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Therefore Manhattanites were prepared for almost anything when the Cleveland Orchestra, still in its precocious youth, sat down on the stage of Carnegie Hall last week, for its eighth annual Manhattan concert, and burst, with groaning wood and trumpeting brass, into the first program ever offered by a U. S. symphony of first rank on which appeared three native compositions.
Ruffling their programs in alarm, jaded listeners read: "I. The Pageant of P. T. Barnum— Douglas Moore."
So that explained the din. Young Barnum was merely listening, as a child, to a circus band. The general naivete of the first movement, the Connecticut hymnology, all suggested the Yankee scene amid which Phineas T. Barnum wriggled his toes in the dirt.
By the way, who was young Composer Moore? Some knew that he spent six years at Yale, two in the Navy, three studying music at Paris, and four years as Curator of Musical Arts at the Cleveland Museum. At 34, he teaches advanced orchestration in Columbia University—indeed ?
But the second movement, "Joice Heth — 161-year-old Negress," was being played. That swathing sound in the woodwinds suggested her boast, capitalized by Barnum for 25c admission, that she was first to swathe George Washington at birth. Rather an indecent theme—like all operas — but a good deal of the piece seemed to be built around a Negro spiritual.
What a mincing third movement! Pretty. "General and Mrs. Tom Thumb" was a good title. But that rasping and rattling— of course they did quarrel like little tornadoes.
Sweet and low, then soaring. What but "Jenny Lind"—the little swede that Barnum made "The Swedish Nightingale." Ah, ah. . . co-lor-a-tur-AH—very nice. The audience stood up and cheered while young Composer Moore bowed from his box.
To complete the program: H. Emerson Whithorne's "Aeroplane," a tonal attempt at flight which taxied furiously without quite getting off the ground; III. Frederich Shepherd Converse's "Elegia Poem," from the melody of an old Negro slave song; finally two foreign compositions as a sop: the Mozart G Minor and Stravinsky's Fire Bird."
"Kadenza Kids"
Turn about is fair play. Manhattan newspapers last week invited professional musicians to write criticisms of a Bach, Mozart and Brahms program, rendered on three pianos and with the assistance of a student stringed orchestra, by a group of amateurs factiously styled the Kadenza Kids. The Kadenza Kids were Music Critic Olin Downes of the New York Times, Novelist-Critic John Erskine (Private Life of Helen of Troy, Galahad) and his daughter Rhoda, and Ernest Urchs, a partner of the Steinway Co. Their object: to raise money for the MacDowell Colony* at Peterborough, N. H.