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MINNESOTA: A STATE GUIDE
 The ArtsThe settlers in Minnesota, like other pioneers the world over, had neither leisure nor impulse for a conscious art. But even in a menacing wilderness the universal urge to express in written words the day's experiences or to sing with one's neighbor impelled many to record their adventures by fire or candlelight, and to travel many trackless miles to sing the familiar tunes or to listen to the nostalgic notes of an old fiddle. Thus Minnesota's first literature was largely in the form of diaries and autobiographies, its first music that of "singing schools" and village fiddlers. Despite the general impression that the Midwest has until recently been almost a barren desert in the world of culture, the truth is that no section of the country has had a more earnest desire for cultural facilities, or shown a more rapid development in the appreciation and expression of art. The artistic taste of those early Minnesotans may be questioned, but their abiding faith in the necessity for mental and spiritual food was obvious from the first. Credit for this faith must be given largely to New England, where the importance of culture was early recognized as second only to that of church-going. At the time of the first migration of easterners into the Northwest, the "golden age" of New England culture was just beginning. Minnesota's settlers as a whole could have taken little part in this renaissance or they would never have come so far away from the springs of enlightenment. Henry Thoreau hurled blasts of scorn on covered-wagon New Englanders who turned their backs on their intellectual opportunities "to escape more than rocks." Nevertheless they brought with them the culture-respecting traditions with which they had been surrounded and these have colored the State ever since. No sooner was settlement well under way than schools began to spring up in every community. With the first post offices came subscriptions to the literary magazines of Boston, and the "singing schools" became not only the opportunity for music but also for the exchange of last month's North American Review, or the latest installment of a Dickens novel. A little later the music-loving peoples of Europe began to pour into the Territory, and soon Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart became familiar household names. Germans in Winona and Czechs in New Prague had their orchestras and bands, the Scandinavians brought with them their ritual-loving pastors, who saw to it that each church had its trained choir, while America created its own folksongs, as from river and forest rose the ballads of the logging industry's shantyboys. As early as 1862, four German musicians in St. Paul formed a string quartet. Soon other music lovers gathered around them and a year later the St. Paul Musical Society had been organized and boasted 200 members. In 1870 an orchestra, whose members were local musicians, under the director, George Seibert, was giving concerts not only in the Twin Cities but in Stillwater, Duluth, and other communities. By the 1880's St. Paul and Minneapolis had become not only thriving trade centers, but the educational and cultural hub of the Northwest. Study clubs and lyceum courses were immensely popular. Many a world-renowned lecturer came up the Mississippi, partly to satisfy his curiosity, but also in response to the call of culture-hungry citizens. Emerson, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Fredrika Bremer lectured in those early days. Each left behind a quickened intellectual appetite, to be fed by a humbler lecturing group that, under the distinguished leadership of William Folwell, was gathering at the new university. Noteworthy among these local teachers was Maria L. Sanford, who came to the university in 1880. In her forty years of teaching and public addresses she probably did more to advance the love of literature in Minnesota than any other person. A grand opera house soon succeeded the "upstairs" amusement hall from whose balconies brass bands had summoned the passers-by. To the cities came the famous Adelina Patti, Jenny Lind, Ole Bull, and many itinerant opera companies, as well as Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Joseph Jefferson, Modjeska, Duse, and Bernhardt. Provincial and crude as the Twin Cities doubtless were in the eighties and nineties, it was nevertheless in those decades that they had their only first-hand experience of supremely good acting. With the new century was to come the gradual decline of the road show, the rise to popularity of the moving picture, and the almost complete inanition of the legitimate theater in Minnesota. In the graphic and plastic arts, the new State was less fortunate. Probably the first original Minnesota painting was that done for the lurid lithographs and posters scattered by the thousands throughout the eastern States and Europe to incite immigration. A few farmers still retain these fantastically exaggerated picturizations of Minnesota's largess, but of the dozens of daubers who perpetrated them the names of only a few have been preserved. That of Edwin Whitefield is worthy of special note. This artist came to Minnesota in 1856 for the Whitefield Exploration Association whose purpose was to develop and explore the Kandiyohi Lake region. He left many water color sketches that in recent years have won for him a significant place in the Nation's pioneer art. To the average town