Two Copies- 3p, onesided pages, 3 horizontal folds,staple in top left corner. Mimeograph on matte off white paper. Introduction on the Institute faculty from page 1-3.
COMMUNITY BULLETIN BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
Second July bulletin 1945 college year 12
EVENTS:
July 11- Dr Karl With gave his first lecture on “The Timeless Tradition of Functionalism.”
July 12- Carol Brice sang a program of songs by Debussy, Ravel, Faure, Saint-Saens and Brahms. She was accompanied by Erwin Bodky.
July 14- Carol Brice, contralto; Frances Snow Drinker, flutist; Josef Marx, oboist; Emanuel Zetlin, violinist; Eva Heinitz, cellist; and Erwin Bodky, harpsichordist and pianist, presented works by Bach, Leclaid and Brahms.
July 17- On her program of German compositions, Carol Brice gave a group of eight songs by Schubert and eight by Schumann. Erwin Bodky accompanied Miss Brice.
July 18- Dr Alfred Einstein presented the first of his lectures on the fate of polyphony from 1500 to Mozart’s death.
The second of Dr Karl With’s lectures was given on “The Hierarchy of Function.”
July 21- Emanuel Zetlin, violinist, and Erwin Bodky, pianist, played a joint recital of sonatas by Mozart, Schubert and Busoni.
July 23- Bernard Rudofksy spoke informally on the role of American women pioneers in clothing.
July 24- In her last recital of the summer, Carol Brice sang works of Purcell, Dowland, Handel and Bach, and closed with a group of Negro spirituals.
July 31- Dr Einstein gave a lecture on “Mozart’s Handwriting and the Creative Process.”
ON THE INSTITUTE FACULTY:
Carol Brice, reared and educated at the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, won unusual recognition as a girl with the famous Sedalia Singers in their many concert tours that included recitals at Symphony Hall in Boston and Town Hall in New York City. From Palmer Institute she went for special study to Talledega Collegein, Telladega, Alabama, noted for its excellence in voice culture and piano-forte instruction, where, upon obtaining her degree of Bachelor of Music in New York City. Here she became the pupil of one of New York’s most eminent teachers, Francis Rogers. She has frequently been presented in concerts at the school as an outstanding vocal artist.
Miss Brice as a concert contralto has made successful tours in all parts of the country. Her most recent acclaim came from the director of the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, Dr Efrem Kurtz, who, in presenting Miss Brice over an NBC coast-to-coast hookup as a soloist with the orchestra, said: “Here is one of the greatest voices of our time.”
Miss Brice was presented at Town Hall in March under the management of the Naumburg Foundation as the winner of its award in a recent contest of outstanding contralto soloists in New York City.
Second July bulletin 1945 page 2
ON THE INSTITUTE FACULTY: (continued)
Dr Alfred Einstein, one of the world’s eminent musicologists, is spending three weeks as a member of the faculty of the Music Institute.
Dr Einstein talks modestly about his work as editor, music critic, author, teacher and outstanding scholar, and does not mention at all the fact that his recent book, “Mozart,” has reached an unprecedented sale for a musicological publication. Written in the United States, the book was an outgrowth of Dr Einstein’s interest in Mozart the man, after he had worked for ten years revising the Koechel listing of Mozart’s compositions.
When Dr Einstein contracted to begin this revision in 1927, he was expected to finish it in two years. Actually, ten years of labor and study went into it. The latter four years of this time, Dr Einstein spent in Italy and England, having left his home in Germany immediately after the start of the Hitler regime. The revision, one of the most authoritative and significant contributions to music history, was published in Germany in 1937 but was not permitted to be reviewed there.
Dr Einstein and his wife came to the United States in 1939, and they are happy to be able to say that they are citizens.
“The United States should become culturally independent of Europe,” he said, in discussing his expectation that the Library of Congress will eventually have original or photostatic copies of the sources for any cultural or artistic work and study.
Guest lecturer at Columbia University in the summer of 1940, occupant of the Nielson Chair at Smith College and Professor of Music at Smith College since the fall of 1939, Dr Einstein finds student-teacher relationships in American schools more personal and therefore warmer and more productive than in European schools.
His recently completed book on Romanticism in Music will be published by WW Norton next year; and the Princeton University Press will publish what Dr Einstein considers his most important work, on the history of the Italian madrigal. This field of study has occupied part of his time for almost thirty years, but it has not eliminated his interest and enthusiasm for other periods and for new music.
Dr Karl With is a shock to the traditional conception of the art historian as a gentle scholar and pedant. An energetic and enthusiastic man, Dr With relishes his role of iconoclast and yet has a spirited positiveness that few professional debunkers can maintain.
“I see the realm of art embracing all man-made objects,” he says, “all things designed, created, produced in order to answer human needs. I don’t mean this only in the physical sense, but also in the religious, aesthetic, social, intellectual sense. It should be our job to puncture the class system which Victorianism established- the ‘fine’ arts, the ‘decorative’ arts, the ‘minor’ arts- and the idea that art is a luxury to be enjoyed by the refined only.”
In 1910, Dr With left school and began his travels and the ‘discovery’ of the arts of Java, Bali, Japan, China. When he returned to Europe after several years in the East, he began his career as an art historian.
Second July bulletin 1945 page 3
In attacking this problem Dr With taught, lectured, was a critic, a director of museums, art consultant to various cities in Germany, headed the Art School of Cologne and turned out a prestigious variety and number of books and articles.
His interest in language is intense. Two books of his poetry were published in his youth, and he continues to respect words as precision instruments. This explains his vivid use of English, which he did not speak at all before he came to the United States in 1939.
Although he was one of the first to be blacklisted by the Nazis, Dr With stayed on in Germany for two years, living incognito and hoping that ani-Nazi could be effective.
“It took me a long time to realize that the German people were not different and separate from the Nazis.”
When he did realize it, he left Germany and stayed for a time in Switzerland. He had to return to Germany to get a visitor’s visa to the United States and lived through eight weeks in terror of being discovered by the Nazis.
He arrived in the United States in 1939, spent six months in New York, and when his visa was no longer valid re-entered through Mexico. In the late summer, he bought a bus ticket and travelled for 4000 miles, educating himself about the United States. He stayed on the West Coast for a time and taught in Pasadena and San Francisco.
Since 1941 Dr With has been Professor of Art at Hamilton College, where he and his second wife, an artist, enjoy living quietly with their year old son, Chris.
COMMUNITY WORK:
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that anything spectacular had been achieved.
With rather depressing regularity the trash is hauled, potatoes are dug and consumed and then too it rains.
The bridge at Roadside has been regraded and spread with gravel. The beef cattle regularly are chased out of the Bee Tree Valley, back to our own side of the mountain. During their travels a Black Angus heifer calf has been added to the herd. Some day about a mile of new fence will have to be strung along the mountain ridge. This is only anticipating trouble.
A new room under North Lodge porch has been completed to store plumbing supplies. The porch steps of South Lodge have been replaced. An electric fence has been put around the farm house field to make a temporary pasture for the dairy cattle.
The dishes are washed by an illusive combination of volunteers and non-volunteers and we usually see Mrs Einstein washing the tables. It will be awful when she leaves!
-Molly Gregory
