Books › Musical Courier 1928-08-09: Vol 97 Iss 6, 1928 › scan 18
Scan 18
Musical Courier 1928-08-09: Vol 97 Iss 6, 1928
91 lines. Read by computer on 29 September 2026. Printed page 19. See the scan on archive.org.
1August 9, 1928
3Variations
4By the Editor-in-Chief
6The Musical Courier is getting near to its fiftieth year of existence and does not even feel middle aged. Lest you do not know it, this is the oldest musical newspaper in America, and never has missed weekly publication since the appearance of its first issue.
8The Musical Courier is printed in New York but is in no sense of the term a New York newspaper. This is a world's journal, and, as such, conducts its columns without any sectional partiality or preference.
10A paper that is not dependent on any one locality, group, set, clique, or vested interest, and is not subventioned by any private individuals or organizations, is a journalistic force that must be reckoned with, as the Musical Courier often has proved, and will continue to prove.
12When we print an item of news that has previously appeared in some local daily paper we cannot stop to consider the fact that it may have been read by our subscribers in that city before they receive our paper. For every one such reader who is pre-informed there are thousands of persons to whom the item is news.
14The Musical Courier policy is to consider its reading world as an entity irrespective of locations, and we lump New York with the rest of the country. We try to supply the most news to the greatest number of readers.
16If we did not supply it, how would American musicians all over the land get their musical news from Paris, Berlin, London, Milan, and Stockholm, and Dresden?
18And how would those cities get their musical news from New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, unless from the Musical Courier?
20The Musical Courier has the largest, best and highest priced staff of writers of any musical paper in the world, and it possesses the most perfectly organized and most expensive news service that ever has functioned in the musical field.
22From all the foregoing you may gather that the Musical Courier is the most important paper in the musical universe. You are right in your assumption.
24Just twenty-eight years ago, in 1900, the Musical Courier received a Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition.
26By the way, editing a musical newspaper is a sinecure of the first order. If we criticize artists they get angry; if we praise them, their rivals get angry. If we publish instructive articles, our paper is called dry; if we inject humor into our columns we are accused of a lack of dignity. If we accept advertising we are called "commercial"; if we would not accept it they would say that we could not get any. If we print constructive editorials we are told to shelve them for more news; if we fill up with news, we hear that we have no original ideas. If we remain in the office, we ought to go out and meet people; if we go out, we are suspected of not attending to business. If we wear old clothes and do not own a motor car they say we are not making money; if we wear new clothes and drive an expensive car they say we are getting all the money and leaving the artist none. What then, are we to do? Likely as not, someone will declare that we stole the idea for this paragraph from some other paper. We did.
28Beethoven came from a Roman Catholic country. His dying remark was, "Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est." His bookcase now is in the possession of Alexander W. Thayer's niece in Cambridge, Mass. He wrote something in his diary in 1816. He finished several compositions in 1822. We got all this from a book in which we were looking up how many quartets Beethoven had written.
30We defer to the English critic who recently spoke of "laryngeal titillations," meaning a trill.
32Mute, inglorious Mozarts do not exist in music. Even if they did not cry out their talents to the world, their parents would.
34More fossilized dinosaur eggs have been dug out of the Mongolian plains. They probably were thrown at Ling Lun, flute player and inventor of the Chinese scale, when he was practising his discovery.
36Prof. Leopold Auer is the author of a book called My Long Life in Music. Maybe it only seemed long owing to the many times he has had to listen to his pupils playing Dvorak's Humoresque and Kreisler's Caprice Viennoise.
38Mezzo—"Are you fond of the Ring?"
39Forte—"You bet; I haven't missed a prize fight in years."
41Henry Ford says that he does not like the music of Stravinsky. The information is being carefully concealed from the sensitive Russian composer.
43By the way, when persons speak of "the Humoresque," you are supposed to know that they mean Dvorak's and not Grieg's or Schumann's. "The barcarolle" means the one by Offenbach, of course, and not those by Chopin, Moszkowski, Rubinstein, and others. "The nocturne" is Chopin's in E flat; "the Hungarian rhapsody" is Liszt's second; "the intermezzo" is by Mascagni. "The prelude" could not possibly be anybody but Rachmaninoff.
45Lord Balfour, just eighty, is to visit America soon to study what this country has accomplished since the war. It is to be hoped that he won't find out.
