$10,000 Reward

People in the U. S. want their music, like their sermons, short. Quick to realize it, Victor Talking Machine Co., when it offered $25,000 last spring 'for the best symphonic work, included prize offers of $10,000 and $5,000 for best and second-best short compositions suitable for a jazz orchestra. The $25,000 symphonic contest stays open until next May. Winners of the jazz contest were named last week in Manhattan at a dinner at which John Philip Sousa was toastmaster.

E. R. Fenimore Johnson, executive vice president of the Victor Company, made the announcement. First prize, he said, went for Two American Sketches to Thomas Griselle of Mount Vernon, N. Y., graduate (1911) of the Cincinnati College of Music, whose recent activities have been with special radio programs. Second prize has been awarded Rube Bloom of Brooklyn for his Song of the Bayou. Both, according to terms of the contract, are U. S. citizens. Each composition took less than five minutes when smartly played at the banquet by Nat Shilkret and his Victor orchestra. Next day both compositions were released on a record--Griselle's Nocturne and March on one side, Bloom's Bayou with its chorus of "Oh Lord, Please Take Away the Darkness" on the other. Victor calls it rightly a $15,000 record, tells purchasers on the jacket that "for more than a generation it has been the particular privilege of the Victor Company to satisfy all musical needs, and all musical tastes. Its ability to do so is self-evident in the roster of famous names that have won the distinction of 'Victor artists'. . . . The American musical scene includes, in a conspicuous place, what is known as 'concert jazz' music. Herein, at present, lie great possibilities of American contribution to musical art. Realizing these possibilities, Victor, in conformity with its policy of promoting every worthy musical activity, has encouraged American composers in this idiom with the same enthusiasm that it devotes to the promotion of the classical forms of music. . . ."