4p, one-sided pages, 4 horizontal folds, staple in top left corner. Mimeograph on matte off white paper. Announces that the catalogue for the 1945 summer music institute has gone to press, Erwin Straus has been granted an one-year leave of abscene. Announces that the summer art and the summer music institute will begin on July 2 and will last for 10 weeks, the music institute focuses on the study of polyphony and ensemble the Service Building just started its reconstruction
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
Community Bulletin Bulletin 27
College Year 12 Monday, April 23, 1945
CALENDAR:
The Board of Fellows will hold a short special meeting this afternoon at 1:00 o’clock in the Dining Hall.
Dick Bush-Brown, Bill McLaughlin and Herbert Miller will summarize and interpret last week’s news at a half-hour meeting of the Community in the Lobby of South Lodge at 7:00 o’clock this evening.
There will be a Special Meeting of the Faculty on Tuesday afternoon after lunch in the Round House to consider the report of Samuel Seldon and Kai Jurgensen on the written and oral examinations of Betty Kelley.
The Board of Fellows will hold its regular weekly meeting in Bob Wunsch’s Study on Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 o’clock.
The Faculty will meet on Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 o’clock in the Faculty Room.
Ira de A Reid will address the College Community on Wednesday evening at 8:15 o’clock in the College Dining Hall on “The Dilemma of Social Planning.”
Mr de Reid, born at Clifton Forge, Virginia, was educated at Morehouse College, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia. He has taught in Texas, West Virginia, and at Atlanta University, where he is now Professor of Sociology. He is the author of a number of local studies, such as The Negro in New Jersey, and of The Negro Immigrant (1939), Negro Youth, Their Social and Economic Background (1939), In A Minor Key (1940), and with Arthur Raper of Sharecroppers All (1940).
Anna Schauffler and Edward Lowinsky, will give a cello-piano concert on Saturday evening in the Dining Hall beginning at 8:15 o’clock. The program will include: Handel’s Sonata Number 1 in G Minor, Bocchorini’s Sonata in A Major, and Beethoven’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The catalogue of the 1945 Summer Music Institute has gone to the press and should be ready for distribution early next week.
Max Dehn will speak to the X Club in Asheville this evening, at their supper meeting at the S and W Cafeteria, on “Plato and Modern Education.” Among the members of the College Community who will go to hear Dr Dehn are Mr and Mrs David Corkran, Dr and Mrs Herbert Miller, and Dr and Mrs Siegfried Schwarz and Mrs Annette Stone.
Ted Dreier is expected to return to Lake Eden on Wednesday morning after a ten days’ business trip for the College to Chicago, New York City, and Washington.
Dr Erwin Straus has been granted a year’s extension on his leave of absence, by the Board of Fellows, to continue his research work, during the 1945-46 Session, at the John Hopkins Hospital.
Bob Wunsch will be the commencement speaker at the Warren Wilson junior college on May 26.
NEWS ITEMS:
Black Mountain College will hold another Music Institute this summer on its campus at Lake Eden. The Institute, which will extend over a period of ten weeks, beginning on July 2, will be primarily devoted
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To a study of polyphony and ensemble. It will feature music lectures, tutorials, open rehearsals, concerts, and courses on the rise and development of vocal and instrumental polyphony with special emphasis on the smaller ensembles of chamber music. The guest faculty will include: Erwin Bodky, pianist and harpsichordist of the Cambridge Collegium, a member of the faculty of the Longry School of Music; Carol Brice, concert contralto; Frances Snow Drinker, flutist, a member of the faculty of the University of Louisville; Dr Alfred Einstein, music historian at Smith College and the author of Mozart: His Character and Work; Roland Hayes, concert tenor; Eva Heinitz, assistant first cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Hugo Kauder, composer of many works for different instrumental and vocal ensembles; Joseph Marx, oboist and English horn player in the Metropolitan Opera Company; William Valkenier, first horn player of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and Emanuel Zetlin, associate concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Company and a member of the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music.
