Music Critic Scores Forster's Views As Symposium Enters Final Phase

The three-day "Symposium on Music Criticism" moved well past the half-way mark with its two meetings yesterday, as the morning's trio of speeches brought up specific problems in music and led to a brisk discussion session in the afternoon.

Martha Graham's dance recital this evening in the Cambridge High and Latin School's auditorium will conclude the meeting, while the final speaking session will take place at 10:30 o'clock in the morning. Highlight of Miss Graham's performance will be William Schuman's new piece, "Night Journey."

Sharply diverging from the views expressed by E. M. Forster, British novelist and critic, in Thursday's opening meeting, Professor Edgar Wind of Smith College suggested that a split between the critical and creative states of mind is not between men, but within the individual.

Wind's speech brought a question from Forster in the discussion session, asking if the critic should primarily make an "aesthetic analysis," and secondarily a "judgement of the artist's responsibility" and aims, or vice versa.

Wind Holds Fast

According to Wind, the two cannot be separated, as the aim of the artist is part and parcel of his aesthetic means.

In the two succeeding speeches, Olga Samaroff, musical educator, critic, and pianist, looked at criticism from the point of view of the performer, while Virgil Thomson, the New York Herald-Tribune's critic, did "The Art of Judging Music."

Miss Samaroff suggested means by which musical life in America could be decentralized and the performer enabled to depend less on the view of New York critics, while Thomson analyzed the processes by which a critic works.