Deems Taylor: Selected Writings

Deems Taylor: Selected Writings

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Deems Taylor at his Hollow Hill home, Stamford, Connecticut, in 1930. (Courtesy of Michael W. Davis.)

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Deems Taylor: Selected Writings

Selected and Annotated by

James A. Pegolotti

New York London

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Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97957‑3 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Taylor, Deems, 1885‑1966. [Literary works. Selections] Deems Taylor, selected writings / [compiled and annotated by] James A. Pegolotti. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978‑0‑415‑97957‑3 1. Music‑‑History and criticism. I. Pegolotti, James A. II. Title. ML60.T296 2007 780‑‑dc22

2006038666

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge.com

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To the Memory of Joan Kennedy Taylor

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

Chapter 1 Poems, 1911–1919

1

Chapter 2 New York Sunday Tribune Magazine Articles and Some Others, 1914–1919

9

Chapter 3 New York World Music Criticisms, 1921–1925

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41

Chapter 4 Vanity Fair Articles, 1927–1929

101

Intermission — An American in Paris

121

Chapter 5 New York American “Words and Music” Columns, 1931–1932

125

Chapter 6 Chapters from Taylor’s Books: Of Men and Music (1937), The Well-Tempered Listener (1940), and Music to My Ears (1949); Several New York Philharmonic Intermission Talk Scripts; and His Final Article (1959)

143

Bibliography

221

Index

223

vii

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Acknowledgments

The germ of the idea for this book happened sometime while I was researching and writing Deems Taylor: A Biography. As I read Taylor’s poems, articles, and reviews, which were in the Deems Taylor Papers at Yale University’s Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, I became immensely impressed by his talent for writing. After completing the biography, I saw the value of assembling some of Taylor’s writings into a book. I am most grateful to the late Joan Kennedy Taylor, Deems Taylor’s daughter and a writer herself, who encouraged me to pursue the idea, and to Electra Yourke, daughter of Nicholas Slonimsky, who pointed me in the direction of Routledge Press. If it were not for the ever-helpful staff of the Yale Music Library and the Deems Taylor Papers, this book could not have been written. Librarians Kendall Crilly and Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy always found time to talk about the project and their interest always encouraged me. My deepest gratitude of all goes to Richard Boursy, the library’s archivist and cataloger of the Deems Taylor Papers. His enthusiasm for the project sprang from his deep appreciation of Taylor’s writing talents. His suggestions to me as to which of the hundreds of articles, reviews, and chapters from Taylor’s books to choose for this book always came along with helpful comments. Because of his wide musical knowledge, he often saw an unusual twist on some of the subjects that Taylor wrote about. Many of his insights have worked their way into this volume to help the reader gain a sense of the times in which Taylor wrote. Many thanks, Richard.

ix

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  •  Acknowledgments

Suggestions also were gratefully received from Western Connecticut State University compatriots Edwin Rosenberg, Howard Tuvelle, Doris Yocum, and Kathleen McGrory. Throughout the completion of the manuscript, my longtime companion Steve Sosin saw to it that there was life beyond Deems Taylor. The author gratefully acknowledges the following permissions: Michael Cook, literary executor of the Deems Taylor estate, for the use of the copyrighted materials of Deems Taylor Michael W. Davis, for the use of the Deems Taylor photographs Hearst Corporation for articles from the New York American E. W. Scripps Company for articles from the New York World The New York Philharmonic for the use of the Deems Taylor program note for George Gershwin’s An American in Paris

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Preface

For much of the first half of the 20th century, Deems Taylor (1885–1966) was a name recognized by millions of Americans because of the multitude of his talents: composer, speaker, author, critic, translator, and editor. Just consider what two of these talents — composer and speaker — achieved for Taylor. As a composer, he was the first ever to be given a commission by the Metropolitan Opera, resulting in The King’s Henchman (1927), with a libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Its success over three seasons of performances was so great that a second commission followed. For Peter Ibbetson (1931) Taylor wrote both the music and libretto, this second opera achieving even a greater success with four seasons of performances. As a speaker, Taylor’s fame came from his commentaries on radio for a variety of concerts throughout the 1930s and 1940s, leading to his selection by Walt Disney to be the on-screen host in the 1940 animated classic Fantasia. Of all Taylor’s gifts, the one that flowed earliest and longest was writing; it began in his college days at New York University and continued to his final years. He developed a style that combined wit and cleverness in a crisp, uncluttered manner, shaped no doubt by his membership in that famed 1920s literary salon, the Algonquin Round Table, and his close friendship with three of its principals: Franklin P. Adams, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley. His first publications were humorous poems in newspapers and literary magazines, so-called vers de société, much favored in the early 20th century. Here, as a sample, are the first two verses of “A Plaint” (Life, Oct. 26, 1911):

xi

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xii  •  Preface

I do not like these poets who Can think of nothing else to do But, when they need a rhyme in “o,” To stick in — “as you all may know.” Sometimes they try a plan that’s worse, And, striving for a rhyme, reverse The order of a sentence: “MadLy run he to the rescue had.” The muse of music also summoned Taylor in his college years, and he chose Oscar Coon, a well-respected musician and arranger, to be his teacher for several months of instruction in music theory and composition. Years later, he memorialized his mentor in “Guide, Philosopher,” a chapter of his book Of Men and Music: … He subsisted, so far as I was ever able to discover, on Scotch whiskey and bananas exclusively. How long this diet had been going on, I don’t know. He was born in 1833, and should have died of dyspepsia about 1870. On the contrary, when I first knew him he was seventyfive and grumbling over the fact that he might have to go back to Oswego and take care of his two older sisters, who seemed to think that they ought to have a man in the house. He wore his white hair rather long, and wore a flowing white beard and mustaches, which gave him the appearance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. If King Lear told the stories that my music teacher did, and swore the way he did, he was a far more fascinating character than Shakespeare has allowed us to discover…. By the beginning of World War I, Taylor was writing articles for magazines and features for the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, which he co-edited with Robert Benchley. In 1916, while the war raged in Europe, he went to France to see the conflict at close quarters, and sent back his perceptions to the Tribune, as well as to other publications. This excerpt is from “Three Poor Devils,” Taylor’s account of visiting a French hospital where injured soldiers were cared for (New Republic, Jan. 6, 1917): … We had reached another bed. No paralytic, this, for he was sitting up, dressed in his uniform, the faded coat unbuttoned at the throat, and wearing a pair of shabby black bedroom slippers. He heard us coming and turned his head; and I saw that he was blind. The halfclosed right eye was dull and sunken, while the drooping left eyelid protruded, swollen and purplish, as though the eyeball beneath was trying to force its way out of the socket. “One of my best patients,” said the nurse. “Bon jour, Grangeon! …

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Preface  •  xiii

From 1921 to 1925 Taylor became the music critic for the New York World, a Pulitzer paper. Among his reviews are those of memorable first performances, such as “Jeritza Triumphs in Korngold Opera ‘Die Tote Stadt’ (New York World, Nov. 20, 1921),” the debut of Czech soprano Maria Jeritza at the Metropolitan Opera. Suppose we abandon as hopeless all attempts to begin this review without mixing metaphors and start bravely by announcing that on Saturday afternoon, about twenty-five minutes to three, a blond thunderbolt swept out upon the stage of the Metropolitan like a flash of sunlight and caroled her way stormily into the hearts of the audience…. The review of Paul Whiteman’s concert premiering Rhapsody in Blue was covered in “Mr. Whiteman Experiments” (New York World, Feb. 13, 1924): … Just before the closing number, a brilliant adaptation of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” George Gershwin played a “Rhapsody in Blue” of his own composition for piano and jazz orchestra. In a way this was the most interesting offering of the afternoon, for it was an experiment in treating the jazz instrumental and thematic idiom seriously, and it was by no means an unsuccessful one…. Often, Taylor reached outside the music world to bring the music lover some unusual speculations, as in “At the Metropolitan” (New York World, Feb. 28, 1924): One wonders sometimes whether Prof. Einstein hit upon his theory of relativity while attending an operatic performance. For at the opera, as nowhere else — except possibly at the dentist’s — one realizes that time is only relative, that the actual duration of an event has little to do with its apparent length…. As commercial radio emerged in the late 1920s, listeners often heard Taylor’s unusually pleasant and lucid voice provide commentary for programs of symphonic or operatic music, programs that then were always live broadcasts. Most successful were his intermission talks for the New York Philharmonic Sunday afternoon concerts from 1936 to 1943, heard by millions every week. He would assemble many of these talks into three highly successful books: Of Men and Music, The Well-Tempered Listener, and Music to My Ears. One of his intermission talks became his most famous piece of writing. Entitled “The Monster,” and the first chapter of Of Men and Music, it described in sharp, pungent phrases the personality and driving force of Richard Wagner, Taylor’s favorite composer.

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xiv  •  Preface

… He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace…. In his final years, Taylor gained a unique place in musical literary history as the first composer to ever write a feature article for Sports Illustrated. (The complete text of each of the Taylor writings mentioned in this preface will be found in this book.) A year after Taylor’s death, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), for whom Taylor had served as president from 1942–1948, chose to provide annual awards in his name to honor authors who best presented aspects of the world of music to the reader in articles and books. ASCAP was right to honor Taylor’s writing talent, for he wrote with an attractive style and a dexterity of words that usually left the reader with something to think about. Many of his works were about the composers and performers of concert music, as well as the direction such music was taking. Taylor was not a fan of the music written by so-called modernist composers, music which to him was often tuneless and dissonant. Still, he knew that musical structure and tastes inevitably change and he urged people to be patient and listen to new works (“The Tolerant Ear II,” in Of Men and Music). … It is important and only fair, as I said before, to give this new music a hearing. Let us assume that you have done so; and the next time we meet you say, “All right, I listened, as you suggested, and I still say it’s nothing but ugliness and noise.” That is exactly why I suggested that you make it a point to hear a piece of new music at least twice before you make up your mind about it. Your first impression is only a reaction; and a reaction is not an opinion…. During that fascinating American period between the two world wars, he often wrote on subjects far beyond music. This diversity was especially true in his thrice-weekly articles for the New York American in 1931 and 1932. It was the time of the Great Depression, and one day he wrote of visiting the jobless and homeless being fed daily from a lunch truck in Times Square. Another time he postulated that heavyweight boxer Gene Tunney, who retired undefeated in 1928, did boxing a favor by showing that brains (he had spoken to a Yale literature class about Shakespeare) and brawn (he defeated champion Jack Dempsey twice) could co-exist in

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Preface  •  xv

one man. Then, in a piece that would prove to be among Taylor’s cleverest works, he facetiously puzzled over who could possibly have nominated him for membership in the National Geographic Society, and why he should pay dues of $3.00 even before his acceptance as a member. Even the “1930 Annual Report of the Police Department of the City of New York” proved an amusing subject for Taylor as he interpreted a variety of crime statistics (New York American, May 8, 1931). … The report of the Crime Prevention Bureau, for instance, is not all statistics. It gets down to Typical Cases, some of which are pathetic, some of which are more or less diverting. There you may read of Peter, aged 12, who visited the office (the cad!) to complain of having been shot by a girl friend with an air-rifle; and what steps were taken to persuade the infant gun-woman to abandon her career…. Deems Taylor was a delightful and insightful commentator, not only about music but on many other subjects that still have relevance. In the hope of providing the reader with a better sense of Taylor himself, as well as his place and time, I have written brief introductions to each of the chapters, and even shorter ones for the individual pieces. Here in this book are some of his best writings, an opportunity for the reader to rediscover an American writer with an engaging view of life. Note: The transliteration of Slavic and German words has changed over the years. For example, in many of the earlier Taylor writings (1920s and 1930s) Tchaikovsky was spelled Chaikovski (and a few other variations) and Handel spelled Haendel. The actual spellings used by Taylor are utilized. James Pegolotti Bluffton, South Carolina

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Chapter

1

Poems, 1911–1919

Introduction Deems Taylor’s poems were his first published works, helped into print by the arrival in New York of Franklin Pierce Adams from Chicago in 1904. Adams, later known simply as F.P.A., came to the New York Evening Mail to write a column of genial chatter about the worlds of literature, theater, and music, as well as his own experiences ranging from play-going to girl friends to tennis. The column, “Always in Good Humor,” became a “must” to be read by the literary crowd or anyone with literary pretensions, usually over breakfast coffee. As one writer put it, Adams came to New York “to teach it the eternal lesson that all towns are small towns and personal gossip is always more interesting than economics.” F.P.A. himself wrote light verse and he welcomed his readers to send him such vers de société, selecting the best ones to help fill his daily column. Young submitters such as George F. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were among those whose poems F.P.A. selected, thus helping their budding careers. A Taylor poem first appeared in F.P.A.’s column in 1906, during his senior year at New York University, which was also the year he wrote the music for the annual NYU varsity show. The show’s success led to his being called back to compose the music for three succeeding varsity shows. Though the 1909 show, The Echo, was bought by famed producer Charles Dillingham for a Broadway production, Taylor’s dream of Broadway fame lasted briefly because the musical had only a short run. A bit dejected, Taylor went to see F.P.A. and received this advice: “Write one set of verses 

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  •  Deems Taylor: Selected Writings

every day and keep them in the mail.” Following through on this counsel, Taylor began his long writing career with humor in rhyme.

A Plaint I do not like these poets who Can think of nothing else to do But, when they need a rhyme in “o,” To stick in — “as you all may know.” Sometimes they try a plan that’s worse, And, striving for a rhyme, reverse The order of a sentence: “madLy run he to the rescue had.” And, I confess, I find it hard To tolerate the slipshod bard Who ekes a stunted meter out By writing, “loudly he did shout.” What earthly right have they to claim That words are not pronounced the same In prose and verse? It seems a crime To me, that “love” and “stove” should rhyme! In fact, unless I could forego Such makeshifts, as you all may know, It not to me would give much pain If I did never write again. Life, October 26, 1911

The Urge I watched the rimester ply his craft — Poor, futile verses, simply made To please an idle few, who laughed And then forgot — a thankless trade. “Why do you write these trifling rimes?” Half wistfully he smiled. Said he: “I wonder! Well, I think, sometimes Because this stuff expresses — me.”

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Poems  •  

Awestruck, o’ercome, I stood beside The mighty one, whose giant pen Had written epics that would bide Forever in the hearts of men. “Why, master, has thy soul been stirred To voice in song thy people’s woes?” “Because, my son, the rate per word For verse is higher than for prose.” Life, Jan. 4, 1912

Jack of All Trades Do you know, unless he’s lazy, I believe a man is crazy If he’s satisfied to learn a single trade. If you figure one as plenty, Look at me — I’ve mastered twenty! Not to mention twenty more I’ve just essayed. I can charm you on the fiddle, Paint a picture, ask a riddle, Tell a story in a way to make you roar. I know sev’ral ways of mixing Drinks. At present I am fixing Up a lock to fasten any sort of door. I know how to run a transit; I can play a jig, or dance it; I can teach a cat to hurdle through a hoop. I have taken parties slumming; I’ve a smattering of plumbing; I have patented a folding chicken coop. All my friends and near relations Say I’m great at imitations. I can palm a coin and take it from a hat. I know all about the weather; I do poker work on leather; I’ve a voice that simple knocks Caruso flat. From a walnut, should you ask it, I can carve a little basket; I’ve a secret way of cooking Irish stew. I can write a splendid sonnet, Fix a clock or trim a bonnet.

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  •  Deems Taylor: Selected Writings

Now I wonder what there is I couldn’t do? … Why, you ask me, did I ever — Since I’m so extremely clever — Take this humble job of cleaning up the street? Yes, it does seem rather shoddy For so versatile a body, But — er — well, you know, a fellow’s got to eat. Smart Set, March, 1912

Song of the Radiator When the winter ulster crawls From its nest of camphor balls; When the muffler, muff, and mitten come to stay: When the chilly morning dip Seems a pleasant thing — to skip, Hear the tapping And the rapping As I quit my summer’s napping And begin anew my thermostatic lay: Clink! Clank! Clink! Watch the coal-bin start to shrink When the freezin’ Winter season Comes along-long-long. Though I’m anything but cheap, Still, you don’t begrudge my keep; For you love the clink and clatter of my song-song-song. When the winter’s at its worst, And the water-pipes have burst, I shall probably be colder than the pole. If your rooms are chill and raw, Wait until we have a thaw; Then the flutter And the sputter Of my super-humid stutter As the mercury emerges from his hole! Hiss! Sftt! Drip!

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Poems  •  

Take a friendly little tip: Did you deem me Far from steamy — Well, you’re wrong-wrong-wrong, When the weather’s nice and mild, How I love to drive you wild With the spitting splash and splatter of my song-song-song! Through the long and noisy day, With its din of work and play, Very likely I’ll be silent as the grave. But when bedward soft you creep And are gently wooing sleep, Hark! the clanging and the whanging And the energetic banging As I tune my pipes and troll my nightly stave: R-rip! Whack! Bing! Don’t you love to hear me sing? Though it’s rusty, Still, my lusty Voice is strong-strong-strong. Curse me, masters, as you will; You will never keep me still, Nor the crashing thump and thunder of my song-song-song— Ho, the fiendish thump and thunder of my song! Century, January, 1915

Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit Note: “Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit” is a line from Virgil’s Aeneid, meaning, “Perhaps one day it will be useful to remember even these things.” F.P.A judged it to be the best submission for his column during 1919, by which time he had moved to the New York Tribune and changed the name of his column to the “Conning Tower.” This witty history of Taylor’s years as a student at New York University first appeared in the Tribune on August 21, 1919. Almost a year later, on July 11, F.P.A. told his readers that “overwhelmed by insistent demands, we

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  •  Deems Taylor: Selected Writings

succumb. And so we shall reprint in Monday’s Conning Tower, Mr. Deems Taylor’s ‘Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit’ … which to our notion is the best history of the higher education in America ever written.”