The institute will be open not only to those students who can take an active part as musicians, but also to those who come as auditors or can participate only in discussions. It will be a meeting place for instrumentalists, singers, conductors, composers, teachers, critics, and amateurs. To the Institute, Black Mountain College is offering a limited number of full and part-time scholarships to talented musicians and music teachers. It hopes thereby to make the Institute a part of the regular student body, that represents a wide across section of American life, culturally as well as geographically.
The combination of artists experienced in the performance of old music and scholars devoted to the interpretation and the revival of it promises an unusually interesting and fruitful music summer at Black Mountain College. The program, however, will not be limited to old or to polyphonic music only. The decline and revival of polyphony in modern music from the Viennese school to the present will be illustrated in courses and performances. Besides the presence of outstanding singers and instrumentalists assures a generous consideration also of music for voice and instruments.
The Music Institute will be under the direction of the music faculty of Black Mountain College that includes Dr Heinrich Jalowetz, Dr Edward Lowinsky, Gretel Lowinsky, and Trudi Straus.
Running concurrently with the Music Institute will be a second Summer Art Institute, under the direction of Josef Albers, Professor of Art at Black Mountain College. There will be also a regular session of the College.
NOTE: The next issue of the Community Bulletin will contain a detailed story on the Summer Art Institute.
Roland Hayes, who will be featured at the Second Summer Music Institute, was a musician from his earliest childhood. From his father he learned to imitate the bird calls in the deep woods of Georgia; from his mother he learned self-discipline and the enormous patience required of any artist. His first music teacher was W Arthur Calhoun of Chattanooga, Tennessee; under him he studied a year and a half. Later he studied for four years under Jennie A Robinson at Fisk University. He was a pupil of Arthur J Hubbard of Boston, Massachusetts, for eight and a half years. He studied in Europe in 1920 under Ira Aldridge, Victor Beigel, Sir George Henschel and Dr Theodore Lierhammer. He conducted his own concert tour of the United States from 1916 to 1920, went to Europe in 1921 to continue his studies and to conduct concert tours, gave a command performance before Queen Mother Maria Christina of Spain in April of 1925. Mr Hayes has sung with Orchestra Collenno in Paris and with Orchestra Hengelberg in Amsterdam; he has also sung in Vienna, in Berlin, and in all the other important centers of Europe. He has toured the United States widely, singing with the Boston, the Philadelphia, the Detroit, and the New York Symphony Orchestras. He has won wide recognition for his interpretation of
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Traditional Negro melodies. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal for “the most outstanding achievement among colored people” in 1925.
COMMUNITY WORK:
Community Work is swinging into a busy Spring Term.
The road bridge of logs and planks near Roadside Cottage has finally been replaced. For some time large trucks had had to join the Hough Leader in going around by the Farm Road; and, as the bridge had become more delapidated, even Faculty cars had begun to be in danger of crushing through it into Mountain Stream. Now we have a three-foot pipe of heavy boiler plate, that used to be someone’s factory smoke stack, conducting the stream through a clay fill. The stone ends still have to be placed, but the road is open to traffic again.
The Service Building reconstruction has just begun; The new building will be one story high and will occupy one half of the old subfloor and foundation that were not damaged by the fire. Three bed rooms and one bath will be provided with a small hall to connect them all. The modern, functional design employs non-critical material as much as possible and can easily be enlarged to cover the whole foundation when there is a need for it. Material is arriving every day. Twenty-two students and several teachers have signed up as constructors. Black Mountain College will shortly resound again to the music of hammer and saw.
