The Harvard Band

The band's Dartmouth Concert is one of the best reasons I can think of for having a Dartmouth week-end. And this year's performance was perhaps the finest in recent years. After three years of constant prodding by director James A. Walker, the band is beginning to assert itself as a musical group of some stature.

Walker conducted an immense and powerful organization Friday night; there seemed to be no limit to the depth and richness of sound available to him. In fact, he seemed overwhelmed at times by the 130 musicians he led. But the situation never got out of control. Despite the great numbers in this year's football band (at least 50 more than last year), attacks and cut-offs were sharp and precise. The ragged entrances that marred previous Dartmouth concerts were absent; clean, precise playing was evident in nearly every selection.

The program Walker presented, however, was not nearly as impressive as his band. Each year the band goes through a crisis trying to decide just how much intellectualism should be injected into what is basically a presentation of football music. The band has yet to find a good compromise between what the audience invariably wants, what they want to play, and what a band of such size can play well.

There is a wealth of light and semi-serious concert music written for band, but this year Walker chose orchestral transcriptions for the meat of his program, with only fair results. It seemed a shame to waste the band's talents on such unrewarding music.

After opening with C. E. Duble's Bravura concert march, a piece which was ideally suited to demonstrate the excellence of the band's brasses, Walker attempted a reading of three selections from Moussorgsky's Boris Godounov. The march had excited the audience, the band's Boris immediately let them down. Exposed woodwind passages were occasionally sloppy, intonation in the cornets wavered, and the pace dragged. Variations on a Shaker Melody by Copland was marred by dissonances Copland never intended, and the first half of the program ended somewhat dully with Rimsky-Korsakov's Procession of Nobles, despite displays of virtuosity by the brasses and percussion.

After the intermission, however, the audience was treated to one of the best performances of football music heard in Sanders in a long time. Morse's Up the Street led the parade, and it was good to see this march reinstated in the band's repertoire after a long absence. Ed Flitton's percussion section, which was excellent throughout the evening, began the football section with a perfect and artistic presentation of last year's cadence. Midway through the trip "Through the Square" (a series of Dartmouth and Harvard songs), the audience was treated to another battle in the never-ending war between the drums and the band when Flitton and his men suddenly ripped off this year's street beat. It is an incredibly complicated cadence and no one has figured out how to march to it.

With the drums setting the pace, and the band and audience enthusiastically following, Sanders vibrated with sound as everyone expressed new dedication to their "foster mother." There are few football songs around better than Harvard's for spirit and melody, and no one but the Harvard band can play them properly. Even the most apathetic student would have felt a surge of school loyalty when the band was finished.

A review of "Never Too Late," a new comedy by Sumner Arthur Long, which opened at the Wilbur Theatre last night, will appear in tomorrow's CRIMSON.