goossens, he played the “Concerto in D minor, No. 3” of Rachmaninoff, “so superbly that the audience sprang to its feet and shouted its acclaim.”

 

VIOLINS AND VIOLINISTS is a cheerful little journal filled with varied information of interest to devotees of this “Queen of Instruments.” Several of its early numbers have been coming as most welcome visitors to our desk. Good luck to our vigorous young contemporary and its optimistic editor!

 

THE ST. LOUIS GRAND OPERA ASSOCIATION is an opera venture underwritten by one hundred individuals and firms to present opera on a non-profit basis—the second such enterprise in the United States, with San Francisco as the first. Its bow to the public was made on April 17th, with a performance of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” with Lauritz Melchior, Danish tenor, and Marjorie Lawrence, Australian soprano, in the leading roles. Verdi’s “Otello” followed on April 21st, and Gounod’s “Faust” on the 24th. Metropolitan Opera Company artists interpreted all leading characters.

 

TRAIPSIN’ WOMAN CABIN, eighteen miles south of Ashland, Kentucky, was the scene of the Ninth Annual American Folk Song Festival on June 11th. Last Year twenty thousand people from all lands treked the picturesque Mayo Trail to this windowless little cabin to hear the mountain songs by mountain singers.

THE ANNUAL BACH FESTIVAL at Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, was held on June 9th and 10th with Dr. Albert Riemenschneider conducting. The “St. Matthew Passion” was the item of chief interest. Eminent vocal and instrumental artists contributed to the programs.

 

DANTE FIORILLO, of Westwood, New Jersey, has been awarded the Pulitzer traveling fellowship in music, which is given each year “to the student of music in America deemed most talented and deserving of this provision for European study.”

 

A “CONCERTO FOR CLARINET,” by Henry Brant, has been awarded the One Hundred Dollar Prize offered by the Society of Professional Musicians of New York.

 

ERNEST BLOCH’S new “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” had its first public performance when on a program in London late in April, with Joseph Szigeti as soloist and Sir Thomas Beecham leading the Philharmonic Society Orchestra.

 

PADEREWSKI’S FAREWELL TO NEW YORK was to have been a concert at Madison Square Garden on the evening of May 27th, and an audience of fifteen thousand was gathered for the event, when the seventy-eight year old “Emperor of the Pianoforte” collapsed and had to be taken to his private railway car that had carried him as far as Los Angeles and back, while he played twenty of his scheduled twenty-five engagements. On advice of his physician the “living immortal among musicians” cancelled the remaining concerts and in the night of May 30th sailed on the Normandie for his home in Switzerland.

 

THE METROPOLITAN OPERA COMPANY drew sixty-eight thousand attendants to its eight performances in one week, in April, at Cleveland, Ohio. Forty Thousand of these came from outside Cleveland, with delegations from several bordering states.

THE SOCIETY OF EGYPTIAN MUSIC, with the collaboration of the Egyptian State Broadcasting Company of Cairo recently presented a program of chamber music, including the “Quartet in F minor, Op. 10” of Hindemith ; “Sonata in B minor, fcr violin and piano” by Respighi; the “Quartet in C major” by Hüttel; the “Trio with Piano, in C minor, Op. 2,” by Suk; and “Starnelli e Ballade, for string quartet” by Malipiero. The artists were M. M. Adolphe Menaszes, violin; Silvestro Catecchio, violin; Joseph Hüttel, alto (viola) and piano; and Mayer Reininger, violoncello.

 

HERBERT L. CLARKE, conductor of the Long Beach Municipal Band (California), and internationally famous cornetist long soloist with the Sousa Band, received recently the honorary degree of Doctor of Music, from Phillips University of Enid, Oklahoma.

 

TURKISH SONGS made up the program of a gala concert given on February fourteenth, at Cairo, Egypt, by the eminent Turkish singer, Mounir Nottedin Bey of the Conservatory of Istanbul.

 

MISS HELEN L. CRAMM, widely known American composer, especially of fascinating pieces for little tots, passed away on June 14, at the age of eighty. Born at Pembroke, New Hampshire, December 8, 1858, Haverhill, Massachusetts has been her home since 1872. Her musical education was received at the New England Conservatory, supplemented by studies with eminent private teachers. Her compositions and compilations are numbered by the score; and these exhibited her peculiar genius for melody which gave a charm to all she wrote. Her reputation as a teacher was second only to that as a composer.

 

MARCELLA SEMBRICH, internationally famous soprano, and for many years of the Metropolitan Opera Company, and Edward de Coppet, eminent patron of music and especially of the great Flonzaley Quartet, are to be honored by bronze plaques on two endowed chairs in the Town Hall of New York, as “tributes to those whose work and worth inspire those who come hither to emulate their example.”

