Babylon to Harlem

Harlem's hotspots last week had 45 knowing visitors. The 45 were delegates to the American Musicological Society's first international congress, climaxing a strenuous six-day program in Manhattan. Such eminent musicologists as Yugoslavia's Dragan Plamenac, Denmark's Knud Jeppesen, Venezuela's Juan Lecuna, watched the Big Apple, the Lindy Hop, the Shag, drank what there was to drink. At the Savoy Ballroom, Bandmaster Erskine Hawkins swung Bach, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Minor in their honor. The bolder musicologists ventured gingerly out on the floor, soon got limber.

Before its Harlem junket, last week's congress had its fill of erudition. The musicologists, whose line is musical research as opposed to musical performance, heard such typical papers as The So-Called Babylonian Notation, Mozart's Handwriting and the Creative Process, The Evolution of Javanese Tone-Systems. Delegates from France and Germany were kept away by the war, and the musicologists soberly discussed probable hindrance of their work elsewhere, applauded a message from French Novelist-Musician Romain Rolland: "In the field of art, there is not . . . any rivalry among nations. The only combat worthy of us is that . . . between culture and ignorance."

It was not all theory the delegates heard: a dozen concerts ranged in theme from music of the two Americas to Venetian and Dalmatian songs of the Renaissance. One program resurrected unpublished music by Handel, none of it performed since the composer's day. Enjoyed most by delegates and outsiders alike was a concert of medieval music at The Cloisters, Manhattan's museum-piece museum of Gothic art, where bull-necked French Tenor Yves Tinayre and a girls' choir sang motets, trouvere songs, Gregorian chants.

Leader of the Harlem jaunt, as of the entire congress, was tweedy, affable, red-mustached Carleton Sprague Smith,* 34, president of the American Musicological Society. Dr. Smith once studied the flute at the Paris Conservatoire, decided professional flute playing was too uncertain a job, though he had worked his way through Harvard by fluting at weddings, in theatres. Since 1931 Dr. Smith has headed the New York Public Library's music division, a clearing house for musical information used yearly by 50,000 people, from schoolgirls to Cecil B. DeMille.

Dr. Smith's outlook on music is sociological, stems from his interest in people, their customs and living conditions. In no slumming or night-out spirit did he shepherd his fellows to Harlem. He says of U. S. folk music: "It's the best thing we have. It's as American as chewing gum and Mark Twain, good and tawdry and proud of it."

* No kin to Musicologist Carleton Smith, radio commentator at Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium concerts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.