Music in Shirt Sleeves

THE summer seasons of music in America have generally been a long dry spell when those who thirsted for the living waters had to be their own rain-makers. That drouth is now ending, thanks to an idea which has taken root in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. The Berkshire Symphonic Festival is a rugged plant. Since it sprouted in a horseshow ring on the Hanna farm seven years ago, its transmutations have been phenomenal. In its second, third, and fourth year it grew under canvas; in its third, — still under a tent, though now a larger one, — it was transplanted to a twohundred-acre estate, ‘Tanglewood,’ one of the show places of Stockbridge, which its owner, Mrs. Gorham Brooks, deeded outright to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Next, the Festival was befriended by the elements themselves. In August 1937, Father Wotan sent a cloudburst and thundersquall to drown out the music of Wagner. This friendly hint was taken to the tune of gifts amounting to $80,000, which before the next season had built from designs by the eminent Finnish architect, Eliel Saarinen, an acoustically flawless Music Shed to seat an audience of fifty-seven hundred. And this summer the vigorous plant puts forth a new shoot — six weeks of an institute for advanced study, the Berkshire Music Centre.

The Festival has a longer history. When Dr. Serge Koussevitzky was asked if he would bring the Boston Symphony to the Berkshires he replied: ‘I am not interested in conducting concerts for the Berkshire community. My idea is to organize a great music festival of a national and even international scope.’ This goes back to his youth in Russia, where he cherished three purposes: to found and conduct his own orchestra, to publish young composers of talent, and to establish a Music Centre ‘which would emanate rays of art and culture.’ The first two he did achieve between 1909 and 1910; plans for his third were afoot at Moscow in 1913. War and revolution shattered all three. Twenty-seven years later, on another continent, his longsustained creative purpose is fulfilled. This July the Berkshire Music Centre opens with 350 students whose enrollment was complete last April, and the range of whose talents and personnel already suggests a scope that is national.

This school is exactly aimed. There is a gap in musical education as obtainable in America: it is between training for technique and practice in performance, between mastery of an instrument (including the voice) and experience in ensemble for the development of imaginative insight and interpretive power. Since nine tenths of the present musical training in this country is for the mastery of an instrument, technique is now common. Where the lack occurs is in some indigenous equivalent to those Kursaal orchestras and provincial operahouses which in Europe turn the student into a professional. It is an agreeable shock to learn that the Berkshire Music Centre will confer no degrees, award no diplomas, will give not even ‘credits.’ Not a single thing to hang on the wall! Here is an art to be practised. ‘The central idea of our short summer work,’ says Koussevitzky, ‘ will be interpretation. You know that the art of interpretation is still very young. In six weeks we cannot hope to give fundamental courses and instruction on the same basis as in conservatories and music schools. Our function is to help artists with good training and knowledge to acquire a penetrating and vivid conception of the music they interpret.’

Other music schools find this to their liking. Berkshire is in no sense a competitor — it is a school for graduate study. It does not even duplicate the work of other summer schools in colleges or universities.

Art and science flourish best in a climate of immense popular enthusiasm. Amateur and professional, both are domesticated at the Berkshire Music Centre. The school is in two departments, an Institute for Advanced Study, and the Academy, where amateurs may spend a happy summer performing with other amateurs great music under the instruction of distinguished professionals — as lay brethren of a Sacred Order. Thus the Institute orchestra of one hundred players is professional, an understudy to the Boston Symphony, whose members are its faculty, and is rehearsed sufficiently to give one concert a week before a school audience, while the Academy orchestra, half its size, is frankly amateur. In like manner the Institute courses are advanced work: orchestral conducting, opera dramatics, composition, harmony, and counterpoint, while the Academy courses are in choral conducting, school music, chamber music, choral singing, and folk dancing. The expectation is that these amateurs will carry enthusiasm fortified by good instruction back into the communities whence they come, there to start orchestras and choral societies of their own. So the Berkshire Music Centre is a magnified Symphony Hall, where a student orchestra is schooled by one of professional eminence and singers by distinguished choirmasters.