dweller of the 1880's art was mainly represented by the traveling panoramas on whose thousands of feet of canvas were depicted in great detail historic scenes such as the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. These attracted large audiences and were thought to offer valuable educational advantages. Nevertheless art was taken seriously in the cities. As early as 1870, Minneapolis had founded an Athenaeum Society and provided funds for the purchase of art books. In 1883 the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts was established, soon to be followed by the Minnesota State Society of Arts. Paintings were produced, many of which were excellent in the traditional academic sense and need no apology today. At this time also, interest arose in the acquisition of collections, private and public. This in turn led to the establishment of museums. The Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts had its own art school and galleries by 1915, In 1933 the University of Minnesota opened a gallery in Northrop Auditorium to which come many of the most interesting foreign and American exhibits. The gallery has started its own permanent collection with notable modern American paintings. St. Paul's frequent exhibits as well as its permanent collection were shown for years at the St. Paul Institute. Today most exhibits are shown at the library, or in the galleries at the St. Paul School of Art founded in 1927. Various civic organizations bring exhibits of both paintings and prints co the smaller cities, notably Winona, Rochester, Owatonna, and others, and to all those in which colleges are located. One indication of the growth of an art consciousness in Minnesota is the fact that requests for murals for schools and other civic buildings are more numerous than can be met by the Federal Art Project. The State's more specific contributions to American art require more detailed treatment.  The history of architecture in Minnesota goes back no more than a hundred years, yet it embraces an unusual variety of structures and designs, and the names of several architects whose ingenuity and creative ability brought notice to the State and fame to themselves. The first buildings in Minnesota of which there is record were the impermanent gabled dwellings the Sioux built at their "capital" on Mille Lacs prior to the Chippewa invasion from the region of Lake Superior early in the eighteenth century. Military penetration preceded settlement, and a log fort was built in 1820 on the bluff overlooking the junction of the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers. The log structure was first occupied in 1822, and about two years later a diamond-shaped enclosure around it was defined by a 10-foot stone wall, with corners accented for defense by round towers. At first called Fort St. Anthony, the name of the military post was changed in 1825 to Fort Snelling. Of this early work, only traces of the stone wall and two of the towers remain. The earliest domestic structures were limited in plan to the barest essentials and constructed of materials readily at hand. In wooded regions the earliest houses were built of logs; on the prairies, they were of sod. Cabins in the forest regions were made of peeled logs, either round or roughly squared, fitted together by notching the ends. Chinked with moss or clay, they afforded protection against the severe cold. The floors were generally of hardened earth. The sod houses of the prairie regions were made by cutting pieces of turf and placing them on top of each other like stones. The roof was made of poles covered with sod.
After 1840 settlers from New England built frame structures strongly reminiscent of Colonial types in the East. Characteristic details were remembered clapboards, shutters, simple gabled roofs, small-paned windows--while plain but vigorous classic moldings and cornices served further to recall this earlier architecture. The wooden Colonial phase lasted for about four decades. Details which might be traced to specific eastern localities were lost; and only the most typical characteristics of the styles were retained. But it is possible to pick out, here and there in many parts of the State, old houses that remind one of the single-story cottages of Cape Cod, or of the rectangular, symmetrical two-story houses of New England. Of such a New England type is the Indian Agency house at St. Claire, The symmetrical facade is executed in variegated red local sand-mold brick, with solid wood lintels over the windows and doors, and solid wood sills. The doorway, in place of the southwest window, is so designed as to preserve the effect of balance in the openings of the facade. The main doorway has side and top lights, framed by very simple trim, with almost no moldings. Where moldings do occur, they follow pure Georgian Colonial precedents. The effect of an exterior cornice is achieved by a sawtooth arrangement of bricks, set at an angle to the face of the wall, and resting on two rows of corbeled brick courses. Unusual also, because of their infrequent use in other Minnesota houses of this date, are the fireplaces in the dining room, the office, and two bedrooms. Severely plain in design, they were utilitarian rather than ornamental. The general plan of this house is obviously studied, and it seems probable that it was prepared in the East for the Government, and executed in the Territory of Minnesota from drawings. Certainly the general plan elements were too well articulated