The men who make the nation's songs, the people who hum, whistle and sing them, the musicians who play them, last week made music that swelled and surged in a crescendo of patriotic feeling. As the sounds from millions of radios, home phonographs, jukeboxes soared over the seaboards, plains, mountains of the U. S., Walt Whitman might again have said, "I hear America singing." The U. S. was singing, as it had not done in years, of pride in its past, of hope in its future.
Lean, twangy, Oklahoma-born Roy Harris, a sobersided, high-brow composer, has never been ranked as a popular song-maker. Last month, on the day that Italy struck at France and England, Composer Harris sat thoughtfully down to some verses he had written. Four days later he finished a song for baritone and a choral setting, with an orchestral accompaniment full of plangent brasses and surging strings of the Preamble to the Constitution:
"We the people of the United States,"
We are the people.
"In order to form a more perfect Union,"
We must plan and work together.* . . .
Roy Harris' eight-minute work, which he called Challenge 1940, had been commissioned by Conductor Artur Rodzinski —a U. S. citizen, born of Polish parents on the Dalmatian coast. Last week Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony gave Challenge 1040 its first performance, in a concert which brought 13,000 people to the open-air Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan. The concert was dedicated to Democracy. Aside from two democratic Czech pieces, the program was 100% American. It made good listening.
Most ambitious work of the evening was a "ballad poem" for narrator, contralto, white and Negro choirs and orchestra: And They Lynched Him on a Tree. Poet Katherine Garrison Chapin (Mrs. Francis Biddle, wife of the U. S. Solicitor General) wrote the words; the music was by shy, devout Negro William Grant Still, who inscribed his score: "Humble thanks to God, the source of inspiration." Composer Still's inspiration often ran to obvious, ear-catching effects, but it kept pace with Mrs. Biddle's ballad: an evocation of Negroes gathering in a pine clearing after the white folks have lynched their man and gone. A tall, handsome Negro, Louise Burge, let out a big, warm voice in the lament of the lynched man's mother:
Oh my Jesus,
Where is your hand?
They've taken this boy
To a dark land.* . . .
Tennessee-born Miss Burge, head of the music department at the Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College at Pine Bluff, Ark., owed her Stadium engagement—her bigtime debut—to a selling talk by President Alain Locke of Howard University, whence she graduated in 1934.
For most of the 13,000 Stadiumgoers, the real part of the evening began when big, magnetic, broad-smiling Negro Baritone Paul Robeson appeared. The Philharmonic, under the come-to-glory gyrations of a new conductor, Mark Warnow of radio's Hit Parade, blared a broad, thoroughly whistleable melody. It was Ballad for Americans, in which Robeson was "the everybody who's nobody . . . the nobody who's everybody," as he was in its radio launching last winter (TIME, Nov. 20). Baritone Robeson sang:
Our country's strong, our country's young and her greatest songs are still unsung,