Up to Louisville

Among professions which the WPA has attempted to aid, music has needed all the help it could get, has been slow in experiencing recovery. Currently nearly 10,000 U. S. musicians do WPA work. In Chicago, where it has placed two men in the Chicago Symphony, the Federal Music Project of the WPA last week announced a more notable feat of re-employment. Robert Sutton Whitney, 33, Chicago supervisor of the Project, was made permanent conductor of the Louisville Symphony Orchestra.

When members of the Civic Arts Association, which backs the Louisville orchestra, began hunting a conductor, they consulted with Pianist Guy Maier, assistant Federal music director in Washington. He sent them to Chicago where the Illinois Symphony, one of 155 WPA concert orchestras throughout the U. S., is able, indefatigable in playing new and rare music. In the Chicago Project headquarters an audition for half-a-dozen conductors was arranged. When Conductor Whitney, slight and wispy-mustached, led the Illinois Symphony with sure, precise beat in his own Symphony in E Minor, the deal with the Louisvillians was as good as closed. Conductor Whitney takes over the Louisville baton next month, is expected promptly to reorganize it. Though he studied conducting with Eric De Lamarter, Whitney made his reputation as a composer and radio pianist in an NBC ensemble with his father and his four string-playing sisters. Conductor Whitney's father, who brought him as a baby from England to Chicago, also plays the double bass in Chicago's Palace Theatre. Whitney's salary in Louisville will be $3,000 a year, $600 more than his WPA post paid.

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