Music: Water Lingers Again

Most teachers and supervisors of music in U. S. schools would agree that it is more fun to play in a juvenile band or orchestra than to listen to one. Twelve years ago in Detroit a mammoth orchestra of 230 high-school students, assembled and drilled for five days by a Rochester, N. Y. supervisor named Dr. Joseph Edgar Maddy, played before a national conference of music supervisors, amazed its much-assaulted audience by sounding not bad at all. Encouraged by the success of this National High School Orchestra, Dr. Maddy two years later founded a National Music Camp on property he bought, in collaboration with a Minneapolis supervisor named Thaddeus Philander Woodbury Giddings, at Interlochen in northern Michigan.

Last week the camp neared the end of its eleventh season. A $300,000 concern, helped through depression years by friends like the Juilliard and Eastman Foundations, Carnegie Corp. and the late Sam Insull, the Music Camp offers eight weeks of fun and din to any young (10-to-18) U. S. musician with $200. About 200 youngsters attended this summer.

Boys and girls of the Music Camp live in cabins on separate lakes, named by the founders Wah-be-ka-ness (“Water Lingers”) and Wah-be-ka-net-ta (“Water Lingers Again”) but unanimously called Green Lake and Duck Lake. All wear uniforms of blue corduroy pants or knickers, blue shirts and socks. Uniformed likewise are the faculty (31 this summer), members of competent U. S. orchestras and music schools. Since 1931, NBC has broadcast concerts from the Music Camp’s open-air Interlochen Bowl. New this year was a Radio Workshop, whose members wrote scripts for the weekly NBC broadcasts, watched NBC technicians at work.