Music: Night Music

What this country needs is more bum music, provided it is handmade rather than a product of the machine age.

That the U. S. is currently getting plenty of bum, handmade music is the delighted conviction of many a pragmatic U. S. maker of musical instruments, for sales have risen sharply in the past two years. This week, in a book called A Little Night Music,* a plea was entered not for more Gershwin and Kern on home saxophones, but for more bum Brahms and Beethoven, played by groups of amateurs on their flutes, clarinets, fiddles, cellos. Its author is Gerald White Johnson, editorial writer of the Baltimore Sun, co-author of The Sunpapers of Baltimore. Though Author Johnson says he is dull of ear and asbestos of soul so far as “the fire of genius that burned in the young Mozart” is concerned, he is an earnest flautist, plays twice a month in a Baltimore amateur ensemble called “The Faith, Hope & Charity Chamber Music Club.”

Flautist Johnson believes that amateur music is the moral equivalent of athletics, as much good fun as bowling or stud poker. Save for a chapter on “The Art of Coming In.” in which he details the feelings of a flautist resting for 74 measures of a Haydn symphony in the knowledge that he must enter on the first beat of the 75th, Author Johnson gives little practical advice in his lean volume. He suggests that none but home-players thoroughly enjoy concert performances such as one he heard of Mozart’s Erne Kleine Nachtmusik (whence his book’s title), which began, for him, with “the sudden, awed, incredulous realization that they had hit it, yes, by George, they hit it all together and all on the key—what a moment! . . . Here now the orchestra is well into it; here is that sforzando where the flutes blew out a gasket last Saturday night—they have taken it at 45 miles an hour and without a quiver. There is that crescendo rising to a high whole note where the cello threw a tire the time before that with a swoop and a triumphant scream from 20 strings they are over it and gone.”

Gerald Johnson’s chamber music group meets twice a month in his Baltimore suburban home, was originally planned as an adjunct to the musical education of the Johnson children but now includes more grown-ups—Mrs. Johnson, a physician, a dentist, a kindergarten teacher, a psychoanalyst, three little girls and a female violinist (Charity) who conducts. Comparatively rich in amateur groups, Baltimore also has a “Sunday Night Group” organized by Editor Hamilton Owens of the Sun, an oboeist, which includes his wife (violin), Biologist Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins, his daughter, Mrs, Gardner Jencks, her husband and, as conductor, Bart Wirtz, head of Peabody Institute of Music’s cello department.

Most remarkable Baltimore ensemble is the one in which Pundit Henry Louis Mencken plays the piano. Called the “Saturday Night Club,” it is 34 years old and, according to Pianist Mencken, welcomes “anybody who can play any instrument, who seems to be a decent sort of fellow and who is fit to drink with.” It meets in a building in St. Paul Street owned by the widow of Violin-Maker Albert Hildebrandt, with whom Mencken and the late Reporter Emmanuel Daniels of the Baltimore News used to play trios. Its members, of whom ten usually show up for the music and then go to drink beer at Schellhase’s German restaurant, include Publisher Albert Knopf, Dr. Pearl, Surgeon Franklin Hazlehurst, Radiologist Christian Deetjent and Professor Max Brodel of Johns Hopkins, sometime American Mercury Writer Heinrich Ewald Buchholz, with onetime Conductor Gustave Strübe of the municipal Baltimore Symphony as leader. Flautist Johnson, who does not play with the Saturday Nighters, calls Pianist Mencken the “Irremovable Rector” of the group. Forthright and fluent at the piano, Mencken has also conducted in his time. Four years ago, when beer became legal, he was interviewed on the subject on the radio, asked and obtained leave to lead an NBC orchestra creditably through Strauss’s Radetzky March and Hi-Lee, Hi-Lo.

*Harper ($1.50).