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Artist
Unknown BMC (Primary)
Title

"Black Mountain College Community Bulletin College Year 12 First July Bulletin, 1945"

Date
1945
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
2017.40.208a-f
Copyright
In Copyright, Educational Use Permitted
Description

6p, onesided pages, 6 horizontal folds, staple in top left corner. Mimeograph on matte off white paper. The regular Summer Session began on June 26. The Art and Music Institute held their first meetings on July 2 (details on page 3&4) The College took a holiday on July 4. The first formal concert of the summer presented on July 7. The new music practice room was opened for use. Announces the RESIGNATION of Robert Wunsch. Theodore Dreier was elected rector, Josef Albers the Chairman of the Board of Fellows, Herbert Miller Chairman of the Faculty, and Mary Gregory the Secretary of Corporation. Appointmented Margaret Grant Beidler to Instructor in English for the Summer Quarter. The student government for the Summer Quarter consisted of Chuck Forberg, Betty Osbourne and Helen Rosenbluth. Visitors- Theordore Dreier back from Lake George, NY, for a 5 day visit; Alumnus Fernando Leon Almna Betty Kelley.

COMMUNITY BULLETIN BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
First July bulletin 1945 college year 12
EVENTS:
June 26- The regular session Summer Quarter began.
June 27- Theodore Dreier arrived from Lake George for a five day visit at the College. He will spend July studying at Harvard University.
June 28- Fernando Leon, who attended Black Mountain College from 1939 to 1942, came for a visit. Fernando received his master’s degree in engineering in Detroit last month. Preparatory to going into the Army shortly, he has left his job with the Chrysler Corporation, for whom he has worked for the last three years in the field of aircraft engine design and development.
July 2- The Art and Music Institutes held their first meetings. Josef Albers and Edward Lowinsky introduced the faculty of the Institutes to the students, and students and teachers arranged a schedule.
July 4- The College took a holiday from classes. A group under Dr Dehn’s guidance hiked to Brown’s Pasture and returned in time for the afternoon baseball game. Students, faculty and staff divided into two teams. The Red Team, starring Ross Penley, triumphed over the Blues- the score: 34-18.
A community meeting in the evening introduced the ideals and practices of Black Mountain College to Institute members. Josef Albers, Molly Gregory, Edward Lowinsky and Herbert Miller discussed education in general and at Black Mountain in particular. Irma Ehrman and Chuck Forberg spoke on the students’ role in the College.
July 5- Carol Brice, accompanied by Erwin Bodky, gave the first of four recitals. She sang a group of Italian songs. Miss Brice will give three more programs, one each of French, German and English songs.
July 7- The first formal concert of the summer presented Erwin Bodky, harpsichordist; Carol Brice, contralto; Frances Snow Drinker, flutist; Eva Heinitz, viola da gamba; Gretel Lowinsky, violinist; Josef Marx, oboist; and Emmanuel Zetlin, violinist. The program consisted of classical and pre-classical chamber music.
July 9- The new music practice room was opened for use. Edward Lowinsky and Josef Albers spoke. Carol Brice, accompanied by Erwin Bodky, sand the Handel “Large”.
The student government for the Summer Quarter consists of Chuck Forberg, Moderator, and Irma Ehrman, Betty Osbourne and Helen Rosenbluth, Officers.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
After ten and half years of service to the College, Robert Wunsch has resigned and is resting at his home in Louisiana. To fill the positions Mr Wunsch formerly held, Theodore Dreier has been elected Rector, and Mary Gregory has been elected Secretary of the Corporation. Josef Albers has been elected Chairman of the Board of Fellows, and Herbert Miller has been elected Chairman of the Faculty during Theodore Dreier’s absence.
First July bulletin 1945 page 2
ANNOUNCEMENTS (Continued):
Margaret Grant Beidler, wife of staff architect, Paul Beidler, has been appointed Instructor of English for the Summer Quarter. Mrs Beidler is a graduate of Earlham College. She also did graduate work at Bryn Mawr and took her master’s degree at Mills College. She has worked at Pendle HIll and taught English literature in Ram Allah, Palestine. Mrs Beidler’s poems and articles have been published in leading magazines.
Theodore Rondthaler’s appointment as Assistant Treasurer has been extended through the 1945-46 Session. Mr Rondthaler, for fifteen years principal of the Clemmons School, has also been appointed Instructor in History. He graduated from the University of North Carolina and took his master’s degree at Princeton. He was an instructor in English at the University of North Carolina, a Reading Fellow at Princeton and later taught at the Hun School.
Mrs Rondthaler, formerly head of the secretarial department at Salem College, is temporarily filling the business office position which was vacated by Peggy Kurtz.
THE SUMMER QUARTER OPENS:
Theodore Dreier, speaking at a Faculty meeting on June 27, suggested a keynote for the 1945-46 Session. This is substantially what he said:
“I think we must conceive of the coming year as one of planning and preparation, during which we can clarify our ideas, add new faculty members, find new sources of support, prepare architectural plans for a building program that may well extend over ten years. A year so spent should equip us to face the future with confidence.
