The U.S. Gets Musical

P:At one concert, a friendly stagehand advised the great Anton Rubinstein not to go on without blacking his face for the "show."

P: At another, a seven-piece orchestra attempted Beethoven's Eroica.

P:At another, the orchestra played The Fireman's Quadrille, during which a fire alarm clanged, men in helmets dragged in hoses, doused real water on fake blaze. Such was unmusical America of the 19th Century, as portrayed by David Ewen in Music Comes to America (Thomas Y. Crowell; $3). Picturing a young nation's groping progress toward musical maturity, the story is by turns comic, valiant, humiliating, prideful. No scholarly treatise, not even an error-free* record, the book is none the less an engrossing, vivid history (as Mark Sullivan might tell it) of music's impact on the U.S. people.

Audiences of the early days nocked to hear the Polish pianist Volovsky "play 400 notes in one measure"; to watch jullien, famed French-English conductor of the 18505, lift a pair of kid gloves from a gold platter and carefully draw them on his fingers before conducting Beethoven; to hear & see 100 red-shirted firemen at the Boston Peace Jubilee of 1869 clanking 100 anvils to Verdi's Anvil Chorus.

In the early Victrola era, a prized record was the $7 single-sided Sextet from Lucia, sung by Caruso, Tetrazzini, Jacoby, Amato, Journet, Bada. In the hysterical years of World War I, secret service men shadowed non-Germans Leopold Stokowski, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Leopold Godowsky. The conductor-worshiping '205 showed the most extreme faddism ("Toscanini conducting Italian nonsense could pack the hall"). In the late-lamented Flagstad epoch, Tristan & Isolde grossed $150,000 in nine performances, "thereby becoming the greatest 'hit' ever to strike Broadway."

Author Ewen hopefully pictures the present-day U.S. as a singing, playing, listening, understanding nation of 10,000,000 music students, 50,000 school bands and orchestras, though he tempers this estimate with such revealing anecdotes as Samuel Goldwyn's Hollywood-scented remark to Jascha Heifetz: "Money isn't everything, Mr. Heifetz. I can make you famous!" More typical of today, Author Ewen thinks, is Jose Iturbi's story of how he found the radio of a roadside lunch-wagon tuned to a Sunday evening symphony. The clatter melted into silence as customers, dishwashers, waitresses succumbed to the music's spell. But the counterman wasn't satisfied. "He scowled at four hamburgers sizzling on the griddle and carefully removed them one by one.''

*E.g., the statement that Frank Black succeeded Walter Damrosch as XBC's musical director in 1928; actually, he succeeded Erno Rapee, in 1932. Damrosch appointed musical counsel in 1927, still retains the title.

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