Beware of Pretty Chords

Back in 1942, several Negro G.I.s at Fort Dix were bored with the kind of entertainment the Army put on for them and decided to make some of their own. The idea was catchy. Before long, they swelled from a quartet to an octet, then to a chorus of 16. By the time Lieut. Leonard de Paur joined the regiment in Arizona, the 372nd Infantry's Glee Club had 55 members, were singing war songs and Negro spirituals with a fair amount of polish, and the Army finally put them on special duty, to do nothing but sing.

Before war's end, the chorus, traveling in their own C-54, gave nearly 1,500 concerts for U.S. troops throughout the Pacific. After V-J day, they decided to stay together as civilians. Last week they gave their first Carnegie Hall concert in Manhattan.

Cut down to 35 members, dressed in smart gabardine battle-jacket uniforms (they call them "costumes" now), de Paur's Infantry Chorus whisked expertly through a diverse program from 16th Century Palestrina to U.S. contemporary Composer Paul Creston, who has arranged works especially for them. Critics gave them good marks for diction, blending of voices and clarity of line, and for a welcome versatility of material which the Don Cossack choruses lack. Wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson: "[This choir] could, without half trying, raise the whole level of our current taste in semi-popular music. It is that good." Columbia Concerts, Inc., which thought so too, has signed the boys to a 140-concert tour of the U.S. and Canada.

Their leader, Leonard de Paur, 34, is a stocky, scholarly looking Negro who, at 18, toured Loew's circuit clutching a battered straw hat and singing Ol' Man River. A friend introduced him to Hall Johnson, who had just scored his Green Pastures success. De Paur got most of his choral training as a singer and assistant conductor of the Hall Johnson Choir before the war.

Training his infantry chorus (whose average age is 28), de Paur strives first to get them in the mood of what the song is about. Says he: "When we sing a Cossack song, we're as near to being Cossacks as we can get; when we sing the Jewish chant Eli Eli, we're as close to being Jews with their whole history of oppression and religious faith as is possible for us." Sometimes the harmony gets too close, and de Paur admits it. "I may go overboard a bit. Lord knows I deplore that homogenized effect as much as anybody--but I just can't resist a pretty chord."

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