MUSIC MISTRESS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 3, 5 January 1937, Page 15

MUSIC MISTRESS.

SYMPHONY MAGIC. MELODY IN THE BATHTUB. 1 MIRACLE WORKER OF NOISES. (By IRA WOLFERT.) NEW YORK, December 5. Every time Francis Gibbs, the torpedo boat manufacturer, Marshall Field, the shopkeeper, and Paul D. Cravath, the lawyer, got together at a concert — and society being what it is, that meant pretty often—it used to be something to see. Up in the balcony the boys would be closing their eyes in rapture, and, down in the boxes, the boys would be closing their eyes in slumber, and at those Sunday concerts of the Philharmonic the Gibbs-Field- trio would give a private rendition of "The Afternoon of a Yawn," which, while not unusual, had a finesse that made it distinctive. From boite to boite the word passed along behind the jewelled hands that attendance at the Philharmonic had proved very educational to three of its board members and had taught the boys to strangle their snores in time to the music.

Now that much has gone out of life. Mr. Gibbs now sups his ear, not his mouth. Mr. Field chushes.'the stray chatterer with all the ardour at his command, and Mr. Cravath is practically rapture couehant every time somebody makes a pass at a fiddle. As a matter of fact, things have gone further than that, they actually have gone so far that Mr. Gibbs will sing on the slightest provocation—not only in the privacy, of his bath, but out of it as well. And Air. Cravath has been arching coyly in the direction of a choral society, while to Mr. Meld life is just a theme song. Nor is that all. There is, also, Mre. Theodore Steinway, of the piano-making family. In days not so long, ago, the only way she could tell a high note from a low note was by the rise and fall of the soprano's bosom. Now her idea of going to town in group her guests rfrourid a phonograph and them them have Bach. Not only the noise he makes, but the notes, too. She gives all present a copy of the score so that they can really go to the mat with the record. , And down in Virginia,, at haughty, hoity-toity Foxcraft School, music used to be something you said "Yoicks!" with and "Taint?? tantivy!" was all the opera needed. Now the girls are going around calling Tschaikowsky divine and a fugue an evening's entertainment. Mme. Stokowski is the Answer. What's happening to them all? It seems to be Mme. Olga Samaroff Stokowski, the conductor's first \?ife. She has thought up a way to teach even a cauliflower ear to absorb music and has taught 3000 people in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Hartford, Scranton, Georgetown, Denver and Los Angeles to enjoy music rapturously. It's really marvellous, she says, what can be done even with people who have j convinced, not only everybody around then), but themselves, that they have "no ear." "If you have a mind, you have an ear," is Mine. Stokowski's slogan. And she told the story of an SO-vear-old bookkeeper who wrote that he had been hearing the noises orchestras make all his life, but had not paid much attention. "Now," she said, "at the end of his life he has discovered music and wants it as he wants food. He wrote to say he did not have much money and could we send him some young teacher who would give him special instructions for one dollar an hour." What started Mme. Stokowski on her new course in life was a recognition of "a serious deficiency in American education." "European education." she said, "is designed to carry ope along a long road. But here, in America, when a man has made whatever success he is ever go in? to make, he has nothing to fill his life —golf and tennis and trips around the world, but really nothing at all of importance. no heart satisfactions. Music is the answer to them. It is an enjoyment that age cannot stale. They Didn't Understand. "Then, too, I knew so many people who attended concerts as a social duty and were bored to tears between the intermissions. Why was that? Why should they sit suffocated by boredom before beauty so strong it should start their hearts to pounding? Simply because they did not understand what the artist was sayinjj to them with his notes. Thinking all these things; Mme. Stokowski next thought up a way to remedy it, and then worked six years on hundreds of human "guinea pigs" to perfect it. She starts by training the ear to recognise the notes of the scale, and after 40 lessons qualifies you as prepared to go out and grow rapturous with the best of them. She_ says that, financially, it has been a losing proposition for her. But in almost every other way it has been .a success. She described her method at the International Congress of Musical Education in Prague last spring, and this winter representatives of several European nations will arrive to study her methods. The W.P.A. has asked her to train teachers so that |he course'may be given throughout thelpountry. "There is one success that has been denied me," she says. "I have received hundreds of letters from people whose lives have been enriched by music and 1 " 'say that even their pleasure in singing in the bathtub has been increased. But no single letter from any of their neighbours thanking me for improving the quality of their i singing."