Lee Eiseman, program chair of Harvard Musical Association, conceived of this publication, The Boston Musical Intelligencer, as the reincarnation of Dwight’s Musical Journal, published by John Sullivan Dwight with the support of HMA for 35 years -from 1852 until 1881.

Robert D. Levin, a world-wide acclaimed classical performer, composer, and musicologist, is Dwight P. Robinson Professor of Humanities in the Music Department of Harvard University. At a recent meeting with Eiseman, executive editor Bettina A. Norton, and musicologist and composer Mark DeVoto, Levin commented on the role of the Intelligencer.

Eiseman: Presuming that there is such a thing as musical intelligence in Boston, I wonder whether musical intelligence and musical instruction have been in a steady state of decline for the past 200 years. I wonder if the dead-cat bounce has occurred yet. The Puritans required every pupil in the public schools  to learn the equivalent of solfège so that they could chant the Psalms. And by 1880, according to John Sullivan Dwight, there was still enough interest in the subject to provoke a debate about fixed or moveable Do in musical instruction in the Boston Public Schools.

Levin: A guest teacher tried to teach me moveable Do in the third grade, and I got into a knock-down drag-out fight with her. …Well, I was eight years old. I had no idea what movable Do was, but I thought it was absolutely the biggest crock that you could ever imagine. She chalked an A major scale up on the blackboard and wrote Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do. I exclaimed, “No no no; that’s La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol La!” She said, “What are you talking about?” And my homeroom teacher rejoined, “Bobby, just let her teach what she wants to teach and keep quiet!” [continued…]

Hollywood was a magnet for musicians in the decade of the 1930s. Developments in the new art of sound-film moved quickly; in the world-wide Depression the film industry was rolling in money, constantly developing new technologies and attracting new creative talent. Then, in 1933, came the expulsion of Europe’s Jewish, modernistic, or otherwise subversive musicians by a dictator whose ideas about music were a particularly strong part of his monomania. Composers fleeing Hitler from not only Germany (where their music was banned immediately in 1933) but from other countries falling under Nazi dominance, came together in the fascinating and often frustrating atmosphere of Hollywood, where music was too often treated with disdain. The question for each European composer who worked in the film industry was how to retrieve his own soul after selling it. How would he be able to return to composing the music he felt was inhim to write “for himself”?

The Viennese composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold was recognized for his remarkable musical gifts when he was a child by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Forced as a prodigy by his formidable father, music critic Julius Korngold, young Korngold was an internationally acclaimed composer of operas from the age of 18. In Hollywood in 1934, for an assignment at the request of Max Reinhardt, the famous Austrian theater producer and director, Korngold took to film scoring as if he were composing opera and later said so: “Just as I do for the operatic stage, I try to invent for the motion picture dramatically melodious music with symphonic development and variation of the themes.” Although he had no previous experience in this field, so keen were Korngold’s dramatic ideas that Reinhardt declared, “If he were not the great musician that he is, he would become a great dramaturg.” The Warner Brothers studio paid Korngold more than any other film composer, allowed him fewer assignments, and gave him the extraordinary privilege of asking producers for changes in their film footage. His name appeared as prominently in the screen credits as the film director’s name. His film fans became so numerous they formed clubs. [continued…]

[Vol. XLI, no. 1051]
Dwight’s Musical Journal
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1881.

VALEDICTORY

This is the last appearance of the Journal of Music which has so long borne our name. For needed rest, as well as to gain time for the solution of certain practical problems (out of which however, nothing has yet come), this post mortem number (so to speak, considering how many obituary eulogies and lessons it has called forth) has been delayed beyond our original intention. In the last number (July 16) we frankly gave the reasons for the discontinuance: namely, ‘that the paper does not pay, ‘but actually entails a loss upon it editor, and that said editor, conscious of his own shortcomings, is heartily weary of the struggle to keep the thing alive within such economical limits as render it impossible to make such a journal as he has desired.

[continued…]