Music: Rhythm in Berlin

At a concert this week in Berlin, Berlin’s famed 65-year-old Philharmonic Orchestra was led by a U.S. war correspondent in battledress. Besides being a war correspondent, the guest conductor was a Negro, born in British Guiana. The 2,000 Berliners and the 500 Allied soldiers in the audience found it quite an experience. They applauded warmly when the conductor led the orchestra through Weber’s familiar Oberon and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. They broke into cheers, and called him back five times, when he gave them Berlin’s first hearing of fellow-Negro William Grant Still’s boisterous, bluesick Afro-American Symphony.

Slender, serious Rudolph Dunbar is no musical freshman. He studied at Manhattan’s Julliard School, has several times conducted the London Philharmonic. He was in Berlin as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press of Chicago. Shortly before the Berlin Philharmonic’s Conductor Leo Borchard was accidentally killed by U.S. sentries (TIME, Sept. 3), he had invited Dunbar to guest-conduct. U.S. occupation authorities were all for it, though their interest was more in teaching the Germans a lesson in racial tolerance than in Dunbar’s musicianship.

Nevertheless, Dunbar quickly satisfied the music critics who counted: the orchestra members. Said the first flutist, after Dunbar had led the men through Afro-American: “Now at last I understand your American jazz.” Dunbar further won the orchestra’s friendship by bringing from Paris a contrabassoon (the orchestra had lost all theirs in air raids).