Music: Baby Bands

New Yorkers who crowded into the Greenwich Presbyterian Church one night last week had trouble believing their eyes and ears. On the platform 20 small children, several of them only two, the oldest seven, were giving a concert. They sat on tiny red chairs, played on violins so small that they looked like toys. But the instruments were real and so was the music that the New York Baby Orchestra made. Round Monte Collins was so young and unsteady that he kept falling off his chair. Little Marie (“Peewee”) Jarecki, her hair frizzed and beribboned to suit the band’s Lord Fauntleroy uniform, could not resist pulling her music rack to pieces and peeking through it at the audience. Curly-headed Ronald Liss had to leave the stage several times. But even the smallest players had learned enough about music to read notes with a fair degree of accuracy, to beat good time when their turns came to climb up on a grown-up chair, bow vigorously, tap for attention and direct the others. Karl Moldrem, the man who , founded and patiently trained the New York Baby Orchestra, appeared on the stage to help the children tune their violins, to remind each of the young conductors that they were to wave their arms in three-four or four-four time. Beyond that he left them to their own resources.

Few New Yorkers had ever seen anything like it, but in California where Karl Moldrem first became interested in training small children, babies’ orchestras have sprung up like weeds. In California it is considered normal for mothers to have cinema ambitions for their children and Karl Moldrem’s baby orchestras are calculated to develop stage presence, self-confidence. His first baby band, in Eureka, Calif., presented the difficulty of finding real string instruments small enough for the players. (Wind instruments are too difficult for children.) The Sherman-Thompson Co. had some 13-inch violins made abroad, some 42-inch ‘cellos, 48-inch double-basses. Karl Moldrem took his idea to Hollywood where film companies made “shorts” of his babies, publicized them so widely that there are now 600 baby orchestras in the U. S., several in Japan founded by teachers who studied under Moldrem, several in Germany. The orchestras in Eureka and Hollywood set the pattern. Karl Moldrem teaches each child individually. First and often the most difficult step for the children is to learn the first seven letters of the alphabet in order to identify the notes of the scale. The mothers have to learn that there is no money in the orchestra for them or their offspring.

The Hollywood Baby Orchestra, ablest of all, played 134 concerts in 1930, earned $130,000 for charity. Impressed by this record and by the chance baby orchestras offer for the wholesale manufacture of miniature instruments, Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. invited Karl Moldrem to bring the Hollywood orchestra to New York. When Moldrem discovered that child labor laws made it necessary to get the permission of every Governor through whose State the children would have to pass, he gave up the venture, decided it would be easier to start another group, one that he and Wurlitzer’s hope will start an epidemic of babies’ bands throughout the East.