Incubator

The late George Eastman, onetime office boy who founded, developed and headed the $177,000,000 Eastman Kodak Co., couldn't recognize a tune or tell one note from the next. But George Eastman wanted desperately to like music.

In 1918 white-haired Eastman founded a $17,000,000 school of music in Rochester. This huge establishment was somewhat grandiose for a town of Rochester's size, but the Eastman School of Music flourished, and is today counted one of the most important music conservatories in the U. S.

As director for their music school, Eastman's executives in 1924 picked a boyish, bearded, 28-year-old Nebraskan named Howard Hanson. Director Hanson's main interest was composition, and it was not long before he had turned Eastman's music school into a gigantic incubator for young U. S. composers. For them Director Hanson provided classes in counterpoint, a symphony orchestra, and even a ballet company to play their works. He installed a recording system, made phonograph records of students' lopsided sonatas and sway-backed symphonies, so that they could study their faults over & over again. Nine years ago Director Hanson held a Festival of American Music at which he conducted a bushel or so of new U. S. music. The festival was so successful that it was repeated every year.

Last week Rochester held its ninth Annual Festival of American Music. At festival's end patient Rochesterians had sat through so many new U. S. compositions, that they would have clutched 0 Sole Mio or Ach Du Lieber Augustin like a drowning man. Most-talked-about item of the series: a symphony by a 20-year-old post graduate Eastman student named Owen Reed. Some critics found Reed's brief, concise opus somewhat monotonous. Not so Director Hanson, who spoke of it with exuberant breath: "Comparison of Reed's work with Beethoven's can be made only by a critic in the year 2000."

Director Hanson, who raised his goatee when he was studying in Rome because he thought young musicians attracted too little attention, still defends the young U. S. composer with crotchety vigor. No modernist himself, he personally dislikes the dissonant groanings and thumpings of the musical Kulturbolschewiki. But he will defend to the death their right to groan and thump.

"There is an enormous difference," explains Director Hanson, "between music that is well-knit and sounds like Hell, and music that doesn't sound the way the composer intended it to sound. The first is competent musicianship; the second is not. . . . A competent composer deserves at least one hearing before an audience."

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