‘“Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit” I Oh, back in the fall of nineteen-two, when I was a Freshman green, I planned to be one of the cultured few, with a high and beetling bean. So I took on Latin, and German IV, French, History V (to the Civil War), Trig, Algebra I — a ghastly bore — — and Freshman chemistree; Here, then, are the facts I still retain from nineteen-two and -three: We1 won the bloody Monday fight, and made the Sophs retire:2 Dear Lehigh licked the football team, by a score that was something dire;3 Bill4 came on from Chicago U. With some barroom stories—and good ones, too;5 I got on the Glee Club, and made Psi U, and sang in the chapel choir.

II As a sophomore, I am proud to state, I was taking the hurdles clear; I dreamed of copping the old Phi Bete by the end of my Junior year. I soaked up Logic, and Physics III, French Lit. (I was there with the loud oui, oui), Psychology, Shakespeare, Verse — not free — — and a couple of courses more. Here’s what I recall as I look back on nineteen-three and -four: Weary chairmaned the Junior prom (his girl was Harriet White);6 I played third quarter on the football scrub, while Loup played center and right; Joe Bauderman ran a record mile, The baseball team was perfectly vile,7 I made the track team after a while, and fussed8 each Saturday night.

III By Junior year I had laid away all hopes of a Phi Bete key, But I toyed with the thought of a proud M.A., and a possible Ph.D., So I grabbed off Plato, and Kant, and such,

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Poems  •  

Church History, Banking (the worldly touch!), The German Bards — whom we termed the “Dutch” — — such French as I might contrive; And the following info still adheres from nineteen-four and -five: Tom Reilley’s9 team smeared R.P.I. to the tune of a large amount:10 I made the gym and the track teams both;11 they ducked young Blum12 in the fount: The Glee Club trip was a Lakewood treat, The baseball team got badly beat,13 And I got third on the Wesleyan meet14— but third place didn’t count.

IV As a Senior now, I was bald and gray with the studious life I’d led, But proud of the knowledge stowed away in my small but well-formed head. I killed International (so-called) Law, Took Spanish and Chaucer (the latter’s raw), Wound up with a thesis on Bernard Shaw — how much of that stuff still sticks? Well, here is the dope I recollect from nineteen-five and -six: Bill and I wrote the Senior show (his book was a mere detail), And Loup played “Elsie, the Cannibal Queen,” and looked like a halfdressed whale: The Senior ball was a dream divine,15 The Senior banquet was mostly wine, And F.P.A. ran a piece of mine16 in the New York Evening Mail.

Notes 1. That is, the class of 1900. 2. Weary [Reginald Werrenrath, later a famed baritone] won’t like this, but it’s true. 3. 46-0, if you must know. 4. William Le Baron [In the 1930s Le Baron became production head at Paramount Pictures.] 5. And a wonderful song, “Kansas.” 6. And maybe he wasn’t stuck on her! 7. As usual. 8. Some girl, too. She married shortly after that. 9. Major T.T. Reilley, D.S.C. 10. 53-0, no less.

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  •  Deems Taylor: Selected Writings 11. I was pretty good, too, but badly handled. I know I could have done the low hurdles in 26 if Mike McCann had only understood me. Stimmie Draper (Arthur S. Draper of the New York Herald Tribune) did the pole-vault that year. He was rotten. 12. I’m not sure of the name. He was going to sue the university, but didn’t. 13. See Note 7. 14. The track up there is so narrow that only three of us could run. 15. I took Adele Martin, a queen. She married Bill Wildman almost immediately afterward. 16. It wasn’t very good.

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Chapter

2

New York Sunday Tribune Magazine Articles and Some Others, 1914–1919

Introduction During the time he sent poems to newspapers and magazines, Taylor also began writing longer articles. More than a few ended up in magazines such as New Republic and Century Magazine, a major literary publication of its day. But it was in 1916, with the help of F.P.A, that Taylor landed the job that sharpened his writing talents: co-editor and writer for the newly initiated New York Tribune Sunday Magazine. His partner was Robert Benchley, brought from Boston especially for his first major assignment in New York. Benchley later became one of the best-known humorists of the United States, both in print and in movies, and a major figure of the Algonquin Round Table. During the short run of the magazine, Taylor and Benchley wrote lengthy stories on a variety of social issues, imbuing them often with touches of humor. In late 1916, and with the blessing of the Tribune, Taylor went to Europe to report on the Great War. The writings by Taylor that follow illustrate his many interests and give insights to the world of his time. They range from a moving account of the inevitable tragedies of war (“Three Poor Devils”) to subjects that reverberate in every American generation: immigrants becoming citizens (“Abs’lu’ly ‘Nentirely Renounce ‘Nabjure”) and patriotism (“The Shrine of Each Patriot’s Devotion.”) This chapter begins with a wonderful satire of academic writing.



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10  •  Deems Taylor

“The Modern Editor and Scholar” (Century Magazine, June, 1914) Note: Deems Taylor, from his youth, was fascinated by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He used a segment of Looking Glass for this satire on scholarship run amuck, then a few years later chose five other segments as the inspiration for what would become his most famous orchestral work, “Through the Looking Glass Suite.”

“The Modern Editor and Scholar” Being a Reprint of a Famous Poem, Together with Sundry Notes and Comments Necessary to its Complete Understanding and Appreciation, All Being Done in Strict Accordance With the Practice of our Best Present-Day School and College Editions of the Classics.



The Poem



1. I sent a message to the fisha ; I toldb them, “This is what I wish.” The little fishes of the seac Theyd sent an answer back to me. 5. The little fishes’e answer was, “We cannot do it, sirf, becauseg — ”



“Through the Looking-Glass.”

Notes a. It is not quite clear just what kind of fish the author means. However, as he refers, on line 3, to “the little fishes,” and as the poem was written in England, they are probably sardines or herring, possibly whitebait. b. Authorities differ as to the exact meaning of this passage. Professor Dummeresel of the University of Narrheit claims that the speaker first sent a written message; this proving ineffectual, that he delivered a second, or oral, message in person. On the other hand, Dr. Jean Galimatias of the Sorbonne maintains that the clause “I told them’ should read “it told them,” or “which told them”; in other words, that only one message was sent, and that a written one. We are inclined to agree with the latter interpretation. c. This indicates that they were salt-water fish. See note a. d. Tautological. “Little fishes” in the previous line is the real subject of the sentence. Cf. Lowell (“Biglow Papers”): “John P. Robinson, he says he won’t vote for Governor B.” e. This repetition is unnecessary. “Their answer” would be better. See note d.

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New York Sunday Tribune Magazine Articles  •  11

f. Note the respectful use of “sir,” indicating (a) that the fishes belong to the servant class, or (b) that the person addressed is a member of the nobility, probably the former. g. Showing that they were female fish.

Questions for Discussion  Who is speaking? Are the person speaking and the person who sent the message one and the same? What was the message? What does it mean? Why? How do you think it was transmitted? Is there an answer to the message? If not, why not? If so, what does it mean, and why? What would you have answered? Why? Write a short essay on submarine telephony.

“The Fiction of Do-As-You-Please” (New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, July 2, 1916) Note: The social acceptance of facial hair on men, and the use of strawhats and wristwatches by males intrigued Taylor. Observing the passing scene in 1916 he believed that facial hair on a political candidate, as in the case of Democratic presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes’ beard (versus clean-shaven Republican Woodrow Wilson) no longer helped gain votes. Meanwhile, the straw-hat trade was holding strong. Wristwatches on men, though, still had to lose a sense of effeminacy. Incidentally, the Taylor mention of Mexico in the final paragraph refers to the expected return of army regiments from “south of the border” after a fruitless year seeking Pancho Villa. The commander of the troops was General John J. Pershing.

He’s cautious; he hung to His job and his tongue, too. Till named by the G.O.P. push. But who’d expect daring From one of his bearing, Who hides his face back of a bush.



Burton Braley, in “Puck.”

I think Charles Evans Hughes must be a brave man. For he is defying one of the most deeply rooted conditions of the American mind, a belief that is shared by most of us, regardless of race, color or habitat — the belief that a man who wears whiskers is ipso facto a comic object. Election time is still months away, but the humorous weeklies, tried and staunch defenders of our national traditions, are already practicing a few pianissimo toots upon what will be one of the keynotes of the

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Presidential campaign. In its issue of week before last “Puck” not only printed the verse quoted above, but faced the issue unflinchingly in the following stirring and polished editorial paragraph: “Well, there’s the ticket — Hughes and Fairbanks. An evenly balanced ticket — just as many whiskers on the tail as on the head. A regular Ostermoor ticket with hair top and bottom.” It is a real menace that Mr. Hughes faces. Many a man has had a promising public career spoiled by getting himself laughed at, and in this country you can get yourself laughed at for almost anything you do, provided whatever you do be not amusing. When Mr. William Randolph Hearst, a few years ago, cleverly alluded to Mr. Hughes as “an animated feather duster” he created a slogan whose exceeding lack of pertinence to the gubernatorial campaign was matched only by the relish with which some thousands of honest Americans reiterated it. Fifteen minutes of Mr. Hughes’s time spent in a barber’s chair then would have spiked Mr. Hearst’s guns. Fifteen minutes similarly spent by him tomorrow morning would throw 408 newspaper humorists out of work, besides spoiling eleven ideas for 159 future newspaper cartoons. Yet Mr. Hughes remains unshaven. Why? Probably, for one thing, because he prefers wearing a beard to going clean shaven. Probably, too, because he considers that fact nobody’s business but his own. Surely an extraordinary attitude for an American. Two facts all Americans agree upon: That we are a free people and that we have the keenest sense of humor in the world. Consequently many of us spend a large proportion of our waking hours in real terror of being laughed at by our equally free and fun-loving neighbors. Our written constitution is liberal enough, but our unwritten one, the one by which our fellow countrymen regulate our private lives, is a holy terror. The number of intrinsically harmless things that the average male inhabitant of this home of the brave dares not do is astonishing. Take whiskers. You would think that, being descendants of hardy children of the wilderness and that sort of thing, we’d applaud the man who lets hair grow where Nature intended it to grow. Certainly the logic of the situation, biologically, is with him. But no. About thirty-five years ago our fathers, wearying of beards, began a frantic daily round of chin scraping. So we, their untrammeled descendants, continue the rite, solemnly applying knives to the hair on our jaws in a futile struggle to keep it from growing in, and as solemnly applying lotions to the hair on our skulls in an equally futile struggle to keep it from falling out. Ever and anon we pause from these pleasing exercises to jeer at the man who believes in letting Nature take its course.

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The straw hat convention is historic. Up to about four years ago no free born American citizen could safely venture to wear a straw hat before May 15. The average temperature from May 1 to May 14 might be — and generally was — 89.57 degrees, but you stuck to your little old last year’s derby just the same. When May 15 did roll around and the thermometer went down to 47.089 degrees, prevailing easterly winds, probably showers Tuesday, you put on your straw hat. If you were rash enough to wear it before the official date, you were, if you were a mere person, followed about by cheering crowds. If you were a member of the Stock Exchange your new hat was smashed over your ears. But that custom was a little too idiotic even for us, so that of recent years persons have been observed wearing straw hats quite openly and shamelessly as early as May 12. There are plenty of things left, though, that the cautious man hesitates to do. You must not part your hair in the middle, even though it parts there naturally, for that proves you a hick. You must not go about bareheaded or coatless, for that proves you insane — or, as your more academic friends would put it, a nut. Which brings me to the nut question in general. It is rather hard to avoid being considered a nut if you have any intelligent tastes. Read this snappy anecdote from “The Saturday Evening Post”:

A Musical Jag A certain New York correspondent used to be city editor of a newspaper in Cincinnati. One of the star reporters on the paper was a pale young man of studious mien, who held himself aloof from the rest of the staff. He wore a flowing tie and horn-rimmed glasses, and between assignments reveled in the pages of Shavian plays and Ibsen tales. He was sent one night by the city editor to cover a big musical festival, and it resulted in his warming up to the staff the next morning for the first time since he had been on the paper. Floating into the office as if wafted by a gentle breeze, he eddied up to the copy desk and said: “Boys, I’m positively drunk with rhythm!” Now, that young man did a number of things that are naturally abhorrent to any sturdy, red-blooded American. First of all, he was pale and of a studious mien, which leads one to suspect that he reads books. Next, he wore a flowing tie, which no self-respecting man would want to do — or would venture to do, at any rate. Never mind about the horn-rimmed glasses. There are men right here in The Tribune office who wear them, and I don’t want to make trouble.

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Furthermore, he read Shaw and Ibsen. That’s always good for a laugh — the reference to Ibsen’s “tales” getting a particularly hearty laugh out of me. “The “Post” writer forgot, however to mention Nietzsche and Emerson, two other authors whose names have ever proved irresistibly funny to the breezy, fun-loving sons of Columbia. Of course, he would be assigned to cover a musical festival. The omission of the adjective “highbrow” before “musical” is probably due to a printer’s error. But the young man’s really unforgivable sin is revealed in the last sentence — or, rather, his two unforgivable sins. First, he had experienced a genuine emotion as the result of an artistic stimulus. He should have known better. In this country you may get excited over a political convention; you may feel deeply about the efforts of bored baseball players to win a bonus by capturing a $16 pennant; you may show real emotion over the attempts of one cretinous gentleman to knock out a prognathous opponent; but never — unless you enjoy being ridiculed — must you be moved by any form of art. We are citizens of the only nation in the world that prides itself on the lack of artistic sensibilities. If you are effeminate enough to be interested in art and to be moved by it, take care not to express your emotion seriously. Describe it in slang, or, better yet, laugh it off. There the young man made his second mistake. If he had said: “Gee, boys! some pep to that music fest! My feet are going yet. Oh, you rhythm!” — if he had expressed himself in such language the boys in the office would probably have agreed with him that there was Some Punch to that classic stuff, and there would have been no story in “The Post.” And now I come to a group of really serious offences — namely, the things that brand you effeminate. All Americans have a horror of being thought effeminate; hence our distrust of art and artists. Hence, too, our fear of wearing certain articles of apparel which effeminate men are supposed to wear. In this we act with characteristic American logic, a good example of which is our reasoning in regard to smoking by women. We argue thus: “Most abandoned women smoke cigarettes; hence all women who smoke cigarettes are abandoned women.” Similarly we argue that he who wears a red necktie is a chorus man, because a chorus man in the days of Louis XIV once wore a red necktie, being color blind and laboring under the delusion that it was a blue one. One might upon similar grounds ban the wearing of trousers or the eating of chicken a la King — indeed, some virile American will, some day, if he happens to think of it. I really hesitate to mention the red necktie. To speak of it here is nearly as obscene an act as to say “bloody” at an English house party. To accuse a man of wearing one is to offer him an unforgivable insult.

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Why this should be no one seems to know. The red tie was originally the badge of the anarchist. Then, with relentless logic, we transferred it to his diametric opposite, the socialist. And now we make another leap and brand any man who wears one as a sissy. But the crowning mark of effeminacy, the ultimate badge of shame, is the wrist watch. What howls of hearty masculine laughter arise at the mention of that girlish trinket! What would become of vaudeville if it were deprived of its perfectly killing jokes about folk who wear wrist watches and carry their handkerchiefs up their sleeves? And what would the stalwart New Yorker do if he couldn’t stand around, clad in a sport shirt that is a first cousin to a middy blouse and wearing one of this year’s Pilgrim Father straw hats, swapping stories about wrist watches? And just think of the people who do wear them! Can’t you just see some girlified British army officer, lying in a blood-bespattered outpost trench, working a machine gun with one hand and holding out the other with a peculiar, affected gesture in order to look at his wrist watch? Doesn’t it just put you in stitches to think of it? And imagine the situation when our regiments return from Mexico. They will be marching up Fifth Avenue. Every one will be cheering — not every one, perhaps, for there may be gaps in the ranks and some people may be crying. Just then some officer will pull his handkerchief out of his sleeve and another will glance at his wrist watch. The spell will be broken. The cheers will turn to hisses. And all the men on the sidewalk who didn’t go to Mexico will burst into one long, loud roar of laughter.

“The Irresistible Fact And The Immovable Expert” (New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, August 6, 1916) Note: “Red tape produces the official mind, but is not caused by it. The malady might be loosely described as a tendency to treat a regulation as though it were a divinity, and to treat a person as though he were a problem in elementary algebra.” So writes Taylor in this article that proves that a little bit of the “official mind” will always go a long way. It also reminds us that infantile paralysis (polio) in its day had every family on tenterhooks, In Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men on Wheels” there is a pathetic chapter describing George’s arrest for calling a German policeman a “dummer Esel.” George, it seems, had wished to enter a park that faced the street upon which he was walking. Instead of going up a block and around the corner to the official entrance, he stepped across a strip of lawn onto the park path. He was immediately confronted by a policeman who pointed out the heinous illegality of his act.

