Music: Game

As the late summer dusk stooped to enfold the arid campus of New York university, Manhattan, one evening last week, a band struck up. The slow movement of the brasses and drums and the grandiose melancholy of the horns contributed a poetic languor to the cool beginning of the evening. But no languor possessed the many listeners. They whispered to each other, took excited notes, whistled snatches of tune. They were playing a game.

Edwin Franko Goldman, conductor of the famed Goldman Band, had offered prizes—one silver, two bronze medals—to go to the persons who recognized the greatest number of tunes from the excerpts which his celebrated bandsmen would deliver. Because it is impossible to print music in the compressed pages of a newsmagazine, readers cannot play the game as Goldman’s listeners played it. But they can try it in reverse order. Reading the name of the selections played by Mr. Goldman, they can see if they are able to whistle:

Elgar, Pomp and Circumstance; Mozart, overture to The Marriage of Figaro; Haydn, andante from Surprise Symphony; Sullivan, excerpts from Pinafore; Schubert, Unfinished symphony; MacDowell, To a Water Lily; Tchaikovsky, Pathetic Symphony; Grieg, Anitra’s Dance from Peer Gynt; Suppe, Poet and Peasant Overture, Wagner march of the Knights from Parsifal; Liszt, Second Hungarian Rhapsody; Sibelius, Finlandia; Strauss, Blue Danube Waltz; Rossini, overture to William Tell; Rimsky-Korsakoff, Song of India; Rachmaninoff, C Sharp Minor Prelude; Handel, Largo; Rubinstein, Kammenoi Ostrow; Beethoven, overture to Egmont; Tchaikovsky, Slavic, March; Moszkowski, Serenade; Strauss, Egyptian March; Offenbach, Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman; Dvorak, Humoresque, Massenet, Aragonaise from Le Cid; Mascagni, intermezzo from Cavaleria; Paderewski, Minuet, Volga Boat Song; Mendelssohn, Spring Song; Schumann Traeumere; Tchaikovsky, Humoresque; Donizetti, sextet from Lucia; Saint-Saens, “The Swan; Goldman, On the Go.

Edwin Franko Goldman is a Jew writer, with musicianly grey hair, an ascetic face, and strong leathery lips of the professional wind-instrument-player.

At 15 he was voted the most popular lad in his class at a Manhattan public school. Some of his waggish friends commented upon the strangeness of his popularity, for he was known to be an inveterate blower of his own trumpet. But it was his skill upon this trumpet, the cornet, that was responsible for his popularity, for his later success.

At 17 he was cornetist in the Metropolitan Opera House. After ten years with his orchestra, he resigned, has since become famed as a teacher, author, conductor, composer. He has written books on cornet playing. His best band compositions have been inspired by the preposition “On”—On the Green, On the Mall, On the Go. The American Indians, on the other hand, are responsible for such pieces as Cherokee, Sunapee, Sagamore, Eagle Eyes. Concerts given by his band in Manhattan parks and stadia have been remarkable for the perfect orderliness of the audiences. His organization has been called, “A Symphony Orchestra in Brass”, “The Greatest Band in the World.”

In May, 1919, on the steps of the City Hall, Manhattan, in the presence of over 20,000 people, he was presented by the city with a very handsome gold watch and chain.