Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1102

Penciled notes by Heath in a small, blue spiral notebook for a letter, Elkridge MD

November 24, 1938

Original -> 1100

 

 

Sir:

 

It is the province of the arts to rouse emotion to move the human spirit into condition and desire to act. Martial music, epic poetry stirs to emulation. The tragic makes us shudder and flee, to shrink and destroy. All art speaks directly to the soul of man, but pure beauty alone inspires, expands and creates. These reflections stirred me at the close of Mme. L. C. G.’s recital of contemporary American music at Town Hall last night. Her American interpretations, very fitly, as it later appeared, were introduced by opening numbers in the best creative traditions of the past — all positive and inspirational in their feeling and mood.

Then her American group was marked for the tolerance of this writer by a complete absence alike of tragic fatalism and despair and of the crass modernism in art that exploits a stark brutality of force and line.

The American numbers, notably those of Lewis Lane and Mortimer Binning /?/ were fundamentally in the philosophic tradition of Emerson and Santayana. Their appeal lay in the quality of their inspiration, in its ministration to the harmonies intrinsic to the esthetic nature of mankind and the consequent incitement to creative and thus to the larger life of the spirit.

Mme. G merits our thanks and applause for her brave essaying of the beauty that is now and here, for her service to art and to the world      setting the best of modern American music in its well-deserved light as a creative influence in a disintegrating world.

S. H.