 

JOSE ITURBI, pianist and conductor, has had a season of brilliant success at the head of the Orchestra of the Theatre Colon of Buenos-Ayres.

 

WHAT A BLOW to our American musical art. The management of the New York World’s Fair announced on May 24th that after May 29th “all programs of classical music scheduled for the Hall of Music would be cancelled,” and that popular music at popular prices would be substitute (sic) . So Commercialism literally kicks Frau Art out of bed.

 

“THE OLD MAID AND THE THIEF” by Gian-Carlo Menotti, twenty-seven year old American composer, and the first opera to be commissioned by N. B. C. for radio, had its world premiere on April 22nd, with the collaboration of the N. B. C. Orchestra; and with Mary Hopple as The Old Maid, Robert Weede as Son of the Trail, Margaret Daum as Letitia, and Dorothy Sarnoff as Miss Pinkerton. Alberto Erede conducted, and Joseph Curton, as Narrator, set the stage and linked the episodes.

 

THE SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY of Natanael Berg, the eminent Swedish composer was celebrated by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Stockholm which invited him to conduct a program of his own works, including his “Fourth Symphony, ‘The Seasons’ “; his widely played “Concerto for Piano, and Orchestra,” with W. Witkowsky as soloist; and “The Hymn of Israel” for mixed chorus and orchestra.

 

ST. LOUIS SUMMER OPERA at Forest Park opened with a performance of Friml’s “Rose Marie” on the evening of June 2nd; and it will close with the American premiere of “Victoria and Her Husband.”

 

THE HORATIO PARKER FELLOWSHIP for musical composition, in the American Academy of Rome, has been awarded to William Douglas Denny of Berkeley, California.

 

THE ANNUAL BERKSHIRE SYMPHONIC FESTIVAL, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky, is announced for August 3rd, 5th, 6th, 10th, 12th and 13th, in the new Tanglewood Shed which has been completed at an expense of $91,193.95.

SOLANGE DELMAS, coloratura soprano of the Grand Opera of Paris, is announced for a concert tour o#f the United States during the coming season.

 

A FOUR-DAY MOZART FESTIVAL at the Juilliard Graduate School of New York City, was opened on April 25th by the production of an English version of “The Marriage of Figaro.”

 

KARL W. GEHRKENS, Editor of the “Questions and Answers” columns of The Etude and Musical Editor of the Webster New International Dictionary, received on June 13th, the honorary degree of Doctor of Music, from Capital University of Columbus, Ohio. On June 6th, he and Carl Wilhelm Kern, with many musical works in the catalogs of the Theodore Presser Company and other publishers, received the same degree from Illinois Wesleyan University of Bloomington, Illinois.

 

THE NORTH SHORE FESTIVAL of Evanston (Chicago), Illinois, was revived with an opening performance on May 16th of Bach’s “Passion According to St. Matthew,” after a lapse of several years because of unsettled business conditions. Dr. Frederick Stock infused “a reverential, awesome quality” into this master work, as he led the chorus, soloists and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra “through its mystic and worshipful score.”

 

RAVINIA PARK, Chicago, long the stronghold of Mr. Louis Eckstein’s wonderful pet opera company, has forsaken the lyric muse and on June 29th began a series of symphonic concerts to last till August 6th.

 

THE PRINCESS OF PIEDMONT was a participant in the second representation of Ravel’s “l’Enfant et les Sortileges (The Child and Witchcraft) ” and Vecchi’s “L’Amphiparnasso (Around Parnassus),” when these works were performed in the May Festival of Florence, Italy.

 

THE PHILADELPHIA OPERA COMPANY announces six performances for the coming season: Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”; Gounod’s “Faust”; Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly”; Bizet’s “Carmen”; Verdi’s “La Traviata”; and Strauss’s “Der Fledermaus.”

 

THE NINTH ANNUAL FESTIVAL of American Music was held at Rochester, New York, from April 24th to 28th, sponsored by the Eastman School of Music under the direction of Dr. Howard Hanson. Twenty- five works of native composers were heard, and several of them for the first time.

 

THE AMERICAN GUILD OF BANJOISTS, Mandolinists and Guitarists held its thirty-eighth annual convention from July 5th to 8th, inclusive, at Providence, Rhode Island. Teachers, students and visiting players had the privilege of seeing an imposing display of published music for their favorite instruments.

 

“THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER,” an American folk opera by Douglas Moore, in the style of the German singspiel with spoken dialogue and occasional music, had its premiere on May 18th and at the same time served to dedicate the “impressively sponsored” American Lyric Theater of New York.

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