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Unknown BMC (Primary)
Title

Black Mountain College Community Bulletin College Year 11 Summer Bulletin 11 Monday, September 11, 1944

Date
1944
Century
20th century
Medium & Support
Ink on paper
Object Type
Archival Documents
Credit Line
Black Mountain College Collection, gift of Barbara Beate Dreier and Theodore Dreier, Jr. on behalf of all generations of Dreier family
Accession Number
2017.40.169a-c
Copyright
In Copyright, Educational Use Permitted
Description

3p bulletin, mimeograph on matte off white paper.

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE COMMUNITY BULLETIN
College Year 11 Summer Bulletin 11
Monday, September 11, 1944
CALENDAR:
Mark Brunswick, Composer, writer, and president of the United States Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, will lead a panel discussion on “The Musical Community” this morning at 10:30 o’clock in the Round House. This will be the third discussion in a series on “The Composer and the American Music Market.” The first panel discussion, on “Music and Business,” was conducted by Roger Sessions, American composer, on Saturday morning. The second, on “Learning and Intuition in Music Education,” was conducted on Sunday by Ernest Bacon, composer and Dean of the School of Music at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
The Board of Fellows will meet this afternoon at 1:30 o’clock in Study 10.
The faculty will meet tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 o’clock in Study 10 to evaluate the Summer Quarter work of the students.
There will be a meeting of the Board of Fellows tomorrow evening at 7:30 o’clock in Study 10.
The Summer Art Institute, the Summer Quarter, and the Summer Music Institute will end on Saturday, September 16.
The 1944-45 session of Black Mountain College will begin on Saturday, September 30.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The summer Art Institute at Black Mountain College is formally exhibiting in the Kocher Room the sculpture done during August and early September by the students of Jose de Creeft, noted Spanish sculptor who has been a member of the teaching staff since August 7. The exhibit includes fourteen pieces; they are in wood, marble, granite, and limestone, collected by the students on the College grounds.
In the exhibition are: a mother and child, in limestone, the work of Robert Blair of Oakland, NJ; “Attention”, a parrot in limestone, the erection of Paula Eicke of Baltimore, Md; “Embryonic Expulsion”, a ducking emerging from an egg, in gray granite, the work of Faith Murray of Charlotte, SC; a Mexican girl in rod granite, by Mary Lou Derryberry of Chattanooga, Tenn; “Joie de Vivro”, a portrait head of a smiling boy, in granite, by Laille Schutz of Chicago, Illinois; “Escape Literature”, a polished granite erection by Richard Albany of Black Mountain, NC; “Contemplation”, a woman engrossed in thought, in black dionite, by Margaret Kennard of Des Moines, Iowa; “Geraldine”, a portrait head in marble by Nancy Smith of West Allis, Wisconsin; “Expectancy”, a figure in gray-veined granite by John Reiss of Milwaukee Wisconsin; “Christ”, a triangular head in mottled granite by Katherine Swartzbaugh of Toledo, Ohio; “Purity”, the figure of a woman in grained wood by Lorrie Goulet of Los Angeles, California; “Dream Cat”, a figure and “Double Personality”, a portrait head in smooth and rough texture by Ernest Costa of Brooklyn, New York.
In commenting on the summer work of the young sculptors, Mr de Creeft said: “After I had made a few preliminary remarks about the creating of forms out of the areas of the materials upon which they were ready to begin work, I instructed the students to work directly, in wood or stone, without the aid of preliminary sketches or clay or plaster models.” He added that he used the direct method because it is especially good for the beginning student, since it increases his spontaneity and offers a strong educational discipline. “Moreover, it enables the student to conserve the pureness of the material and at the same time eliminates the old academic processes that only complicate the work of the sculptor.”

