Stokowski's Natives

A Mexican Indian, a onetime cowboy and an Alabama Negro who used to be a bootblack composed the bulk of the music which Conductor Leopold Stokowski brought from Philadelphia to Manhattan one night last week. The fair-haired Stokowski was proving that his orchestra gives an occasional hearing to untried native composers.

The Mexican Indian was Manuel Ponce who contributed Chapultepec, a suave Frenchy picture of the cypress woods which surround the castle in Mexico City where the ill-fated Maximilian once lived. The cowboy was Harl McDonald, now a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, who meant his Santa Fe Trail to describe the trek of New England pioneers across the blistering desert. The McDonald pioneers were not a hardy lot and their mood, more often than not, was touched with the Russian melancholy of Tchaikovsky.

William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony had a few exciting moments when drum beats drilled out a climax in true African fashion. But for the rest Composer Dawson appeared to have forgotten his primitive background. After his shoe-shining days in Anniston, Ala., he worked ambitiously at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. He studied music in Kansas City, later in Chicago where Conductor Frederick Stock chose him for his first trombonist. He returned to Tuskegee in 1930, to head the music department, direct the choir.

In his Negro Symphony Composer Dawson wanted to voice the struggles of his people. He used Negro folk themes but he dressed them with such fancy orchestration that they lost their force and spontaneity. Applause was more for Dawson, the Negro who had managed to have a piece played by the proud Philadelphia Orchestra, than for a symphony which was for the most part undistinguished, a conventional copy of the white man's ways.

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