Ladies in Minneapolis

When last week ended in Minneapolis the people, of the town thought that they had never seen so many ladies or heard so much music. The ladies, 3,000 of them, had come from all over the U. S. for the biennial convention of the National Federation of Music Clubs. They congregated in front of the University of Minnesota's Northrop Memorial Auditorium, lined up behind their State banners and marched inside to hear the Minneapolis Symphony play the opening concert. For seven days thereafter music and musical talk flowed like liquor at an American Legion convention.

Seven Philadelphia harpists played one night, dressed angelwise in flowing georgette robes with snoods around their heads. The Twin City Opera Company gave Rigoletto. University students gave Madame Butterfly. John Erskine, Harold Bauer, Rudolph Ganz, Ernest Hutcheson and Henri Deering played the piano. Baritone Lawrence Tibbett and Soprano Florence Macbeth (from Mankato, Minn.) sang. Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge sponsored chamber music by the Gordon String Quartet. Twenty-five amateur choruses performed and an orchestra came from San Antonio, Tex., the players all in their early teens. Delegates who took a few hours off to buy presents to take home heard music in the department stores. When they walked in Powderhorn Park they heard community singing for which an all-banjo orchestra plunked vigorous accompaniments.

At business sessions the ladies concerned themselves with all manner of weighty problems, even discussing Inflation. They lunched and dined with the important artists, who got little time to eat. They nearly smothered Lawrence Tibbett trying to get his autograph. They flocked like hummingbirds around handsome, affable Arthur Walter Kramer, editor of Musical America who, dedicating his current issue to the Federation, ended his apostrophe: "It is, as it ever will be. Goethe's 'das ewig Weibliche' [the eternal feminine] that leads us on."

On the way home many of the delegates visited the Century of Progress Fair, mindful that it was in Chicago, at the Fair of 1893, that the idea of a Federation came up when a group of clubs met there, discovered it was fun to sing together. In the 35 years since its founding, the Federation has grown to have 5,000 clubs. 500,000 individual members, dozens of earnest aims. It conducts study courses, encourages U. S. composers by offering prizes which have ranged from $100 to$10,000. It has spent over $300,000 helping young U. S. artists to launch their careers--among them Soprano Hilda Burke and Contralto Kathryn Meisle who got into the Chicago Opera. Basso Arthur Anderson who got into the Metropolitan.sb And the ladies of the Federation make good listeners for ambitious young artists who would otherwise have a hard time finding any listeners at all.

The Federation's boosting of U. S. talent has reached its peak under the administration of Mrs. Elmer James Ottaway. pretty wife of the publisher of the St. Petersburg (Fin.) Times and Port Huron (Mich.) Times-Herald. Many a delegate doubted last week if the Federation could ever get a more popular president than Mrs. Ottaway. But her time is up. When the music subsided in Minneapolis last week pince-nezzed Mrs. John Alexander Jardine of Fargo. N. D., was elected president, and Mrs. Ottaway stepped down to the chairmanship of publicity and the editorship of the Clubs' magazine. Mrs. Jardine's family were at the convention--her husband (no kin to onetime Secretary of Agriculture William M. Jardine) who heads Jardine Bridge Co. in Fargo and serves in the North Dakota legislature, their son John who attends North Dakota's State University. Agnes Jardine never had professional ambitions as did Mrs. Ottaway who was a pianist before her marriage. Mrs. Jardine learned about music from her father who was the Methodist choirmaster of Aurora. Neb.

sbFour $1,000 prizewinners this year were Pianist Dailies Frantz (Ann Arbor), Cellist Louise Essex (Indianapolis), Violinist Byrd Elyot and Tenor Edwin Austin Kane of Manhattan.

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