Howard Barlow
Music, good music, is the vitamin of the soul. It can be a solace, a refuge, a tranquilizer. It contains joy, even rapture---it reflects sorrow, even pain. It serves a universal need, in a universal language---a need made more apparent by the appearance of Sputniks and Muttniks---and even Phuttniks.
Howard Barlow, 1958 (commenting on the greater need for music in the age of science.)
Howard Dunham Barlow (1892-1972) lived a life of composer, arranger, conductor, and radio and television pioneer. Largely self-taught as a conductor, he initiated an orchestra in New York City in the mid-1920s, participated in the making of history by conducting the orchestra on the first day of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Sunday, September 18, 1927. For fifteen years he continued as the conductor of the Columbia Symphony on the network. In 1943 he turned to NBC to become the conductor of the well-established Voice of Firestone program, a Monday night stalwart, and led the program into the television age. His championing of American music brought him awards and commendations.
The Barlow Archives contain a FINDING AID that leads to:
The italicized quotes below are by Howard Barlow himself from the
Columbia University Oral History that was completed in 1951
I studied music while I was in high school with the superintendent of music in the public schools of Denver, a man named Wilberforce J. Whiteman. His son Paul was a viola player in the Broadway Theatre, right across the street from the Methodist church...I really got my first taste of conducting with "Daddy" Whiteman, as he was affectionately called. That came as quite an accident. I was singing in the North Denver High School glee club, and one morning Daddy Whiteman was late for the rehearsal and the boys said, "Well, let's sing," and they designated me to lead them...During my little experiment at conducting, Mr. Whiteman came in and laughed heartily at some of my antics. He told me if I would come to his studio that afternoon he would show me how to conduct. This, of course, was a great opportunity for me, and I went down and he showed me how to beat time. That was my one and only lesson in conducting.
HOWARD BARLOW AND PAUL WHITEMAN.
I was invited by Mrs. Edward MacDowell to come to the MacDowell-Peterboro Colony, the MacDowell Memorial Colony at Peterboro, New Hampshire, to conduct a festival for the National Federation of Music Clubs which was meeting there in (July)1919. There was no fee attached to this; it was just experience.
The following excerpt is from a letter of Mrs. Edward MacDowell to Barlow's mother, July 15, 1919
I have not half said all I might of the really astonishing command your son had of the Orchestra. Only a born leader could do some of the fine artistic things he did, such as the accompanying of the MacDowell Concerto.
[I was persuaded] to attempt to assemble an American orchestra, all American players. I frankly was a little dubious about it, but I also frankly needed a vehicle to get experience and reputation in orchestral activity...we went through two seasons of concerts. This was called the American National Orchestra. We couldn't use "American Orchestra" because there had been at one time an American Orchestra; we couldn't use the "National Orchestra" because there was a National Orchestra in Washington and so we called it the American National Orchestra.
NOTE: The orchestra would also always feature compositions by American Composers.
My good friend Deems Taylor was then the critic on the New York World, a morning paper, and he was one of the most brilliant critics that we ever had in the business here...Deems came out with a long Sunday article about the American National Orchestra, saying it was just what the American people needed, that it was a second-rate orchestra, it wasn't a first-rate orchestra; but there were enough first-rate orchestras such as ours. Well, that was an atomic bomb in the Board of Directors. They would not be satisfied with a second-rate orchestra...They decided that they would disband and at the end of the second seasons we gave up.
After the demise of the American National Orchestra, Barlow conducted and arranged music at the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street in New York.
One night [January 1926] after the performance...the assistant to Arthur Judson...put his head over the railing of the theater pit and asked me if I was interested in going into a new business called radio. I said, "Yes," not knowing exactly what it meant.
What it did mean is that Arthur Judson, a co-founder of CBS, would choose Howard Barlow to be the serious music conductor for the new broadcasting system and on Sunday, September 18, 1927, Barlow's twenty-three piece orchestra rang up the invisible radio curtain playing Luigini's Ballet Egyptienne from Radio Station WOR in New York City.
