Prizes, Judges

The Victor Talking Machine Co. last week offered $40,000 in prizes for musical compositions by U. S. citizens. It will pay $25,000 for the piece most suitable to be played by a symphony orchestra, $10,000 and $5,000 for the best and second best piece suitable for performance by a dance orchestra.

The symphonies and jazz-dances will not be played to an eager audience in the effort to discover which are best. They will be examined by five exceedingly able judges who, if none of the offerings are good enough to get the prize, will award the money to the "development of creative musical work in America. . . ." The five: Olga Samarov, onetime critic (1926-27) New York Evening Post, concert pianist, divorced wife and friend to Leopold Stokowski; Leopold (Anton Stanislaw) Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, by some able critics considered the world's best symphony conductor after Toscanini; Rudolf Ganz, Swiss pianist, composer, onetime (1921-26) conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; Sergei Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky, Russian conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Friedrich Wilhelm August Stock. Rhenish composer, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.