The Council elects Eldon Rosen an Associate

From the minutes of the Council of Associates, Saturday 17 March 1979, transcribed from the Archive.

The Council met in the Salon at three o’clock to consider the piece submitted by Eldon Rosen, maker, proposed as an Associate by the eldest Associate, the Master of the Atelier and Hesper Rosen.

The piece is a walnut cabinet on turned feet, with a slatted grille and a single dial of twelve registers, from Repose to Resolve. Mr. Rosen explained that the cabinet plays a low tone which cannot be heard as a tone, and that a person seated beside it for some minutes comes to feel as the register describes. He asked the Associates to sit with it for twenty minutes, at a register of his choosing which he would not name, and then to say what they felt.

Thirty-four of the thirty-six Associates present wrote the word calm or a word like it. Two wrote that they had fallen asleep, which Mr. Rosen said was the second register and not the first. The Master asked whether the cabinet could be set to make a person feel anything they did not wish to feel. Mr. Rosen replied that it could not, and that if it could he would not have brought it.

The Council elected Mr. Rosen an Associate without dissent. On the proposal of the President, the cabinet is to be tuned in the small paneled room off the Salon, known since 1911 as the Penfield Room, after the cabinetmaker who paneled it.