47Dr. McGovern, the expert on Thibet, furnishes the information that it is the only country which does not use jazz. Our own notion is that the Grand Llama has some of the records in his private collection, and when he is sure he is alone plays them to himself as a relief from the oppressive solemnity of his high office.
49The real reason why Chopin wrote and published piano music has at last been revealed by a discerning critic of Indiana, who informs a startled world that, "In all of Chopin's scores we find an abundance of physical difficulties and ingenuities apparently invented to bother the neophyte."
51And furthermore, anyone desiring to be a composer, has but to follow this simple recipe from Lombroso's Man of Genius: "Musical creation is the most subjective manifestation of thought, the one most intimately connected with the affective emotions, and having less relation to the external world than any other, which causes it to stand more in need of the fervent but exhausting emotions of inspiration."
53A little success in music is a dangerous thing, but a little failure is much worse.
55Let us see what some of the others are saying:
56"How's the acoustics at your church?"
57"Great—unless you sit in the very first rows you can't hear a word."—Life.
58Guillaume Tell of Marseilles, France, is mentioned as a likely contender in the Olympic marathon. He is said to have remarked, when interviewed, that there is no money in the apple-shooting racket any more.—Spokane Spokesman-Review.
59Boston paper prints a puzzle showing a young blond man playing a saxophone with the end plugged up, and the caption is, "What is wrong with this picture?" We think it is all right.—Detroit News.
60In Wales they have a stringed instrument called the "crwth." It is claimed to have been the progenitor of the violin. This is a genealogical fact which had better be hushed up and not looked up. Nor need the wit suggest that the viola d'amore is the love-child of the violin.—Portland (Ore.) Oregonian.
61Percy Grainger, the pianist, is to be married in the Hollywood Bowl. This is a structure capable of holding 20,000 guests, in which case the bride had better take along a spare lipstick.—Life.
63That bashful fiddler who was ashamed to refer in company to the "belly" of his violin, no doubt is related to the lady who spoke of the "limbs" of her piano.
65Good music never has descended to the people; the people have come up to good music.
67In the Philippine Islands one of the native tribes makes music on a flute blown by the nose. The thought arises whether the players could master selections in sharps, their noses being flat.
69On a certain occasion an enthusiastic lady, hearing the late Max Reger play the piano part in Schubert's Trout quintet very beautifully, sent the performer some trout next day for his dinner. Reger wrote her a note of thanks in which he said that at his next public appearance he would, with her permission, take the liberty of playing the Ox Minuet by Haydn.
71Mme. Emma Calvé broadcasts this message: "Girls, if you feel the divine spark of music with you, let nothing deter you from fanning it into flame! Study for opera." Girls, our advice to you is this: "Unless the flame is a devastating conflagration, rush to a fire house the moment you feel the beginnings of a feeble sputter and have the hose turn enough H2O on you to drown out every vestige of the false and unprofitable flicker. Then get married."
73David L. Piper has some new musical definitions in the Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) of July 22, among which our favorites are the following:
74Abbreviation—The lost art of holding top notes to a respectable length.
75Accomp.—Abbreviation for "accomplice," or the partner in crime of the singer who murders the classics.
76Accord (French)—Obsolete. Denotes harmonious relationship between sopranos.
77A cinque (Italian)—A proper repository for those sour kitchen ballads.
78Ad libitum (Latin)—Term used by instrumentalists in defining their harsh treatment of those extremely difficult passages.
79Aeolian harp—Harp manufactured by the Aeolian Company of New York.
80Affable (Italian)—Type of deportment assumed by great musicians while giving interviews.
81After note—The extra note played by the green orchestra violinist who forgot that there are only three beats to a measure in a waltz.
82Agnus Dei—Woman composer, famous for her church music.
83A ton basse (French)—Giant bass fiddle weighing a ton.
85We flatly refuse to believe B. E.'s story about the young man who took a correspondence course in piano playing and when he was performing a piece for his friends and forgot which finger to put on the B flat, said: "Excuse me a moment," and rushed to the telephone to call up the correspondence school and ask them.
87Bolero—"Fiddlinsky is wonderful at double-stopping."
88Fugus (testily)—"They ought to make him a traffic cop."
90Russia is not recognized by the United States officially, but Americans seem to recognize—and patronize—Russian compositions, singers, actors, instrumentalists, conductors, plays, poems, novels, dancers, dishes, restaurants, cabarets, and cousins and other
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