[78-L] A Gathering of Giants

[David Lennick]

That's interesting, because Norbeck & Peters asked if I still had any copies of 
it. I have one. I also have the complete unedited (and unjoined) transfers I 
made from a better copy some years later. Someone approached me about reissuing 
it but expected me to give it to them for nothing, which is not my favorite way 
of being a CD producer.

The Music & Arts set omitted the Hanson Symphony (mostly because of time 
restrictions but also because the performance was awful and badly miked).

dl

On 11/14/2010 11:25 AM, Cary Ginell wrote:
>
> September 24 marked the 70th anniversary of probably the most remarkable concert in American popular music history, ASCAP's "Cavalcade of American Music." Six years ago, I wrote this article on this show for Music Reports, Inc.'s "Smart Licensing" newsletter - I missed commemorating the anniversary two months ago, so forgive the belated notice. Thought everyone might be interested in this retrospective.
>
>
> A Gathering of Giants: The 1940 ASCAP 25th Anniversary Concert
>
> 				Cary Ginell
>
> 		OK, here's a short quiz question. On what day did the most
> concentrated collection of musical talent assemble for one of the most
> electrifying, unforgettable concerts of the 20th century? Was it
> Woodstock, 1969? The famed Benny Goodman jazz concert at Carnegie Hall
> in 1938? One of the Rock ?n' Roll Hall of Fame jam sessions? Well,
> whatever your choice, a vote surely should be cast for September 24,
> 1940, when a "Who's Who" of Tin Pan Alley songwriters gathered for a
> concert held on an island in San Francisco Bay.
>
> The
> occasion was the 25th anniversary of the founding of ASCAP, the agency
> founded in 1915 to collect royalties for its membership by licensing
> their works for public performances. In 1939, America was fretting about
>   the inevitable war in Europe, and trying to decide between jumping in
> to help Great Britain from being overwhelmed by the Nazi machine or
> retaining its neutrality and riding out the war. In New York City, the
> World's Fair was being adversely affected by the turmoil in Europe, as
> many nations began dismantling their pavilions. New York mayor Fiorello
> LaGuardia ran into Gene Buck, then ASCAP's president, and the two of
> them began thinking of a way to take New Yorkers' minds off the war
> news. It was LaGuardia who suggested a series of concerts be staged to
> honor ASCAP's upcoming 25th anniversary. ASCAP's membership included
> many of the greatest names in popular and classical music; most of whom
> were still alive in 1939. Buck promised a grand show, with one concert
> held in September 1940 in San Francisco, the site of the Golden Gate
> International Exposition. The second concert would be held in New York
> the next month during the final week of the World's Fair.
>
> Up
>   until 1940, ASCAP had contracted with the major radio networks to
> broadcast music published by ASCAP songwriters. But now, ASCAP wanted to
>   change this practice, and negotiate a separate license with each
> station. The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) balked at this,
> since it would obviously result in greater revenues for ASCAP and
> unfairly raise fees for each radio station. The deadlock resulted in the
>   threat of a boycott by radio stations of all published material ASCAP
> represented, and the establishment by NAB of a rival organization to be
> called BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), which would then provide music for
> the networks.
>
> The war in Europe was subsequently
> paralleled by a less violent, yet still rancorous war between the radio
> networks and ASCAP. The networks claimed that they could make any song a
>   hit merely by broadcasting it on their radio stations. ASCAP responded
> by saying it took more than that to make a hit; it took talent. To prove
>   this, ASCAP went ahead with the anniversary concerts, with Gene Buck
> assembling the greatest array of songwriting talent ever to appear in
> one place.
>
> The site of the first concert was the
> Golden Gate International Exposition Federal Plaza on Treasure Island, a
>   small mound of land halfway between San Francisco and Oakland. The San
> Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge had been completed in late 1936, making the
>   island accessible to traffic from both sides of San Francisco Bay, and
> on September 24, 1940, 25,000 people gathered for the first of two
> performances that day, one in the afternoon and the other that evening.
> The master of ceremonies for the afternoon concert was composer Deems
> Taylor, who was then in the process of providing the narration for Walt
> Disney's upcoming animation classic, Fantasia. Taylor introduced the
> afternoon's festivities, which would consist of a symphonic concert by
> American classical composers. It began with a performance of an overture
>   based on the Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, arranged
> by Roy Harris and conducted by Howard Hanson, then director of the
> Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Hanson followed this
> with a performance of his own Third Symphony, which had been completed
> in 1938. Film composer Richard Hageman, who had just won an Academy
> Award for his work on the score for John Ford's Stagecoach, followed by
> conducting an excerpt from his ballet based on Robert Browning's The
> Ring and the Book.  Other American masters featured that afternoon
> included Charles Wakefield Cadman, William Grant Still, and Deems Taylor
>   himself.
>
> The evening performance was held indoors at
> the California Coliseum at the behest of opera star John Charles Thomas,
>   who didn't want to expose his voice to the San Francisco Bay fog. The
> Coliseum, which was designed to seat 9,476 people, was virtually bulging
>   at its seams as an estimated 15,000 people jammed into the hall,
> cramming the aisles and even climbing the walls for space. An additional
