Music Trade Review

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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
TELEPHONE
NUMBER.
1745—EIGHTEENTH
STREET.
The musical supplement to The Review is
published on the first Saturday of each month.
'T'HE concerts in the public parks seem
* to be attracting unusually large au-
diences this summer. In Central Park,
Sig. Fanciulli's fine band is heard twice
weekly in programs of rare excellence—a
happy blending of the classical and good
popular music. The bandmaster of the
Seventy-first Reg't is fortunate in having
among his staff of artists such a brilliant
cornetist and cultured musician as Wm.
Paris Chambers. His solo playing is an
attractive feature of every concert in New
York's great park.
To appreciate fully the beneficial influ-
ence exercised by our municipal concerts,
Battery Park, Washington Square, Tomp-
kins Square, Madison Square and other
points, must be visited on the nights when
the bands play. These breathing-spots of
the big city are always thronged. The
audiences are appreciative and have a defi-
nite taste. They prefer stirring marches,
coon songs, sentimental melodies, to all
other things. They keep time to the
marches, they voice impromptu choruses
to the ditties of the day, and as they are
generally in couples they draw closer one
to the other when the cornet-player toots a
tune that tells of loving hearts. These
concerts are events. If any one doubts
the existence of a love for music among
the masses he may easily discover his mis-
take on any pleasant evening.
*
ALKING of "music" and the "masses, 1 '
brings to mind the multitude there
are in every large city who go about utter-
ing the passionate cry, " Give us a tune!"
Their desire for a tune might well move a
diminished seventh to tears, or cause the
stoutest augmented fourth to quail and re-
spect the triad. It is no manner of use
telling them that there are tunes in the
operas of Wagner, that the " Meistersinger"
streams with tunes, that "Tristan" is full
of melody, that the wood-bird music in
"Siegfried," the spring-night music in
"Die Walkiire," is magically tuneful, that
the overture to "Tannhauser" and the
third act of "Lohengrin" contain airs to
turn us into mandarins. They reply that
they want tunes that are tunes. Never
argue with them. It is useless, and leads
to discords, and they prefer concords,
though very often they could not tell you
the difference between one and the other.
These partially musical people, who swarm
like bees in the highways and by-ways like
something tripping. They dread a fugue
more than pestilence, a piece of strict
counterpoint more than famine. Talk not
to them of subject and countersubject, of
sequences and modulations, of exposition
T
—which they connect with Paris and the
next century—and of inversion. They
cannot dissect music, nor do they desire
to. They decline to use their intellect in
connection with a gay art—as they con-
sider it. What they want is to sit in a
comfortable seat and hear tunes. Yet they
are not the totally unmusical. They are
the partially musical, and they have every
right to be considered. Also they can be
gently educated, if you don't let them
know it, just as children can swallow pills
if they don't know they are swallowing
pills, but are totally unable to get them
down if they do.
month just closed has been a busy
one for music teachers in all parts of
the country. At Cincinnati, the Music
Teachers' National Association closed one
of its most successful reunions, the pro-
grams and business meetings being well
attended, and the results on the whole
being of such a nature as to help for-
ward the cause of American music every-
where. In a number of States conventions
have also occurred. In fact the concern
manifested in the success of these meetings
this year has been above the average, thus
demonstrating very properly that the in-
terests of American musicians and Ameri-
can music can best be conserved and ad-
vanced by an active personal participation
in movements of this character.
If American composers are to become a
greater power in the musical world they
must take the initiative just as surely as
a business man would in exploiting some
product of his mind or of his factory.
These associations, National and State, are
deserving of the warmest support from all
having at heart the advancement of Ameri-
can music. That the cause may prosper
and attain the fruition we all desire is the
earnest wish of this paper.
*
IN a recent apotheosis of the rag-time
*• vogue, Rupert Hughes expresses the
opinion that while this "school" of music
meets with little encouragement from the
scholarly musician, he predicts that rag-
time has come to stay, that it will be taken
up and developed into a great dance-form
to be handled with respect, not only by a
learning body of negro creators, but by
the scholarly musicians of the whole world.
If rag-time was called tempo di raga or
rague-tenips, says Mr. Hughes, it might
win honor more speedily. Or if the word
could be allied to the harmonic ragas of
the East Indians, it would be more accept-
able. What the derivation of the word is,
I have not the faintest idea. The negroes
call their clog-dancing ' ragging,' and the
dance a ' rag.' There is a Spanish verb,
raer, ' to scrape,' and a French naval term,
rague, ' scraped,' both doubtless from the
Latin rado.
*
O YNCOPATION is an unexpected visi-
^
tant in negro music, and perhaps it is
as well to admit at once, to avoid argu-
ment, that this is borrowed from the
Cuban dance, the habanera. Rag-time,
however, bears only the faintest possible
resemblance in letter and in spirit to
the music of the Spanish races on this
continent. It has almost as much kinship
with the Hungarian dances of Brahms
and the Slavic dances of Dvorak. It has
much of the abandon of a Friska, but in
essence rag-time is utterly distinct, racy
and shiftlessly chaotic.
To formulate rag-time is to commit
synecdoche, to pretend that one tone is
the whole gamut, and to pretend that
chaos is orderly. The chief law is to be
lawless. The ordinary harmonic progres-
sions are not to be respected; the dis-
sonances are hardly to be represented by
any conventional notation, because the
chords of the accompaniment are not logi-
cally related to the bass nor to each other
nor to the air. It is a tripartite agreement
to disagree. In this beautiful independ-
ence of motion the future contrapuntalist
will fairly revel; the holy fugue itself of-
fers no more play to ingenuity.
latest phase of the rag-time mania
is the publication of such tunes as
"The Star-Spangled Banner," Mendels-
sohn's "Wedding March," and even the
"Trovatore" Miserere re-arranged in rag-
time. Their bad taste will serve at least
this use, says Mr. Hughes: It will display
the elasticity and the energy and the cap-
tivation of rag-time as a special dance-
form. It will doubtless find its way grad-
ually into the works of some great genius,
and will thereafter be canonized; and the
day will come when the decadents of the
next century will revolt against it, and will
call it a "hide-bound, sapless, scholastic
form, dead as its contemporaries, canon
and fugue." Meanwhile, it is young and
unhackneyed and throbbing with life—
and it is racial.
*
TJUGO GORLITZ, manager of Ignace
* * Paderewski, has denied that the pianist
was married on May 31, but does not ex-
clude other dates. He also says that the
pianist has not had his hair cut short. So
all, as the hero says in the melodrama, has
not yet been lost.
*
D R O F . M A C D O W E L L has a number of
*• ambitious and highly commendable
plans in view in connection with the music
department of Columbia University this
fall. He has arranged to have a Univer-
sity Chorus and a University Orchestra,
membership in either of which is required
of every male student in the department
and is permitted to all other university
students. To carry on the work effectively
Dr. MacDowell has called to his aid Gustav
Heinrichs, whose solid musicianship and
ability are too well known to need com-
ment. Under the guidance of this ex-
perienced conductor the chorus and orches-
tra should attain considerable prominence
in the musical affairs of this city. In
another course Dr. MacDowell is to teach
free harmony and the practical composition
of music, and compositions of the students
are to be discussed and analyzed. This
course may in time be expected to work
in with the orchestra and chorus, so that