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George politely apologized and offered to step back across the grass to the sidewalk. No, that wouldn’t do. It would merely be a double trespass. What then, asked George, should he do? After long cogitation the policeman finally suggested that he walk a block to the official exit, go out, come back on the sidewalk to his starting place, turn, walk back to the official entrance, and thus legally enter the park. “It was then,” says George, “that I called him a ‘dummer Esel.’” What fun I used to have when company came, reading that chapter aloud; how we would laugh over it — at least I would — and say, “Isn’t that just typical of the German official mind!” How different it seemed from our cheery American common sense. I’m not so sure, now. It may be only imagination, but it does seem as if official-mindedness were creeping upon us. The newspapers of late have furnished all too conclusive evidence that one worthy American after another is falling a victim to this insidious malady. It is not easy to define official-mindedness. It is not quite literal-mindedness, and it is hardly chuckle-headedness. Red tape produces the official mind, but is not caused by it. The malady might be loosely described as a tendency to treat a regulation as though it were a divinity, and to treat a person as though he were a problem in elementary algebra. Perhaps I might better cite some recent examples, or cases. These will serve both to indicate the growing prevalence of official-mindedness and furnish the reader with a means of supplying his own definition of the term.

“There Ain’t No Such Animal,” Says Science of the Man-eating Shark Case Number 1 was a result of the late shark scare along the Jersey coast. During the first few days of excitement, after two people had been killed by the sharks and several others injured, one of the newspapers sent a reporter to interview an aquarium official upon the subject of man-eating sharks. That gentleman promptly disposed of the question. “Man-eating sharks?” he said. “There is no such thing as a man-eating shark. It is not recognized by science. If these sharks attacked human beings it is because they mistook them for fish.” Now, to you or any other layman, that statement sounds a little silly. But it isn’t. It is merely the result of a man’s having dug so deeply into his subject that he can’t see out of it. It is evidence of the official mind at work. The gentleman’s mental attitude may be difficult to forgive, but it is quite easy to understand. Science did not recognize man-eating sharks. If she met any, she cut them dead. Therefore, there being no such thing as a man-eating shark, if any shark so far forgot himself and his duty to science as actually to eat a man, why, the only charitable thing to do was to

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look the other way and assume that the shark had made a terrible mistake. Imagine that shark’s feelings when he discovered what he had done! However, such blunders will not occur again. A Society for the Preservation of the Better Nature of Sharks is probably even now in the process of organization. Its object will be to see that every sea bather wears a neat tag affixed to his right ankle, announcing that he is not a fish. In this way many a shark will be saved from taking a step that he would regret for the rest of his life.

West Orange Returned Pleasantville’s Injured Children Without Thanks Case No. 2 was also brought to light by a recent scare, the infantile paralysis epidemic. You will remember that New Jersey municipal authorities placed an embargo upon the interstate shipment of children under sixteen. On July 30 an automobile “bus,” on its way from Pleasantville to West Orange, ran wild down a mountainside and struck a fence. Of the nine passengers, one received a fractured skull and is dying; one broke a collarbone and suffered internal injuries; the remaining seven escaped with their lives, but were severely bruised. Whereupon — I quote from the New York Herald: “Three of the seven were small children, and, as West Orange has a quarantine against children during the infantile paralysis epidemic, they were hurried into another automobile and sent back of the mountains to Pleasantville.” Here we meet the official mind in one of its less harmless phases. The only fortunate part of the whole affair is that Pleasantville had no quarantine against severely bruised children. Otherwise, I suppose, those unfortunate infants would still be playing the minor role in a game of battledore and shuttlecock between the two towns. But these and all other examples falter and pale before the polychromatic effulgence of Case No. 3, The Affair of the Poisonous Mushrooms. An Official Description of a Fungus Is Very Official Indeed A lady living near Pelham, N.Y., developed a fondness for mushrooms and decided that, rather than pay the prevailing high market price, she would raise her own. So she wrote to the Department of Agriculture, and in due course the department sent her a generous supply of mushroom spawn. This she planted in her cellar, in accordance with the directions, and soon had the satisfaction of gathering a plentiful crop of homegrown mushrooms. Before going on with the main story let me digress long enough to print an elementary description of the mushrooms she raised. I quote it from a recently published handbook of “Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms,” issued to provide an accessible and intelligible means of identifying the multifarious members of the mushroom family. The one she raised was not the Perplexing

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Hypholoma; nor was it the Veiled Stinkhorn. It was not even the Unsafe Inocybe. No. It was something much worse than that. This is what it was: Pileus thick, fleshy, hemispheric when very young, then hat-shaped, and at length expanded, cospitosed, 3-5 cm. broad; surface moist, slightly viscid when very young, hygrophanous, by becoming fulvous or isabelline according to age and moisture conditions, glabrous, smooth on the umbo, rugese and folded on the broad rim when in the hatlike stage; margin entire to lobed, not projecting, smooth, entirely from fibrils or remnants of a veil, incurved when young, marked with a water-soaked, dark fulvous zone about 3 mm. broad; context white or slightly yellowish, very thick at center and very thin toward the margin, the odor and taste resembling that of the common mushroom; lamellae squarely adnate, without sinus or decurrent teeth, plane, somewhat semicircular in shape, at least when young, inserted, fullgineus, gray or whitish on the edges, not distinctly marbled, purplish fuliginous when viewed from below, of medium distance, about 8 mm. broad; spores broadly ellipsoid or ovoid, somewhat pointed or narrowed at both ends, black, smooth, opaque, 11 — 13x7 — 8.5 m.; cystidia not found; stipe thick, fleshy, sometimes equal but usually much enlarged upward, whitish or rosy-isabelline, not polished, longitudinally striate at the apex, whitish-pruinose above, whitish-tomentose below, conspicuously hollow, 6 — 10 cm. long, 5 — 10 mm. thick. As one or two of the technical terms may be unfamiliar to the more illiterate reader, I might explain that the Umbo is an elevation at the center of the pileus; adnate means attached squarely to the stipe; water-soaked means soaked with water; and fleshy means like flesh. The other terms should be self explanatory. The Government’s “Edible” Mushrooms Produced Hysteria, Hyperaemia and Paralysis  Well, to get back to our story. The lady cooked the mushrooms and invited five friends to share the feast. Her daughter had the misfortune to be ill on the night of the banquet, and so had to stay upstairs in bed. It was a bitter disappointment, and she was very disconsolate as she lay listening to the cheerful hum of voices in the dining room. All at once it struck her that there was something queer about the sounds that came from downstairs. Everybody seemed to be unusually hilarious. The sounds of mirth increased until the entire party was screaming with hysterical laughter. Then, abruptly, there was dead silence. For ten minutes the frightened daughter lay wondering what had happened. At last, unable to endure the suspense any longer, she arose and managed to get down to the dining

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room. She found the entire party sitting around the table, livid, speechless and paralyzed. She immediately rushed to the telephone and called in every physician in the neighborhood. By prompt and heroic measures, the doctors managed to revive the victims, and eventually succeeded in pulling them all through. Naturally, however, the lady who had raised the mushrooms felt a trifle put out by the treatment she had received at the hands of the Department of Agriculture. It was hardly good sportsmanship, she felt, for them to take advantage of her ignorance by giving her poisonous mushrooms to raise. So she wrote and told them so. In fact, she went so far as to say that she intended to hold the official who had sent the mushroom spawn personally responsible for her narrow escape from death. Asked to Poison Herself Twice In Order To Convince Officialdom  I must admit that the official saw right away that something was wrong. The reason I know that is because I happened to see the letter he wrote back to the lady. It went substantially like this: “Dear Madam: I was greatly surprised to receive your letter of the 21st inst. I am sure that you must be mistaken in your belief that the spawn we sent was of a poisonous variety of mushroom. It could not have been, because the variety of mushroom mentioned is nonpoisonous. Consequently I should consider it a favor if you and your friends would prepare and eat a second lot of the suspected fungi, to see if they really cause the trouble.” I am sorry to say that the lady was inconsiderate enough to disregard this request of our Department of Agriculture. Perhaps it is just as well that she did. For the department officials finally consented to examine some specimens of the suspected fungus, and found that it was poisonous, after all — a new variety, in fact. So they made amends. They named it after her.

“ — Abs’lu’ly ‘Nentirely Renounce ‘Nabjure — : Hyphenated Americans Might Not Be so Half-Hearted in Their Americanism if America Were a Little more Whole-Hearted in Welcoming Them to Citizenship — Not even a Flag in the Naturalization Court” (New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, August 13, 1916) Note: In 1916, any foreign-born arrival, accepted formally into the United States after review of credentials and a medical examination at Ellis Island, was a legal inhabitant of the country. The Immigration Act of 1924 formalized a quota system, mainly to cut down the influx

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from Southern and Eastern Europe. It continued an ongoing exclusion of Chinese, yet set no limits for immigrants from Latin America. As of this writing (2007), one of the biggest social, economic, and political issues of this country is immigration from Mexico. Not long ago the government decided to admit some American Indians to citizenship. Instead of being wards of the nation, living by sufferance on a government reservation, these picked Indians were to be given title to their lands and were to be made voters and taxpayers. The problem of naturalization was a bit delicate. It is difficult to know just how to go about “naturalizing” a man whose ancestors were robbed by your ancestors of the land you propose to give him and tax him for. The simplest way would have been to give the Indians a paper, or something, and let it go at that. But our present Secretary of the Interior happens to be Franklin K. Lane, and Mr. Lane is an extraordinary being — a public official with an imagination. What he did was to write a special ceremony and ritual for the occasion, and then travel out to the reservation to conduct the ceremony in person. Here it is: The Secretary stands before one of the candidates. “Joseph T. Cook, what was your Indian name?” “Tunkansapa,” answers the Indian. “Tunkansapa, I hand you a bow and arrow. Take this bow and shoot the arrows.” The Indian does so. “Tunkansapa, you have shot your last arrow. That means that you are no longer to live the life of an Indian. You are from this day forward to live the life of the white man. But you may keep that arrow. It will be to you a symbol of your noble race and of the pride you may feel that you come from the first of all Americans.” The Secretary now addresses Tunkansapa by his white name: “Joseph T. Cook, take in your hands this plough.” Cook does so. “This act means that you have chosen to live the life of the white man. The white man lives by work. From the earth we must all get our living, and the earth will not yield unless man pours upon it the sweat of his brow. “Joseph T. Cook, I give you a purse. It will always say to you that the money you gain must be wisely kept. The wise man saves his money, so that when the sun does not smile and the grass does not grow he will not starve.” Lane now takes up the American flag. He and the Indian hold it together. “I give into your hands the flag of this country. This is the only flag you ever will have. It is the flag of free men, the flag of a hundred million

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free men and women, of whom you are now one. That flag has a request to make of you, Joseph T. Cook, that you repeat these words.” Cook then repeats the following after Mr. Lane: “Forasmuch as the President has said that I am worthy to be a citizen of the United States, I now promise this flag that I will give my hands, my head, and my heart to the doing of all that will make me a true American citizen.” The Secretary then takes up a badge upon which is the American eagle, with the national colors, and, pinning it upon the Indian’s breast, speaks as follows: “And now, beneath this flag, I place upon your breast the emblem of citizenship. Wear this badge always, and may the eagle that is on it never see you do aught of which the flag will not be proud.” I wonder if you are thinking what I thought when I read that ritual and that pledge. It seemed to me that here was a man who knew well how to make the ceremony of naturalization the unforgettable moment that it should be. And I thought: If an officer of this government takes these pains to welcome a new citizen who was born here, how much more eager the government must be to greet the new citizens who have come to us from foreign countries. What is that ceremony like? So, one Tuesday morning, I went to the second floor of the Federal Building, at the lower end of City Hall Park, to see our newly naturalized citizens of foreign birth take the oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Let me describe what I saw: I saw a large, ugly room with a high ceiling — a courtroom, its yellow painted walls hung with oil portraits of men in judicial robes. At one end of the room was a railed-in space. Behind the rail, at a table, sat a kindly faced man wearing horn-rimmed glasses. Behind him rose the judge’s bench. Here sat a man in black robes, with a stout, soothing-looking court attendant standing beside him. Around the sides of the room and across the other end were rows of benches. Here sat the applicants for citizenship, with their friends and witnesses. Looking at these people I began to realize why ours is like no other nation on earth, and why, on the other hand, it is a little like every other nation on earth. For here sat Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Irishmen, Poles, Swedes, Russian Jews, German Jews, Negroes, Englishmen — men and women from every corner of the civilized world, gathered together to declare themselves Americans. On the whole, a modestly, even shabbily, dressed crowd, and a serious crowd. It was a significant moment for these people. It was not so serious to the people in charge. Not that they were flippant; they were just bored. As I came in, there were administering the oath of allegiance to one Samuel Kessler, a young Russian Jew. “Hold up your right hand,” said the man in horn glasses. “Do you hereby declare on oath that you abso-

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lutely and entirely renounce and abjure all ‘llegiance, mumble, mumble, fo’n power or principality, mumble, mumble, mumble — Patrick Gallegher!” Samuel Kessler looked a bit bewildered. He probably wondered what Patrick Gallegher had to do with his becoming a citizen of the United States. He may be wondering yet; for as he did not move promptly, the bailiff touched him on the arm and waved him toward a door. Samuel Kessler had become a citizen. After filling in a paper upstairs he would be free to vote, and to pay taxes, and do jury duty. His great moment had come and gone. Fifty years from now, he can tell his grandchildren of the proud day when he stood up before a man who said: “Do you hereby declare on oath —mumble, mumble —Patrick Gallagher!” Patrick Gallegher, as you have guessed, was not part of the oath of allegiance. He was simply the next candidate. After him came Thomas Carrol, a negro. He had with him two witnesses, white men. “Hold up your right hands,” said the man in horn glasses. Up went three right arms. Down came Thomas Carrol’s, pulled down by the bailiff. In fact, one of the bailiff’s chief jobs seems to be that of standing behind applicants and witnesses in order to pull their arms up or down at the proper times. The man in horn glasses spoke again. “Doyouseolemnlyswearthatthetestimony subscribedbyyouistruesohelpmeGod?” he observed. The witnesses nodded. The official turned to Thomas Carrol. Up went Thomas Carrol’s right hand, hoisted by the bailiff. “Do you hereby ‘clarenoath ‘tyou abs’lu’ly ‘nentirely renounce ‘nabjure — mumble, mumble, mumble — Virginia Marozzi!” Out went Thomas Carrol, citizen and up came Virginia Marozzi with her two witnesses. After her came Jacques Vallon, a Frenchman; Giuseppe Spolino, an Italian; and Carl Gustav Erickson, a young Swede. “William Morris Ullman!” called the man in horn-rimmed glasses. A young German Jew came forward with his three witnesses. They were sworn in, and then the official prepared to administer the oath of allegiance to William Ullman. “Do you hereby declare ‘noath that you absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance — what? Oh, no. That was the sixteenth, I think — to all foreign powers and principalities, mumble-mumble” — I didn’t quite realize, at first, what had happened. Then I knew. An officer of a Federal court had stopped halfway through administering the oath of allegiance to the United States of America in order to answer a question put to him by the bailiff. Confound it, I’m not blaming the man! I don’t blame any of the court officials. They must do their work as it is laid out for them. They must do it hurriedly, for there is much of it, and they have not sufficient time in which

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to do it right. No wonder they are bored. So would you be, if you have to naturalize fifty persons in one scorching August forenoon. Their government doesn’t care; why should they? I say their government doesn’t care. In that room there was not one symbol that might suggest the United States of America. There was not even an American flag. One thing, though, the government did do. It set its prospective citizens a singularly bad example in the way of obedience to law. This was a Federal district court, and, as such, was naturally without the jurisdiction of local ordinances. So the United States government calmly violated a stringent law of New York State. It kept a water cooler in a public place without providing individual drinking cups. There was one tumbler, bountifully decorated with thumbprints. I was thirsty, but I did not drink out of that tumbler. I had seen some of the people who had used it. I try to be democratic, but I could not use that tumbler. In the lives of all of us there are two supreme crises — two events predestined and inevitable: the day we are born and the day we die. These new citizens had chosen to add a third great moment, not inevitable, perhaps, but deeply significant. For what is naturalization but a voluntary rebirth, the renunciation of an old life and the choosing of a new? In that moment a man says: “Though I was born in another country I am not of that country. The things for which it stands are not the things that I desire most. And so I choose this as my native land; here is freedom; here are my ideals!” It is as though a man should choose for himself a new mother. How many men make that choice lightly? Not many, I think. What of yourself? Suppose you found that the United States no longer stood for the ideals that meant everything to you; suppose you decided to renounce allegiance to this country and become the citizen of another. Would you come to that decision without thought and without regrets? Do you think that such a decision costs a man nothing? These men and women who take our oath of allegiance are doing what we naturally consider a fine and commendable thing. It is the highest compliment they could pay us. But do not forget that to thousands of men and women in Europe they are committing an act that is very like treason. And these new citizens know that. They are not altogether happy as they take the oath. They are at the crossroads. They may have lost their love for the country they have left; but they do not love ours — yet. They approve of it, they admire it. It is for us to make them love it, to make them revere the flag that is its symbol. And what are we to give them? What do we give them? Is this to be our welcome, the memory we would have them carry away of their first moment as Americans — this hurried gabbling of meaningless words, this

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scramble through a perfunctory ritual that lacks even the poor dignity of a grammar school commencement? The people we call hyphenated Americans are in the wrong, of course. They have no business to become American citizens and renounce allegiance to another country if they do not intend to make that renunciation complete and permanent. But perhaps they would not be so half-hearted in their Americanism if America had been a little more wholehearted in welcoming them to citizenship — if she had shown a little more interest in them at a time when that interest would have mattered to them tremendously. Franklin Lane would have done it. Read over again the last part of the ritual he wrote for those Indians. Get your district leader to read it, and your Congressman. Then think what it would mean to a newly naturalized American if he could repeat a pledge like that. When it comes time for Franklin K. Lane to go; when, in obedience to the inscrutable workings of Providence and politics, it becomes necessary to supersede him as Secretary of the Interior by some eminent — Republican — manufacturer of cloaks and suits or plumbing fixtures; when that happens I wish he might be persuaded to go to the second floor of the Federal Building, at the lower end of City Hall Park, and show us how to welcome our new citizens. If there were more Franklin K. Lanes in this country there would be fewer hyphenates.

