The Philadelphia Orchestra is one of the nation's prime dispensers of "music for musicians" — classical, romantic, modern. There never has been anything vulgar, anything jazzy, about it. The players' costumes, as is eminently proper, always match the programs in dignity and sobriety; they are invariably quite up to the requirements of what the man will wear. The expressions and attitudes of the musicians correspond; they exude gravity, dignity, devotion.
But the approach of Spring, and the happy dispersion of musico-financial troubles (TIME, April 21, May 12, 19) seem to have infected Conductor Stokowski with more than a mild dash of gaiety, boisterousness, even vulgar abandon. Stokowski has started a hilarious military band in Philadelphia.
It is called "The Band of Gold," and has been recruited largely from the ranks of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The players (120 of them) are costumed in scintillating yellow uniforms. Their faces beam with merriment. They blow their horns with hilarious gusto. Their cheeks puff out like full-bloom peonies.
"This band is different from any other band," exclaimed Stokowski at its first appearance at the Academy of Music. "I have put aside all tradition in my use of instruments. I have had no regard for conventions or academic rules. There is nothing like a band for gay music."
Then the "Gold Banders" launched into von Suppe's overture, Light Cavalry. And Stokowski began to get what he wanted. "I wanted the tone-color to sound like gold," he explained to the audience. "I wanted the band to look like gold—the golden, brazen look of sunlight."
The program wound up with Victor Herbert's American Fantasy, a brass-band composition which galloped through The President's March, Way Down Upon the Swanee River, The Girl I left Behind Me, Dixie, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, and finally, as both band and audience rose as a man, The Star Spangled Banner.
Eskimo
Music has displayed a certain reluctance to explore the frozen North. It was not until the time of Grieg that the possibilities of a tonal invasion of Arctic wastes and peoples was recognized. Percy Grainger and MacDowell have made tentative advances into the interpretation of the spirit of snow-lands. But it has remained for a Danish disciple of the Norwegian Grieg to bring forth a full-fledged, large-proportioned evocation of Eskimo life, of its strange superstitions and frigid passions.
This composer is Hakon Borresen, and he has written an opera called Kaddara. With the text translated into French, it has just been produced at the Monnaie in Brussels. There it created a sensation.