Music Department projects Spring Symposium on Criticism of Music

The Music Department began the new year this week with a series of announcements indicating that its most active season since the turn of the century is under way. Together with the appointment of one of America's foremost musical scholars, Otto Kinkeldy, as a lecturer for 1946-47, Arthur Tillman Merritt, chairman of the field, reported preliminary ideas for a spring symposium at the University on music criticism.

The three-day symposium, as sketched, would be unique in American musical history, designed to attract scores of critics, writers, musicians, composers, and teachers to the University in May. The central portion of the meeting would consist of talks in Sanders Theatre by widely-known experts on many facets of the various musical fields. Nightly concerts featuring new works by noted composers are projected.

Kinkeldy, former professor of Musicology at Cornell, will he visiting Lecturer in music under the Horatio Appleton Lamb Fund, which as in the past sponsored such men as Bela Bartok, Georges Euesco, Aaron Copland, Gustav Holst, and Hugo Leichtentritt. Kinkeldy will conduct a seminar in musical history this fall and will also teach the University's introductory course in music research.

The primary object of the symposium is an exchange of opinions on criticism and its relationship to greater public appreciation of music and allied arts, as well as the raising of critical standards. International arrangements are being made for the gathering by Chairman Merritt.

The new compositions being composed for the symposium concerts would of themselves make the event an important one in American music history. Some of the most important moderns in the world have agreed to write new compositions for the concerts, among the Walter Piston. Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith. Aaron Copland, and G. Francesco Malipiero.

Martha Graham and her company will perform in another "special event" for the symposium, as will the Collegiate Chorale of New York, with Robert Shaw conducting. Announcement will be made late of the details of the concert programs, which will be open to as many of the general public as can be accommodated.

Lecturer Kiukeldy has had a long and fascinating career in the musical world. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, them went on to become a professor of Musicology at University of Breslan in 1910, earning the distinction of being the first American to hold a professorship in a German university.