>   10,000 frustrated wannabes were redirected to Festival Hall, where they
>   listened in on loud speakers.
>
> Gene Buck was the emcee
>   for the evening concert, which was entitled "A Cavalcade of American
> Music by Those Who Make America's Music." At 8:45 pm (45 minutes late,
> due to the seating problems), the concert commenced with Howard Hanson
> conducting John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever.  What followed
>   was a jaw-dropping parade of the most prominent, legendary, and
> successful songwriters in American history up to that time, each
> performing his or her own compositions.
>
> Since few Tin
> Pan Alley songwriters were also performers, their renditions of their
> classics could hardly be compared with their respective commercial
> recordings by America's top performing artists. But the charm and
> magnitude of talent radiated from these writers, many of them wizened
> and long past their prime, and the audience became more excited with the
>   introduction of each personality. Buck gave each one a glowing intro:
> the greatest of the great, shakily but enthusiastically singing or
> playing the most legendary songs of the first half of the twentieth
> century. Leo Robin sang Jack Benny's theme song, Love in Bloom, with
> co-writer Ralph Rainger accompanying on the piano. Albert Von Tilzer
> sang Take Me Out to the Ballgame, complete with the now forgotten verse
> concerning a girl named Katie, who didn't want her boyfriend to take her
>   to a concert, preferring a baseball game instead (baseball fans might
> be shocked to discover that the venerable baseball anthem is actually
> about a girl's desire to attend a game that only men attended in 1908).
>
> The
>   parade continued, with each performer upstaged by the next. Billy Hill
> sang The Last Round-Up. Shelton Brooks played Some of These Days on
> piano. Harold Arlen, who had been a jazz singer with bands led by
> Fletcher Henderson and Red Nichols, played piano while Judy Garland,
> just coming off the filming of The Wizard of Oz, sang Over the Rainbow.
> Others who performed and the songs they sang included L. Wolfe Gilbert
> (Waiting for the Robert E. Lee), the team of Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby
> (Three Little Words), Walter Donaldson (My Blue Heaven), Ann Ronell
> (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf), Arthur Freed (Singing in the Rain),
> James Monaco (You Made Me Love You), Jerome Kern (Smoke Gets in Your
> Eyes), Harry Armstrong (Sweet Adeline), Sigmund Romberg (Lover, Come
> Back to Me), Harry Warren (Jeepers Creepers), Jimmy McHugh (I Can't Give
>   You Anything But Love), Hoagy Carmichael (Stardust), Peter DeRose (Deep
>   Purple), and even W. C. Handy, who played a cornet solo on St. Louis
> Blues.
>
> As the concert wound down to its inevitable
> conclusion, the audience, exhausted from applauding and from the
> emotional overload of seeing all of these legends in one place, held on
> for the grand finale. Jerome Kern returned to play Ol' Man River on the
> piano. And then came the venerable George M. Cohan, now an old man
> beyond his 62 years who would die less than two years later. Although
> Cohan had written many of the country's most famous and beloved
> patriotic tunes, he had only made commercial records on one occasion in
> 1911. None of the songs he cut that day were any of his big hits, so
> this was a treat that few Americans had witnessed. Cohan bellowed out a
> medley consisting of his four greatest songs: Give My Regards to
> Broadway, Yankee Doodle Dandy, You're a Grand Old Flag, and finally,
> Over There, the last two songs having earned him a Congressional Medal
> of Honor for their inspiration of U.S. troops during World War I.  The
> audience's response to Cohan was electrifying. They wouldn't stop
> applauding and screaming their affection for the Grand Old Man of
> American song.
>
> But the show was not over yet. The
> reclusive Irving Berlin was the closing act, and as Berlin launched into
>   a creaky version of God Bless America, the audience stood up and joined
>   him in singing it. Berlin hadn't thought much of the song when he wrote
>   it toward the end of World War I. "A little too jingoistic," he
> thought, and stuffed the music in a trunk. In 1939, when singer Kate
> Smith asked him for a patriotic song, he remembered God Bless America,
> which now seemed to fit the times, and Smith's radio rendition of it
> became the high point of her career. Now, as the shy and diminutive
> Berlin concluded the song, the applause rose like a tidal wave, and the
> concert ended.
>
> In his autobiography, W.C. Handy would
> describe the show as "a program that was never before nor can ever again
>   be duplicated this side of Kingdom Come." A little over a year later,
> America was at war and the musical landscape would never be the same.
>
> Although
>   the 1940 Cavalcade of American Music was transcribed for posterity, it
> was never broadcast on radio nor was it heard by anyone for over a half
> century. Fortunately, ASCAP pressed a few sets of 16" transcription
> discs in preparation for their fight with NAB, but nothing became of
> them. No recordings of the October concert in New York have ever been
> found. In 1996, the San Francisco concert was finally released on four
> compact discs by the Music&  Arts Programs of America record label
> (www.musicandarts.com). Listening to it, even 64 years later, is an
> emotional, incredible experience. If not for the dispute between ASCAP
> and NAB, we most likely would not have been able to hear this most
> remarkable program.		
> 			
>
>
>
> It doesn't appear that Music and Arts still carries this set, but you can purchase it from the following:
>
> For a postpaid copy of the 4-CD set Carousel Of American Music (Music and Arts
> Programs of America CD-971), send $53.50 to Norbeck&  Peters, P.O. Box 4,
> Woodstock NY 12498.  Phone is 800-654-5302.
>
>