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What a College Can Do in Broadcasting
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purposes: an unfailing program supply, and an established clientele.
PLENTY OF MUSICAL TALENT
EVERY standard college has in its students and faculty a wealth of musical, dramatic, forensic, and athletic talent, by the very nature of college requirements and conditions. St. Olaf is particularly fortunate in having at the head of its school of music Dr. F. Melius Christiansen, who has produced under his direction the St. Olaf Lutheran Choir, an organization with an international reputation for choral singing. When the choir, long recognized in Minnesota as of an unusual character, first invaded the East in 1920, it received such extravagant praise as to make the tour a complete triumph, and gained from the best of the nation's critics the title, "the world's supreme choir." Coming into prominence almost simultaneously with the popular Main Street of Sinclair Lewis, it was hailed as "the vindicator of Main Street," anc' a Brooklyn critic wrote that the choir had "proved that Gopher Prairie and its environs are dispensers, not despisers of culture." The reputation thus founded has been more securely established in succeeding years.
Naturally, then, St. Olaf College is the gathering-place for a large number of capable student musicians, and from the membership of the choir numerous artists are selected for the programs broadcasted from WCAL. To the
thousands of persons throughout the country who have heard the choir, the radio programs are of peculiar pleasure even aside from their merit, because they have seen and heard the singers in person.
But things musical at the college are not limited to the choir. There is an excellent concert band of forty pieces, developed by Dr. Christiansen, and now under the direction of J. Arndt Bergh. The band has undertaken extensive tours, including one to the Pacific coast last spring, and has been enthusiastically received. Its members have contributed often to the success of WCAL concerts. There is also a college orchestra as well as numerous smaller orchestras, quartets, and other groups of entertainers, composed and managed by students.
At a college of liberal arts, with music one of the arts, a high standard is to be expected. Then, also, there is in all college programs an appealing youthfulness which is one of their greatest charms. It is the amateur instead of the professional. While the same perfection of production may be present, there is added the ingenuous enthusiasm of youth in its own performance.
But music forms only a part of the programs any college station is in position to offer. Other forms of entertainment are equally welcome. Within the short space of three years the English department at St. Olaf has built an innovation into a tradition, and now
THE 1922-23 ST. OLAF LUTHERAN CHOIR
This organization, developed by Dr. F. Melius Christiansen, has excited the admiration of the nation's best critics. It has given many recitals at WCAL