"Band of Gold"

The Philadelphia Orchestra is one of the nation's prime dispensers of "music for musicians" -- classical, romantic, modern. There never has been anything vulgar, anything jazzy, about it. The players' costumes, as is eminently proper, always match the programs in dignity and sobriety; they are invariably quite up to the requirements of what the man will wear. The expressions and attitudes of the musicians correspond; they exude gravity, dignity, devotion.

But the approach of Spring, and the happy dispersion of musico-financial troubles (TIME, April 21, May 12, 19) seem to have infected Conductor Stokowski with more than a mild dash of gaiety, boisterousness, even vulgar abandon. Stokowski has started a hilarious military band in Philadelphia.

It is called "The Band of Gold," and has been recruited largely from the ranks of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The players (120 of them) are costumed in scintillating yellow uniforms. Their faces beam with merriment. They blow their horns with hilarious gusto. Their cheeks puff out like full-bloom peonies.

"This band is different from any other band," exclaimed Stokowski at its first appearance at the Academy of Music. "I have put aside all tradition in my use of instruments. I have had no regard for conventions or academic rules. There is nothing like a band for gay music."

Then the "Gold Banders" launched into von Suppe's overture, Light Cavalry. And Stokowski began to get what he wanted. "I wanted the tone-color to sound like gold," he explained to the audience. "I wanted the band to look like gold--the golden, brazen look of sunlight."

The program wound up with Victor Herbert's American Fantasy, a brass-band composition which galloped through The President's March, Way Down Upon the Swanee River, The Girl I left Behind Me, Dixie, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, and finally, as both band and audience rose as a man, The Star Spangled Banner.

Eskimo

Music has displayed a certain reluctance to explore the frozen North. It was not until the time of Grieg that the possibilities of a tonal invasion of Arctic wastes and peoples was recognized. Percy Grainger and MacDowell have made tentative advances into the interpretation of the spirit of snow-lands. But it has remained for a Danish disciple of the Norwegian Grieg to bring forth a full-fledged, large-proportioned evocation of Eskimo life, of its strange superstitions and frigid passions.

This composer is Hakon Borresen, and he has written an opera called Kaddara. With the text translated into French, it has just been produced at the Monnaie in Brussels. There it created a sensation.

The Story. Ouiarak, Eskimo fisherman, is married to the young and beautiful Kaddara. One day he has bad luck. Kaddara taunts him for coming home emptyhanded. Enraged, Ouiarak returns to his kyak, again paddles out to sea. Led by a magic fish, he is then enticed by an enchantress-siren, one Announa. He lands on her beach (the "beach of widows"), succumbs to her charms. She prepares to destroy him, but he escapes in a blinding snowstorm over the frozen ocean. Kaddara, awaiting his return with her infant child, dashes out into the storm and rescues him. She welcomes him home with her warm kisses just as the first signs of the Arctic Spring show above the horizon. The happy ending is enhanced by a dance of villagers and flashes of the aurora borealis.

Meanwhile, boosters of American savage folklore in opera need not despair. In London, Hiawatha, produced as an opera with Coleridge-Taylor's music, filled the great Albert Hall.

Herbert

A great melodious Irishman, singer of happiness and love, Victor Herbert, fell dead as he ascended the steps of his doctor's office to find out if he was ill.

On the first day of February in 1859, in Dublin, he was born. While a mere child his father died in Paris, and his maternal grandfather, Samuel Lover, poet and novelist, took the management of his education. At the age of nine he was sent to Germany to study music. He studied at Leipsig, Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart, and made his first public appearance as a cellist in the Royal Orchestra of Stuttgart. In 1886 he married and came to America. He played with or conducted many orchestras, Metropolitan, Thomas's, Seidl's, Pittsburgh. But the great successes of his career were to come as a composer, as a weaver of the light airs of musical comedies and light operas.

The roll call of his successes swelled to vast proportions. It included Babes in Toyland, It Happened in Nordland, Mile. Modiste, The Wizard of the Nile, Naughty Mariette, Princess Pat, The Red Mill, Angel Face. It included innumerable songs, "Kiss Me Again," "A Kiss in the Dark," "Two Little Love Bees."

His prolificity continued to the end. He was working on music for the forthcoming Follies, and on an overture for Janice Meredith, a motion picture. His home in Manhattan was his principal workshop, equipped with a sound proof composing room, drafting boards, on which he worked seated on a high stool, five grand pianos.

On the day of his death, after a business conference, he lunched at the Lambs Club (theatrical). He felt ill and went home. After a rest he started for his doctor's office in his automobile. He left the car unassisted and started up the doctor's steps. As he did so, he fell dead of heart trouble.

"World Court"

The Etude, Philadelphia magazine, assembled a "Musical World Court" to determine who were the greatest composers and what their finest compositions. The court was composed of Americans, 8; Russians, 4; Englishmen, 3; Poles, 3; Italians, 2; Frenchmen, Belgians, Spaniards, Germans, Austrians, Australians, 1 each. Of these 26 judges none were critics; all (except one--an author) were active musicians in one field or another. They were: Leopold Auer, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, John Alden Carpenter, George W. Chadwick, Frederick Corder, Charles M. Courboin, P. M. T. Vincent d'Indy, H. Clarence Eddy, Arthur Foote, Robert Fuchs, Amelita Galli-Curci, Percy A. Grainger, Mark Hambourg, Josef Hofmann, Alberto Jonas, Edwin H. Lemare, Josef Lhevinne, Mortiz Moszkowski, Giacomo Puccini, Olga Samarov, Eduard Schuett, Cyril M. Scott, John Philip Sousa, Walter R. Spalding, Siegfried Wagner, Owen Wister (the author). Each was asked to choose what he thought the ten greatest compositions.

The greatest compositions with the number of votes to each were:

Die Meistersinger, Wagner, 14

Mass in B Minor, Bach, 10

Fifth Symphony, Beethoven, 9

Tristan und Isolde, Wagner, 9

Ninth Symphony, Beethoven, 5

The composers received mention as follows:

Beethoven, 36

Wagner, 33

Bach, 24

Mozart, 14

Brahms, 14

Schubert, 13

Chopin, 12

Schumann, 12

Mendelssohn, 8

Tchaikovsky, 8

Debussy, 7

Bizet, 7

Franck, 7

John Alden Carpenter, composer of The Birthday of the Infanta, a ballet-pantomime produced a few years ago (1919-1920) by the Chicago Opera Company, named Irving Berlin's Everybody Step third on his list.