“Although we face many obstacles, a comparison of our present situation with our status in 1933 should be encouraging. Moreover, there was never a time when active interest and concern in educational problems were made widespread than now. People sense that in the long run education is vitally connected with peace. Black Mountain College has the opportunity to contribute to the development of new and more effective methods of education.
“Two of the fundamental ideas with which Black Mountain was started are:
“First, we work out our ideas day by day. This does not preclude planning, but insures an organic development.
“Second, we are a community that is self-governing and at least partially self-supporting. In such a community, an intimacy between living and learning arises that is lacking in more formally institutionalized settings.
“Not only students, but also teachers can develop here. A productive enterprise would be for each teacher to formulate at least for himself, if not for immediate publication, what he is trying to do and how he seeks to accomplish his purposes in teaching. Eventually, we should have such statements for every department in the College.
“Thus, our year of planning will be a year of intense living too, during which we shall apply our principles as we go.”
One important achievement of such a period of evaluating and planning could be the growth of feeling of the permanency of Black Mountain College. The College has appeared to live from complication to complication, from crisis to crisis. We have tended to feel, “If we can just get through this year we’ll be okay.” This is falacious.
First July bulletin 1945 page 3
We will not understand our role in education until we get beyond this moment-by-moment living. Having developed continuity of growth, our form of education will be far more dynamic. We will see our little calamities in their proper perspective and will be able to point our activities more purposefully toward the realization of our program: to prove that a democracy is the most effective settting for education in intelligent living.
The Editors
THE INSTITUTES OPEN:
On July 2, at 11:00 AM, the Art Institute met in the lobby of North Lodge. After his welcome, Josef Albers spoke of the summer as a time for concentrated work and thought.
“We are here only for ten weeks” he said, “and art is a job for lifetime...If anyone has come here for a vacation; sorry, we don’t sell any.”
He quoted Hokusai, who diedighty-nine, and whose last words were, “If the gods had given me only ten years more- only five years more- I could have become a really great painter.”
Mr Albers introduced the Art faculty, each of them talked about the course he is giving:
Ossip Zabrinske: “We shall try to organize and rationalize the means to present to you this hermetical world called sculpture.”
Paul Beidler: “We don’t talk about ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ architecture, but about good, bad or mediocre architecture. We may work on some of the practical problems in architecture facing us here at Black Mountain College.”
Molly Gregory: “I prefer that we work toward having an understanding of what wood and tools are and what they do, rather than in particular construction.”
Josef Albers: “In Color we try to find out: What does color mean to us? What can we do with color? In Design, we want to learn about materials, to see their capacity and appearance and relate them. The course is meant to lubricate our eyes and our brains in relationship to material so that we learn to see the meaning of form.”
Anni Albers and Berta Rudofsky described their workshop courses in weaving and leatherwork, and Fannie Hillsmith explained her class in painting composition.
At 1:15 the Music Institute met in the lobby of North Lodge. Edward Lowinsky spoke about a recent article by Virgil Thomson, who said that musical life in this country is tied up with business.
“What we do here may be small,” Mr Lowinsky said, “but it can help counteract art for business’ sake. We want to develop a meeting place for artists and an intensity of relationship with artists.”
Erwin Bodky, harpsichordist, explained the choice of the theme, Polyphony and Ensemble, as the nucleus for the work of the Music Institute: “Music is realizing that by going back it can find its way of the impasse of the nineteenth century and can go toward a new fluency in musical writing.”
Heinrich Jalowetz, who will bring the study of polyphony and ensemble up to the present day, described polyphony as:
“The indicator of the development of basic musical conceptions. A new intensity in composition has started with a new understanding of the demands of musical structure. Our tendency now is to get rid of a style too much concerned with harmony.”
First July bulletin 1945 page 4
Eva Heinitz, Josef Marx, Frances Snow Drinker and Emanuel Zotlin will give instruction in cello, oboe, flute and violin. They will also play regularly with the collegium musicum and the chamber orchestra, both of which will be made up mainly of students.
Carol Brice outlined her series of four song recitals. Miss Brice will also give voice lessons.
COMMUNITY MEETING:
The community gathered in the Dining Hall at 8:15 in the evening of the Fourth of July, with Josef Albers presiding.
In his opening talk, Mr Albers said:
“Prevailing education, unaware of the needs of our time, prefers analysis to synthesis, explanation to action, thinking in verbal terms to thinking in situations and forms. It evaluates ‘knowing something’ usually higher than the ability ‘to do something’....
“I hope and have every reason to believe that Black Mountain College is on the way to a democratic education in which all varying abilities develop.”
