Schellenbaum & Bombshell

In brassy dignity, an odd-looking contraption stood on the stage of Chicago's Orchestra Hall one night last week. It was a Schellenbaum (bell tree), an instrument of Moorish origin, looking like a brass Christmas tree hung with bells and horse tails. It is the only Schellenbaum owned by a U. S. orchestra. The Chicago Symphony, which got it as a gift from the late Composer Camille Saint-Saens, trots it out rarely. But last week, when the Symphony began its soth season, its 36th under the still competent baton of stooped, white-haired old "Papa" Frederick Stock, was one of those times.

The audience thundered applause when Papa Stock entered, lifted his baton to begin a Festival Fanfare which he had written for the jubilee. Next to Stainer's Sevenfold Amen, the Fanfare was probably the longest (ten minutes) ever composed, gave every instrument in the orchestra something to do, finally had even the Schellenbaum (manned by a percussionist) shaking like a hula dancer.

But the U. S. music season started last week not only with a fanfare but a crash. The U. S. air bristled with batons--in Philadelphia (where the season opened fortnight ago), Boston, Cleveland, many another place. Buffalo, which has a modest symphony, struck up in a new plushy, streamlined, $1,300,000 Kleinhans Music Hall built by the late Edward L. Kleinhans, clothing storeman, and PWA. (Buffalo also dedicated a $2,700,000 Memorial Auditorium, finest in the land.) In Manhattan's mellow Carnegie Hall, the Philharmonic-Symphony also launched its 99th season of concerts. This last event produced the loudest crash. For Manhattan's Herald Tribune produced a notable new critic: witty, chubby-cheeked, ex-expatriate Virgil Thomson, composer (Four Saints in Three Acts, cinemusic for The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River), onetime writer on music for Vanity Fair and the Boston Transcript.

The death of Lawrence Oilman a year ago left not only the Herald Tribune but the U. S. musical scene without a musicritic to compare with the late great James Gibbons Huneker, Philip Hale, Henry E. Krehbiel, et al. In the scramble for Mr. Oilman's job, Composer Thomson won on past performance and by agreeing with the Herald Tribune management that musicriticism should come out from under its bushel.

After listening to the Philharmonic, elegant Mr. Thomson headed his review Age Without Honor. He shrugged at its Beethoven, compared its Elgar with "that massively frivolous patchwork in pastel shades of which one sees such quantities in any intellectual British suburban dwelling." Calling Sibelius "vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial," he stated that he had never met a Sibelius-lover among "educated professional musicians." In Critic Thomson's sum: "The music . . . was soggy, the playing dull and brutal. As a friend remarked who had never been to one of these concerts before, 'I understand now why the Philharmonic is not a part of New York's intellectual life.' "

Carnegie Hall, full of 50th-anniversary feelings, rocked to its foundations. Even the Negro elevator operator felt that his name had been scandalized. Not since Critic Paul Rosenfeld made some vulgar reference to God giving a "positively farewell" recital on the trombone had anything so irreverent been seen in print. Herald Tribune readers ate it up.

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