Mrs. Carpenter's Dot

In Cambridge, Mass, this week. Composer John Alden Carpenter, 56, and Ellen Waller Borden, 47, were married. Composer Carpenter's first wife, Decorator Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, died less than two years ago. Mrs. Borden, whose Cambridge aunt gave her her wedding, was divorced from Oilman-Stockbroker-Sportsman John Borden. The wedding was a quiet affair but in Chicago, where both composer and his new wife live, it was loudly publicized, set several events in motion.

When Mrs. Borden announced her engagement she said that the wedding must wait until $100,000 had been raised by Chicago's newly-organized Friends of Music who intend to build an outdoor Temple of Music for the World's Fair (TIME, Dec. 26). Donations came in so slowly that she asked her friends to give her wedding presents in cash, which she would use to hire a professional money-campaigner. Campaigner John McKeown, advised by his brother Mitchell McKeown, managing director of Chicago's Unemployment Fund, was hard at work for the Friends last week. At a big organization dinner at the Drake Hotel, Frederick Stock, who played the viola in the Chicago Symphony before he became its conductor, gravely tucked his instrument under his chin, played publicly for the first time in 20 years. Total of the Friends of Music's fund up to this week (unofficial) : $20,000.

Dark Horse Green

Word that typewriters, revolver shots and police sirens would concatenate in Carnegie Hall, last week drew a crowd unaccustomed to entering Manhattan's most formal music house. Theatre folk, songwriters and newspapermen flocked to hear tabloid Paul Whiteman (126 Ib. thinner than he used to be) play Tabloid. It had been written for him by his oldtime orchestrator, squat, baldish Ferde Grofe who now runs the Grofe Realty Co. in Teaneck, N. J.

Newspapermen knew that Grofe had been persuaded to write Tabloid by his friend George Clarke, restless, hard-driving city editor of the New York Daily Mirror. Grofe visited the Mirror offices, devised a scenario which called for typewriters to click out hectically the routine news of the day, for a harp to represent the society editor calling for a copyboy, for a big bass horn to bellow like the managing editor. A sob sister had her maudlin, banal bit. Piccolos and traps described the comic-strip antics of Mickey Mouse. Revolver shots expressed murder headlines. Drums drummed the roar of the presses getting out an extra. Grofe was so determined to give an accurate picture of the death house that he visited Sing Sing, pretending to be a lawyer's clerk. But in spite of his pains, in spite of instrumentation gaudy as the newssheet he was depicting, in many a critical opinion Grofe came in second at Paul Whiteman's concert.

Dark horse was John Waldo Green, a square-faced, square-shouldered young Harvard-man (class of 1928) who earlier in the evening had come on stage grinning and bowing, sat down at one of the three pianos which had 'been pushed in front of the orchestra, and proceeded to solo in a suite called Night Club. Johnny Green's music was as blatantly programatic as Grofe's. It described tables being set in a speakeasy still reeking with smoke from the night before. Revelers drifted in. Two lovers sat in a corner oblivious to the noise around them. Hot, reeling couples packed the dance floor "not much bigger than a dime." Corks popped in a drunken finale. But Night Club had verve, spontaneity, fresh harmonic and rhythmic effects missing from the run of ambitious jazz, which nowadays seems all dressed up with no place to go. Two parts at least--the melody given to the lovers and the strident "Dance on a Dime"--should make song hits as rich as Johnny Green's "Body & Soul," which Torchsinger Libby Holman made famous.

"Body & Soul" dates back almost to Johnny Green's Harvard days when he founded the Gold Coast Dance Orchestra, played the saxophone for the Harvard Band, became a protege of Gertrude Lawrence who, when he was a freshman, sang one of his songs in Chariot's Revue.

For six months after he left Cambridge, Johnny Green tried dutifully to be a stock broker's clerk. Then he took a $60-a-week job with Paramount Publix, which led to ghosting at the piano, orchestrating Maurice Chevalier's Big Pond, synchronizing shorts. Five years have obliterated his Harvard stamp. He chews gum, wears tan spats, pin-checked suits, hires a trainer to pummel him every morning so that he will appear dapper when he gets chances to conduct in cinemansions. Johnny Green's bathroom is his pride. It is papered with the covers of the 15 songs he has had published. Some of them: "Hello, My Lover, Goodbye," "I'm Yours," "Living in Dreams," "Rain, Rain, Go Away."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.