to have been designed at that early date in Minnesota. At Mendota, below the bluffs of Fort Snelling, Henry Hastings Sibley in 1835 built a house of native stone, with white wood cornice and trim. It is curiously like many of the stone houses of Pennsylvania. The laths were of interwoven willow sticks which were readily obtainable along the river bottoms. The house with its several outbuildings is now the property of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who have attempted to recreate the atmosphere of the original house with furniture of the period. On the whole, the architecture of this period followed current trends in the East. In the fifties the octagonal house had a certain vogue, and two interesting examples of this quaint experiment are the Dr. William Thorne house at Hastings and one at Afton on the Saint Croix.
The period from the end of the Civil War to about the year 1893 may be considered the Victorian era, architecturally. Insofar as Minnesota is concerned, the period is one of eclecticism. National influences obscured local tendencies, except for those interesting minor notes introduced by immigrants, which are found at random, frequently in churches. One can readily detect the application of Byzantine detail on the otherwise ordinary churches of the Syrians; and the ornate, pinnacled, Gothic motifs of churches used by those of German extraction. The German congregation of the Assumption Catholic Church in St. Paul had the plans of its church made in Munich in 1871 by Edward Riedel. The Romanesque influence of H. H. Richardson was widely apparent in a variety of buildings; and interesting survivals of the style are the Minneapolis City Hall and Pillsbury Hall at the University of Minnesota. Simultaneously, the French influence of the Ecole des Beaux Arts was evident in innumerable mansard-roofed dwellings and mansions of the chateau type The older sections of Summit Avenue in St. Paul and Park Avenue in Minneapolis testify to the variety of architectural styles. Materials used at this time were largely those obtainable within the State: Kettle River sandstone, dull red in color; Mankato limestone, St. Cloud granite; and, of course, lumber, for lumber played a very important part in the economic history of the State. Easily obtainable lumber was frequently used to imitate a variety of other materials and by means of the jigsaw was cut into innumerable tortured forms and applied indiscriminately from cellar to ridge pole. Then, as if the applied ornament were not adequate, structural forms such as porte-cocheres, towers, balconies, dormers, and elaborate turrets were added to the buildings. The most notable contribution to architecture in this period was made by Leroy S. Buffington of Minneapolis. In the early 1880's, when he worked in Chicago, he is known to have discussed with various architectural associates his idea of building a steel frame as a structural support for the fabric of stone or brick which clothed the building. At that time for every floor of increased height above three or four stories, the stone walls of the foundations and lower floors had to be made thicker, and the space in the lower floors was thus increasingly sacrificed. Moreover, stone or brick subjected to the weight of many stories imposed definite restrictions upon the height of buildings owing to limitations in compressive strength. Buffington's idea was to erect a steel frame to which thin veneers of brick or other material of relatively light weight could be attached, and the frame itself was to carry the mass, rather than the masonry walls. In 1887, after many years of work on his idea, he applied in Washington for a patent on a 28-story steel frame building. On May 22, 1888, the patent on "Iron Building Construction" was issued to him, whereupon he became the object of widespread derision by short-sighted critics. In 1889 the architects of the Tacoma Building in Chicago made use of the idea for a thirteen-story building. A precedent was set for the use of a cage or "skeleton" construction; and the principle, once demonstrated, was thereafter more and more frequently used. Buffington fought against what he considered patent infringements, both in the law courts and by writing, but without success until 1929, when Rufus Rand of Minneapolis voluntarily paid a royalty for the use of the skeleton construction adopted for the Rand Tower in Minneapolis. Buffington's claim to priority has caused widespread discussion and heated controversy. In its issue of June 1929, the American Architect concludes with finality that he must be given credit for the method of steel construction now so commonly in use. Buffington's work as a practicing architect has generally been overlooked because of the more sensational aspects of his architectural theories. Nevertheless, he designed numerous buildings that, as examples of the period, and considering the influences then at work on architecture as a whole, are creditable. Among his designs were Pillsbury Hall and the Old Library Building at the University of Minnesota. Pillsbury Hall is Romanesque in the best Richardson manner; the library is Greek in style with a portico copied from the Parthenon in Athens. He also designed numerous residences for a rising class of wealthy people and planned commercial buildings, factories, and warehouses for their businesses. His work was restrained and almost invariably in good taste. The Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 gave impetus