$25,000 Worth

Writing music (unless you include Tin Pan Alley hits) is no way to get rich quick. So it was news that a tall, gangling musician named Leroy Robertson had got $25,000 for a long-haired orchestra piece. Probably no piece of classical music had ever been so handsomely paid for.* The money Robertson got for his Trilogy would have supported Mozart or Schubert for life.

The $25,000 came from Detroit's music lover Henry Reichhold, who runs the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Reichhold's publicity men snagged newspaper space by calling Prizewinner Robertson a cowboy-composer. Actually, though Robertson did herd sheep in Utah as a boy, he is a music professor at Brigham Young University, and winner of the New York Music Critics' Circle award in 1944 for a string quartet. He had not even entered Reichhold's contest: he sent the score, signed "Nostrebor" (his name spelled backwards) to his New York publisher, who entered it without Robertson's knowledge.

Last week, Detroit Symphony-goers and a national ABC radio audience got their first chance to hear what all the money was spent for. The composer himself had explained his work: "If it is broad and sweeping, as the judges say it is, it comes from viewing the high plateaus of the Wasatch Range while tending sheep. . . . One passage sort of expresses the old-timers who spit tobacco into brass spittoons. . . ." But Trilogy had little picture painting about it: it was a well-knit if not wonderful symphony, with occasional ear-splitting eruptions of brass. Commented Detroit Critic Harvey Taylor: "Those 25 Gs could have fallen into much, much less able hands."

* Verdi got $20,000 from the Khedive of Egypt for Aida, which was written for the opening of the Suez Canal. A Stalin Prize, first class, also pays about $20,000.

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