Edward Lowinsky spoke on self-education:
“Education should consist in making for the best conditions of self-education. Think of the prescribed courses, mechanical books and texts used in most schools, and you will see that little time remains for self-education. At Black Mountain we try to get rid of the conventional substitutes for self-activity.”
Molly Gregory, after explaining the necessity for the sometimes confusing variety of activities and points of view at the College talked about the working of the community:
“We depend on argument and counter-argument and understanding before we move ahead. We depend on everyone to respect the field and activity of every other person and still maintain his self-respect. We depend on the willingness of people to back up a suggestion or criticism with action.”
Irma Ehrman extended the regular students’ welcome to new students:
“Since we want the Institutes to feel that they are an organic and natural part of the College, we want them to experience not just a summer program, but our kind of education.”
Chuck Forberg presented his interpretation of the College:
“The usual college is a place where a student takes advantage of certain offered subjects. It depends largely on him what happens to him and to what degree all the material he goes through becomes a part of his perspective. In this community we are much more concerned with the thing that in other colleges usually happens in spite of the college- the reaching of an individual’s perspective on himself.”
Dr Miller, the last speaker, commented:
“If the Declaration of Independence hadn’t been signed, Black Mountain College could not be. What we are trying to do is live the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
First July bulletin page 5
CONSTRUCTION AND WORK PROGRAM:
On Monday, July 8, the new music practice room was formally opened for use. Out of rough concrete brick, raw lumber, and the unskilled but devoted labor of students and faculty has emerged a new form. Now that it is completed the structure reveals that the quality of inevitability which was implicit from the beginning but which only the designer could fully anticipate. During the construction it had to be taken on faith.
The trapezoidal shape with its slanting glass walls seemed a daring, and to some skeptical ones, a dubious innovation. On Monday the magnificent voice of Carol Brice and the full rich tones of the now Steinway proved conclusively that here was no superficial stylistic device. A bold new answer had been found for the old acoustical problem of musical volume confined within a small area.
The visual pleasure and emotional satisfaction which the building gives the beholder is neither accidental nor consciously striven after for its own sake. It derives naturally from the architect’s direct approach to the problem imposed by the purpose of the structure and the characteristics of the materials available to his hand.
In his remarks on the architecture Mr. Albers used the word “modern” which he qualified as “something representing a particular change of human mentality at a particular time.” He further defined it as “a cultural fulfillment of advanced expectations.”
-Margaret Beidler
It is usually a rather clear-cut affair- reporting on the work done by members of the community. The hauling crew hauled, the farm crew farmed, the construction crew, etc., but it is a little more complicated in vacations or before a new group arrives, because everyone seem to do everything and one looks back with a measure of surprise and wonders how it all happened and realizes that it actually did. The old foundation was finished, on schedule in time for Malry, Cornelia, George and Gertrude to move in before the South Lodge Extension was painted. This wasn’t a miracle, it was largely due to Mac Wood; and the paint was nearly dry before the Brices moved into their apartment in the Extension. A partition which made a storage room of two-thirds of the cellar of this same Extension has been moved and that room, plus the two bedrooms, have been painted for the Beidler family to live in for the summer. (Rather a sporting proposition!)
The York House which the College is renting from the State Test Farm for the summer is painted and ready for guests. Furniture moves in slow steady cycles all over the campus, some painted, some not.
The new bridge near Roadside is graded and smooth and really finished. The grounds look somewhat better, debris removed and the grass cut.
Eighteen bed stands, fourteen sculpture stands and twenty-one stools for the art room have somehow come from the shop.
The farm is past the June rush season and caught up. Twenty-seven acres of soybeans are planted for hay. Late vegetables are in and the silage corn has been worked twice. A veal calf, hog and beef have been slaughtered for the kitchen. We are now harvesting our own potatoes and some vegetables.
Most of the credit for all this should go to Ross Penley and Gordon Runyon, who have worked steadily till after dark without much help while everyone was rushing to get the College ready to open. They deserve and will need more help now.
First July bulletin page 6
With amazing foresight, Fanny of Belmont View, a cow, made it possible for us to increase the milk production: six gallons just as the Institutes opened.
And rather quietly, in the shade of pine trees, work on the Music Practice Room progressed. Paul Beidler put the lock on the door at9:30 Friday evening and at 10:15 that evening the pianos arrived from New York by truck.
-Molly Gregory
July 12, 1945

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