The preparation of that first program was quite a story. In the first place, the equipment in WOR was not complete. As a matter of fact, the first program was monitored in the men's room down the hall from the studio because the panel, the big board in the control room, was not complete...the only soundproof room that they could find was the men's room down the hall from the studio, so that the engineers worked in there and we were totally "blind," as we say as far as our communication witht he control room was concerned.
In 1930, CBS began broadcasting the New York Philharmonic concerts on Sunday afternoons. Since the Philharmonic did not broadcast in the summers, CBS initiated concerts in that time slot with the Columbia Symphony.
[From] May the first to October first I took it. Fortunately I was able to get a much enlarged orchestra. I sometimes had as high as sixty men, of course against the Philharmonic's one hundred and ten, it was not too happy a comparison, but the acoustics of a small studio in comparison to Carnegie Hall made the sound not too different.
Voice of Firestone was the first successful commercial radio program featuring classical and semi-classical music, but always with a vocal soloist featured. It had begun in 1928. In 1949 it became the first to simultaneously broadcast and telecast a musical program.
In the fall of 1942 I became the conductor of the Voice of Firestone radio broadcast...(Of the radio public) about twenty-one percent listened to our program regularly (and) thirty-five percent of the radio population listened occasionally.
Howard Barlow's years on radio ended in 1958.He turned to guest conducting, writing and some teaching. He died in Danbury, Connecticut on January 31,1972.
| Published Arrangements of Songs for Chorus by Howard Barlow |
|---|
| Name of Composition | Composer | Arrangement |
|---|---|---|
| At the Gates of Sevil | Fourdrain,Felix | Women, 3-part |
| Berceuse | Gretchaninow, A | Women, 3-part |
| Body and Soul | Kramer, A. Walter | Women, 3-part |
| Firelit Dark, The | Winston, Thomas | SATB and Women, 3-part |
| Flowers of the Forest | Anonymous | SATB |
| God in Nature | Beethoven, L. | Women, 3-part |
| Great Awakening, The | Kramer, A. Walter | SATB |
| Islands of the Sky | Pilzer, Maximilian | Women, 3-part |
| Love Immortal, The | Rimsky-Korsakov | Women, 3-part |
| Lullaby | LeBaron, M. H. | Women, 3-part |
| Mulberry Tree | Wells, John B. | SATB |
| My Heart's a Yellow Butterfly | Bochau, Charles H. | Women, 3-part |
| My Mother | White, G. S. | Men, 4-part |
| My Native Land! | Gretchaninow, A | Women, 3-part |
| Stork and the Skylark, The | Fourdrain, Felix | Women, 3-part |
| Wounded Birch, The | Gretchaninow, A | Women, 3-part |
| Yellow Dove, The | Fourdrain, Felix | Women, 3-part |
| Zuleika (Song of Zuleika) | Rimsky-Korsakov | Women, 3-part |
The following review of the New York Philharmonic concert of November 5, 1942 was published in the New York Herald-Tribune on November 6th by its well-known critic, the composer Virgil Thomson.
| Year(s) | Name of Orchestra |
|---|---|
| 1933 | Philadelphia Orchestra |
| 1934-1942 | New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Statium |
| 1936 | National Symphony, Washington, D.C. |
| 1938 | Duluth Symphony |
| 1939-1942 | Baltimore Symphony |
| 1941 | Hollywood Bowl |
| 1941-1944 | Orchestre Les Concerts Symphonique du Montreal |
| 1942 | Rochester "Starlight Symphony" |
| 1942-1944 | New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall |
| 1943 | Chicago Symphony |
| 1944 | Seattle Symphony and Vancouver Symphony |
| 1949 | Fairfield (Ct.) "Pops" |
| 1954 | Buffalo Philharmonic |
| 1954-56 | Milwaukee "Pops" |
| 1958 | Toronto Symphony |
| 1958-1963 | Miami "Pops" |
| 1960-62 | New Orleans Summer "Pops" |
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