to the various tendencies of the classic and Renaissance styles, and during this epoch such well-known examples of neoclassicism as the new State Capitol were brought into existence. Minnesota also nurtured numerous architects who later rose to national prominence. Among these were E. L. Masqueray, a Frenchman from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris; A. H. Stem, one of the architects of the Grand Central Terminal in New York and designer of many charming houses; and James Knox Taylor, who later became supervising architect for the United States Treasury Department at Washington. Though not natives of the State, these men while residing here produced some of their best work, most of it in the classic tradition. Masqueray's French training was very evident in his designs, and whether he was designing the cathedral in Saint Paul, the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, or the buildings for the St. Louis Exposition, he invariably displayed a taste for the baroque and the dramatic. In 1893 the State of Minnesota announced a Nation-wide competition for a design for a new State Capitol, and from the projects submitted by architects of national prominence, Cass Gilbert's plan was selected. He was then a young man with his first large commission, which in time brought him an increasing number of opportunities for designing buildings of importance. So successful did this young Minnesotan become that he moved his offices to New York, where he supervised plans for such widely known structures as the Woolworth Building in New York, the West Virginia State Capitol, and the Supreme Court Building in Washington. The Capitol Building for the State of Minnesota is an impressive structure of white marble, expressed in a Renaissance vernacular. It served as model for most of the State capitols built in the ensuing twenty-five years, and it was not until the spell was broken by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in his design for the Nebraska State Capitol that any notable deviation from the academic, domed statehouse was attempted. One other monumental scheme of State-wide interest, also Cass Gilbert's, was the rearrangement of the University of Minnesota campus. This plan also was chosen by competition, and since its adoption the buildings have been cast in rigidly conceived and symmetrically fenestrated structures of brick trimmed with stone. Individually and collectively the buildings are planned to be monumental (an effect which they have achieved) but the diverse elements of a large university are housed not too happily in structures that bear no relation to their functional requirements. To this period, although advanced in style, belongs what is to architects probably the most interesting building in Minnesota: namely, the National Farmers' Bank in Owatonna, begun in 1907. Its board of directors must be given credit for casting aside the prevailing Greek and Roman modes in bank buildings, and searching for an architect who could design a utilitarian structure to meet special requirements. They asked Louis Sullivan to design the building, and so admirably was it done that it is still one of the best examples of modern architecture in the State. Minnesota is now entering the period called "modern," or "functional," which is too international in spirit to be affected by specific movements within the State. All major commercial work is now being done in the modern manner, and the latest civic structures bear the stamp of modernism. The new city hall and courthouse in St. Paul was one of the first important structures of its kind to accommodate various civic functions in a skyscraper type of building. An interesting feature on the ground floor is the Memorial Hall, three stories high, finished in black glass. It is the dramatic setting for a Peace Memorial created by Carl Milles. As a domestic style, the modern has made relatively little progress. However, within the State are two examples by Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest living exponents of modernism, and a pupil of Louis Sullivan. The house owned by Mr. Philip Little, Jr., at Lake Minnetonka represents the earlier phase, and the M. M. Willey house in Prospect Park in Minneapolis is characteristic of Wright's current work. The Willey house has the long low lines and the widespread eaves of Wright's "prairie" style, and is still the most satisfying of domestic designs in any contemporary style within the State. Indigenous to Minnesota, and almost completely ignored by its people, are the stark, unornamented, functional clusters of concrete--Minnesota's grain elevators. These may be said to express unconsciously all the principles of modernism, being built for use only, with little regard for the tenets of esthetic design. Everyone has seen the rhythmic repetition of these cylindrical forms accented by the shadows made by the hot summer sun, and the whole dignified mass set against the sky; yet it remained for European visitors to discover that while Minnesota sought for artistic expression in other directions, it had achieved in its grain elevators a signal triumph of functional design. During its pioneer stage Minnesota produced a considerable literature which today is valued chiefly for its historical significance. Most of these writings were of the nature of travel books, and served not only to acquaint the world with a new country where "they till the land but own the land they till," but also to inspire distant