$1,000 Quintet

Famed because it still uses simplified spelling ("Club Kalendars ar being maild well before Christmas"), the Lake Placid Club in New York's Adirondack Mountains is rich, regards itself as a solid U. S. institution. Year ago, as a fillip to U. S. music, the Club announced two prizes for new compositions by U. S. citizens: $500 for a choral work, $1,000 for a quintet for piano and strings.

Last spring Dr. Otto Wick of San Antonio, Tex. won the $500 for a work called The Temples of Peshawur. In the $1,000 competition, under pseudonyms, 40 citizens entered quintets which were judged by Composers Frederick Jacobi and Samuel Gardner, onetime Associate Conductor Modeste Alloo of the Cincinnati Symphony. Last week two movements of the prize-winning quintet were played over an NBC program and the composer's name announced: Louis Gruenberg. Well known for his murky, savage Emperor Jones, his light, charming Jack & the Beanstalk, Composer Gruenberg, nevertheless, received his money by mail. This week the Lake Placid Club will be the scene of the first concert performance of his work, but Louis Gruenberg will not be there. The Club bars Jews not only as members but as guests and amplifies this prohibition in conventional, unmistakably English spelling: "The invariable rule is to make no exception for refined and agreeable Hebrews."

As far as pleasing ordinary listeners goes, it is hard to put life and variety into the neat forms of chamber music, hard to put color, especially over the radio, into the timbres of piano and strings. Gruenberg's quintet, wandering among E minor and related keys, sounded cool, intellectual, mathematical. But listeners who knew him were pleased that the judges had awarded the $1,000 to one who would not write skin-deep music for anyone's money. Son of a poor Russian violinist who brought him to Manhattan's East Side as a baby, Composer Gruenberg, 54. is dreamy, soft-voiced, soft-eyed. He studied piano under Ferruccio Busoni, became dissatisfied even though his teacher said he had "God-graced hands." Gruenberg's early, romantic Hill of Dreams won a $1,000 prize given by Harry Harkness Flagler for the New York Symphony. He turned to syncopated dissonances in The Daniel Jazz and Jazz Suite. But the rewards of modern composers--$100 or so for an occasional orchestra or opera performance--are not great. Unlike Deems Taylor, who earns money by writing and radio work, unlike John Alden Carpenter, a Chicago businessman who made money in mill, railway & ship supplies, most of his life Gruenberg has been a poor musician with an occasional patron. One of these was Mrs. Alma Morgenthau Wiener, sister of the Secretary of the Treasury, whose financial arrangements with him got into the courts three years ago, when it became known that they had counted--unsuccessfully so far--on selling The Emperor Jones in Hollywood. To Composer Gruenberg and others like him, last week's Lake Placid award pointed up the fact that the radio, not only a channel but a frequent source for prize-money, may increasingly replace rich individuals as a patron of music.

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