That sweete accorde is seldome seene.

-Sir Thomas Wyatt.

From a sketch by E. H. Garrett.

Pierce Building, South Corner of Copley Square, Opposite the Public Library
Home of the School of Expression

Offices and Studios Occupy Almost the Entire Third Floor (Elevator)

Boston 17

AUTUMN CALENDAR 1921

REGULAR TERM, registration for

Wednesday, October 5, 9 a. m.

REGULAR TERM, begins.....Thursday, October 6, 9 a. m.

Holiday, Christmas Recess, begins...... Friday, December 23

OFFICE HOURS

President: 8 a. m. to 9 a. m.

Dean: 9 a. m. to 5 p. m.

Director Evening Classes: 12 m. to 1 p. m.; 6 p. m. to 7 p. m.

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday

Office: 301 Pierce Building, 12 Huntington Avenue

Telephone: Back Bay 3635

S. S. CURRY, Ph. D., Litt. D., President

ANNA BARIGHT CURRY, Dean

Pierce Building, Copley Square, Boston, Mass.

GREETING

The School of Expression extends greetings to its students, graduates and friends, wherever they may be and wishes them all happiness and success in their undertakings during the coming year. To the graduates of last year who are now entering upon their new duties as teachers of Expression in various schools and colleges of the country, as readers and interpreters of literature and dramatic art, we say: Hold fast your ideals and the great principles of your art. Remember you are the authorized representatives of the School of Expression and that you hold its reputation in your keeping. By your work we shall be judged.

To the hundreds of students who have attended our Summer Terms, held this year in five different states, and to the many devoted friends who have helped to make the terms successful, we wish to express our keen appreciation of their interest and good will. Your presence and your evident joy in your work have been an inspiration to us and we are glad to believe that you feel the same about ours.

To the incoming and returning students we say: Welcome! Let us work together to make the coming year the best we have ever had.

THE REGULAR SESSION

For after all is said and done it must be remembered that the real work of the School of Expression is done in the Regular Session which begins the first of October and ends the middle of May. Each year, in addition to the regular routine work, we offer a number of selected subjects which vary from year to year. This year the choice is especially rich. We are offering several new subjects and others which will be taken up from a new point of view. Each year we try to improve on the work of the previous year, to do something better than we have ever done before. At the School of Expression no subject is ever finished and complete. The road is always opening out into new and fascinating vistas.

SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH

Spoken and Written English will be co-ordinated in a course in Public Speaking and Writing. It is hoped by this means to carry over into the writing of English some of the freshness and spontaneity which characterizes the expression of thought in Spoken English. It is said that Robert Louis Stevenson composed aloud, walking up and down. Oratory was a well established art in Greece long before there were any written records of it. And so we at the School of Expression are merely going back to first principles when we try to stimulate written expression through vocal expression.

The work in Public Speaking is progressive throughout the entire course and is co-ordinated with the work in Literature and Vocal Expression. The students speak on subjects they are studying and on matters which interest them. The approach is through "conversations" and informal discussions, storytelling, "talks" before the class, leading on to constructive thinking in speaking and writing, extemporaneous speaking, descriptive and story writing, newspaper writing, and journalism. The student meanwhile gaining in confidence and ease, in fluency and power.

A course in Business English, Spoken and Written, will be given on Saturday afternoons and in the Evening Classes. This is a new course with us and is introduced especially to meet the needs of young business men and women.

DRAMATICS

There is every reason to believe that the dramatic successes achieved by the School last year will be duplicated during the coming season. Shakespearean studies, studies in farce, for freeing personality, in poetic drama, contemporary drama, musical comedy and the presentation of plays and scenes at Studio recitals and before outside audiences will be continued. In addition studies will be made this year in early English drama and in nineteenth century epic drama. Wagner's "Parsifal" will be studied under the direction of the Dean with musical interpretations by the Music department.

A new course in Dramatic Criticism of Histrionic Expression will also be given by the Dean.

In order to meet the needs of professional workers in the Motion Picture industry, certain additional work in construc

tive thinking in Literature and Pantomime will be given in the regular school course.

The plays which we gave last year at the Girls' City Club, at Settlement houses, before the American Legion, the Somerville Improvement Association and similar organizations, were good experience. People express surprise that the School of Expression can produce plays so rapidly and with such ease and finish. Of course, the plays are not finished products; they are sketches, studies "in one sitting," so to speak, and they are marked by the freshness and spontaneity which belong to the sketch and constitute its chief charm. Speed is an essential element in the training of our plays, but the lines are always learned and the action goes off with spirit.

It is interesting to learn that the University of California* in its plays given in the great Wheeler Auditorium has adopted our plan of indicating the end of a scene by turning off the lights rather than by dropping the curtain. And for the same reason -because it hasn't any curtain. Like us, too, they have "no proscenium arch, no back stage, no means of lighting in the conventional manner.' Like us, too, "they have secured the co-operation of their audience" in overcoming these apparent handicaps. The School of Expression has operated this kind of a stage in its studio recitals for twenty years with excellent results.

THE CREATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE

Knowledge of literature, in the School of Expression, is tested through vocal expression. Assimilation rather than information is the aim of the work. Literature is studied as a revelation of life-the life of the individual and of the race. The various forms of literary expression are studied in connection with the work in Vocal Expression throughout the course. Each year a particular historic epoch is selected for special study. A cross-section of life is laid open, as it were, and a large part of the School work is brought to bear synthetically on the period, its life, its literature and its art.

This year the Fourteenth Century, with its background of the Middle Ages, is the particular epoch selected for study. No period of literary production is more significant for the student of modern literature than the period from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries for it is here one must look for the

*("The Theatre without a Stage," by Irving Pichel, Theatre Arts Magazine, July, 1921.)