PAGE SLX
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE. KANSAS
FRIDAY,APRIL 28,1950
The Editors Report -
NATIONAL MUSIC WEEK Festival Of Sound
by C. A. Burmeister
Ed. Note: We have a treat for you today. Mr. Burmeister, graduate student in music education and Director of Instrumental Music, Central Missouri State college in Warrensburg, has done us the service of writing the following editorial. We highly recommend it for it is excellent reading.
National Music week is a city, county, state, and nationwide celebration in honor of music. It is a spontaneous participation, through performance or listening, in the most democratic of the arts. It is a seven-day "drive" by the friends of music to make more widespread the enjoyment of music by the general public and to extend the recognition of its value as an individual and a community asset.
The first Music week was held in Boise, Idaho in 1919. Following New York's first Music week in 1920 (which was widely publicized), National Music week originated as a series of local observances.
It was organized as a national celebration in 1924. The first week in May was chosen as a time for annual observance. First chairman of the national committee was that noted patron of the arts, Otto H. Kahn.
Calvin Coolidge was the first honorary chairman and each President since then has accorded his moral support to the affair by accepting titular chairmanship of an honorary committee composed of the governors of every state and territory in the Union.
The active national committee is composed of the presidents of 34 national organizations including the Music Educators National conference, National Federation of Music clubs, Music Teachers National association, General Federation of Women's clubs, the D.A.R., Federal Council of churches, and service groups.
National Music week will be observed at the University in a full week of varied activities beginning Sunday. There will be a rich offering of musical programs open to students and the general public without charge.
In addition to the programs of the Music Week festival proper, students and the public will have an opportunity on Sunday, May 7, to hear a concert of the music of Bach performed by students and faculty members under the sponsorship of Phi Mu Alpha, professional music fraternity.
National Music week is an opportunity for everyone to subject himself to the substance of the fine arts by attending these outstanding offerings in the field of music. During the past two years, the University has placed increasing emphasis on the Humanities.
The Music Week festival intensifies and focuses attention on a fine arts program which throughout the year offers many opportunities for continuing participation in the best of music. Under the guidance of Dean D. M. Swarthout of the School of Fine Arts, the University Concert course has presented six major attractions at a nominal cost to students. The school is the source of scores of concerts and recitals.
What is the dynamic potency of the most moving of arts which we honor during Music week? In a sermon delivered at Plymouth church, Brooklyn, in June 1872, Henry Ward Beecher expressed it. . .
If you rise still higher, out of the tribe of uninstructed animals into the human race, you find superior musical gifts and endowments. There the sense of music takes possession of the understanding, and of the whole realm of taste, and of the heart itself.
And the tongue by which men evolve the highest thoughts and feelings is the tongue of music . . . So the griefs which come and go in a day can be easily soothed; and the sorrows and cares which will not go can be made tolerable by the sweet sid of song.
"Joy can be excited out of sadness. Patience can be inspired out of discouragement. The sweetest and richest experiences can be attained through the voice of music."
AMERICA'S TRAGEDY:
B-Class Citizens
by Dale Fields
Saturday, many eyes will be focused on Lawrence. Flags will be flying that day, bands will ring out with stirring marches, military and veterans' organizations will march, speeches will be given.
Yet while famous dignitaries tell us of our splendid heritage of freedom, there will be some in Saturday's crowd who have only the vagueest idea what that freedom actually means. These persons will be of a different color, a different race than those dominating the day's festivities.
The climax will come when the huge parade groups around the bandstand and pledges allegiance to the United States. This is the schedule for "I Am An American Day."
They will listen to speeches telling of equality; but they will find Lawrence restaurants still closed to them. They will be allowed to mingle with the crowd pledging allegiance to its country; but they will have to sit in a special section if later they attend the theater. After watching school children march side by side in the parade, they will send their own children back to a segregated elementary school.
These people are America's B-class citizens.
TODAY'S MAIL
Hecklers
We at K. U. have had trouble before with our spectators at athletic events. Baseball is no exception.
Sir:
When we play other teams on their diamond, their students join together and cheer for their team WIN OR LOSE, and razz the opposing team. When we play on our own pasture, students yell for us only when we are ahead and razz us when we are behind.
Baseball is known for its hecklers but why should K. U. students run down their own team. If the boys in the stands don't want to yell for us and think they can do better, they should remember that uniforms are still being checked out at the stadium.
If you aren't a good enough player to come out and try for the baseball team, you can still be a good enough sport to yell for the team that represents your own school.
Education senior
Next Sour Owl Spiced Up A Bit?
Carl Ellis
By Bibler
"What will the next issue of the Sour Owl be like, Doug?" a student asked Doug Jennings the other day.
"Well," replied Doug, journalism senior and editor of the campus humor magazine, "I figure it has to sell, so we're planning to spice it up a bit."
"But, Doug," complained the student. "A humor magazine doesn't have to contain suggestive cartoons and off-color jokes in order to sell."
"Famous last words my boy." retorted Doug. "Those are the identical words uttered by the magazine's faculty adviser last semester."
"Where is he now?" inquired the student.
"In a breadline," said Doug, "And if the next issue of the Sour Owl fails to sell, I shall join him there."
"Then," summed up the student, "You plan to make the next issue of the Sour Owl a risque one?"
But on that point Doug refused to risque statement.
The oldest still-existing tax-supported library is at Peterborough, N. H.
Daily Kansan
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Little Man On Campus
"Yeah he was a good student until this semester. Last year he promised his girl they'd be married when he graduated this spring."
AMERICA'S SUPER—
by Robert Sigman
Detective Force
Times do change. Yet even the greenest freshman on the Hill can recall when Congress limited its activities to lawmaking. Today its business seems to be more detective work than legislating.
Is this a natural trend in a working democracy? If Congress does develop into a super-detective force, will another way of passing laws originate? Is it possible that Congressmen have so much spare time between refusals to pass President Truman's proposals that they must play "Dick Tracy" to occupy themselves?
It is rather doubtful that any Congressman can do a top-notch, really efficient job as a law-maker while he is carrying on a full-scale investigation of Hollywood's morals, or how badly the Navy navigates its ships, or something equally as foreign to the job of legislating.
If the state department really is loaded to the gills with communists, then the job of rooting them out should be given to the agency best qualified to root them out—the F.B.I. J. Edgar Hoover and his boys did a superb job during the war of anticipating the moves of subversive agents of the Axis powers. There is good reason to believe they could do the same with communists.
With Congress split into investigating committees, what is going to happen to our lawmaking body? The thing has long passed the stage where it could be called a time-filler. With the committees investigating everybody in sight—including themselves—it is now a fulltime job.
Tomorrow is I AM AN AMERICAN Day. On that day we honor all our new citizens who for the first time this year can join us in saying I AM AN AMERICAN. Let all of us-new citizens and old—work together to preserve our hard-earned heritage of freedom.
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