“Keeping You Out in the Open Air” (New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, August 20, 1916) Note: In the New York of 1916, the “weekend” had only progressed to a day-and-a-half, with part of Saturday still worktime. The as yet nonair conditioned office worker especially treasured summer weekend trips out of the city, the basis of this piece. And note the O. Henry-like ending, something not uncommon in Taylor writings. FRIDAY — Lunch with Estep. Says I look pale. “What you need is fresh air. Out in the open. Get some sunshine in your blood.” Poetical chap, Estep. Come to think of it, I don’t feel as fit as I might. Probably working too hard. Must speak about it at the office. Estep says, why not come out to his place over Sunday? Nothing much to do but if I don’t mind taking pot luck, they’d be glad to have me. Good idea. Thanks, I will. “See you tomorrow, 1:16, lower level.” Now for the open. SATURDAY, 8 A. M. — Hot. Glad I’m going away for the week end. Attractive phrase, “week end.” Suggests butlers. Don’t know why. 9 A. M. — In the subway. Hotter. Unpleasant looking crowd. All immigrants, apparently. What a fool a man is to wear a coat in summer. I am

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overworking. Good thing I’m going away over the week end. Wonder if Estep has a pergola. 9:40. — At the office. This is terrible. If I open the windows my mail blows away. If I close them, I don’t care whether I have any mail or not. Bum job. Think I shall resign before long. Simply slave, slave, slave — and for what? I certainly need that week end… . 11:30. — Oh, Lord! Forgot my suitcase. Time to go home and get it, if I hurry. Is it worth it? Oh, better go. Now for the subway. 12:15. — Home. Not much time. Must get that suitcase packed in a hurry. Better be systematic about it. Where’s that “Shoppers’ Week End Packing List”? Got it. Let’s see: “Address book, American flag, atomizer, automobile goggles, breastpin, button hook” — idiots! Gosh, I must hurry! Never mind. Throw in everything I can find and trust to luck. 12:30. — At the subway station. Phew! Don’t remember packing any books. Suitcase must weigh fifty pounds. 12:40. — In the subway. Getting hotter. Same car I came down in before. Remember the guard — evil looking scoundrel. Remember the air, too. Might get up some sort of musical joke about that, something about “carrying the air” — that’s just the rough form, of course. Work it up later. GRAND CENTRAL, 1:15. — Suitcase weighs seventy-five pounds. Must have packed the Encyclopedia Britannica. Holy smoke! One minute to catch the train. Run for it. Suitcase strikes angry old gentleman. “Wherdyathinkyergoin!” Sorry. Not time to apologize. Suitcase weighs 156 pounds. There’s Estep. Waves. “Hurry up!” Hope I last long enough to reach him. If I can just get within striking distance. They’re closing the gate. “All aboard!” Made it. On the train. — Is this or is it not the dirtiest railroad in the United States? We have quite a debate about it, Estep taking the negative. He wins. Still, I haven’t been to Long Island for years. 2:30. — Walloping Falls. We’re there. Mrs. Estep down to meet us in machine. This is something I like! Cool, too. “Oh, yes,” says Estep, “we’re four hundred feet up, you know.” Doesn’t look that high. Quite flat, in fact. In the machine. — Sit in back, Estep’s in front. “Want a rug?” No, thanks. Prefer to enjoy this cool air. “Have luncheon?” Oh, er — yes. Sandwich in the station. Now, why did I say that? Nothing to eat, now, till dinner. Late, too, probably. This cool air gives one an appetite. Certainly cool in this machine. Windy, too. Better take rug. Pretty thin for automobile use. Must speak to Estep about it; privately, of course. Wife might think I was criticizing… . Hey! Hold! Would you mind stopping a minute? Lost my hat. Run back and pick it up. Thanks. Back in the machine. Hope it isn’t much further. Is it always this cold, I wonder. Ask Estep. “Cold? Ha, ha! That’s a good one! Dje hear him, Ethel?

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I told you he was quick.” Fool! Suppose he thought I was joking… . Oops. Almost lost my hat again. Better hold it. Difficult to hold hat and rug, too. There at last. Smaller place than I thought a man of Estep’s standing would have. Still, these bungalows are often surprisingly roomy. Dog on porch. Sniffs at suitcase. Hello, old fellow! Sniffing at my legs now. Hope he isn’t savage. “Oh, he’s very friendly when he gets used to you.” Hope he gets used to me soon. Don’t like sniffy dogs. INDOORS. — Open fire going. Cozy. Nice little place. Magazines around. Take one and draw chair up to fire. Nothing like this country life. I’m going to enjoy this visit. … Beg pardon, what was that? Oh. Estep says we’d better go out. “Don’t let’s lie around in this stuffy house any longer. Come on out and get some fresh air. You haven’t seen the view yet.” Get up. Wish I’d brought my overcoat. OUTSIDE. — We are seeing the view. I don’t think much of it. Country looks desolate and wind-swept. Maybe it’s just my imagination. There certainly is a breeze, though. Why didn’t I bring that overcoat? Estep says that on a clear night you can almost make out the light on the tower of the Woolworth Building. Don’t see why he’s so proud of that. I can stay home and see it distinctly. Say so, to Estep. Great mistake. He seems hurt. Acts as though he had built the view.… “Well, let’s go back.” Now for that open fire. Indoors again. — Where’s that magazine? Perhaps now. … Hello, dog in chair. Get down, sir! Growl from dog. Never mind. Take another chair. Estep again. “Dinner’s ready.” Good! Probably feel better after a little hot food. “We eat out of doors, you know. So stuffy in the house this time of year.” Oh, well. It’s food, anyhow. DINNER. — I wish I had a sweater. The wind is freshening, too. Interesting. Didn’t know it could. Table set under a tree. Looks pretty, but impracticable. Ground seems a little bumpy. My chair has a habit of tipping at the wrong time. Soup. I shall feel better soon. Salt, please. Oh, yes. At my right. As soon as I lift the salt-celler the corner of the tablecloth rises majestically and sails into my soup plate. Oh, I see. Have to use salt-celler as anchor. Never mind. Won’t have salt. … Breeze still freshening… . Cold bean soup not so good as hot. Five minutes later. — Irish stew. Maybe that will be hot. No, it isn’t. Estep doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. Better say nothing. … Ouch! what was that? Oh, I see. Branch of tree blew against the back of my neck. Estep thinks it a huge joke. Chump! Suppose it had been something serious? Might have been knocked unconscious. Less to him if I had been. Dog around again. Sniffing. Mrs. Estep admires him. “Isn’t he clever? He always knows when there’s food around.” He’s sniffing at my feet now. Better feed him something. Maybe he’ll go away. “Beg, sir. Beg for it!” Good heavens! He’s in my lap. Down, you beast!

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Bread blows off. Rescue it. Dog gets some. Coffee coming. It’s actually hot. Sugar, please. Oh, yes, on other corner of table. Don’t dare pick it up for fear tablecloth will blow away. Never mind, I can reach it with my spoon. Blows off spoon. Never mind. Won’t have sugar. Dog around again. Sniffing. Wait till Estep isn’t looking. Kick dog. EVENING. — Dinner over. Estep proposes going out to see the view again. By night. “perhaps we can see the Woolworth light.” Won’t go. Explain that I don’t feel very well. Estep says I am overworking. “What you need is about two weeks of this sort of life. It would make a new man of you.” I agree. Think I’ll go to bed. 10:00 P. M. — So this is my room? Better than out of doors, though. The Esteps sleep out on the sleeping porch. Offered to stay indoors tonight and let me have it. Controlled my feelings well, though. Don’t think they suspected anything. Said I had a slight chill. Have, too. Not slight, though. 10:15 P. M. — This man Estep is a regular miser. For a man of his standing in the community to buy little, thin, skimpy, cotton blankets like these is simply disgraceful. Gets a good salary, too. Wonder what he does with it. Maybe he gambles. Think I’ll drop a note to his boss, when I get back. Just a friendly warning. Unsigned. 10:30 P. M. — Dog howling outside. Maybe he’s cold. Hope so. That would make it unanimous. Hm. Good joke, that. Must make a note of it. Never mind. Fingers would be too stiff to write, anyhow. 11:00 P. M. — Remember a phrase in a letter, once: “The long arctic night.” MIDNIGHT — I wish I was home. SUNDAY, 6:00 A. M. — Another day. What shall I do? … An idea. Where’s the telephone? 6:03 A. M. — Downstairs. Good thing the Esteps are outside. If I can just get Phil Thomson on the ‘phone. Jiggle jiggle. Hello. Jiggle jiggle. HELLO. Suppose there isn’t much traffic this time of day. … Oh, hello. Get me Morningside 12897, please. Shame to call him so early, but it’s got to be done. … Hello. That you, Phil? What? This is me. What? … Hello, operator! You cut me off. … Operator says she’ll have to call the manager if the other party uses language like that again. Sorry. Get me the number again. I’ll make him stop. … Hello. Phil? Now listen: I know it’s awfully early, but it’s a matter of life and death. I’m up at Esteps and I’ve got to get away. Understand? No, I don’t mean that. I mean I’ve got to be called away. Get me? What? Why, I want you to send me a telegram Urgent. … Not later than seven o’clock. What? … Now look here, Phil, I’d do the same for you if you were in my place. You could go right back to bed again. It won’t take half an hour. It isn’t as though I were asking you to do anything that would inconvenience

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you a lot, like paying back that twelve dollars you borrowed last June … what? Thanks, Phil. I knew you’d do it. Thanks ever so much. Yes, I want it to get out here about seven-thirty. 7:15 A. M. — Almost time for that telegram to come. Esteps not up yet. Hope it comes before breakfast. 7:45 A. M. — Estep just knocked. “Breakfast in half an hour.” I will NOT eat breakfast in that blizzard again! 8:15 A. M. — Can’t wait around any longer. Might as well go down and get breakfast over with. 8:20 A. M. — Downstairs. No hope. We’re going out to breakfast. … What’s that? It isn’t — it can’t be — yes, it is! Saved! 8:21 A. M. — Boy with telegram. What, for me? Open telegram: “I HOPE ESTEP OPENS THIS SO THAT HE WILL KNOW YOU CALLED ME UP AT SIX OCLOCK IN THE MORNING TO TELL ME TO SEND YOU A FAKE TELEGRAM SO YOU COULD COME HOME AS FOR THAT TWELVE DOLLARS MY CHARGE FOR SENDING FAKE TELEGRAMS IS TWELVE DOLLARS PER TELEGRAM SO WE ARE EVEN NOW THOMSON 6:57.” His idea of a joke, I suppose! Collect, too. … What? Oh, er — yes. Very urgent message. No, not bad. Just have to go to town right away. Big business deal. My brokers. No, of course not. At his — their — house, of course. Customer just in town for the day. No, thanks, afraid I can’t stay for breakfast. It is an imposition, I know, but if I could get to the station in time for the 8:32 … oh, would you? Thanks ever so much. … 8:25 A. M. — In the machine. Cold. Never mind. I’ll be home soon. Hope it’s hot. 8:47 A. M. — In the train. Suffering cats! I left that telegram on the living room table!

“Still with the Same People? Why Do You Always Feel Obliged to Sit Down and Talk to the Boresome Acquaintances You Happen Across in the Subway?” (The New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, September 17, 1916) Note: This article by Taylor is especially appealing because it could have been written just as easily yesterday or any day past, present, or future—and it could be you or me. And even today, the conductor’s calling of the streets over the loudspeakers of the New York subway system often appears to be a language unto itself. Just how long he had been there I don’t know. The subway train was just pulling out of 145th Street when I glanced up from my paper and noticed him sitting opposite me. I shuddered, and looked away hastily, reopened the paper and plunged resolutely into the business troubles. But it was no

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use. That one fleeting glance had been sufficient to bow my shoulders with care. I was face to face with a great problem, and I would know no peace until I had solved it. Had I or had I not met that man before? I was sure I had, but where? I stole another look, and my heart sank. Yes, whoever he was, he was someone I knew, and before long I was going to be sitting beside him, desperately trying to think of something to say. I don’t know why, whenever I see a man in the middle distance whom I know, or fear that I know, I should have an irresistible impulse to sit down beside him and talk to him. But I do, always. When I was very young, too young to be at all hazy about whom I just did and did not know, I used to laugh at the tales about the serpent of the jungle and how he captures little birds and rabbits by holding them spellbound with the gaze of his glittering eye. But I am older now, and credulous, and I don’t laugh any more. In fact, I am prepared to write a detailed account of the feelings of one of those rabbits as the serpent hypnotizes him. The eye of a nodding acquaintance has the same awful power over me. “Hunteneres naigs,” observed the guard, slamming the doors. If only I could avoid that man’s eye until we reached Ninety-sixth Street! The car would fill then; there would be no vacant seat left beside either of us, and I should be saved. I went back to my paper. I read the shipping news and the tide tables; I read the court calendars; I read naval orders and the movements of warships; I read advertisements bearing glad tidings of certain miraculous bargains to be had in foulards and genuine cotton blankets, and other advertisements pointing out the inestimable eupeptic properties of Swallowtail tobacco; I read some war dispatches almost through; I even read a few want ads, remarking without surprise that several firms were still anxious to employ first-class bushelmen. What a bushelman is I don’t know — the name always had a vague Australian sound to me. Whatever he is, he is a much-sought citizen. If ever I am compelled to drop newspaper work and earn my own living, I shall take a course of lessons and become a bushelman. There seems to be a perpetual and never satisfied demand for good ones. [Note: a bushelman is a tailor’s assistant.] But my reading was not a success. I could not keep my wandering attention fixed. Ever, in the back of my mind, an unanswered question gnawed and gnawed: Who was that fellow across the aisle? I ventured another glance. Yes, somewhere I had met the owner of that face. I ran rapidly through my list of acquaintances. No clue. Had I perchance — One Hundred and Third Street! If I could only keep from looking at him for two minutes more! There was no use in trying the paper again; I

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already knew whole pages of it by heart. Perhaps the car cards might help. I would probably be violating no one’s privacy if I read them. I glanced idly over his head, humming a tune the while. WHY NOT BUY ONE OF OUR $1,500 GUARANTEED NON-REFILLABLE FIRST MORTGAGE BONDS? pleaded the card. Too easy. I knew the answer to that one right away. I tried another. HAVE YOU A LITTLE BANSHEE IN YOUR HOME? was the first line. Really, I thought, this is too much. Do these people think I have nothing better to do than sit around filling in questionnaires? One might think that — Lost! In a moment of abstraction I had let my gaze fall until it rested full upon the face of my man of mystery. And as I sat, frozen with terror, I saw him grow conscious of being looked at, saw him glance up, saw his eyes light with growing recognition. He smiled and nodded. One of us, at least, was glad to see the other. “Nice ixtree!” yelled the guard. But it was too late. The unknown had crossed the aisle and was sitting down at my side. “How’s the boy?” he said. I grasped his hand and shook it warmly. “Fine, thanks!” “How’s everything?” “Fine, thanks!” It struck me that there was a growing monotony about my conversation. Besides, he was asking all the questions, thereby putting the burden of saying bright things entirely up to me. This was obviously unfair, and must be stopped. I leaped into the dialogical breach. “How are you?” I said modestly. “Fine, thanks!” Aha! I had him on the run. Greatly encouraged, I got off another good one. “That’s good,” I said. Then I had another inspiration. “How’re they coming?” “Oh, pretty good. I can’t complain. How you getting along?” Confound the fellow! Why did he keep asking these personal questions? However, I was his match. I thought carefully, and then replied: “Oh, pretty good. I can’t complain, either.” Another bright line came to me “They might be better and they might be worse.” The guard came to the rescue. “Gransenl!” was his contribution. This coupled with my last observation seemed to nonplus my companion, for he was silent until the train had pulled out of the station. Then he turned, and again addressed me. “Still with the same people?” I pondered. “Yes,” I said, finally. “Yes, I suppose you are.” He seemed surprised. “Oh, no. Been in for myself four years now.”

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Well, I hadn’t made much of a success of that. I tried again. “You don’t say! Well, that certainly is fine! I hadn’t heard about it. What line you in?” He appeared even more surprised, and a little resentful. “Why, the same line I was always in. I just quit the job and went in for myself, that’s all.” “Oh.” There was a long silence, broken only by the whir of the ventilating fans, the yells of a fretful infant and the roar of the train. He was apparently lost in thought, while I was once more desperately trying to figure out who under the sun he might be and where I could have met him. I turned to have another look at him, and caught him in the act of turning to have another good look at me. My heart leaped. Perhaps he, too, was as much in the dark as I was. Why not make a clean breast of things and begin life anew? “Look here, old man, I’ve met you somewhere, I know, but I haven’t the slightest idea where, and I don’t know who you are, and you don’t know where you met me either, nor who I am. Obviously, we have nothing in common. Our conversation shows that. I’m sure nothing I could say would be of the slightest interest to you, and I must say your affairs mean less than nothing to me. Why not acknowledge the fact like men? Let’s stop boring each other, and sit on opposite sides of the car and be at peace.” I fancied myself saying this. But I didn’t speak. I lacked the courage. Instead, I tapped my folded newspaper lightly and carelessly hummed a merry little tune, to show how completely at ease I was. Also, I glanced casually about the car and read a couple more of the interrogatory car cards. Again the guard broke in upon our chat. “Fawtnstree!” he announced. My companion waited until we were well under way again and conversation was correspondingly difficult. Then he spoke. “Seen the old man lately?” he howled. Now who the deuce was the old man, and why should I have seen him lately? Why couldn’t the fool have left matters as they were, instead of dragging in some septuagenarian whom I never heard of? However, something in the way of a reply was obviously expected of me. So I rallied gamely. “No.” “He was asking about you only last week. Asked me if I’d seen you lately, and I said I hadn’t.” This was serious. Evidently the old man had been flattening his nose on the window pane for weeks, waiting for me to heave in sight, and here I not only hadn’t hove, but didn’t even know who he was. I was ashamed — I admit it frankly — and resolved to make what reparation I could. So I explained. “No, I haven’t seen him.”