writers. Among these latter were the great German poet, Friedrich Schiller, and New England's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, at that time regarded as equally talented. (Carver's Cave was immortalized by Schiller, who received his inspiration from Carver's Travels, published in 1792 and later translated into German. Longfellow was led to write Hiawatha after reading Mrs. Mary H. Eastman's Dahcotah; or Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling, published in 1849, and "the various and valuable writings of Mr. Schoolcraft." For his descriptions of Minnehaha Falls, which he never saw, he used a photograph by Alexander Hesler, a Chicago photographer.) A less-famed writer who found in Minnesota a fund of local color was the Indianan, Edward Eggleston (1837-1902), who spent several years in the State preaching, making soap, and collecting material for his Mystery of Metropolisville. He is thought to have written Hoosier Schoolmaster here. Eggleston was St. Paul's first librarian. Of all the writers of pioneer days, the fiery Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), "Sage of Nininger," was the most picturesque. For forty years he threw himself into the turbulent whirlpool of pioneer politics, and, when defeated, withdrew to make a living and to salve his sores by writing controversial books of which his thousands of admirers demanded repeated and enormous editions. It is claimed that 700,000 copies of his novel Caesar's Column were sold here and abroad, while Atlantis went into 21 editions and was published in both England and France. Donnelly is said to have quoted Epictetus (in the original Greek) on the floor of the United States Senate and to have surprised erudite Europeans by the extent of his learning. His best known book, The Great Cryptogram, was devoted, as were many of his lectures, to his alleged proof that Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays. Early "western" writing was nearly all highly romanticized. To Hamlin Garland belongs the credit of being the first writer to cast aside the romantic tradition and to picture pioneer living in an honest realistic fashion. Garland used Minnesota, which he repeatedly visited, as a source of much local color, and he must be regarded as the direct forerunner of the State's two outstanding realists, Sinclair Lewis and Ole Edvart Rolvaag. The first generation of the twentieth century not only popularized Minnesota writers but brought several to the attention of that smaller audience whose prime interest is in scholarship and style. To the latter group the State university has made a notable contribution. Among these are Oscar Firkins (1864-1932), whom William Archer declared to be America's outstanding critic; William Watts Folwell (1833-1929), Minnesota's beloved teacher and historian (author of the four-volume History of Minnesota); William Stearns Davis (1877-1930), whose historical novels (including A Friend to Caesar), written as relaxation between periods of research, are among the best novels of that genre America has produced; and Joseph Warren Beach, critic and poet. From the university, too, came Minnesota's outstanding lyric poet, the young Arthur Upson, who was drowned in 1908 at the age of thirty-one when contemporary critics, both American and British, were predicting for him the glory of a poet of the first rank. Many of his poems appeared first in the Bellman, the little literary magazine published in the early 1900's by William C. Edgar, editor and publisher of the technical journal, Northwestern Miller. Upson's lyrics are for the most part concerned with the sensitive and wistful response of a poet to the gentler phase of beauty, but it is their almost Greeklike purity of form that won him his reputation among contemporary critics. Poets still make pilgrimages to the Arthur Upson Room in the University Library, endowed by Ruth Phelps, another University writer. Before Miss Phelps's marriage to the French author, Paul Morand, she taught Italian literature, the subject of her critical essays. Elmer E. Stoll, held by many to be the greatest contemporary Shakespearean student, and Martin Ruud, an authority on medieval culture, have gained international recognition. Better known to America at large are F. Scott Fitzgerald, who first revealed with bitter and brilliant incisiveness the cynical desperation of early post-war adolescents; Charles Flandrau, whose Viva Mexico is one of the most delightful accounts of that exciting Republic; his sister-in-law, Grace Flandrau, writer of novels about St. Paul and short stories of Africa; Martha Ostenso, author of Wild Geese, a prize-winning novel concerned with life in northern Minnesota. Others are James Gray, literary commentator and novelist (Wake and Remember); William McNally, playwright and novelist (The House of Vanished Splendour); Darragh Aldrich (Earth Never Tires); Maud and Delos Lovelace (Gentlemen from England); Lorna Beers (A Humble Lear); Dagmar Doneghy (The Border); Charles A. Eastman, the distinguished Sioux (Indian Boyhood); and Margaret Culkin Banning, prolific magazine contributor and novelist, who has not only established herself as an acute observer of Minnesota's social scene, but also has given of her time and counsel to many State and civic enterprises. Three writers overshadow the Minnesota literary field: Thorstein Veblen, economist and social philosopher, Ole Edvart Rölvaag, novelist, and Sinclair Lewis, first American winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) lived in Minnesota from his eighth year when his family moved from Wisconsin to a farm near Northfield, until his early twenties and graduation from Carleton College. He knew the State also as a refuge during his scholastic career. His people were Norwegians who migrated from their first homes to escape poverty and oppression. At Carleton he read intensively in the social philosophers from Hume and Kant to Spencer, absorbed the current equalitarian ideas in politics, and evidently found his direction as a critical analyst of modern industrial civilization. His direction does not lend itself to easy classification. While he definitely discarded the classical in economics, he did not adopt Marxism as such although his approach was distinctly social and opposed to capitalism on moral and practical grounds. In subsequent years of study, teaching in universities, and writing, Veblen evolved his theoretical system. He saw history as a succession of conflicts between the predatory and the industrious. Few men of his time could relate Veblen's thinking with the problems he attacked, and a highly complex manner of expression diminished his circle even more. But our contemporary scientific economists acknowledge an immense debt to him while lecturers and writers make common coin of many of his characteristic epithets and phrases. Of the 10 works he published, The Engineers and the Price System (1921) has become widely known among students of social and economic organization. His first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), is a popular reprint and best-seller among works of this nature. Ole Edvart Rölvaag (1876-1931) left a fishing career in Norway to come to America when he was twenty years old. Almost penniless when he arrived in the Northwest, it was only after many tribulations that he finally was given a professorship at St. Olaf College, at Northfield, where he taught until his death. In Giants in the Earth, he presented the physical and spiritual experiences of pioneering with such truthfulness and sympathetic beauty that the novel's permanence in American literature seems assured. Published originally in Norway, where it was widely praised, when rendered into English it met with almost phenomenal success, and was acclaimed immediately by some critics as the "most powerful novel that has ever been written about pioneer life in America." Although Rölvaag's succeeding novels never achieved the simple but profound greatness of this first work, they demonstrated again his integrity and craftsmanship. Sinclair Lewis, native son of Minnesota, has been regarded with mixed emotions by many of his fellow Minnesotans. Indeed it was not until the Swedish Academy had awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1930 that their full approval was bestowed upon him. Local pride was outraged by the ruthless manner with which in Main Street he stripped Minnesota small town life of any suggestion of charm and romance. But in 1920, young Americans, suffering from the disillusionment and frustration of the war and sick of pretty phrase-making, found in Main Street a satisfying and exciting expression of many of their feelings. Its incisive, almost reportorial realism struck a new note in American literature. Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, and Theodore Dreiser, it is true, already had awakened an appreciation of realistic writing, but they were enjoyed only by the discerning. Lewis' success was due not only to the fearless expression of his penetrating insight, but to his seemingly artless power of arousing, in critical and uncritical alike, immediate recognition of his portraits and their backgrounds. His influence was soon reflected in the books of dozens of young writers and continued to expand with each new novel he issued until about 1930. He lists among his accomplishments 16 novels, 6 of them best-sellers. Translated into foreign languages they brought him international fame. If in common with other prophets Lewis has had to wait for full appreciation from his own townsmen, few will be found now who will deny to the red-headed young rebel Sauk Center once knew as "Doodle," the credit of having become, with Dreiser, the primary liberating force of the writers of his day. Minnesota has made at least three outstanding contributions to America's music and has nurtured several concert artists and composers of distinction. Among the concert artists are Eunice Norton, distinguished pianist born in Minneapolis, and the two Metropolitan Opera singers, Florence Macbeth born in Mankato, and Olive Fremstad brought from Sweden at the age of six to Minnesota where she made her first public appearances. Of its composers three warrant special mention: Dr. John J. Becker, whose modern compositions have been played and approved both in New York and Europe; Donald N. Ferguson, the classicist; and Stanley Avery, who, between his distinguished organ recitals, has composed scores played by several leading orchestras. The brilliant and comprehensive study of Indian music (Chippewa and Sioux) made by Frances Densmore for the Smithsonian Institution; the interpretive work of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; and the revival and adaptation of medieval church music by F. Melius Christiansen, leader and inspirer of the famed choir at the College of St. Olaf, Northfield, are the State's major contributions to American music. Miss Densmore, who was born and still resides in Red