All this seems to have gone so swimmingly as perhaps to sound easier than it was. Music in America is, it is true, a rising tide. In 1900 we had six major symphony orchestras; in 1940 we have sixteen, and, in a second flight, two hundred and fifty lesser ones, four fifths of which have been established since 1919, and one half of which, slump or no slump, postdate 1929. As the pioneering significance of our earliest orchestras thus subsides, it may be ‘the superior use of its forces’ which has so distinguished the Boston Symphony that will continue to blaze trails. The zeal of its conductor and the skill of its management — which, by increasing the number of concerts, by differentiating its types of audience into distinct groups according to days of the week, seasons of the year, age and youth, and cities visited on tour, enabling it to pay the highest average annual wage of any orchestra in the land — have been further manifested in the planning of the Berkshire Festival and Music Centre. Generous, it is true, have been the private gifts to the Festival, for the Music Shed, and of ‘Tanglewood’ as a local habitation, but it is also true that seven summer festivals have been given without financial loss, save in the second year, which was before the Boston orchestra came to the Berkshires. The school starts with no rent to pay and no extra expenses aside from improvements or additions to the buildings already on the estate which house it. Thus the principal items of its budget can be for faculty and free scholarships for students of promising talent but unable to pay. In an era which has too often imagined that education means gilt-edged equipment, this school proceeds on the idea that education is the excellence of the teacher plus the quality of the taught.

When we speak of a community as happy in the enjoyment of the good life, we mean in general ‘the humanities’: literature, art, music, drama, architecture, schools, sports — in two words, education and hygiene. But when the purpose is to quicken these by grants of money it is found that scientific discoveries are easier to measure, if not swifter to appear, than are achievements in the arts. Your artist may be a slow developer, and to award him a stipend must remain somewhat of a gamble, the donor betting his money and the artist betting his life.

The Rockefeller Foundation has granted $60,000 to the Berkshire Music Centre. Out of this sum scholarships are to be awarded in varying amounts. Ten thousand dollars will help to build the stage of an operatic workshop theatre whose auditorium for tlie present is a tent, to remodel the hay barn into a choral rehearsal room above and a room for rehearsals of the school orchestras in the basement below. What was the woodshed of the mansion house becomes a music store, the garage is made into another rehearsal studio, and in the house basement is a room for the playing of phonograph records. Practical minds will, of course, be asking how the Berkshire Music Centre will continue to pay its bills if or when the Rockefeller grant comes to an end. ‘Tanglewood’ is a sizable estate, three hundred and fifty students (two thirds of whom are already housed in dormitories of the Lenox School and of the Cranwell School for Boys, an institution of the Jesuit Fathers) make a wieldy unit for the start; but there remains elbowroom enough on the acreage, and there should develop drawing power enough in the idea to double the enrollment without doubling expenses.

In its annual summer pilgrimage from Boston to the Berkshires the only instrument which the Symphony Orchestra could not carry along was the organ. The Carnegie Corporation has given $12,000 for an organ, specially designed for its place and function, which has been built into the Music Shed and will be ready for the performance next month by chorus and orchestra of Bach’s BMinor Mass.

Shirt sleeves tactfully ingratiate an art with a population still mindful of its pioneer and workaday origins. ‘For my part,’ says Miss Vilda (poets are under discussion) in a famous story of rural New England, ‘I’ve always despised to see a strong, hulkin’ man, that could handle a hoe or a pitchfork, sit down and twirl a penstalk.’ But when sweat is seen streaming off the brows of musicians hatless and coatless in an open Music Shed entirely surrounded by farmlands, art begins to wear the look of honest toil. In Europe the musician was long an appanage of church or court, and even in the nineteenth century lie was slowly emancipating himself from dependence on an aristocratical class; in America the musician’s place must be devised within the framework of a democratic way of life. One sure sign that music is to become a main ingredient in American culture is this force of gravity which draws music more and more to the multitude, and the eagerness with which the multitude comes to music.

Summer is a season that is scored for full orchestra. Music, originally an outof-door art, has been too much housed. Increasing artificialization has tended to carry it indoors under lamplight, into steam heat, air conditioning, and evening dress — most of all in these northern latitudes, where weather is clement less than half of the year. An art sinks its roots deeply into the soil of a nation only when it goes to and comes from the people — which is to say, when it can live in the open. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has of necessity been cityfostered, but now this exotic hothouse plant, winter-grown under glass, is taken out into the Berkshire countryside to bloom by day under summer suns, to flower by night under summer stars, to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.