Music: Kansas City

• Share

John Powell, the American composer who has used American Negro tunes so extensively in his compositions, has given to The Kansas City Star a statement that will seem to many a strange pronouncement. Powell does not think that Negro music can figure considerably in the development of an American national school of music. Says The Star: "At any rate, Powell does not believe they (Negro spirituals) can justly be made the basis of a national American school —because, he declares, there is not the least kinship between the Negro and the descendants of the first English settlers, who still are presumed to boil highest in our melting pot. Mr. Powell favors using the ' Lonesome Tunes' of the Tennessee and Carolina mountains for the basis, if such there is to be. The strange melodies are genuinely of 'our people,' he points out, and of a strange and lasting fascination."