Music: Stokowski’s Chosen

This spring, platinum-polled Leopold Stokowski toured the U. S., gave auditions to 500 aspirants to the “All American Youth Orchestra” which he plans to take to South America. Although he had set age limits (15 to 25), he stretched the limit after hearing, in Detroit, a 14-year-old Negro trumpeter named William B. Horner Jr. Last week, Trumpeter Horner’s name was on the list of 84 winners announced by Conductor Stokowski in Manhattan. The other players, although they came from all over the U. S., were by no means all young, or cornfed, or self-taught. There were young players from recognized orchestras, students from conservatories like Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, 14 players from around New York.

Of his orchestra, which will make its debut in Washington before embarking for South America in mid-July, Stokowski exclaimed: “I expected to find great talent, but I have found more and a higher type of talent than even I believed existed. . . . These musicians are of a musical quality that has not existed in previous generations in our country. A great flowering of Art is just beginning in America, and it is expressing itself first through Music.”