Works Progress Administration: Federal Music Project

President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) aimed to employ millions of workers after the financial crash of 1929. While most of these jobs were devoted to building infrastructure, the program also employed Americans in the visual and performing arts. One of these branches, The Federal Music Project (FMP), employed musicians to perform at free or low cost public performances, create original compositions and provide music instruction for adults and children. To further cultivate public appreciation for music, these performing groups were recorded on transcription discs, which were distributed to hundreds of radio stations across America. In between performances, an announcer attempts to garner the public’s support for the work of the WPA.

“The American people want freedom and a plan to democracy. They said so, unequivocally at the polls. Behind them were years of depression, and ahead, similar years if they choose to abandon a working plan of common sense relief. Their choice proved to a world, pawning its future to war that America is a lone oasis of intelligence. Depression as a force, hasn't yet used up its strength. Harder than ever it drives the military machines of other nations to provide work for their jobless. We call WPA a work relief program, but it is really far more than that. It is a new mold for democracy. A better concept of representative government.” Los Angeles Colored Chorus, Program No. 23

The WPA sponsored many New York City-based music groups who performed regularly on WNYC during the Depression, including the WNYC Concert 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. 

Publisher image The Works Progress Administration and the National Youth Administration helped keep WNYC’s airwaves lively. Here, Eleanor Saunders sings with the NYA Orchestra, February 9, 1939. (Photo courtesy of Steve Haimowitz)

In fact, in 1936, about half of WNYC's broadcast hours were underwritten by the Federal Music Project (FMP), with an average month accounting for 135 broadcasts. 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 Programs 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 dealt with the fundamentals of composition, were broadcast by WNYC and attracted wide attention with an added enrollment of more than 1,300 active participants who received mimeographed copies of the lessons so that their study could be continued at home.

That same year WNYC's World's Fair studio played host to a Composers' Forum concert and a composers roundtable. 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.