--Mac Wood
WITH FORMER STUDENTS:
PFC Lucian Marquis writes from Germany on April 3: “At present I am sitting in a surrounding so unbelievable that, were it not for certain outside factors, I could be dreaming all this! Am sitting in a room with ankle deep rugs, soft lights, modern furniture and on the other side of the double door a marble bath with hot and cold water, a radio crooning the latest song hits! But don’t let all this mislead you; this isn’t a bed of roses..We’ve hit it lucky for a few days. This is still the infantry and we still do the dirty work. Right now though an officer and I are taking care of the Allied Military Government in four small villages around here. It’s a fascinating job, but lots of headaches. Everything from pregnant goats to slave laborers who want to go home. We're doing the ground work here, no fancy offices or fine stationary; and the hazards of war are not sufficiently absent as yet. Here we realize even more fully the tremendous problem Germany will offer after the European victory. The people around here for the most part try to assure me every day that they never were Nazis at all, but are only too willing to denounce fifteen others who were! Those accused, in turn, denounce the denouncer. There is no basis of trust here, for there is no measure by which the Nazis can be distinguished from others; thus all Germans must be considered guilty! (These exclamation marks are not intentional, but rather the characteristics of this captured typewriter.) The officer and I travel from village to village, settle disputes, hand out passes, help along in the cooperative distribution of food. From what I have seen the Germans are a hell of a lot better off than the French, Dutch, or Belgians, as far as their economy is concerned- the result of some very scientific looting over a period of four years. The Germans also, for the first time, see the horrible destruction of war on their home soil; whether it will make them pause and think or make them only more nationalistically embittered one cannot say yet. My one wish is that when this damn thing is over, we will not stop fighting for the liberty and equal opportunity of all men and that w will not let only the old men make the peace; otherwise all this misery has been in vain....What has happened to me since I left Black Mountain College in 1942? In the summer of 1942 I went up to New York and worked around a few printing shops as a copy holder. At the same time I entered the Graduate School of the New School for Social Research to continue the
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Study of philosophy and political science. In the spring of the following year I worked as a short wave monitor both for CBS and the United Press, listening to foreign language broadcasts. In the fall of 1943 I entered the Graduate School of Columbia University, and in November of that same year I was inducted into the Army. I trained in Texas with the Infantry, first in Heavy Weapons’ Company, later in Louisiana and California with the Intelligence Section of a Hq Company. As you know, two former Black Mountaineers, Henry Adams and Oppy are in the same outfit with me....Am getting the Bulletin, and read, of course, avidly what has happened to the old gang..”
PFC Isaac Nakata writes from continental Europe on April 10: “Things are running as well as could be expected. We are still on the same mission; and although it is a bit trying and boring at times, I am bearing up as best I can with mingled satisfaction and disgust....I am doing a lot of plain thinking these days and some reflecting on the values of life. Many of my ideas on the army and on army life are academic now, since I can begin to evaluate what has transpired and some objectivity obtains....Army life is kind of racket with all the conflicts and evasions of its ramifications and personalities. One can ‘play the game’, and there are good and bad players. One has to be quite realistic to be a good player in a way to accrue advantage to himself in a material way. I am wondering now whether or not the people who are now soldiers will be the same when they have ceased their soldiering. A dual personality seems inescapable in some respects, since the army is so totally regimentative. I wonder if the army hasn’t changed all of its personnel to some degree. I am afraid some of the truer values of wholesome living will be perverted. We live by orders and regulations, on checks and counterchecks, on double talk. I have heard many men say that they can’t have a true friend in the army, and I believe they are right. There are so many angles to the game that one is selfish or foolish to expect trueness or honesty in anybody or anything. Those who have seen much combat are hence realistic, bitter, and hard to fool by flag waving or hollow words....Excerpts from Emil Willimetz’s letter in a recent Bulletin was interesting, but his ideas on my old outfit are not correct. We fought hard because we were a good outfit, and good outfits stay on the lines the longest and have the harder objectives. When one has to fight, he fights hard, to the best of his ability, because he has to, was trained to, and has pride; and one forgets about races and ideals in battle....We have something like basic training here. There is work, but there is also playing. After all, in all cases and instances it’s not intolerable overseas, though the regimented life is annoying. But we are not here as tourists, students, or civilians....I especially like, in the Bulletins, the news of alumni in the service overseas..”
REQUESTS:
If you know people who are interested or who may become interested in one or both of our Summer Institutes, please send us their names and addresses at once so that we can mail catalogues out to them at once.
We shall appreciate getting from you, too, the names of people who are able and willing to support our cultural summer program with contributions, particularly for student scholarships.
Any contribution, small or large, will and deeply appreciated. A contribution of a hundred dollars will be considered a sponsorship.
