Music: May Amateurs

Where all the talent came from, Detroit scarcely knew. The challenge went out only a year ago: the fourth city of the U.S. would hold an International Music Festival in a new amphitheatre to be built on the river front near the Belle Isle Bridge. When the Festival began last week more than 10,000 amateurs were ready to take part in the ten-day session. Five thousand freshly-scrubbed schoolchildren were first to perform. And eager to follow were the singers from Ferndale, the many local Ukrainians, Scots, Scandinavians, Slavs. Choir singers were Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists. More than forty organizations and 17 nationalities were to be richly represented. But Detroiters were proudest of the workmen who stood for their city’s No. 1 industry—the men who make automobiles for Chrysler, Hudson and General Motors.

Such a huge choral festival was the ambition of Boston’s bustling Emma Fisher who has never forgotten her chagrin of 14 years ago when she went to Switzerland as a delegate to an Anglo-American Music Conference. There she discovered that Britons could sing and that her U.S. companions could not. The Britons boasted of their many choral societies and forthwith choral singing became bustling Emma Fisher’s platform. Last spring she visited Detroit, talked to influential citizens whose enthusiasm grew strong when the Juilliard Foundation offered to lend $5,000, when Mrs. Frederick M. Alger agreed to head the festival committee. The Alger name is big in Detroit. Old Michiganders remember the “General,” rich from lumber and iron, who served President McKinley as Secretary of War. The General’s Son Frederick was not too social to be an ardent American Legionary up to the time of his death two winters ago. Young Fred Alger Jr. took to horses and polo, owns Azucar, the gelding that won the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap in California this winter (TIME, March 4).

Young Fred’s mother who calls herself “Mignon” and fights for “enlightened temperance” did a real civic turn when she gave the festival her energy and name. Socialites needed her spur to be interested. But the 10,000 amateurs required no prodding. The foreign-born elements have been as faithful to their music as to their native food. The industrial groups have developed swiftly in the past two years. Chevrolet has a glee club of 40, directed by David Redwood who works in the die room at the forge plant. Hudson has a glee club and a band. General Motors has an orchestra and a chorus of 400, some of them foundrymen, some division managers, some electroplaters and one a patent attorney. Buick men sing in the Industrial Mutual Association Glee Club in Flint. Ford has no chorus, no orchestra of its own but boys in the Henry Ford Trade School are proud of their German Band. Ford uses the regular Detroit Symphony for its radio concerts.

Chrysler’s male choir, the most up & coming group, owes its existence to little Tom Lewis, a bespectacled Welshman who as a boy worked in the mines and had his greatest fun at the yearly eisteddfod. In the Chrysler factory Tom Lewis found eight other Welshmen who liked to sing with him. Encouraged, he corralled more workers—a millwright, a metal finisher, a carpenter, a stockman. Two hundred sang with him at the Festival last week, a bit self-conscious in their dressed-up clothes but lustily sure of the songs (“Cornfield Melodies,” “Galway Piper”) that Tom Lewis had taught them.

May is the month for festivals throughout the U.S., the month when Bethlehem, Pa. makes its annual bow to Bach, when Conductor Frederick Stock takes his Chicago Symphony to Cornell College, Iowa, and on to Ann Arbor, Mich., where local choristers have long sung like professionals. Cincinnati’s biennial festival took five days last week. Soloists were there from Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. Seven hundred schoolchildren sang at the Saturday matinee. Trained adults were well equal to Mendelssohn’s Elijah, to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Conductor Eugene Goossens had prepared three premieres especially for the occasion: Atalanta in Calydon, skillfully designed by Granville Bantock; La Belle Dame sans Merci, a rambling peroration by Cyril Scott; a sonorous Stabat Mater by Cincinnati’s own Martin G. Dumler.

Because the biennial festival is Cincinnati’s big social turnout, no one was busier last week than Marion Devereux, the chirping, bright-eyed little spinster who writes the society reams for the Cincinnati Enquirer (TIME, May 8, 1933). Marion Devereux is a dictator in her own small sphere. She tells Cincinnati matrons when to give their parties. As a reporter, she is rarely seen taking notes but no detail escapes her. The Enquirer ran 29½ columns of society news on the festival last week. Mr. Benjamin W. Lamson “deserted his own box party to enjoy Miss Ferguson’s charming wit and humor.” Mrs. Harry Elstner Talbott of Dayton “wore her pearls and diamonds in her ears.” “Miss Mary Elizabeth Rogan was a dainty charmer. . . .” Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson “was, as always, very distinguee.” Mrs. Henry Probasco was “very Grande Dame.” The Hinkle box was “a scene of constant va et vient.” Mrs. E. W. Edwards’ daughter was missed but “she, of course, is not going out if, any large way at present. . . .”

At the Enquirer, Devereux copy is sacrosanct, no matter how muddled. Copy-readers never tamper with a line. Thus Enquirer readers were profoundly puzzled last week over the following paragraph:

“In nothing to the Philistine are the May Festivals more intriguing than in the boxes and the Audience. Last night these themes of and corridor and foyer were paramount to the carnal-minded devotee of these two yearly events.”