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“Why don’t you drop in and see the old man some day? He often asks about you, and was asking only the other day if I’d seen you lately.” “I certainly will.” And, indeed, I would have been glad to — I even resolved to drop in and see him that very day. But it did seem silly, now that the conversation had gone so far, to say, “By the way, who is the old man?” So I didn’t, and for all I know the old man is waiting yet. “Brooklyn Bridge!” shouted the guard clearly, thereby breaking the world’s record for calling out the running broad station. I arose. “Well, here’s where I beat it,” I remarked jocosely. We shook hands. “Mighty glad to have seen you, old man.” “Thanks. Mighty glad to have seen you.” “Hope I’ll see you again some time.””Yes. If you’re ever down ‘round my way, drop in.” “Thanks. I’ll do that little thing.” “Say,” he added, as I turned to go, “Let’s get together some day for lunch.” “All right, let’s do that.” “Fine! Let me know ahead and I’ll get hold of the old man. Gimme a ring some day, will you?” “I’ll do that.” Ah, now I would find him out! I would get his telephone number, call up information and ask her who he was. I spoke craftily. “I’ll call you this week. Where’ll I get you? “Oh, just gimme a ring. I’m in the book, you know.” And so we parted. I’ve often thought of him since, though. I want to go out to lunch with him, not so much for the sake of his conversation — I know beforehand about what that will be — but to see the old man. Several times I thought I had him identified, but his name evades me. If you’d say it to me I’d know it the minute I heard it. You know how it is. Still, he’s in the book. I have that much to go by. And so I have started looking for him there. I’ve been at it two weeks now, and I’m nearly through the C’s. Some day I shall find him.

“Three Poor Devils” (New Republic, January 6, 1917) Note: Taylor had two reasons for asking the Tribune to sponsor his trip to Paris in the fall of 1916. His then wife, Jane Anderson, had gone to Europe to report on the war and he wanted to see her. But he had a deeper psychological issue to deal with: he considered himself a pacifist (his parents had been Mennonites), and there was a nagging doubt — he might actually be a coward. Though he never made it to the war front, he got close enough to have enemy cannon fire come

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close enough for him to say: “All at once I began to be frightened.” But in a hospital he saw the results of those who had been at the front. Not nearly so many die of wounds received in battle nowadays as formerly, because of the immediate scientific attention that the wounded receive. To-day soldiers can be shot up a good deal without serious injury —Hiram Maxim [inventor of the machine gun] The nurse stopped beside a cot near a window. “This is Brissol,” she said. He lay upon his back, motionless; only his head had turned slightly upon the pillow as we neared him, that he might more easily look at us. But I did not notice his face. I was looking at his feet. They stuck out at the bottom of the bed, each bound lightly to a thin board padded with cotton—like a makeshift sandal. They were waxy white, and looked clean and soft, like a woman’s hands. The white coverlet that hid all between ankles and chin lay without a wrinkle. The nurse explained. “He’s paralyzed, from the waist down. Shrapnel. And we had to amputate his left arm. His back is sore, too — bed sores, you know, from lying still so long. It is covered with them. The worst I ever saw. …” She turned to the wounded man and spoke in French. “Brissol, this gentleman is from New York.” He had been watching us, his eyes glancing from one to the other. They were eyes black and extraordinarily brilliant, as though they had taken over the vitality that had passed from that inert body. He spoke now for the first time. “Ah, New York.” He smiled, “To see my petit bras?” “He calls the stump his ‘little arm,’” she explained. “I’ll ask him to show it to you. He likes us to joke about it.” She turned again to Brissol. Would he show us his petit bras? He nodded, and with his remaining hand turned back the coverlet that we might look. The sleeve of the flannel nightgown had been cut away to give freer play to what was left of his arm. The end was neatly done up in intricate platings of bandage. The upper part, where the flesh showed, was white, waxy white like his feet, and frail. I could have spanned it with my thumb and forefinger. He could move it, he said. See; The thing wagged grotesquely. “Ce n’est pas très long, mon p’tit bras,” he murmured. “How long did you lie wounded before the stretcher-bearers found you?” The question was almost involuntary. I do not know why I asked it.

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“Two days. … That is a long time.” He paused a moment. “A long time,” he repeated softly. “Will he ever walk?” I asked the nurse as we turned away. “No. Never.” “Still—somehow it doesn’t seem quite so bad as if he were a younger man, with a whole lifetime —” She shook her head. “He is not old. Many of them look like that. He is only thirty-five.” We had reached another bed. No paralytic, this, for he was sitting up, dressed in his uniform, the faded coat unbuttoned at the throat, and wearing a pair of shabby black bedroom slippers. He heard us coming and turned his head; and I saw that he was blind. The half-closed right eye was dull and sunken, while the drooping left eyelid protruded, swollen and purplish, as though the eyeball beneath were trying to force its way out of the socket. “One of my best patients,” said the nurse. “Bon jour, Grangeon!” At the sound of her voice his heavy, patient face lighted up with eager welcome. “Ah, Mees Smeeth! Bon jour, bon jour!” he babbled excitedly. Then, suddenly, his mood changed; he became mysterious, important. “Attendez! I have something for you!” He fumbled under the pillow for an instant, found the object he was searching for, and held it out proudly. A little basket; a clumsy little raffia basket about three inches across, wobbly and lop-sided, with frayed ends of straw sticking out of its uneven rim. “Ah, c’est joli!” cried the nurse. “For me? Truly? Merci, Grangeon!” Her eyes were very bright. She took his hand and held it, patting and stroking it as she talked to me. “Poor Grangeon! It’s worse for him than for some of them. He is older — over forty — and he is only a peasant, a farm hand. He is not clever. He finds it hard to learn raffia work and chair caning, like the rest. It is too late. He cannot change. I don’t know what he will do.” She was talking in English, of course. But Grangeon did not seem to mind being left out of things. He sat on the bed, his legs straight out before him and his shoulders bent a little. But his chin was raised, so that he seemed to be peering at something very far off. That was because he was but newly blind. When he had been blind a little longer he would not hold his chin up that way. He would give up the fight, the unconscious struggle to see, and the taut muscles would relax. Already the anxious, puzzled lines on his face were commencing to smooth out, were giving way to the awful placidity of the blind. Perhaps this was why he seemed so much younger than Brissol; Brissol, who was thirty-five and looked fifty. Sitting there, clutching the nurse’s hand with his thick, calloused fingers, he seemed strangely like a child. You

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thought of a little boy, in the dark, holding fast to his mother’s hand for comfort… . “We must go,” the nurse said. “The surgeons will be making their rounds soon.” She gently disengaged her fingers. “Au revoir, Grangeon.” “Au ’voir, ma’mselle.” As the door closed behind us she glanced down the corridor and pointed in surprise. “Why there’s Dupré. I didn’t know he was well enough to be up. We must stop and speak to him. He’s a very remarkable case — plastic surgery. When he came, it didn’t seem as though he could possibly live. But the surgeons saved him. They’ve given him almost a whole new face.” He did not look up as we stopped before him. He was sitting in a low chair, leaning forward, his elbows upon his knees and his hands loosely clasped. His chin was slightly raised … as Grangeon’s had been. Over his right eye and half of his right cheek was a black patch. His nose was quite flat, the right nostril a mere flap of skin. Part of his mouth — the left side — was still normal, a mouth. But just under his nose a thick, livid scar divided his upper lip, ran down the lower lip and jaw, and disappeared beneath his chin. To the right of this scar there was nothing; nothing human, that is. There was skin and flesh, bone, too, perhaps. A slit to the right of the scar corresponded to what was the mouth on the left. The thing had no lips. Jean Dupré was twenty-four years old. He had once been a man, perhaps even a handsome man. The nurse spoke, very cheerfully. “Dupré, bon jour! How do you feel now? Is your cold any better to-day? Ça va bien?” “Non. Ça ne va pas bien.” He had not raised his head, nor had his expression changed. But the terrible lipless mouth had moved; and from somewhere, hell, I think, had come a voice …. It was the nurse who first broke the silence as we went on down the corridor. “He wears that black patch, you know … because there is nothing underneath. Just a red hole.” “He has seen himself? “No. He hopes to get back the sight of his left eye — he can tell night from day. But he never will.” We were both silent for a little while. Then she spoke again. “Do you know,” she began hesitatingly, “I can’t help thinking … these three men … perhaps it would have been better —” She did not finish. There are things that it is useless for nurses to think about — or surgeons either. They are not the judges. This wonderful civilization of ours, so intricate, so specialized, has set them a single task: that of healing broken men, of keeping living souls in dead bodies. There are other specialists to take charge of the killing.

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“To die for one’s country! … If one were only sure of dying.

“The Shrine of Each Patriot’s Devotion” (New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, February 18, 1917) Note: In a world transformed by September 11, 2001, perhaps it is comforting to know that the issues of 90 years ago in Congress— “pork” and other patriotic aspects — remain with us, but we still survive. The other day I heard a man say that the American nation is a little less than three years old. What he meant, of course, was that for the first time in our history we have been more or less cut off from Europe; that the flood of immigrants to our hospitable shores has stopped; and that at last we have had time to draw breath and take stock of ourselves, to push forward the gigantic work of fusing into one race the scores of nationalities that go to make up the American people. It may be that he was right, and we are at last turning into a nation. What bears him out most eloquently, perhaps, is the wave of patriotism that has just swept the country. When our long-standing dispute with Germany terminated with the President’s severance of diplomatic relations with that country, the people of the United States backed him up with impressive unanimity. Almost overnight we stopped being Irish-Americans, or German-Americans, or French-Americans, or any other kind of qualified Americans. We became Americans. We hung the flag from our windows and flew it from our flagpoles; we wore the Stars and Stripes in our buttonholes. Our colleges held patriotic meetings and our ministers preached patriotic sermons. Rich men offered to lend their private fortunes to the government, while manufacturing concerns placed their factories at the disposal of the nation. As this is being written no one knows whether or not we are to have war with Germany. One thing is certain, though. If war does come we will meet it as a nation, loyal and undivided. But after the war, what? Or suppose there is no war? Are the flags to come down, the speeches to be forgotten, the pledges of loyalty and devotion to be forgotten? Now that we are, magically, a nation, are we going to remain one? That will depend largely upon whether our patriotism is strong enough to weather calmer times. The finest thing that could happen to this country would be for its citizens to experience a wave of patriotic feeling every once in a while when there existed no foreign crisis of any sort. And a mighty good place for such a wave of peace-time patriotism to start would be at headquarters; that is, in Congress.

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Take the House, for example. Just now it is passing through the short session, the interval between election and March 4. [Note: In 1933, the 20th Amendment changed the transfer of power to January 20.] Has it enacted much bad legislation during this period? Not at all. Has it enacted much good legislation? Well, no. Has it done anything at all? Oh, surely. First of all it had a perfectly glorious time investigating the peace note leak, the result of which was to prove irrefutably that there had been a peace note leak. Then it postponed indefinitely the discussion of five important bills while it appropriated $32,000,000 for public buildings. After that, drawing a long breath, Congress bravely appropriated $38,000,000 more for rivers and harbors. (If “public buildings” and “rivers and harbors” takes too long to say, you can use a shorter word: say “pork.”) A wave of patriotism sweeping through the House would wreak awful havoc among the pork bills. Congressman Whoozis, for example, might come to the conclusion that Pork Centre, his home town — population, 3,620; total assessed value of real estate, $27,000 — could worry along without a $40,000 post office building, or Representative Whatsis might decide that $63,000 was too much to appropriate for the enlargement of the harbor of his home town, situated not far from the Mojave desert. Pork Centre needn’t begin to worry just yet, however. At present writing the chief abiding place of Congressional patriotism is the Congressional Record. The Senate, too, would find patriotism a great help. Last month, for example, our Senators were debating the question of consolidating certain governmental bureaus and divisions. It was estimated that by abolishing duplication of work this measure would save the country about $30,000,000 a year — almost enough to pay for Congress’s public buildings expenditures. All the Senators admitted that the money should and could be saved; but they were afraid of the pressure that would be brought to bear upon them by the people whose offices had been abolished. Finally Senator Overman had a happy thought. He put the responsibility for carrying our proposed reforms up to the President, and for further safety proposed that the President carry them out “during the vacation of Congress.” However, the bill didn’t pass. Senator Oliver, of Pennsylvania, killed it. He wasn’t going to stand idly by and see the country degenerate into a monarchy. As he so cleverly put it, the proposed bill “confers powers upon the President that Congress should hesitate long before conferring.” When Senator Overman, who must have dangerous socialistic tendencies, still insisted, Senator Oliver delivered the supreme, crushing argument that finally killed the pernicious measure. He said: “I will not confer upon the President of the United States or upon any one else the power to do away with any bureau or to restrict any of the executive departments as they

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have been established year after year and term after term by Congress.” That settled that. If a wave of patriotism had happened to hit the Senate just about that time, everything would have been much simplified, of course. The Senators would have argued that if they could save the country money it was their duty to do so; and they might have done the abolishing themselves, instead of first passing the buck to the President then deciding that it would be dangerous to allow him to have it. Perhaps it is hardly fair to be too hard on Congress. After all, Congress claims merely to represent the people; and after a brief consideration of our average annual per capita output of patriotism one is forced to the reluctant conclusion that Congress probably does. One of our favorite pastimes, for example, is cheating the government of our country. Let me tell you a story I heard not long ago — a true story. An American citizen, a prominent one, went to Europe year before last for an extended visit. Being a prominent American citizen, he was invited to public dinners and public meetings. He was also invited to speak at these gatherings, and being a prominent American citizen he did. He claimed, I believe, to represent public opinion in America. In the course of his speeches he spoke of America’s — unofficial America’s — sympathy with the Allied cause, said unkind things about the Administration, and mourned the decline of American patriotism. Last year he returned to America; and when he passed through customs the inspectors found ten thousand dollars’ worth of undeclared goods in his trunks. Not that he was an exception, particularly, except that the amount was a bit large and that he got caught. We all look upon smuggling as more or less of a joke. Suppose some one offered to sell you, cheap, a box of smuggled cigars. Would you spurn the offer indignantly on the ground that the smuggler had robbed your country of a fraction of its income? Somehow I doubt it. Think, too, of the hours you spent, when the income tax blank came in, trying to pare down your income and increase the number of your dependents in order to make yourself exempt. Of if you don’t like to think of that, think of the open season for property taxes, when your millionaire friends trip lightly down to the tax bureau to explain, first, that their property doesn’t amount to nearly as much as their assessments say, and, second, that they live in Cleveland, Ohio, anyway. Some of these same men, by the way, probably put their manufacturing plants at the disposal of the government last week. “That’s all very well, but if our government was half as efficient as it ought to be our taxes wouldn’t be so high?” Quite so. And who puts inefficient

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people in governmental jobs? You can’t blame Congress or the war. Think of what might happen if a wave of patriotism should strike our citizens around election day. Instead of going into the booth and marking crosses opposite the names of two men he knows, one man who is an awfully good friend of Cousin Ella’s husband, and nine men whom he never heard of but who must be all right because they belong to his party, the average voter might actually spend two or three hours looking up the political records and professional qualifications of the candidates and then vote for the men he thought best qualified. A wave of patriotism wouldn’t hurt our newspapers, either. During these past two weeks the one thing the American people needed and wanted was a chance to sit down and think things over. We were on the brink of being drawn into the most stupendous war in the history of the world. We wanted to do our duty, to the country and the world, and we wanted to know the truth about things, so that we could make up our minds just what we ought to do. We wanted to realize the thing that confronted us. And what has our free and untrammeled press been doing? Well, it has printed the news — when there has been news. But some days there hasn’t been any news. So our newspapers have printed countless columns of rumor, conjecture, personal guesses, private opinions of men who didn’t know much more about the situation than we did. These columns have been surmounted by enormous headlines which couldn’t have been any bigger if they had been true. You could have any kind of news you wanted. If, on a given morning, you thought we ought to declare instant war upon Germany you could read a paper whose “news” fully bore you out in your opinion. If you didn’t want war with Germany under any circumstances you could, that same morning, read another paper whose dispatches were reassurance itself. Or if you didn’t know just what was going to happen you might, if you looked long enough, find a paper that would admit that nobody else did, either. The evening papers have been especially industrious. Today, for example, something extremely important may happen, about three o’clock in the afternoon. In that case, all the American evening papers that publish Sunday editions will issue a ten o’clock extra tonight. But if nothing at all happens they will issue a ten o’clock extra just the same. Boys will be bawling it beneath your window. You will start up and listen, then you will run out, bareheaded, to buy a copy of the special extra. You will pay five cents to learn that nothing has happened. The trouble is that so many newspaper owners are more patriotic about the newspaper business than they are about the United States. When a Congressman puts through a pork bill for his constituents he is being more patriotic about his district than he is about the United States. When power

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companies steal waterfalls and spoil rivers, or when paper companies wipe out forests, they are being more patriotic about the power business, or the paper business, than they are about the United States. It is all a matter of what we mean by patriotism. We are all patriotic, but not always for the same thing. Just now we are feeling patriotic for our country. We have stopped thinking first about our state, or our town, or our neighborhood, and are putting the United States first. If we would only do that a little oftener we wouldn’t have to insist that this is the finest country in the world; other people would tell us so. Patriotism is a loyalty to something bigger than our immediate interests, and the history of the world is the history of the broadening of patriotism, the widening of the field of men’s loyalties. Cavemen were loyal to their families. Then they came out of their caves and formed tribes, and were loyal to those. The tribes settled down in villages, and the members of one village would defend it to the death against members of another. The villages became clans, and men were loyal to those. The clans united and became little kingdoms, or states, or duchies. Late in the Middle Ages the little kingdoms and duchies because fused into bigger ones, and men found that they belonged to nations. The great war came, and the nations of Europe split into great camps. Half the men in Europe were loyal to one side and half to the other. Now we are talking of a League of Peace after the war, in which whole nations will be patriots. For they will be loyal to something bigger than they are. Some day, I think, some day very far in the future, we are going to be world patriots; we are going to be loyal to the human race. But that, of course, is what people call a Utopian dream.