Wing, Minnesota, spent many months on Indian reservations analyzing and recording the music which is still, as it has always been, one of the greatest pleasures of the Chippewa tribe, and their only art that retains, unchanged, its primitive form. According to Miss Densmore's observations, rhythm--the dominant element in every Chippewa song--is unaltered by the singer, although he may and frequently does vary the words as he sees fit. The instruments used are the drum, the rattle, and the flute, the latter reserved wholly for love songs. Drum and voice are given independent expressions seldom sounded simultaneously, and it is the accent of the former that determines the nature of the rhythm. Songs are usually of accomplishment rather than of yearning or self-expression, and are sung over and over for several hours. The singer does not move the lips, but creates the tone by the contraction of throat muscles. Minute gradations smaller than a semitone are commonly used. The descending interval of the minor third occurs with special prominence and frequency. The inception of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra dates back to the nineties, when Emil Oberhoffer, a talented music-loving German, organized the Philharmonic Club from a local chorus of mixed voices and a small string orchestra. The club's concerts grew steadily in popularity, but as more ambitious programs were undertaken, Oberhoffer felt increasingly the need of skilled and professional players other than the community could provide. He interested a group of businessmen, who, in 1903, formed the Minneapolis Orchestral Association and guaranteed financial support of a 40-piece orchestra for five years. E. L. Carpenter was chosen president and has not only continued in this office but remains its outstanding patron. Oberhoffer conducted the orchestra until 1922, when he resigned to go to California, where he repeated his Minneapolis successes. By that year the orchestra had grown to 80 players, many internationally known, and in its previous season had given 115 concerts. Henri Verbrugghen (1873-1934), who followed Oberhoffer as conductor, was a scholarly and talented Belgian violinist, widely known in Europe, Australia, and America. Under his direction the orchestra won for itself a place among the country's best orchestras and visited more than 300 cities. During Verbrugghen's regime the Orchestral Association and the University of Minnesota completed an unusual arrangement whereby the latter accepted sponsorship and offered its auditorium, with a seating capacity of 5,000, for the permanent housing of the orchestra. This affiliation has been of mutual benefit. The university remains entirely free from financial obligation, receives reduced rates for students and staff, and has at its disposal the association's valuable music library, while the orchestra has the advantages of close co-operation with the university's musical department and an appreciable reduction in its overhead expenses. Since 1930 all symphony concerts have been held on the campus. When Verbrugghen's health failed after seven years of conducting, he was succeeded (in the fall of 1931) by the young Hungarian, Eugene Ormandy, whose personality and greatly diversified programs aroused new enthusiasm and interest. In 1936 he resigned to conduct the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and his place was taken by Dimitri Mitropoulos, a Greek conductor, whom the critic Olin Downes and the distinguished Boston conductor Koussevitsky have declared to be one of the world's outstanding conductors. The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra has grown from a group of 40 amateur musicians to one composed of 100 trained artists. Its contribution to the enjoyment and cultural development of this midwestern State has been made possible through the talent of foreign-born artists and the financial support of American businessmen. It is not surprising that Minnesota with its predominance of Lutheran churches should be the home of some of the finest a capella choirs in the country, since Lutherans from the sixteenth century have regarded choir singing as essential to their ritual. One of the most distinguished of these choirs is at Glenwood, and its Bach recitals have become well known throughout the Midwest. The Bach choir at the State university is also worthy of special note. The a capella choir at the College of St. Olaf, at Northfield, is the only one of its type in America. It owes its renown to the genius of its conductor, F. Melius Christiansen, who was born in Norway in 1871, came to America at the age of 17, and joined the St. Olaf faculty in 1903. From approximately 300 students--most of them children of Scandinavian farmers--Christiansen chooses 60 boys and girls, of whom about one-third are lost each year by graduation. By means of rigid discipline and his own fervor, he trains them to sing, in perfect pitch and tone, the most difficult and austere church music, unaided by either notes or accompaniment. The choir has made two concert tours to northern Europe where it was received with the same enthusiastic praise it has invariably met in American cities. Dr. Christiansen had achieved world recognition for his adaptations of sixteenth and seventeenth century church music, and today there are few sacred choral programs that do not include one or more of his compositions. As Lutheran music is based largely on Bach, so is that of the Roman Catholic Church on Palestrina. Opportunity to hear this early Catholic music is offered at intervals at St. John's Abbey, at Collegeville (see Tour 9), which, through the efforts of the Benedictine fathers, has become a recognized center of the liturgical movement.
