John Alden Carpenter (1876), one of America’s foremost composers, was born in Park Ridge, Illinois, and educated at Harvard where he took the music course, studying afterwards in England with Edward Elgar, the English composer. A business man, Carpenter still devotes his time to composing music that has put him among America’s leading musical lights. While he might be called a romanticist, his tendencies are impressionistic, and none understands better than he the charms of rich and unusual harmonies, the use of modern melodic and orchestral effects, and the value of humor in music. All these we find in his Adventures in a Perambulator for orchestra, and his ballet Krazy Kat, where jazz rhythms are used to great advantage. One of the most beautiful works of its kind, is the ballet after Oscar Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta, performed by the Chicago Opera Company, and his first ballet written for the Metropolitan Opera Company is called Skyscraper, certainly American! Carpenter’s settings of Tagore’s Gitanjali are among America’s finest songs; he has many others, a concertino for piano and orchestra and a violin sonata.
An All-American Symphony
Eric Delamarter (1880), born in Lansing, Michigan, has written a Symphony After Walt Whitman in which he has used twenty-year old street songs from the “Barbary Coast” (San Francisco Bowery), Lonesome Tunes of Kentucky, and a fox-trot rhythm with newer street songs. These, Delamarter has woven into a symphony with skill and sincerity. The material is All-American although neither Negro nor Indian.
Delamarter is a well-known musical critic in Chicago, an organist, composer of many other works for orchestra, organ, and oratorios, incidental music for drama, cantatas and songs and since 1917 assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Noble Kreider and Edward Royce, son of Professor Josiah Royce of Harvard University, have both written well for the piano. Harold Bauer has played variations and short pieces by Edward Royce.
Ernest Schelling—Pianist-Composer
Ernest Schelling (1876), born in Delaware, New Jersey, appeared as pianist at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, at the age of four! His musical training abroad included several years with Paderewski. He has made many concert tours in Europe and America, and for two seasons has conducted the children’s concerts of the New York Philharmonic Society. His important orchestral works include a symphonic legend, a suite, two numbers, Suite Phantastique and Impressions From An Artist’s Life, for piano and orchestra, and his latest work to enjoy wide popularity, The Victory Ball.
John Powell—Virginian
All the charm and refinement of the Southern gentleman are reflected in John Powell’s personality, along with an earnest sincerity and conviction. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, (1882), is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and Navratil in Vienna. He has made an international reputation as brilliant pianist and is also one of our most gifted composers. Powell’s works show classical training in form, with which he combines a rich romantic feeling and a love for folk music.
He believes that music should draw on the folk element for its strength, and has proved his theory by using freely the folk music he knows best, that of the negro. In the South, At the Fair, piano pieces, show this early influence and his fund of humor, and in his Negro Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, Powell has painted a picture of the negro in many moods—sinister and menacing, primitive bordering on barbaric, as well as humorous, care-free and childlike.