Mrs. Talbott's Gesture

"Not for self-exploitation nor for profit but as a gesture of international friendliness," there sailed from Manhattan last week on the S.S. Leviathan the sixty members of the Dayton (Ohio) Westminster Choir, for a two-month European tour beginning with seven concerts in England, going then to France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and back through southern Germany, Switzerland and France.

Choir Conductor. Dayton, Ohio, as everyone knows, hears the first clang of more newborn cash registers than any other city in the world. Many persons have still to be informed, however, that Dayton hears also the best choral music sung today in the U.S., for which credit is due John Finley Williamson, a conductor who knew what he wanted, and Mrs. Harry Elstner Talbott, a wealthy Daytonian who believed in him.

What Conductor Williamson wanted was better church music. He wanted to recreate an interest in the art of hymnology. Music, he said, was once the child of the church, where Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and the rest had their training. It should be brought back and made worshipful, the professional tang taken out. It should be devotion itself and delivered always with the greatest artistry.

John Williamson, quiet son of a clergy man, took his first job in Dayton as teacher of public speech and church music in the Central Reformed Theological Seminary. Soon he was engaged in choral work and for two years he directed simultaneously the music of seven churches. Then in 1920 he founded the Dayton West minster Choir, first made up of factory men and women, but later, because workers could not give the time to satisfy the Williamson ideal, of people who, like himself, wished to devote their lives to church and choral music. Today the choir of the Westminster Presbyterian Church is preeminently a choral school where more than 100 men and women from 30 states have gathered for the three-year course that fits them to be choral conductors.

The senior students have gone out as members of the touring choir, proven themselves as choristers. But back in Dayton they have learned more than the art of group singing. The Williamson course includes ear-training, conducting, hymnology, English, harmony, musical theory, history of music, Bible and church music literature. Five school days a week begin at 7:30 A. M. In addition there is field work, the organizing and conducting of graded choirs; then a tour (thus the personnel of the first choir changes each year); then church positions to be administered in the Williamson way. Already more than 100 churches have requisitioned Dayton Choir graduates, at handsome salaries.

Benefactor. Rare indeed are musical enterprises of any sort which have been made to pay for themselves. The Dayton Westminster Choir makes no such pretense, has for patroness the able and energetic Mrs. Harry Elstner Talbott, widow of Engineer Talbott who built the Soo locks and many a railroad. Herself a good amateur musician, Mrs. Talbott was quick to see the worth in Conductor Williamson's work, to contribute generously her money and time. Aside from the choir, her interests have been manifold and great. She has been president of the Anti-Suffrage League in Ohio, of the Anti-Saloon League. She has been an active realtor in Miami. She is mother of nine children--seven comely daughters, all married, and two sons--Harold, a polo-playing director of Chrysler Corp., Dayton Steel Racquet Co., Sikorsky Aviation Co. and many another corporation, and Nelson ("Bud"), Yale football captain in 1915, now president of N. S. Talbott Co.* All nine children with their husbands and wives and 24 offspring spent last Christmas with Mrs. Talbott in Dayton. The seven comely daughters were with her last week at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan, seeing her off for Europe with the choir she subsidizes. Last summer, she went abroad and arranged the tour herself, soliciting the sponsorship of many a European eminent.

*N. S. Talbott is a director of the mass production McClaren Consolidated Cone Co., which provides the U.S. with many an ice cream cone; the Dayton Friction Toy Co., famed for its fire-engines for children: the Vance Manufacturing Co., which makes the steel in Pullman cars look like wood.