Music: Gum Chewer

"I'm not a fine pianist, and I don't want anyone to get the impression that I think I am. I'm just a composer who plays and whose friends are kind. Also I don't want anyone to think I have any illusions that Dark Dancers is great music. . . . It's just a pleasant score. . . ." Not every composer is able or willing to give such an accurate estimate of his abilities. Though grey-haired, exuberant Charles Wakefield Cadman has been lately somewhat neglected by sophisticated music lovers in favor of younger and more sensational composers, he remains one of the very few highbrow U. S. musical figures whose names are known to the U. S. man in the street. Last week his five-year-old suite, Dark Dancers of the Mardi Gras, received its first public Manhattan performance by the Philharmonic-Symphony under Conductor John Barbirolli. Dark Dancers is pleasant, rhythmic, imitative, is not likely to achieve the popularity that sold over 1,500,000 copies of his song At Dawning, composed 20-odd years ago.

When veteran Conductor Walter Damrosch once asked a schoolchild who Charles Wakefield Cadman was, the child answered: "He's a great American Indian." Prior to 1915 Cadman spent some time among the Osages and Omahas, recording their music, lecturing on it, deriving themes from it. Two decades ago he turned from such ventures to the writing of opera, produced Shanewis, first U. S. opera to survive two seasons in the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera House, and A Witch of Salem, given by the Chicago Civic Opera Company. Then he turned to orchestral pieces and chamber music. An indefatigable worker, he has also written over 300 songs.

Like Stephen Foster (Old Black Joe) and Ethelbert Nevin (The Rosary), Cadman was born in Pennsylvania (Johnstown, 1881). His father was an employe for many years in the Carnegie Steel mills in Duquesne. Leaving public school at 14, Cadman took up music in earnest, and 14 years later supported himself in Pittsburgh by playing the organ and teaching the piano. After two years as music critic of the Pittsburgh Dispatch he spent a short time studying in Austria.

Cadman believes that native composers have not yet struck the common denominator which constitutes the true American musical idiom, sees U. S. composition as too much swept by passing fancies (jazz, Indian idioms, Negro spirituals, et al.), finds extreme modernism merely "an interesting experiment." Says he: "There must be melodic line. The appeal must be to the heart as well as the head."

A member of the Uplifters' Club in Los Angeles, and of the Sons of the American Revolution, he chews gum continually, claims that only the late Will Rogers used more.