Original Girl

The judges had hoped for something original. The results were 98% disappointing.

Of the 100 entries in the young composers contest at Detroit's Grinnell Foundation, most sounded like crudely rewritten Mendelssohn, Debussy, Mozart. Only two scores had both real originality and technical skill. The judges had no alternative--they awarded both first and second prize to Manhattan's 14-year-old Philippa Duke Schuyler, brightest young composer in the U.S. (TIME, July 1, 1940).

Harlem-born Philippa, a mulatto, is a pretty girl who reads Nietzsche, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. She likes to play chess against herself (to a skeptical reporter who asked how it could be done, she replied: "Maybe I'm a schizophrenic"). At six she gave recitals of her own compositions (The Goldfish, The Jolly Pig). At ten she had finished grammar school (her I.Q.: 185); at eleven she had written 100 piano compositions. Most of her friends, she says, are grownups. Her Negro novelist father, George Schuyler (Black-No-More, Slaves Today) and her white Texas-born mother used to credit her genius to such things as her diet of raw meat, but now she is a vegetarian for what she calls "esthetic reasons."

Philippa's first-prize Manhattan Nocturne, written when she was twelve, has been performed by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, the Chicago Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Said Philippa: "I was in Mexico on a vacation trip with Mother, and I was so homesick for New York that I wrote it to express what I felt." The second-prize Rumpelstiltskin is from Philippa's almost-completed Fairy Tale Symphony.

Last week, wearing a grown-up black dress and a black mantilla, Philippa sat with queenly poise in a box of Detroit's gold-spangled Masonic Temple Auditorium and heard the Detroit Symphony play her Nocturne before 7,000 schoolchildren. Conductor Valter Poole shrewdly programmed it after Mozart's First Symphony, composed when Mozart was eight. Neither score was great, but both showed great promise.

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