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Chapter

3

New York World Music Criticisms, 1921–1925

Introduction When Taylor returned from Paris and his at-a-distance look at World War I, the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine was on its last legs, so he sought and gained an editorial position with Collier’s magazine, where his NYU classmate, William LeBaron (his lyricist for the NYU varsity shows), was an editor. Concurrently, he turned his hand to more composing. Years before, he had studied music theory, so he used that knowledge to arrange songs for choruses and gain a little extra money. Meanwhile, he developed his musical skills writing songs, several cantatas, and some orchestral works. The music world started to take note of him in 1919 with the premiere of his orchestral suite Through the Looking Glass. It gained an excellent review from Henry Krehbiel, one of the “Big Five” music critics in New York at a time when a dozen newspapers, each with its own music critic, filled the city’s newsstands. When James Gibbons Huneker, another of the “Big Five” critics, died in February of 1921, a door opened for Taylor that he quickly stepped through with the hope of becoming a major player in musical circles. Huneker, who wrote for the New York World, the Pulitzer paper, was arguably the most respected of all the music critics in the United States. At that time the World’s columnists were as influential as those of any New York paper, perhaps more so. Never one to underestimate his talents, Taylor went to the editor of the World, applied to be the music critic, 41

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and got the post. Thus entered a fresh new voice among the city’s music critics, many of whom had been at their craft for decades. He brought to his writings the experience of a composer, as well as that of a humorist with imagination. Throughout his four seasons of being the World’s music critic, he kept his composing juices flowing by writing incidental music for Broadway dramas. From 1921 to 1925, Taylor covered every type of concert music, with special emphasis on opera and orchestra. Opera in New York was then in the hands of the Metropolitan Opera and the San Carlo Opera, the latter a professional company whose season preceded that of the Metropolitan. As for major orchestras, New York had two: the New York Philharmonic and the New York Symphony; these performed in the city’s two principal concert music venues respectively, Carnegie Hall and Aeolian Hall. Adding orchestral variety were regular visits of the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, and the Boston Symphony, under Pierre Monteux. Few regional orchestras traveled to New York and none from overseas, though famed conductors, such as Richard Strauss, the composer, and Wilhelm Furtwängler, came from Europe to be guest conductors. At times, Taylor covered two concerts on the same day, always with the responsibility to have the reviews to the composing room by midnight, because the World was a morning paper. For opera reviews, this often meant he had to leave before the performance was completed. The need to write reviews under this time pressure was mollified by the so-called “Sunday Piece.” Here he could ruminate about something he had heard or seen days before and write a more objective and insightful opinion. This chapter brings a variety of Taylor’s reviews, both those written by midnight for the morning paper and those Sunday pieces, based on longer reflection. Of the 29 writings in this chapter, three have unusual originality: (1) his reviews from the Midwest of concerts by six regional orchestras, dispatched daily from a trip there; (2) a review of the 1924 Metropolitan Opera’s opening night from five different viewpoints; (3) his review of a performance of one of his own orchestral compositions. In February of 1923 Taylor went to the Midwest for two weeks to hear concerts by the symphony orchestras of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. No music critic had ever reached that far beyond the Hudson River to seek out the quality of regional music making. And certainly none had sent back daily reports, as did Taylor. For the 1924 opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, Taylor wrote five different reviews: one in the style of the Associated Press, three in the styles of his co-journalists on the World — F.P.A. (Taylor’s old friend Franklin P. Adams), Heywood Broun (who shared a World office with Taylor) and Frank Sullivan, and then one of his own. The review’s secondary

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headline read: “Taylor Appears in Quick Change Act, Covering Opening in Some Good Disguises.” Regarding reviewing the performance of one of his own orchestral works, The Siren Song, Taylor apparently saw no ethical dilemma in this. His approach had such cleverness and wit that few could not be charmed by the result, as exemplified by the review’s final words: “We should like to hear more works by the same composer.” The World reviews chosen are in chronological order, which provides a musical path through four of the most interesting concert years in New York history. The punctuation, spelling and capitalization used by Taylor are maintained here. For example, it was then the tradition not to capitalize title words such as “symphony” or “concerto” or the number of the opus. Though today we would write Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in Taylor’s day it was Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The spellings of Russian and Slavic composers are also maintained as they were at that time.

“‘Aida’ At The Manhattan” (September 29, 1921) Note: Taylor’s very first review for the World — a performance by the San Carlo Opera — lost little time in showing how he could infuse cleverness and humor into the subject. Fortune Gallo initiated the San Carlo Opera in 1913 and gained a reputation for fine productions at modest prices. Its principal function was as a touring company, and it carried on those traditions until it disbanded in the 1950s. The San Carlo company’s performance of “Aida” last night was not, perhaps, perfection, but it was a spirited one and on the whole extremely creditable. Marie Rappold, who was guest soprano for the evening, sang the title role with considerable beauty of tone and excellent phrasing. Gaetano Commasini, the Radames, displayed a voice of great beauty in the upper register and did great execution with his top notes, but his lower voice was almost entirely wanting during the first act. He improved considerably later. The rest of the cast was surprisingly good. Gaetano Viviano as Amonasro slipped from the pitch on one or two occasions, but gave an excellent dramatic performance. Nina Frascani sang Amneris in place of Agnes Kraemer, who had been announced earlier, and was adequate for three acts and excellent in the fourth. The orchestra played with good tone and attack, although the brasses displayed an occasional distressing desire to see whether they could make more noise than the singers. They could. Carlo Peroni conducted well. Sylvia Tell led the ballet, but she had to share the honors with six Ethiopian flappers who looked like feminine Lew Dockstaders [i.e., minstrel show

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performers in blackface] and who elicited fervent tributes from the audience that may not have been entirely expected. The scenery was pretty bad, but it was so well lighted that it passed muster. It was a shock, though to find that all the temples in the middle distance at Memphis were in ruins, even in those days. An added attraction of the evening was the Manhattan Opera House cat, who strolled across the stage with his hands in his pockets during the Nile scene to the delight of everybody — that is, everybody except Mme. Rappold. It is said the he had been told by one of the stage hands that the cat was a sacred animal in Egypt, and immediately went out to see if there was any truth to the rumor. He is not expected to appear in “La Boheme” tonight.

“In the World of Music” (October 9, 1921) Note: In this, one of his first Sunday pieces, Taylor provided insight into the character of “Carmen,” using a performance by a little known soprano of the San Carlo Opera company as his basis. Then he explained why he believed that Giuseppe Verdi knew an awful lot about the human nervous system. It would be pretty hard to prove to any jury of experts that Esther Ferrabini is one of the great Carmens of operatic history. Certainly her vocal equipment is nothing to boast of: a large, homely, mezzo soprano voice, which she misuses cruelly at times. In looks, [Geraldine] Farrar’s Carmen immeasurably eclipses hers. Moreover, as the jury would point out, many of the great, traditional Carmens are dead; I heard only one of them — Bressler-Gianoli. So, retreating to the impregnable heights of personal preference, let me merely assert that I have seen and heard six Carmens and that Esther Ferrabini is the best Carmen I ever saw. Every mezzo tries Carmen sooner or later, but not many achieve her. Either they are anxious to prove that she was, after all, not a bad girl at heart, and make her a rowdy debutante; or else, conceiving that she was what the movies would call Passion’s Slave, they proceed to exhibit her as a candidate for the Women’s Night Court. Ferrabini’s Carmen is neither. Here is a big, sleepy-eyed, sensuous, gipsy girl, with a streak of white fire in her blood. She attracts men, and knows it, and glories in the fact, and rather despises them for it. Her scene with the men in the first act is superb. She doesn’t strut like a schoolgirl in her first short dress, and she doesn’t accost. She exults — as impersonal as a queen bee and as innocently pleased with her devastation as a good machine-gunner. Not a vampire, for she has a sense of humor. In her fight with the other cigarette girl she doesn’t try to abolish her adversary, as I have seen some Carmens do. By the time the two of them

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have been dragged out into the square she has rather lost interest in the row. She does make a perfunctory pass at the other girl, but she does it almost with a grin, and you feel that she knows she has a reputation as a terror and hates to disappoint the boys. For they are all boys to her, these soldiers and bullfighters and smugglers. And she is old, born old and wise. What she secretly wants is a master. At the Manhattan [Opera House] the other night Don Jose never really had a chance with Carmen. She was delighted, of course, when she finally cajoled him into untying her hands and letting her escape, but you knew she was a little contemptuous too of a youth who could be so weak. Still he was an officer and a young gentleman, and the conquest tickled her vanity. But when, in the second act she made him desert and run off with her his doom was sealed. Don Jose was a confirmed clinging vine and Carmen knew it. Escamillo was an accident. It might have been someone else. Ferrabini’s Carmen does not love Escamillo, except perhaps at first, while she still hopes that he may beat her. It is the Toreador who holds her, the famous bull-killer with his gold lace and white horses and cheering crowds. When the pair make their triumphal entry in the last act, most Carmens fawn on Escamillo. Ferrabini does nothing of the sort. She admires him, but only for the glitter and notoriety that are his. It is the crowd she watches. To think that this great man, over whom they’re making all this fuss, is her lover! You see her hug the thought to herself. If the opera were one act longer it would have to show Escamillo out of a job and Carmen off to the arms of some new celebrity, someone who might, this time, be the big man she was hunting. Seeing other Carmens in the last scene, with Don Jose, one wonders why under the sun she doesn’t run down a side street when Jose goes after her with a knife. You don’t wonder that, seeing Ferrabini. She isn’t frightened; she’s angry — furious at this discarded youngster who has dared to threaten her and who is trying to keep her from her Toreador. She runs, but not away from him. She is going to pass him, knife or no knife. So Don Jose kills her. But not he, nor Escamillo, nor any other man ever mastered her. Vocally, Ferrabini can do something that few singers ever seem to manage — something that makes up for the shortcomings — and they are many — of her natural voice; she can act with that voice. She colors it, she changes the quality to suit the mood she is portraying. The average singer is so intent upon emitting a pretty noise, at all times and at all costs, that she seldom succeeds in being more impressive, dramatically, than a canary. ***** It is too bad Verdi didn’t write a handbook upon applause, calling it “Audiences, and What Makes Them Work,” or something of the sort. The

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old gentleman knew all about the human animal’s nervous reactions, how to make him applaud and — what is equally important — how to stop him. Almost any skillful composer has some instinctive knowledge upon the subject, but Verdi must have used the knowledge deliberately. When the cheering section at the opera roars its approval, it may believe that the action is spontaneous. As a matter of fact, barring accidents or unusually bad singing, applause at a Verdi opera, particularly in the earlier ones, before Giuseppe began to have artistic scruples, has been more or less predetermined by the composer. Of course a high note is always sure to put the audience in an applauding mood. The rapid vibrations tickle their ear drums and stimulate the nerve centers and start the blood circulating faster. They accumulate a little surplus nervous energy and want to spend it. Besides there is the added excitement of being present at the performance of a difficult physical feat. Opera audiences like to hear Galli-Curci leap over a couple of octaves just as movie audiences like to see Douglas Fairbanks leap over a couple of tables. But the high note alone may not turn the trick. The actual volume of sound is small, whatever its intensity. So the orchestra comes in and whips up the nerve centers with its added bulk. Then the noise stops abruptly. The pressure is removed, and the edified listeners beat their hands and yell in order to work off their surplus energy. It isn’t art at all. It is sheer automatism. This is the ABC of the art of applause extraction. But the early Verdi was even cleverer than that. He drives his audiences into frenzies by a further refinement of the art — suspense — and by helping his singers to be at their best. The simplest way to explain how he does it is to illustrate. Let us take the end of the third act of “Il Trovatore.” Here is a tenor. Owing to the exigencies of the libretto, he is not going to have a great deal to do, pyrotechnically, in the last act. This is his last chance to shine. The problem is to help him get the most out of what he has to do. Verdi begins by smoothing out the nerves of his audience and the vocal cords of his tenor. He gives Manrico a placid, easygoing scene with Leonora, which pleases the listeners without exciting them and gives Manrico a preliminary canter around the upper middle section of his voice. His little lyric aria, “Amor, sublime amore,” gives him just enough work to keep the vocal cords warm without putting any strain upon them. Then an organ plays. The tenor has a moment of complete rest and the audience is still further soothed. This is the extreme low point of the scene, from a nerve specialist’s point of view. Suddenly Ruiz enters, so excited that the audience, however ignorant of Italian, knows that something is wrong. The orchestra, too, begins to show signs of perturbation. From this point on, the process of goading the audience continues remorselessly. The tempo of the music grows swifter and swifter and the voices grow louder and louder. The tenor, well rested,

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is in the pink of condition. Ruiz rushes out, and Marico begins “Di Quella Pira.” The audience knows that this must be his big aria — all signs, and the argument printed in the program, point to it. But they miss something, they hardly know what. That something is a real high note. Despite a few G’s and a couple of A’s, the tessitura, that is, the general “lay” of the voice in this aria, is comfortably low for a tenor. They wait and wait for that high note. Will it never come? Finally it does come — a high C on “O teco.” It isn’t Verdi’s — an enterprising tenor stuck it in — but it’s effective. To the audience the scene is over and it prepares to relieve its nerves by applauding. But no. Leonora sings a line or two, and the audience, baffled, remains tense. Whereupon the tenor, pulling a sword — always an inspiring object — braces his legs, throws back his shoulders, and releases a terrific C on “morir,” the easiest vowel sound in the tenor voice. Manrico in turn rushes out, Verdi unleashes the full orchestra — steps on the brass, as it were, the curtain falls hastily, and nature takes its course. Of course the audience howls. How can the poor things help it?

“Strauss Leader At Carnegie Hall” (Nov. 1, 1921) Note: Taylor’s review of this concert conducted by Richard Strauss anticipated his trip to Bavaria the following summer to interview the great composer. Taylor’s recollection of that experience is found in “Richard Himself ” (p. 164) One Strauss opus to whom another was in part dedicated sat in Carnegie Hall last night and heard the composer of both conduct the second. Which, in plainer English, means that Richard Strauss’s son was among the several thousand who gathered to hear the famous musician conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in three of his own works: the symphonic poems “Don Juan” and “Til Eulenspiegel,” and the “Sinfonia Domestica.” It was a grayer and thinner Strauss and sparser of hair than the one who conducted here seventeen years ago but as extraordinary a conductor as he ever was. The results he obtained from Stokowski’s orchestra after two rehearsals were amazing: a precision in attack, a delicacy and flexibility in tempo and dynamics that spoke volumes for the virtuosity of the players as well as the persuasiveness of the Bavarian master. Strauss as a conductor seems singularly austere to a public such as ours accustomed to a school of conducting that vies with Pavlowa in its pursuit of the poetry of motion. His right arm does most of the work, the left dangling at his side except to beckon the entrance of an instrumental group or to indicate an ultimate peak of orchestral dynamics. He keeps his head and body still, except for a slight turn upon occasion, and his feet do not move

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at all. It is disconcerting to hear the orchestra mount through thunderous waves of sound and to see Strauss’s right arm indicating a mild “one-two, one-two” that is almost comically disproportionate to the gigantic results it evokes. The bulk of his work is obviously done at rehearsals. “Don Juan” and “Til Eulenspiegel” have both been done here so frequently that it would be vain to expect Dr. Strauss to have discovered any striking novelties in their interpretation. He did, however, take the horn passage at the beginning of “Til” rather slower than it is generally done — and with good effect. The tempo of the passage was sufficiently swift to be exhilarating without being so fast as to make the listener wait uneasily for the horn player to stumble. “Til’s” second theme — the one that is assigned first to the D clarinet — had a more impish tang than most conductors and players get out of it. The “Sinfonia Domestica” is less often done, thus more volubly discussed, than either of the other two. It was superbly played, and the composer conducted it con amore. Dr. Strauss is quoted as wanting this composition heard simply as a symphonic work and as disavowing the elaborate story that always accompanies it. If this is true, why did last night’s program contain the notes that the composer pretends not to sanction? The work, heard as absolute music, has eloquence, brilliance and power, although it is too long. But the program notes exhibit its creator as totally destitute of any sense of proportion. According to them the “Sinfonia Domestica” is descriptive of a family — husband, wife and child — presumably the Strauss family. In its proportions it is more descriptive of the home life of a dinosaur. A dire, fateful motive on the oboe d’amour, developed by horns and violas — the child! A blare of brass, with fiendish trills in the wood — baby is having his bath. A crash like the fall of Babylon — father has fallen asleep and is having a bad dream. A final chorale chanted by an augmented brass choir with the rest of the 112 players added for good measure — father and mother have been discussing the baby’s future and have finally agreed upon it. Life in the apartment under such a family might be brief but it would not be silent. The audience was enormous and looked like an animated Who’s Who in music. The orchestra applauded the conductor, the house applauded everything and Dr. Strauss applauded the orchestra.