Minnesota had become accustomed to the conventional and formal styles of painting, and thus early in the present century few were prepared to appreciate a group of young men and women who painted with new vigor and independence. Like the writers, these artists were through with mere prettiness. Shocked comment and sharp criticism did not deter them. True they made few sales, but they were used to that, and they were thoroughly enjoying themselves as they plunged into a succession of lively experiments. The lithographs of the witty Adolph Dehn derided Main Street as ruthlessly as did the works of Sinclair Lewis. Wanda Gag added a sprightly note of fantasy in her woodcuts. Both artists have been unsparing with their social comments. Many others found subject matter for brilliant realistic compositions in Minnesota villages, grain elevators, silos, mining towns, and stretches of concrete road. Theodore Haupt, Elizabeth Olds Clement Haupers, Dewey Albinson, Erle Loran, Cameron Booth, Frances Greenman, and others became familiar names to New York dealers, and the interest of those who follow art trends turned to the Northwest. The American Magazine of Art, reviewing the State's contribution, in 1934, remarked: "We are led to suspect that perhaps Minnesota, despite all the troubles of the day, is finding herself the possessor of a genuine tradition." A comparison of Minnesota painting today with that of older groups leaves the feeling that here is a quality of breeziness and a solid rejection of outworn conventions that promises much for the future. Many signs point to a correspondingly active interest in the world of art on the part of Minnesotans generally. The annual exhibitions by Twin Cities artists in the Minneapolis Institute of Art are viewed by thousands; State Fair galleries in which annually hundreds of local canvases are shown, together with traveling collections of famous paintings by European and American artists, attract the largest crowds at the fair. Private and public galleries are visited by increasing numbers, and the art work of the Federal agencies has been supported enthusiastically. Minnesota's early sculpture, architectural or detached, was for the most part commissioned, and unfortunately offers little to excite the imagination. Like the State's earlier painters, its sculptors almost invariably have been craftsmen of sound technique. Their work, with the possible exception of Paul Manship's, belongs to the academic school. The most prolific was Jacob Fjelde, who designed several bronze portrait figures which have been placed in Twin City parks and public buildings. Fjelde emigrated from Norway to Minnesota in the late nineteenth century. He had studied in both Italy and his own homeland. His bust of Henrik Ibsen at Como Park, St. Paul, was modeled from life, and its replica has been placed in Bergen, Norway. Other works include the somewhat idealized bronze of Ole Bull, the violinist, and the Reading Woman figure at the Minneapolis Library entrance. Fjelde's romantically treated Hiawatha and Minnehaha group, placed on a stony island a short way above Minnehaha Falls, is enjoyed by the many lovers of the Longfellow idyl. His commissions included many portrait busts, and the 24 spandrel figures representing the arts and sciences on the old library building of the State university. His son, Paul Fjelde, also a sculptor, is at work in the State on commissions for busts and memorial plaques. Paul Manship, formerly of St. Paul, is Minnesota's best-known sculptor. Many consider him a distinguished exponent of an archaic but highly stylized art; other critics hold that he is really an adroit emulator of the later Hellenic and Italian Renaissance artists. The cleverness with which he echoes the graces of Olympia and Pompeii is beautifully illustrated in Playfulness, the figure of a woman and child in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Spring Awakening, in the St. Paul Institute of Science Museum, is delicate and charming. His bronze fountain group, Indian Hunter, at Summit and Western Aves., is another embodiment of the decorative conventions he loves. Manship's free archaistic style has gained for him enormous prestige with architects, and may influence American sculpture in this generation as definitely as French's realism did in the last.
Most eminent in the realm of academic sculpture is the work of Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), New Hampshire artist, whose figures in the attic and dome of the State Capitol are marked by dignity and simplicity of line. French is remembered as a facile craftsman, who tended to sentimentalize the human figure. A Minnesota sculptor whose work is not represented in the State is James Earle Fraser, of Winona. His fame rests chiefly on his well-known equestrian statue, The End of the Trail (purchased by San Francisco), memorials and figures for Government buildings in Washington, and the Indian head chosen for the buffalo nickel. Today Minnesota is experiencing a more spontaneous and widespread desire for art expression and appreciation than ever before. Its pioneer crudities are outgrown, and its New England heritage has been enriched by later European ideas.    
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