The blotting-paper (anti-rustle) programs distributed in Radio City's Studio 8 H for last week's Manhattan broadcast by the NBC Symphony sported the names of four U. S. composers.. To concertgoers the most familiar was that of pasty-faced Emerson Whithorne, onetime music-critic and husband of Pianist Ethel Leginska. Whithorne's new Sierra Morena, premiered by walrus-mustached Pierre Monteux, consisted of Spanish folk-idioms with impressionistic gravy. The -gravy lacked the smoothness of Ravel's, the piquancy of Manuel de Falla's, tasted a little like both.
Second U. S. name was that of Hollywood's Jon Cowley, who composes when he is not doing the whistling for Walt Disney's cinema cartoons. What struck listeners most about Composer Cowley's tricky "Crazy House" Suite was its orchestration, and that was not by Composer Cowley.
Third U. S. name was that of Philadelphia's blonde, blue-eyed, Yankee-born Hilda Emery Davis, who in private life is the wife of Danceband-Leader Meyer Davis. Forty-two-year-old Mrs. Davis, having been a professional pianist at the age of 10, having mothered five children, and taken a fling at Tin Pan Alley (Yon Are the Reason for My Love Song), had decided on a plunge into serious composition. The result, a symphonic poem, The Last Knight, based on some mystical verses by the late G. K. Chesterton, got solicitous treatment from Conductor Monteux, Composer Davis' brother-in-law. Like the now classic Negro Rhapsody of John Powell which followed it, Mrs, Davis' opus was agreeably straightforward. Her knight errant did a good deal of pale loitering and sounded a great deal like the hero of Richard Strauss's Heldenleben but as Opus I it rated at least a passing mark.
Composer Davis takes her new career as a serious composer seriously. Out of bed at 7:30 to get the children off to school, she is at her composing by 10. After three or four hours of steady work, she goes off to play golf, drink tea, cocktails, attend a concert. Husband Meyer she sees only intermittently because he is always on the road with one of his bands. "Isn't that goofy?" asks Composer Davis.