Conferees Listen

In Manhattan last week convened 2,500 music teachers at the fifth biennial Music Educators National Conference. A small part of the conferees' time was occupied giving tongue to such easy-going pedagogical theses as that of Dr. Edwin J. Stringham of Columbia's Teachers College: "Let the teacher lead her class with a swing rendition of Minnie the Moocher and soon she will find it possible to interest the youngsters in Bach's chorales." Most of the conferees' time was spent giving ear to people playing and singing in large, determined groups. Heard were:

P: The smartly-uniformed Joliet (Ill.) High School Band, six-time winner of the National School Band championship. The band played once at City Hall where Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia presented its 100 young members with medals, thrice at "band clinics" where the music pedagogs solemnly analyzed its technique. At week's end the Joliet tootlers began an engagement at Radio City Music Hall.

P: Eighteen hundred male voices of 44 Associated Glee Clubs of America massed in Madison Square Garden.

P: Pretty, blonde Soprano Helen Jepson of the Metropolitan Opera, onetime glee club singer in Akron, Ohio.

P: Three thousand five hundred Manhattan school children, who also performed in the Garden for an audience of 20,000 including Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt.

P: The premiere of Walter Damrosch's Abraham Lincoln Song (lyric from Walt Whitman's Captain, My Captain), for one baritone, a chorus of 400 "freed slaves" and orchestra.

By the time the conference ended kindly old Conductor Walter Damrosch was given a huge red scrapbook pasted full of letters from moppets who appreciate his music appreciation courses over the radio, a Texas Centennial Ranger Commission a ten-gallon hat, a medal from Parents' Magazine.

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