Clubbers

For the amount of cultural fuss it begets, music is unequalled among the arts. There are in the U. S. no less than 4,900 local music clubs, with a total of 500,000 lady members ready to defend the diatonic scale as they would defend their young. Last week 5,000 of them, smartly dressed and a little less bosomy than D. A. R. ladies, wound up in Baltimore the 21st biennial convention of the National Federation of Music Clubs, moved on to New York City for two days at the World's Fair.

Besides holding concerts which bring out acres of corsages, the music clubbers' conventions involve a more useful activity. Since 1915 the Federation has given some $30,000 in prizes to young U. S. musicians. Winners last week in convention contests were Pianist Samuel Sorin ($1,000 and a chance to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra), Contralto Martha Lipton ($1,000 and a spot on a Firestone radio program), Violinists Bernard Kundell and Marion Head ($250 apiece).

In Baltimore the clubbers heard a speech by Pianist Olga Samaroff (born Lucy Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Tex. and once married to Conductor Leopold Stokowski), who deplored the profession's "cutthroat competition," stepped up by refugee musicians in the U. S. The ladies re-elected as their president curly-browed, sweet-spoken Mrs. Vincent Hilles Ober of Norfolk, Va., to whom The Good Fairy Valse was dedicated and played by Pianist Henry Holden Huss. Mrs. Ober waved a triumphant wand.

"During these two years," she said, "we have been somewhat frightened by the silence of our countrymen created by the lack of community or mass singing. . . ." To break the silence, President Ober had arranged for a "national chorus" of 950 voices. When this great choir trooped into Baltimore's Lyric Theatre to perform such easily negotiable gems as Ah, Love but a Day by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, it had to be placed in the orchestra seats while the audience sat on the stage. When part of the national chorus, transported to the World's Fair, reached the climax of the Federation's week--a concert in the Court of Peace--it encountered competition. A carillon in the Belgian Pavilion was ding-donging for all it was worth. The chorus, aided by the club-ladies who valiantly joined in the singing, put up a good fight. But the carillon won.

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