Word: musicalities
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...made St. Olaf's choir what it is is genial, 68-year-old Dr. Christiansen. The violinist son of a Norwegian blacksmith, Dr. Christiansen came to the U. S. from Larvik, Norway, went to St. Olaf College 26 years ago as head of the music department. Since then he has become the college's most respected figure, and though St. Olaf's youngsters call him "Christy" behind his back, they would never dare address him as anything but Dr. Christiansen...
...Christy" has been a U. S. citizen for the past 50 years, but his broad Norwegian accent, his preferences for rye bread and prim, batwing collars, stamp him unmistakably as an old-worldling. So, perhaps, does the self-effacing devotion to music that makes St. Olaf's lusty youngsters hang on his every word and glance. Critics have often asked him how he manages to get such results with a constantly changing group of college students. Says he, grinning good-naturedly: "Character is what counts. ... If it comes to a choice between character and exceptional voice, I choose character...
Last winter, when the New York and San Francisco World's Fairs were in the lath-&-scaffold stage, New Yorkers and San Franciscans were already discussing tall plans for the music Fairgoers were to hear. Tallest planning was in Manhattan, where pudgy, music-loving Mayor LaGuardia had inaugurated a campaign to raise $1,200,000 to finance a World's Fair music festival. With this money, portly Olin Downes, New York Times music critic and Fair music director, proposed to buy Manhattan a festival she would never forget. Two months later news leaked out that the campaign...
...time the Fair opened Director Downes got his second wind. Banking on patriotic fervor rather than musical interest, he succeeded in getting Norwegians, Brazilians, Poles, Rumanians and Swiss to hire the New York Philharmonic-Symphony for a concert or two apiece of their own national tunes. Nobody else was interested. But there were enough Norwegians, Brazilians, Poles, Rumanians and Swiss to make a crowd. Aging Walter Damrosch and youthful John Barbirolli were drafted to conduct a concert apiece in the Fair's blimplike Hall of Music. Only really impressive bit of music up to last week was a special...
Meanwhile San Francisco sat and moped over its music. Director of the San Francisco Fair's music, dollar-eyed, dewlapped Harris De Haven Connick, had pictured a rosy future on an $800,000 budget. But last week, with their Fair already open more than two months and Director Connick out on his ear, irate San Franciscans were clamoring for more and better music. So far the most important music absorbed by San Francisco's 2,900,301 Fairgoers was played by Edwin Franko Goldman's band. After booping inconspicuously in odd spots about the Fair grounds...