NYPR Archives & Preservation
The WPA Federal Music Project is a Major Presence at WNYC
From the mid-1930s to early 1940s, the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) distributed thousands of transcription discs to hundreds of radio stations around the United States, including WNYC.
The WPA sponsored many New York City-based music groups who performed regularly on WNYC during the Depression, including the WNYC Concert Orchestra, The Capitol Dance Orchestra, the Amsterdam String Ensemble, The Manhattan Chorus, The Municipal Dance Orchestra, the Morningside String Trio, the Waverly Brass Band, the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Juanita Hall's Negro Melody Singers and the New York Civic Orchestra (whose 1939 recording of Tchaikovsky's elegy from his Serenade for Strings can be seen above).
In fact, in 1936, half of WNYC's broadcast hours were underwritten by the Federal Music Project (FMP), with an average month accounting for 135 FMP broadcasts. Of these programs, 103 recordings were made and distributed by transcription disc to stations around the country. In September 1938 FMP broadcasts on WNYC were up to 75 hours per week.[1] A year later the WPA's annual report noted that FMP sponsored music accounted for nearly 85 percent of all music performed on the station with the WNYC Concert Orchestra, the Negro Melody Singers, The Manhattan Chorus, a string ensemble, and a string trio.[2]
By the end of 1940, the New York City WPA Music Program reported it had provided nearly 1,100 hours of WNYC broadcasts that year. WNYC's Assistant Director Seymour N. Siegel wrote: "If the Federal Music Project has helped the City Station by supplying a substantial sustaining musical basis, WNYC, in turn, has unquestionably brought infinitely larger audiences than could ever be crowded into a concert hall. In the program of educating the listening public to the appreciation of the higher type of music, WNYC has done its part."
The WPA FMP and subsequent WPA Music Program were also platforms for discussions about music, music education, and the premieres of new works. In 1939, composer Roy Harris presented 30 illustrated lectures entitled Let's Make Music, under the auspices of the WPA Composers' Forum Laboratory. The series, which focused on the fundamentals of composition, was broadcast by WNYC and attracted significant attention and had an enrollment of more than 1,300 active listeners who received copies of the lessons for home study.[3]
That same year WNYC's World's Fair studio played host to a Composers' Forum concert and a composers roundtable. These presentations filled gaps in World's Fair music planning and included 201 works by 41 composers. Among them works by Charles Wakefield Cadman, A. Walter Kramer, Wintter Watts, Sidney Homer, Frank La Forge, Halsey Stevens, Richard Singer, Marshal Kernochan, Michael Gusikoff, Ernest Charles, and Bainbridge Crist.[4]
During WNYC's second annual American Music Festival in 1941, the WPA program assisted with an orchestra of 100 musicians drawn from the WNYC Concert and New York Civic Orchestras. Among the composer-led works was Philip James' satirical suite Station WGZBX, and the world premiere of Morton Gould's Spiritual for String, Choir, and Orchestra. Deems Taylor conducted his composition The Highwayman, with Richard Hale singing baritone. With the United States' entry into World War II, WPA funds were cut significantly and came to an end by June 1943.
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[1] Bindas, Kenneth J., "All of This Music Belongs to the Nation," The University of Tennessee Press, 1995, pg. 33.
[2] WPA Annual Report for 1939, Government Printing Office via Internet Archive.
[3] Pettis, Ashley, "The WPA and the American Composer," The Musical Quarterly, Vol XXVI, 1940, pg. 106.
[4] Ibid., pg. 109.