Word: conductor
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Leaders in founding the almost-amateur Crawfordsville Orchestra eight years ago were two violin-playing housewives (Mrs. James Brown, Mrs. Theodore G. Gronert), musical-minded Lawyer Lowell S. Love, who became the first conductor, and Professor Henry C. Montgomery, who (self-taught) played the French horn, became the orchestra's librarian and guiding angel. With a full concert strength of 55 to 60 musicians, the orchestra now includes music teachers, Wabash students, musically knowledgeable farmers and townsfolk. Ages run from 15 to 61. Some instruments, like the English horn and bass clarinet, are missing. So for its concerts...
...Present conductor-28-year-old Gilbert ("Gib") Kellberg, school music supervisor in New Ross, Ind.- is an earnest, moose-tall Swedish-American, with feet like fiddle cases. He earns $25 a concert. Graduate of a small Indiana conservatory, he plays the bassoon, once heard the New York Philharmonic-Symphony play in Chicago, listens on the radio to Toscanini for pointers. Total expenses of a concert run to about $50, most of which is recovered at the box office. Deficits are underwritten by boosting citizens (who subscribe about $1, get their names in the program...
...real basis for disgust with Tchaikowski among many music lovers has little to do with the music itself, but a great deal to do with the way it is played. It is so universally cheapened in the cannonball these days that an accurate performance is become a curiosity. Conductors think that to interpret Tchaikowski means whipping themselves up into a fine poetic frenzy, and loading the music with trite sentimentality. As a result it has sounded cheap and sugar-coated, has rung sour on men's ears, and turned them to music less easily perverted by a conductor...
Seven years ago, some students at the University of Minnesota formed a Bach Society. They persuaded a genial, absentminded, popeyed music professor, Donald Nivison Ferguson, to be their conductor. Anyone able & willing to sing Bach for three hours a week could join. The Bachsters welcomed not only students, but socialites, white-collar workers of Minneapolis and St. Paul, a telephone lineman. Once a year the Bach Society held an "open meeting," free to the public...
...starts for cold motors. The plug has electrodes coated with polonium, a radioactive element discovered by the late great Marie Curie (and named for her native Poland). The polonium shoots a steady stream of subatomic particles which ionize (electrify) the air in the spark gap, make it a better conductor when the spark jumps...