“Jeritza Triumphs In Korngold Opera ‘Die Tote Stadt’” (November 20, 1921) Note: Maria Jeritza (“Marie” in those days) is acknowledged as one of the most beautiful sopranos ever to grace the Metropolitan stage. Not

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only did she impress reviewer Taylor, but she also impressed at least three major composers: Erich Korngold, who wrote Die Tote Stadt as a starring vehicle for her; Richard Strauss, who gave her the lead roles in premieres of his operas Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau Ohne Schatten; Leoš Janáček, who gave her the title role in the premiere of his opera Jenúfa. Suppose we abandon as hopeless all attempts to begin this review without mixing metaphors and start bravely by announcing that on Saturday afternoon, about twenty-five minutes to three, a blond thunderbolt swept out upon the stage of the Metropolitan like a flash of sunlight and caroled her way stormily into the hearts of the audience. For such, roughly speaking, is about the general impression left by Marie Jeritza’s debut with the Metropolitan Opera Company. The opera in which she made her debut, Erich Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt,” was equally a newcomer, as Saturday’s performance was its first in America. It was written for Mme. Jeritza, and her presence among us is due to Manager Gatti-Casazza’s enterprise in importing her to sing it. [Taylor then writes at length about the libretto and about Korngold’s score, “a mixture of excellences and defects.” He admits that “Of Korngold’s talent for composition there can be no question. ‘Die Tote Stadt’ is an amazing performance for a boy of twenty-two.” Taylor calls the opera “overscored,” making his point cleverly: “The score is full of ‘effects’ that seem not so much the result of the inevitable demands of the action and the music as of a desire to keep the players from earning their salaries too easily. The celesta, for instance, is a very pretty instrument, effective in inverse ratio to the number of times it is employed; Korngold keeps this unfortunate instrument tinkling away until it becomes no more impressive than a cash register.” He also criticizes the composer’s vocal writing. “[Korngold’s] writing for the voice is generally bad. The vocal parts often sound as if they were afterthoughts fitted into the score just before it was sent to the copyist. As usual with German composers, the soprano part is too high and the tenor part is too low.” Taylor then returns to further assessment of Mme. Jeritza.] Now to discuss the new prima donna, Marie Jeritza. Her personal appearance calls for superlatives, but let it suffice to say that she is tall, she is blonde, and she is beautiful. When she came upon the stage Saturday in a flame-colored hat and cloak, she drew a gasp from the audience that was a far more eloquent tribute than all the handclaps that followed. She is an actress of extraordinary grace, fire and emotional variety. She created the part of Marietta, and she draws a portrait of this seductive

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and tempestuous wanton so detailed and authentic that it is difficult to imagine what “Die Tote Stadt” would be without her. Hers is a stage personality of extraordinary vitality. She exhilarates. Tall as she is — and her proportions are statuesque — she moves with the ease and grace of a panther. Her gestures are never conventional and never false. It will be interesting to see her in other roles. Her voice is one of tremendous power and range and of considerable beauty, and she colors it wonderfully to express the mood of the moment.… There were defects in her singing yesterday, notably a tendency to push up to her high notes; but before deciding that they were inherent one would have to hear her in a part that was less of an outrage on the soprano voice than what Mr. Korngold has written.… “Die Tote Stadt” will probably remain in the Metropolitan repertoire; Marie Jeritza undoubtedly will.

“A Great Artist” (December 2, 1921) Note: It didn’t take long for Jeritza to prove that Taylor was correct in seeing her potential both as singer and actress. In this performance, her first Metropolitan appearance as “Tosca,” she established a tradition for every soprano who followed her in the role — to sing “Vissi d’Arte” from a prone position on the floor. No one who saw Tosca last night is likely soon to forget her. Tosca swaying at the head of the table, clutching a silver fruit knife behind her back as she faced Scarpia with a horrible twisted smile upon her lips, her tortured eyes glazing with fear and terrible resolution. For last evening at the Metropolitan Marie Jeritza made her first appearance in the title role of Puccini’s opera and gave a performance that left a packed house alternately breathless and cheering. A certain proportion of those who attended last night’s performance had come with a fairly obvious intention of being shown. Jeritza had created a profound impression in “Die Tote Stadt,” but the part of Marietta had after all been written expressly for her. Would she be as effective in a role already familiar through the efforts of two generations of opera singers? What she did was to take Sardou’s threadbare melodrama and turn it into quivering life itself. She gave a performance of thrilling beauty and intensity, every tone and gesture of which was instinct with authority and imagination. She sobbed at the end of “Vissi d’Arte” and more than one of her hearers wept with her. She is a great artist, there is no doubt of that. One would have to forsake the operatic stage and go back to Sarah Bernhardt to find a Tosca that could hold an audience so spellbound.

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It was a performance that took small account of tradition. Her first act costume, for instance, was the most ingenuous of pale blue gowns and a scarf for her head. Just before the “Vissi d’Arte” she crouched on the sofa, from which Scarpia roughly pushed her so that she half slid, half fell, to the floor. It was from this prone position that she sang the whole aria — a vocal feat as difficult as it was effective. Her voice was as beautiful as her acting. Only once or twice did she fall into her fault of “scooping” her high notes. But even then she scooped to conquer. Mr. [Antonio] Scotti surpassed himself as Scarpia. Jeritza’s unconventional stage business made it necessary for him to make frequent changes in his familiar acting of the role, and there were occasions where the slightest lack of cooperation on his part would have ruined her performance. But there was not a moment when he did not assist her magnificently. In the part of Cavaradossi, Aureliano Pertile made his debut with the Metropolitan company. It was extremely unfortunate that Mr. Pertile should have had to make his first appearance at a time when attention was inevitably centered upon another artist. There is no space now to do him justice. Let it suffice for the present to say that he has a fine voice, sings with exceptional skill and expressiveness and possesses dramatic talents that on any other evening would have made his debut a notable one. He is decidedly an asset. [Note: Pertile sang only one season at the Metropolitan, then was politely let go. However, back in Italy and with strong support from Toscanini, he sang with great success and was to many Italians a second Caruso.]

“Rachmaninoff Plays” (December 5, 1921) The wet discomfort overhead and underfoot had no terrors for the crowd that went to Carnegie Hall yesterday afternoon to hear Sergei Rachmaninoff’s first piano recital of the season. There was not an empty seat in the house and the number of standees had been limited only by the fire laws. A satisfying player this tall Russian. What he can do he does to perfection, and what he cannot do he does not attempt. Not the greatest pianist in the world; a certain power of grasping the impalpable, of evoking what lies beyond the borderland of dreams — this he does not possess. His touch is true and sure; but it is like that of a surgeon: it probes and reveals. Debussy’s “La Cathedrale Engloutie” would fare poorly under his hands, for he would have no patience with Debussy’s pale tone wraiths. He would push on through the mist in vain search for the clear outline that Debussy does not draw.

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But perhaps there is no greatest pianist. Certainly in one field of pianism Rachmaninoff is supreme. He is tremendously articulate. No living pianist can surpass him in the power of delivering an eloquent, definite message where there is one to deliver. His Chopin group yesterday was one of marvelous explicitness. Even in the nocturne op. 27 he was direct. It was hesitant, but only with the hesitancy of shyness, never of inarticulateness. The D flat waltz was like a windy day of vivid sunshine with tiny whirlwinds of sound-motes caught up to hover and fall and soar again. He played his own “Etudes-Tableaux” — fireworks, if you will, but fireworks that glowed like jewels, with little scale passages shooting out in microscopic perfection like points of flame. His arrangement of Kreisler’s “Liebesleid,” in the form of a theme and variations, is so perfectly uttered in terms of the piano that one almost begins to think of the original as a transcription. It is immensely satisfactory, “meaty” music, full of melting counterpoint in the inner voices and small chords overhead scampering down in a panic lest they be too late. The end of the recital was evocative of the days when Paderewski played — a feminine rush to the platform to beg for encores. He granted six, the last, of course, being the notorious C sharp minor prelude. His playing of this was sometimes disconcertingly rapid. One would have said that he did not quite grasp the composer’s intentions.

“Chaliapin as Boris” (December 10, 1921) Note: Feodor Chaliapin, the first Russian singer to gain international stature, had performed at the Metropolitan during the 1907–08 season in four operas — “Mephistopheles,” “Barber of Seville,” “Don Giovanni,” and “Faust.” He did not return again until 1921 and then in Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godunoff” (to use the spelling of that time), the role for which he would always be remembered. Feodor Chaliapin brings something to the opera that is greater than singing, greater than acting. He brings drama, that perfect realization and illusion of life for which singing and acting exist, the thing that only a few of the great possess. Jeritza has it; Whitehill sometimes has it; but neither possesses it to the overpowering degree that Chaliapin does. He sang Boris at the Metropolitan last night for the first time here. One says “sang” because it is the conventional word and the most easily comprehended. It is not adequate. He lived Boris; he was Boris. When he strode upon the stage in the first act towering above his lords and nobles, his gold crown flashing in the sun, his kaftan heavy with embroidery, and swept his arm over his people in a great gesture of benediction, all sense of artifice, of the theatre, vanished. As long as he was there the other singers, the

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scenery, the audience, even Moussorgsky’s great music — all were blotted out. One saw only the Czar Boris Godunoff, living, triumphant, agonizing and dying. Chaliapin must be the most stupendous stage personality in the world. There is no question of his creating an illusion. The thing he inspires is belief, instant, absolute, unquestioning. When he gazed, terrified, across the palace chamber at the ghost of the murdered Dimitri, the audience turned startled eyes toward the spot at which he was gazing. And when they saw nothing there they turned again to the Czar, groveling on his knees by his chair, a tortured Rodin figure come to life, so huge, so pitiful — and wrung their hands and suffered his torment with him. When he lay dying in the hall of the Duma, his great frame stretched prone as a fallen oak, his glazed and blinded eyes turned for the last time upon his little son, men and women watched him with unashamed tears trickling down their cheeks. His voice is marvelous. Such thrilling timbre, such almost incredible control of coloring and dynamics, are something one might not ever find again in a generation of opera going. He sang in Russian; and it seemed as if Moussorgsky’s music had never quite been heard before. For Moussorgsky did more than set Russian words to music; he wrote music that is as much a part of the Russian language as the words themselves. For the rest of the performance was largely a familiar one. Orville Harrold lent his fine voice and good acting to the part of Dimitri. Leon Rothier was Brother Pimenn, Jean Gordon was Marina and Paolo Ananian was Varlaam. Mr. Audisio made Missail a sketch of irresistible drollery, and Mr. Bada as Shouisky rose to unexpected heights in his scenes with Boris. Mr. Papi led a fair performance that dragged at times, and the chorus sang well but showed signs of needing some acting rehearsals. The house was sold out completely, of course, and the audience was hysterical in its reception of the great Russian. The roar that greeted him after the Kremlin scene was deafening. And well they might cheer. They were seeing operatic history in the making.

“Something to Whistle” (December 11, 1921) Note: In this Sunday piece, Taylor identified his belief that it would be “catchy tunes” in old or new classical works (just another name for memorable themes) that would assure a work’s survival. If “Ernani” has not enjoyed the continuous prosperity of “Il Trovatore,” “Rigoletto,” “Aida,” and so many other Verdi operas, early and late, it is probably because “Ernani” lacks what all the others have: some good catchy tunes. The preposterous libretto may have something to do with

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the case, but probably not much. “Il Trovatore” and “The Magic Flute” still survive, despite two of the most idiotic librettos ever written. Good tunes are what “Ernani” lacks. There is melody, to be sure, yards and yards of it, technically speaking; but very little that any one cares to hear twice or hearing twice, can remember. Perhaps we have all missed the point a little in discussing current music in terms of harmony and orchestration. What we should look for are tunes. Arnold Schoenberg’s “Five Orchestral Pieces” exactly resemble “Ernani” in one respect: there is not much in either work that anybody can whistle. “Give me something with a tune to it,” says the abhorred Man in the Street. “Something that I can take away with me.” And the horrified highbrow withers him with a glance and rushes shuddering to Carnegie Hall to hear “L’Apres Midi D’un Faune” — which is built from one of the most ravishingly catchy tunes ever written. The Man in the Street is dead right. We all want tunes. Of course we don’t admit it, or call them tunes. We talk of “flowing melodic line,” or “pregnant melos,” or “thematic material of deep significance.” Tunes we mean. Every viable musical composition ever written has survived only because it contains one or more musical phrases or complete melodies that either can actually be remembered and quoted by a majority of its hearers or at least arouses in them a desire to do so. Just why this should be so is debatable. One opinion on the subject is probably as good as another, and mine would be that we all have an instinctive desire to repeat the aesthetic emotions aroused by the contemplation of a work of art. We see a picture or hear a piece of music or read a poem or a novel, or see a play and receive pleasure from doing so. We naturally want to repeat the pleasurable experience, and recalling the thing we saw or heard helps us to do so. So we instinctively seize upon the element in the work of art which is easiest for us to remember. That element is generally either the subject or a sharply defined detail. If it is a poem that gave us pleasure, we quote some particular phrase or phrases that stay with us. If it was a novel or a play, we remember the plot or some striking passage. If it was a picture, we recall the shapes of some things represented in it. If it was music, we remember a melody or a theme. Recalling these things, which are easy to remember because they are sharply defined, not only serves to remind us of the things themselves but arouses in us the pleasure we obtained from the work of art as a whole and from other details that our conscious minds had forgotten. For instance, suppose the work of art was a picture. What actually gave us the most pleasure may have been some striking arrangement of greys and greens. But if we try to recall merely the colors the recollection of that particular picture becomes hopelessly mixed up with the memories of several other pictures that had greys and greens in them. The moment,

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however, that we remember that this picture showed a woman in a grey dress, sitting under a tree, our memory shuts out all other images of grey and green pictures. Remembering the outlines that enclosed the colors helps to make the memory of the colors themselves more vivid because they are more definite. It was a grey dress, and green grass. We recall, too, the purple shadows in the tree trunk and the bit of orange coral at the woman’s throat — details that we could completely have forgotten if we had been thinking only of color without line. The case is similar in music. In this art, as in all others, the mind grasps images more readily than masses; and the nearest thing to an image in music is a melody. It would be absolutely impossible to remember even a short composition, such as Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” by trying to recall only its harmonies, beautiful and important as those harmonies are. It is only after repeated hearings that one can clearly recollect the sound of the harmony or even a short phrase of music; and then only by recalling the melodic phrase that overlays the chords. In one of the movements of Debussy’s “Iberia” suite, “Les Parfums de la Nuit,” occurs a series of consecutive seventh chords that to me is one of the most exquisitely beautiful harmonic sequences ever written. I have heard it played again and again, and I can play it myself, on the piano; yet try as I will I cannot reproduce in my mind’s ear the sound of that succession of chords unless I make a conscious effort to recall the melodic phrase formed by their upper notes. You know the “Fate” motive from “The Ring” — that magical modulation from D minor to F sharp major? Here is a theme whose entire effect is harmonic. It consists of three notes, A, G sharp and B, over two chords. The second note is by no means necessary to the modulation; the theme could easily be played without it. Yet try to recall the sound of those two chords without recalling that G sharp. You cannot do it. Inevitably your imagination must evoke the melodic phrase before it can recall the harmonic. What, in the last analysis, are Bach’s Melody on the G string; the second theme of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathetique” symphony; the finale of the Ninth Symphony; “Donna E Mobile,” and “The Afternoon of a Faun”? Catchy tunes, neither more nor less. Most people who have heard them can hum or whistle parts of them, and every one at least has the impulse to do so. Call them “themes” or “motives” if you please; the names do not matter. What does matter is the fact that what made “Dardanella” world famous for a year is precisely what has made Handel’s “Largo” world famous for two centuries. In each case the composer wrote a melody that people recognized when they heard it, and wanted to sing or hum or whistle to one another. This is the joint in the armor of most of our present day revolutionaries. They don’t write recognizable melodies. They write music that is all mass or color or mood or harmony, and no outline. In his treatise on composition

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Villiers Stanford compares a musician whose music is all harmony to a painter who would send his palette to a picture exhibition. It is all very well for Schoenberg and Casella and Malipiero and Stravinsky to delve ever deeper into the unplumbed depths of possible harmonic and orchestral combinations. The question they don’t seem to answer satisfactorily is, “Where’s your tune?” Unless they can produce one it will take a miracle to keep their works alive. For all history is against them.