B M C Community Bulletin Summer Bulletin 11 Page 2
Mr de Creeft gave individual instruction to his students, trying to draw from each of them his creative point of view in three-dimensional form. “I helped each student to overcome his personal creative weaknesses. I helped him to follow his own ideas after he had clarified them.”
Mr de Creeft has worked in the ateliers of Barcelona, Madrid and Paris and has exhibited widely in Europe and America. He was a member of the jury of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 and of the jury of the Chicago Art Institute Exhibition in 1938. He won the $5,000 Sculpture Artist-for-Victory Prize recently. His work is represented in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and in the museums in Brooklyn, Seattle, West Palm Beach and Wichita. A world War memorial, designed and executed by him, stands in the city of Saugues, France.
Mr de Creeft teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at his own studio.
At the beginning of the new session Mrs Walter Boyden of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will succeed Mrs Otto Billig as dietitian. Mrs Boyden was the dietitian the second year of the College.
Bob Wunsch will speak this evening at the Schoolmasters’ Club in Asheville on “A Warning Against Post-War Speed-up in Secondary Education.”
NEWS ITEMS FROM LAST WEEK:
“The further back we go in time, the less we observe the problems besetting nowadays the art of interpreting. If we go back far enough, we reach a point at which no problem whatever exists, because there is no difference between composing and interpreting,” said Ernst Krenek, pianist and composer, in an address at Black Mountain College on Monday evening on “The Composer and the Interpreter.” “The man who invented the tune performed it at once, at the moment of invention. This process is known as improvisation.”
“Improvisation has held sway even up to our own days, when it is still practiced in the ‘jam sessions’ of swing musicians. Serious music, however, has more and more taken on the character of literature; the written or printed score has the full significance and dignity of an art, regardless of whether or not and how often it is performed. In the course of that process composers have worked out an increasingly elaborate system of graphic signs referring, among other things, to tempo, dynamics, and expressive shadings in order to convey their intention to the performer.”
According to Mr Krenek, the interpreter’s task is twofold: “to make his performance sound as if it were a free improvisation, as it if were created at the moment of the rendition; and to try to obey most faithfully the instructions of the composer. No matter how detailed these instructions are, they still leave a wide margin for the free display of the interpreter’s imagination.” Mr Krenek illustrated this point with an example from dramatic literature, showing in how many ways certain lines could be interpreted.
In regard to contemporary music, clear and intelligent articulation is the main problem of the interpreter. Because of the unfamiliarity of the idiom it is particularly necessary to present the relationships of the various elements with utmost clarity.” Mr Krenek exemplified this by analyzing a passage from his own third piano sonata.
In conclusion, Mr Krenek said that composers ought not to be too pessimistic about the danger of the interpreter’s overstepping the boundaries left to his imagination. “The personality of the interpreter vouchsafes an increment of vitality that is not only desirable, but truly necessary in order to put the message of the composer across.”

B M C Community Bulletin Summer Bulletin 11 Page 3
This slide-illustrated lecture on “The Evolution of Modern Art” on Thursday evening, JB Neumann characterized the abstract paintings of Josef Albers as: “Mathematics with a soul, creations of an architectural mind, a play with space and color producing rhythm, emotion put into the ice box, logic with a heart.” He added that Mr Albers “a master of the counterpoint, an artist creatively excited about proportions.”
After Mr Neumann’s lecture on Thursday evening, Black Mountain College was entertained with a dance in the Dining Hall by a company of the 134th Field Artillery, a group now stationed for a short period at Moore General Hospital. The affair was arranged by Patsy Lynch and Muffie Vaughn, representing the College, and Captain Gremillion, commander of the company. Music was furnished by the Moore General Hospital dance orchestra.
More than fifty uniformed men attended the dance. They were soldiers who had been together for nearly four years, in training and in action. They had fought in the South Pacific, chiefly on New Guinea. Most of them were from Ohio; a few were from Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
“The layman thinks of photography as something that emanates from a drug store, that photography is an accident,” said Barbara Morgan, well-known American photographer, in a slide-illustrated address on “Vision in Photography” in the College Dining Hall on Friday evening. “Unless thinkers and feelers do considerable conscious and painstaking work on photography, however, photography can never attain the realm of art.”
Mrs. Morgan listed as the essentials for good photography “the functioning inseparately of the camera lens, the eye, and insight.” “Prevision before the click is of consummate importance and is recognized to infrequently by photographers generally,” she said. In this prevision should be “the vicarious taking and developing and printing of the picture.” This involves a knowledge of the physics of light. “Having light as a working partner is something magnificent and challenging” commented Mrs Morgan.
WITH FORMER STUDENTS:
New Addresses:
Mrs Bruno Piscitello
612 Magnolia Street
Greensboro, North Carolina

Nancy C West, S 2/c
USCGR (W)
299 West Twelfth Street
New York 14, New York
In the Mail:
Aurora Cassotta writes from Greensboro, North Carolina: “Bruno and I had hoped that we could spend a weekend at the College before he goes overseas, but due to the fact that military personnel is restricted from that area because of the infantile paralysis, we won’t be able to make it. I would like to come down though for a few days after Bruno is shipped….It’s really good to be in God’s country again. Trees, trees, and still more trees! After Texas that really is something!”

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