Homegrown

When the West produces musical talent (e.g., Fiddlers Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern), it has to go East to be polished. Last week, the West opened a musical finishing school of its own, at luxuriant, seaside Santa Barbara. For $30 a week board and up to $250 for eight weeks' tuition, 50 "advanced and specially gifted musicians" will be provided with extracurricula not offered by the East's famed but city-bound Juilliard, Eastman and Curtis: a private beach and mountain scenery, as well as a list of celebrated teachers, advisers and sponsors as long as an unwound French horn.

The Metropolitan's Richard Bonelli (voice), England's Griller Quartet (chamber music) and Composer Ernest Bloch (music craftsmanship) are on the faculty. Sponsors include Pierre Monteux, Artur Rodzinski, Bruno Walter, Yehudi Menuhin, Artur Rubinstein, Laurence Tibbett, Helen Traubel, Lotte Lehmann and Joseph Szigeti. Hollywooders Darryl Zanuck, Ronald Colman, Alec Templeton and Jeanette MacDonald chipped in scholarships.

Director of the new, nonprofit Music Academy of the West will be plumpish Isabel Morse Jones, whose championship of Western musicians last January cost her her 20-year job as music critic of the Los Angeles Times. Said Isabel of her new school: "We do not aim at educating hundreds. We hope to have a hand in training the talented 3%."

From the Louis XV wing of the great palace at Fontainebleau came sounds of furious piano cadenzas, the scraping of violins, and of someone trying to conquer a flute. The Americans were back.

The American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, a luxurious classroom for U.S. art & music students, had grown out of Walter Damrosch's World War I school for Army bandmasters. Among those who passed through its famed English gardens and composition classes were Aaron Copland, Walter Piston and Dick Rodgers (of Rodgers & Hart). In the early '20s, Composer Francis Casadesus had run the music school. Present director: his famed nephew, Pianist Robert Casadesus, whose wife, Pianist Gaby, is also on the faculty.

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