Frets in Minneapolis

Two generations ago there arrived in the U. S. a troupe of Spaniards who toured the land as "The Spanish Students," dressed in their native costume and performing on guitars, mandolins, bandurrias. On their heels followed a band of Italians who also called themselves "The Spanish Students." So intense was their rivalry that, when the two troupes met in Denver, they battled it out with fists. To the musical instrument trade of the U. S. this was a godsend. The mandolin was something new to most people, and in the 1890's, heyday of parlor music, that wiry-sounding fretted instrument became the rage.

The mandolin lost popularity during the War. For a time stringed instruments yielded to brass and reed, chiefly the saxophone. Then touring Hawaiians brought in the cheap, easily played ukulele, the steel guitar with its throbbing, swooping tone which home musicians thought glamorous. By 1928 radio had cut into the field, but, with jazz music at a noisy, amorphous stage, the banjo had a vogue of a sort. Currently the trade claims that home instruments are enjoying an upswing from which the guitar is getting the most benefit. The most respectable member of its family, this soft-toned fretted instrument was admired by many a classical composer, is played privately by Violinist Fritz Kreisler, is the specialty of Spaniard Andres Segovia and interests most U. S. amateurs because it figures in hillbilly music. Guitar sales are now at an alltime U. S. peak, 500,000 a year. In an $8.000,000 business, exclusive of organs and pianos, in which banjos, guitars and mandolins account for $4.000,000 annual sales, peaks were 200,000 for banjos (now 15,000), 150.000 for mandolins (now 10,000), 1,000,000 for ukuleles (now 25,000).

Ella Wheeler Wilcox plays the mandolin; Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby and Edsel Ford's son Henry II, the guitar; William Randolph Hearst used to strum a banjo. Not any of these but 1,500 other adepts of fretted instruments gathered last week in Minneapolis for the 35th annual convention of the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists & Guitarists. Convention manager and official host was Chester William Gould, 36, a big, loud-voiced banjoist, organizer of the 50-piece Gould Mandolin Orchestra, which this week was to perform a Mexican Fantasia in costume, and of the champion Go-piece Gould Banjo Band, which was to render a new arrangement of Ravel's famed Bolero.

Conventioneers were promised prizes for the largest orchestra, the orchestra which had traveled the greatest distance. Likewise this week there were to be banjo, mandolin, hillbilly, Hawaiian, junior, electro-phonic and popularity contests. To be seen and heard in Minneapolis were the most famed virtuosos of fretted instrumentalism, some of them playing on instruments worth thousands of dollars. Tenor Banjoist Albert Bellson played, for the first time anywhere, Bach's famed Chaconne, which is ordinarily a sombre, magnificent violin showpiece. Rev. Adam F. Hunkler, O.S.B., self-taught Catholic priest, played the five-string finger banjo on the same program with that maestro known to all Hawaiian guitarists, Sophocles Papas. Finally there was "the world's greatest mandolinist," Giuseppe Pettine of Providence, R. I., of whom the official Guild Reporter said in advance of his platform appearance:

"Pettine when before his audiences with an expression denoting mastery over a lovable, gracious and obliging instrument, personifies in every movement the ideal of the rare artist, and thus as by a mysterious and invisible chain, one is bound by a bond of the most sincere sympathy. the most pleasant sensation and warmth of heart to the man, even before the artist has spoken. . . . He holds his audiences spellbound, as if by some magic power. Whether it is his overwhelming temperament, his transcendent mythical power in music that seems capable of overcoming all the difficulties of his art; whether it is the ravishing charm of his melancholy gracefulness, his delicious mandolin poetry, the far-reaching effects of which we realize most keenly--who can decide?"

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