Fair Music

Last winter, when the New York and San Francisco World's Fairs were in the lath-&-scaffold stage, New Yorkers and San Franciscans were already discussing tall plans for the music Fairgoers were to hear. Tallest planning was in Manhattan, where pudgy, music-loving Mayor LaGuardia had inaugurated a campaign to raise $1,200,000 to finance a World's Fair music festival. With this money, portly Olin Downes, New York Times music critic and Fair music director, proposed to buy Manhattan a festival she would never forget. Two months later news leaked out that the campaign had flopped, that the Fair's most spectacular musical event would be a song fest in the Court of Peace by the world's largest and loudest collection of glee-club singers (5,000 amateur voices).

But by the time the Fair opened Director Downes got his second wind. Banking on patriotic fervor rather than musical interest, he succeeded in getting Norwegians, Brazilians, Poles, Rumanians and Swiss to hire the New York Philharmonic-Symphony for a concert or two apiece of their own national tunes. Nobody else was interested. But there were enough Norwegians, Brazilians, Poles, Rumanians and Swiss to make a crowd. Aging Walter Damrosch and youthful John Barbirolli were drafted to conduct a concert apiece in the Fair's blimplike Hall of Music. Only really impressive bit of music up to last week was a special Wagner cycle put on not at the Fair Grounds but at the Metropolitan Opera House, and as the World's Fair entered its third week, even the Met's special cycle was playing to poor houses.

Meanwhile San Francisco sat and moped over its music. Director of the San Francisco Fair's music, dollar-eyed, dewlapped Harris De Haven Connick, had pictured a rosy future on an $800,000 budget. But last week, with their Fair already open more than two months and Director Connick out on his ear, irate San Franciscans were clamoring for more and better music. So far the most important music absorbed by San Francisco's 2,900,301 Fairgoers was played by Edwin Franko Goldman's band. After booping inconspicuously in odd spots about the Fair grounds, the band had finally landed in the Court of Honor. There, at $8,000 a week, they were still whiffling and booping to a handful of listeners.

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