Constellation Similarity Assertions

Ethel Burns (ca. 1908-1998, born Ethel Feingold) grew up in Brooklyn, the child of Russian immigrants. She studied piano and graduated from the Juilliard School and Columbia University. She began teaching music at Boys High School in Williamsburg in 1938. There, she formed the Melody Men, a racially integrated chorus that performed around New York City and the Catskills. Following a brief marriage to another teacher named Bernstein, she took a shortened version of that name.

In 1950, Burns took a job at WNYE, the radio/television station of the city's Board of Education, where she co-created a radio show about music for grade schoolers called It's Fun To Sing. She produced several other programs for the station before moving to WCBS in 1959. There, she co-created the television program American Musical Theatre. The show featured performers, writers and directors from the Broadway, opera and ballet worlds discussing and performing their art before an audience of students. An early form of public television, the show's guests included Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Richard Rodgers, Harry Belafonte, Richard Burton, Sammy Davis Jr., Marc Blitzstein, Edward Villella, Abe Burrows, Sally Anne Howes, Stephen Sondheim, Roberta Peters, Shirley Verrett, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. The weekly half-hour program, which ran for six years, won three Emmy Awards and was also broadcast in Australia, Japan, England and Canada.

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