By Editorial Staff

THE YEAR 1967 contained both the fifth season of New York’s American Symphony Orchestra and the eighty-fifth season of its founder and conductor, Leopold Stokowski, our Musician of the Year. It is rare enough for a man in his eighties to remain professionally active in any field, even in such a healthful and traditionally long-lived one as conducting. It is rarer still for an octogenarian to remain a pioneer. But for one to organize an orchestra from scratch, both literally and figuratively, to blaze new paths with it, and in a few seasons to make it one of the most exciting musical organizations extant—that must surely be unique.

Leopold Stokowski, of course, never has operated according to standard procedure, and almost surely never will; it is one of the secrets of his eternal youth. This youthfulness has, in turn, been the real key to Stokowski’s success. On the podium this remarkable musician retains the vigor of a man half his age. Those who have seen him at parties will vouch for the fact that he appears one of the youngest guests in the room. Try to help him out of a car onto an icy sidewalk and he will more than likely knock your hand away. (“If you rely on people to keep you going,” he has told us, “you will become dependent on them.”)

Or take a look at his adventurous programming for, say, this month. The first pair of concerts did schedule such a standard as Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony (after all, Tchaikovsky is a natural for Stokowski’s flair and the sound of his orchestras) but it also included Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo and Carl Ruggles’ The Sun Treader. And this week: for the Christmas season there is a selection from Handel’s Messiah (not, to be sure, the whole thing; everybody else is doing that) but also from Gossec’s La Nativité. The rest of the program consists of Verdi’s Te Deum, Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden, and Ives’s Fourth Symphony! This last work points up another rare Stokowski quality.

The Ives symphony was premiered by him three seasons ago. He also had helped to unearth, unravel, and decode it. Within a year everybody was talking about, performing, and listening to the music of Charles Ives. Almost singlehandedly, Stokowski had resuscitated the composer and turned him into a bestseller. Granted, to premiere a work may be no heroic achievement. Every performer enjoys that attendant honor. Other conductors too have been fortunate in some of the works they have brought to life. But how many of them have been willing to give second performances of the works, without all the accompanying headlines? Very few. Yet Leopold Stokowski always has, valuing the new friends he can gain for unfamiliar music more than he does those headlines. So the following year he repeated Ives’s Fourth Symphony; and this week, after a one-year omission. Maestro Stokowski has scheduled it again. (Under formal circumstances he expects to be called Maestro, not in homage due, but simply as a professional. He himself calls and refers to his own assistants as Maestro. Despite the glamour surrounding this one-time Hollywood star, who had his podium bathed in spotlights, who was the epitome of musical showmanship, who squired Greta Garbo everywhere, he remains one of the music world’s least egotistical performers. It is unlikely that he could take offense at anything or feel insulted by anyone. But he will accept advice, even musical advice, from anybody with a worthwhile idea that didn’t, for some unusual reason, occur to him first.)

This is not to denigrate the works he introduced. They are legion. He has given either the world or American premieres of the music of Mahler (Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony No. 8), Berg (Wozzeck), Stravinsky (Le Sacre du printemps, Oedipus Rex, Les Noces, Renard), Schoenberg (the concertos for violin and piano, Verklärte Nacht, the Five Orchestral Pieces), Shostakovich (Symphonies Nos. 1 and 11), Prokofiev (Alexander Nevsky), Kodaly (Hary Janos Suite) and Orff (Carmina Burana), as well as a multitude of works by Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Villa-Lobos, Falla, Satie, Varèse, and countless others. He has given hundreds of American scores their first hearing, including compositions from South and Central as well as North America. In fact, the premiere itself sometimes even included the second performance. One recalls how an audience at New York’s City Center once booed a new composition—in itself an unusual event in this sedate era of concert-going. The Maestro turned from the orchestra to the audience, raised one of his celebrated hands, and gave one of his celebrated admonishments: “We in the orchestra have played this music many times, trying to find out what it is the composer is telling us. You have heard it only once, and so you may not have heard him at all. We will therefore play it again for you, and let us both try to understand.”

And, by all means, let us not forget what Maestro Stokowski has done for Bach in America. An entire generation of Americans was introduced to that master’s music through the Stokowski orchestral transcriptions.

BORN LEOPOLD BOLESLAWOWICZ Stanislaw Antoni Stokowski in London on April 18, 1882, he had a Polish father, an Irish mother, and a British education. His studies at Queen’s College in Oxford and at the Royal College of Music centered on organ, counterpoint, and composition. As a youth of eighteen, he became organist at St. James’ in Piccadilly. At twenty-three he came to the United States, and was appointed organist and choirmaster at St. Bartholomew’s in New York, where he began to attract considerable attention. In 1908 he was back in Europe, where he conducted his first orchestral concerts; but the following year, he emerged as conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, in which post he remained for three notable seasons.

The year 1912 was a turning point for Stokowski and for Philadelphia. It was then that he moved from the Queen City to the City of Brotherly Love to assume the leadership of the barely twelve-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra. In very short order, he transformed that organization from a passably good orchestra to possibly the greatest virtuoso ensemble the world had ever known. By means of constant experimentation, unorthodox instrumental techniques, and revolutionary seating arrangements, he succeeded in creating a new, far more opulent orchestral sonority—the famous “Philadelphia sound” that eventually became known as the “Stokowski sound.” For twenty-six years—from 1912 to 1938—he treated audiences not only in Philadelphia but in New York, Baltimore, Washington, and across the nation to the most colorful symphonic performances they had ever heard.

When Stokowski resigned from the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1938, he was ready to start on a fresh career. Youth was calling once more. In 1940, he created the All-American Youth Orchestra, in order· to prove to a doubting world that a first-rate ensemble could be formed from the young people of our nation. Later, he aided in the founding of the New York City Symphony Orchestra at the City Center of Music and Drama, shared the directorship of the New York Philharmonic with Mitropoulos, and served as music director of the Hollywood Bowl and the Houston Symphony.

All the while, in Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere, he was working with acoustical, electronic, and radio engineers to improve the quality and fidelity of the musical sounds reproduced in phonograph recordings, broadcasts, and motion pictures. Many of the improvements we enjoy but take for granted today are the direct result of his frequently revolutionary and audacious sonic experiments. Fifteen years before stereo became a household word, he developed a “super-stereo” soundtrack for the Walt Disney film Fantasia, in which the music—which he himself conducted—emerged not from two but from fourteen channels!

In October 1962, at the age of eighty, Stokowski decided it was time to give youth another fling. Gathering together some of the most talented recent graduates from our great music schools and augmenting them with distinguished alumni of the All-American Youth Orchestra and top free-lance musicians from the New York area, he formed the American Symphony Orchestra. Its aim has been to give musical opportunity and experience to highly talented young men and women regardless of race, color, or creed; and besides bringing outstanding performances of great music to adult audiences, it is helping to foster a whole new generation of musicians and music lovers through an extensive series of youth concerts. When these children grow up to attend adult concerts we would not be surprised to find centenarian Leopold Stokowski still conducting them.