Word: concertizing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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People in big cities seldom get a chance to hear such authentic hot spirituals. But last week at a Carnegie Hall concert of Negro music sponsored by the leftist New Masses, 2,600 Manhattanites heard some pretty warm ones. Entitled "From Spirituals to Swing," the New Masses concert set out to demonstrate the evolution of Negro music from the African jungle to the boogie-woogie. This it did not quite do. The boogie-woogie (played by Meade "Lux" Lewis and others) was fairly well in the groove but the jungle music (represented by African phonograph recordings) sounded as irrelevant...
...What the concert did demonstrate is that the best U. S. Negro music is not all produced in Harlem and on Broadway, but that some of it comes from towns of the South and Middle West. From them the concert's manager, Swing Pundit John Hammond, had imported eleven hand-picked Negro musicians. Of these the most musically interesting were four lean, earnest-looking Negroes from Kinston, N. C., who call themselves Mitchell's Christian Singers...
Though known to inquisitive record collectors through a few recordings of curiously wailing, syncopated spirituals,† Mitchell's Christian Singers had never before sung at a formal concert. Their spirituals were sung with touching solemnity, and with the intensity and abandon of hot jazz. Both jitterbugs and highbrows heartily approved them...
Most of the music that is played in concert halls comes from the broad musical meadows of Central Europe. But most of the tunes that set people dancing or whistling come from their own musical back yards. For want of a home-grown product even half as good, non-Germanic countries have had to import a large part of their concert music. But during the past 75 years composers in other countries have struggled to raise their own distinct national types of concert music, to produce symphonies, quartets, operas that are 100% Russian, Hungarian or American (jazz). Some have been...
...nostrils. His music, delicately flavored with the weedy condiments of Norwegian folk song, soon won him world fame. By the time he was 60 even the Central Europeans admitted he was good, placed a bust of him in the famous Gewandhaus hall of fame in Leipzig. Even the concert-shy man-in-the-street knew and whistled melodies from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite...