Girl Trail Rider To Play "Broncho" Organ on 4-Day T

 

BANFF, Alta., July 23 -- Miss Edmee Moore, a young lady born and raised in this capital of the Canadian Rockies, has just taken on a formidable job of musical broncho-busting in connection with the annual four-day trail ride of the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies. It's going to be a tough job (and well does Edmee know it!) but she hopes her experience with refractory animals will pull her through. The expedition, made up of bankers, cowboys, professors, engineers, Indian guides, magnates and other lovers of the trail, starts from Banff July 29. Its objective this time is Mt. Assiniboine -- the Matterhorn of the Canadian Rockies. At the end of each day in the saddle the Trail Riders dismount, pitch their tents, and gather after supper round a roaring logfire for some music. A Wheezy, rheumatic portable organ has always led the singing, and in recent years these out-of-doors men and women have been guarding jealously the sad imperfections of the instrument. In fact they have sternly resisted every effort to have it repaired. As a result the battered little organ, carried by a proud packhorse, has stead becoming harder and harder to control. Some of its stops do not respond, some give a surprisingly delayed response, some of its reeds need tuning, and each pedal has quirks of its own. Last year this fractious instrument was surpassingly played (to admiring applause) by a master musician, Harold Eustace Key, Montreal's composer, organist, and conductor. Edmee was along on that trip and studied Mr. Key's technique, so that now she hopes to come within coughing distance of his all-time record for speed and control. More than this she will not claim. But her father, who is Col. Phil A Moore, president of the Trail Riders' organization, is more cheerful. He and his daughter, in the course of their recent world cruise aboard the liner "Empress of Britain," heard a great deal of native music in Algiers, Cairo, Bombay, Bankok [sic], Shanghai and elsewhere. "Yes," says Colonel Phil, "we heard a lifetime of native music in just a few months and I can only judge its merits in a comparative way. If our Trail Ride organ is allowed to continue its blessed state of disrepair, it will eventually discourse music fully as sweet but hardly as sour as that played by natives in the Orient. When our organ reaches that status we shall make an extra charge for the ride. Such a charge will cover the super-native music of the organ -- music any traveler must pay to hear while in the Orient. As it is, the Trail Riders are getting a break; and most of them know it too, or they wouldn't be coming back year after year. I think it will be a few seasons more before that organ can attain the desired heights. Still, you never can tell. And I have great faith in Edmee's power over that little musical burro."