“‘Salome’ Again” (February 6, 1921) Note: In 1907, the Metropolitan Opera introduced Richard Strauss’s “Salome” to the United States. Then seen as scandalous, it had only one performance. Two years later, Oscar Hammerstein’s opera company, competitor to the Metropolitan, brought Mary Garden from Chicago for the role of Salome and she created a sensation. She revived her portrayal in 1921 in New York with the Chicago Opera Company. After a silence of more than ten years, Richard Strauss’s “Salome” was heard at the Manhattan Opera House on Saturday night, when the Chicago Opera Company gave a performance of it as a benefit for — of all things! — the American Committee for Devastated France. This committee is headed by Miss Anne Morgan, who, rumor has it, was largely responsible for having “Salome” banished from the Metropolitan Opera House in other years. Perhaps Miss Morgan thought it would be a good joke on Germany to revive the opera for a French benefit. At any rate, the joke was not on Dr. Strauss, who must have received royalties from the performance. Scenically it was a good performance; otherwise it was only fair. Julian Dove’s stage setting was beautifully designed, had solidity and mood, and was well lighted. Mr. Polacco conducted with care and precision but without much apparent enthusiasm. The audience was large and came so late and talked so much that it must have been fashionable. Miss Garden’s performance of the title role was unusually good, vocally. Several of her scenes — notably the duologue with Iochanaan — had fascinating dramatic interest. But in general, her portrait of Herod’s perverse stepdaughter had too much waste motion. Its depiction of the neurotic and erotic heroine was too literal. Salome may have lacked repose in real life — in fact, one may reasonably assert that she did. But Miss Garden strode about the stage so restlessly that the eye tired in trying to follow her. What should have been frenetic seemed too often fussy. The dance of the seven veils was graceful and as candid as the occasion allowed, although the omission of three of the veils caused a certain amount of disappointment.

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Her scene with the head was chatty rather than horrible. It had been gollified, if memory serves aright, since the Hammerstein days. Riccardo Martin made an effective looking Herod and acted and sang the part acceptably if not brilliantly. He was under the handicap of not knowing his lines any too well, as Mr. Muratore had been scheduled for the role up to his illness last week. Mr. Dufranne was a sonorous and impressive figure as Iochanaan. Eleanor Reynold’s was indifferent as Herodias. Jose Mojica lacked positiveness as the young Syrian Captain, but won a degree of sympathy, and killed himself with satisfying realism. Chicago is reported to have been frightfully shocked by “Salome.” Saturday night’s performance wasn’t a very shocking occasion. It was beautiful in spots, a bit vulgar in others, and — now it can be told — just the least little bit stupid several times.

“The Last ‘Carmen’” (April 18, 1922) Note: Geraldine Farrar, American soprano, had a dual role: diva at the Metropolitan and actress in over a dozen silent films. Her independent streak gained her the adulation of young women, who were given the name Gerryflappers by the critic W. J. Henderson. The excesses of adulation shown during and after the performance of her final “Carmen,” one of her greatest roles, was equaled four days later in “Zaza,” the verismo opera by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, her final performance at the Metropolitan Geraldine Farrar’s last performance of “Carmen” with the Metropolitan Opera Company, given yesterday afternoon at a special matinee, was a benefit affair for the Charities Aid Association. Marie Sundelius was Micaela, Orville Harrold was Don Jose, Jose Mardones was Escamillo and Angelo Bada was Dancaire. Mr. Hasselmans conducted, and Miss Galli and Mr. Bonfiglio danced. It was a tumultuous afternoon. Dancaire lost his wig in the inn scene and had to be reminded of the fact by Carmen. In the last act Escamillo’s white horses, fired with the spirit of the occasion and emulous of the ballet, did a bit of toe dancing on their own account and displayed an inclination — fortunately discouraged — to go visiting in the orchestra. The Gerryflappers were out in force and after the second act pelted Miss Farrar with a shower of bouquets that kept all the male members of the cast busy retrieving them. Among the trove was a gold wreath, which Mr. Harrold placed on the singer’s head, and a bouquet of roses tied to a tambourine. At the close of the performance many of the audience, particularly the feminine members, refused to go and crowded to the orchestra rail, applauding and cheering. Even after the asbestos curtain had been

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lowered, at 5:25, upward of eight hundred people remained, calling “Gerry! Farrar!” At ten minutes of 6 a representative of the management shouted that Miss Farrar was leaving the theatre. The crowd left then, but only to reassemble outside the stage entrance on 40th Street, where, over 1,000 strong by now, they stood waiting, resisting all efforts of the Opera House attaches and a lone policeman to dislodge them. At 6 o’clock Miss Farrar’s chauffeur emerged and put down the top of her car. Cheers. At 6:10 o’clock Jose Mardones appeared in his street clothes. More cheers, and cries of “Bravo, Mardones!” Finally, at 6:20, Miss Farrar herself appeared, still in make-up and wearing her last-act headdress. The crowd cheered and applauded as, bowing and obviously in high spirits, she stood up in the car and tossed an enormous sheaf of roses among her admirers. It was demolished before it touched the ground. Just as her car began to move, most of the girls of the chorus and ballet, some rather briefly arrayed, crowded to the windows and clambered out upon the fire escapes, shrieking: “Gerray! Geree-ee-ee!” Miss Farrar smiled and waved to them as the car disappeared east on 40th Street. Nobody will ever believe something that happened then. As the crowd dispersed, a youth in a battered army overcoat approached and said: “Say, who was that?” “Farrar!” “Ferarra?” “No, Farrar: Geraldine Farrar.” “Sing at this house?” “Yes.” “Well, she must be good!”

“Mostly Personal” (October 29, 1922) Note: Taylor, as most writers do, at times reflected on some episode of his life. In this case he recalled college years when he, as pianist, and two other students played as a three-piece ensemble at a vacation hotel on Stamford, Connecticut’s Shippan Point, along Long Island Sound. A few Sundays ago we mentioned the fact that the first Wagnerian music we ever heard was the “Tannhaeuser” overture as rendered by a summer hotel orchestra consisting of violin, cornet and piano and hinted rather pointedly that the performance was execrable. What was our surprise the other day to receive a letter from Charles N. Drake, the concert manager, in which he claims to have been the violinist of that orchestra and bitterly upbraids us for our slurs upon the organization. Much as we regret the injury to Mr. Drake’s susceptibilities, we can only repeat, doggedly, that

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the orchestra was terrible; and not even the fact that we were the pianist can cause us to reverse our judgment. There is a nasty sneering tone about the Drake letter that we do not like. He hints broadly that if the orchestra was not perfect it was due to a weakness in the piano department; and he flatly declares that the violin section was superb. This is nonsense. We distinctly remember asking several of the guests which player they considered the best of the three and they all voted for the cornettist. They said that the sound of his instrument was such a comfort on dark nights when they were miles from the hotel. He, by the way, was the wealthy member of the orchestra. The regular salary was one’s board and $8.33 a week — a curious sum, the result of trying to divide $25 by three. The cornettist was with us, because we were classmates and because it was rather dashing for collegians to work in the summer time; but he had an allowance from his mother and so did not have to live on his salary. The orchestra was paid off on Saturday, at noontime, and every Saturday afternoon about 2 o’clock the cornettist would walk to the end of the pier, holding the odd 3 cents of his salary and ostentatiously hurl them into Long Island Sound. Every Monday, salary and allowance spent, he would go out at low tide and try to find them. But he never did. There must be 30 or 40 cents buried to this day in the mud just off Shippan Point.

“The Philharmonic” (January 11, 1923) Note: This simple title hides the fact that here Deems Taylor, the music critic, reviews Deems Taylor, the composer. In 2004, Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, referred to this particular review when he wrote: “In 1923 Taylor found himself in the awkward position of reviewing a concert at which one of his own works was played, and his solution reveals why he won a place among the wits of the Algonquin Round Table.” Myra Hess was the soloist with the Philharmonic last night in Carnegie Hall, playing Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. It was Miss Hess’s first orchestral appearance there this season and the audience greeted her with flattering enthusiasm both before and after she played. The young English pianist soon proved that the pleasant memories she left behind her last season were well grounded, for she gave an appealing and poetic reading of the concerto. The first movement was keyed a little low; it might have had more thunder and lightning than she gave it. The others, however, were beautifully done, with romantic charm in the slow movement and a never failing bubbling eagerness of tone and rhythm that made the rondo irresistible.

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The novelty of the evening was another of the American works that Henry Hadley is introducing this month, a symphonic poem, “The Siren Song,” by Deems Taylor. The work was written in 1912, and won the orchestral prize awarded by the National Federation of Music Clubs in 1913. It was not performed at the time, was revised three years later, and finally received its first performance last summer at one of the [Lewisohn] Stadium concerts, under Mr. Hadley’s baton. The piece takes its name from a poem by Joseph Tiers, Jr. — too long to quote here — that recounts how the mariners at sea hear the siren’s song rising from its gray depths, and lose their souls. If one resists her spell, he reaches safety and the sunlight again, only to be haunted forever by her voice. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out in the preface to “The Irrational Knot,” human beings are entirely renewed every seven years so that an author may properly treat a twenty-year-old novel of his own as the work of a stranger. Such being the case, perhaps a reviewer may be similarly distant toward his own eleven-year-old symphonic poem. So far as we are concerned, “The Siren Song” is virtually a posthumous work, written by a young man whom we imperfectly — if fondly — remember. We thought it a promising work with a certain freshness of feeling and a disarming simplicity of utterance that partly atoned for its lack of welldefined individuality. It followed the program with clarity and a degree of dramatic effectiveness, although the music did not seem to reach very far beneath the surface of the subtle and rather neurotic poem whose mood it aimed to express. The thematic material is, on the whole, good and offers possibilities for development, of which the composer has not always availed himself. The middle section, the “Siren” theme, was best handled and had flashes of real beauty, and a martial section that followed had vigor and good rhythm. Structurally, the piece is a little naïve. The development is neither elaborate nor particularly skillful, for the transitions are not always smooth, and some of the joints gape alarmingly. The spirit of Wagner hovers undeniably over much of the work. We could trace no direct Wagnerian reminiscences, but much of the scoring, as well as the treatment of the themes, showed the hand of Richard. The orchestration was fairly good. There were occasional passages whose effect was probably somewhat different from what the composer had intended, but on the whole the instrumentation, if not brilliant, was sound. Mr. Hadley and the orchestra gave the new work a colorful and spirited performance that helped it greatly. On the whole, “The Siren Song” interested us. We should like to hear more works by the same composer.

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“By Way of Introduction” (February 4, 1923) Note: Taylor became the first New York music critic to venture into the Midwest and assess the quality of the many fine orchestras there and compare them in quality to the orchestras of New York. What follows is his Sunday piece explaining why he was taking this journey. At the end of the piece are brief segments of Taylor’s reviews of concerts by each of the six orchestras he visited: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, and St. Louis. For generations the controversy has raged as to which form of music is the highest. The champions of opera — and they have been far from few — generally point triumphantly to Wagner and rest their case. And if Wagner were the only man who had ever written opera, they would have a very good case, for he scaled the heights. But that was Wagner. Taking the average run of opera and noticing certain facts — that a bad libretto is fatal even to great music, for instance, and that “Tosca” with Maria Jeritza will draw more audiences than will “Rheingold” with nobody in particular — one begins to suspect that opera is by no means a purely musical form, that if operas were simply played, without being either sung or staged, they would not, necessarily, weigh heavily in the musical balance. The type of music that we group under the head “Symphonic” — symphonies, suites, tone poems — is not pretty generally admitted to represent the highest and most complex form yet attained by the art. It demands an interest in music for its own sake, unalloyed with literary, vocal or dramatic associations, and implies a degree of musical intelligence on the part of the listener that goes much further than the mere sensuous response to a pretty tune or a contagious bit of rhythm. Consequently, one of the quickest tests of the musical culture of a nation or a community is its interest in symphonic music. If that interest is real enough and widespread enough to support one of the least profitable — financially — of musical enterprises, the symphony orchestra, we may safely conclude that that nation or community deserves to have its claims to musical culture taken seriously. There was a time — and not very long ago, reckoned in terms of this Nation’s life — when, if you said “Boston, New York, Chicago,” you had about summed up America’s centers of musical culture, measured, that is, in terms of symphonic music. There were occasional and sporadic attempts in other communities to play orchestral music, but these three cities, and these alone, seemed capable of supporting permanent symphony orchestras. That time is past. The change began in the late eighties, and during the last decade of the nineteenth century symphony orchestras began to spring

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up all over the country in bewildering profusion. Some of these failed to command local support and eventually died of undernourishment, but many of them survived and have grown to occupy a permanent place in the life of the communities that support them. Suppose we digress a moment to define our terms. We have a bad habit in this country of taking excellent words and bleaching all the meaning out of them by applying them where they were never intended to apply. We have “art” linoleum, “sensible” cigarets and “sanitary” erasers. And by the same misuse of the language a “symphony” orchestra, if the motion picture theatres are to be believed, is almost any instrumental combination of more than six pieces. This is hardly exact enough. [Here Taylor refers to the orchestras that many of the large motion picture theaters maintained during the years of silent films.] In the loosest sense of the term a symphony orchestra would have to be defined as an orchestra big enough to play a symphony — that is, a combination of not less than forty-five or fifty men. To be absolutely exact, one would have to define “symphony orchestra” as meaning an orchestra capable of playing any work in the standard symphonic repertoire — including such a composition as Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben,” for instance — without alteration or condensation of the parts; in other words, an organization comprising from eighty to one hundred players. Considering the late start America got in symphonic music, we have done amazingly well — much better, in fact, than even the average musician, American or European, realizes. The 1918 edition of “Who’s Who in Music” lists every symphony orchestra in the world large enough and permanent-seeming enough to be worth listing. In Great Britain there were sixteen organizations; in France, sixteen; in the United States, forty. In other words, five years ago American had exactly the same number of orchestras, in proportion to her population, as Great Britain and one-third more than France; and the relative figures would be about the same today. Not bad for a nation of Babbitts. Yet, how many of us know anything about these orchestras, or have ever heard more than two or three of them? New York regularly hears orchestras from two other cities — Boston and Philadelphia — every season, in addition to its own three, but the range of its acquaintance is otherwise confined to an occasional visit from one of the Middle Western organizations. It is doubtful if any other American city hears even that small proportion of the country’s good symphonic orchestras. It is, of course, our justly celebrated geographical vastness that is responsible for the comparative sameness of our orchestral diet. One could probably hear every orchestra in England in the space of a month. To accomplish the same feat in America he would have to become a nomad for half a year at least.

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However, excepting always the excellent orchestras of San Francisco and Los Angeles, it is quite possible for the curious listener in the East to hear the best of the American orchestras in a comparatively brief space of time. For, outside of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, they are clustered in that East-Central part of the United States that is loosely called the Middle West and ought to be called the Far East. There are six permanent orchestral organizations in this section, and when one has heard these and compared them with those of the East, he will have some idea of the average excellence achieved in presenting symphonic music in America. And that is what this reviewer purposes doing. Leaving New York to shift for herself temporarily, he will hear in turn the orchestras of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and St. Louis, all in the space of twelve days. He will review the concerts of those orchestras as conscientiously and dispassionately as possible and will try to transmit such impressions as he is able to gather of the local conditions, favorable and adverse, under which they are organized and directed. The resulting series of articles will, naturally, need a serviceable winter-weight mantle of charity to enable it to be called a “survey” of musical conditions. It would take months to do that properly. They will, at least, be a series of personal impressions, accumulated fast enough to form some sort of basis for comparative study and will, I hope, give a sketchy idea of what is being done to present the best in music throughout a reasonably large and representative section of the United States. The Cleveland Orchestra; Conductor: Nicolai Sokoloff (February 5, 1923 — Abridged)  I heard the Cleveland Orchestra play Thursday in its own home town. To one who has heard the Cleveland Orchestra recently it will hardly come as a revelation to be told that it is a good orchestra and it sounded just as well last night in Masonic Hall as it did in Carnegie Hall a fortnight ago. The audience made one feel at home instantly, as a fair proportion of it arrived late and trooped in between the first and second movements of the symphony. There must be thousands of American concert-goers who have never heard the first movement of any symphony, just as there are scores of music critics who never have heard the last act of an opera. In one respect last night’s audience established a record never even approached by New York listeners. Nobody coughed except during the intermissions. The concert began with the New World symphony, one of those works that are so popular that hardly any one bothers to play them any more. Mr. Sokoloff not only dared to play it, but had evidently ventured to do something still more bizarre — rehearse it. The result was as brilliant and stirring a performance as one could wish to hear. For once the second

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movement was not sentimentalized to death. For all its melancholy languor, it had an underlying vital urge that kept alive and vibrant. The scherzo went with electric crispness and lightness, and the finale with its full-throated bass litanies was positively thrilling. Mr. Sokoloff’s reading throughout was distinguished not only for its beautiful balance and glowing color, but for a certain “forward,” thrusting quality that allowed no one to forget that Dvorak came of a singing race and was writing about a dancing one. The orchestra displayed its familiar excellences. It has attained a degree of solidity and homogeneity in its four years of existence that is little short of amazing. Not only do the men play together, but they play with an obvious enthusiasm and pleasure in their own good workmanship that is rare to find. To say that they play like amateurs sounds like a shabby sort of compliment, yet that is what they do in the real sense of the word — experts who play for the love of playing. The Cincinnati Orchestra; Conductor: Fritz Reiner (February 7, 1923— Abridged)  The Emery Auditorium, where the Cincinnati Orchestra gives its concerts, is arranged inside very much like Carnegie Hall in New York except that it is about a third smaller, holding 2,000 people or so, and not one-tenth as ugly. In fact it is very attractive with its spick and span white and gold walls and green vines trellised along the edge of the orchestra platform.  Yesterday afternoon’s program was the eighth given in Cincinnati this season under the baton of Fritz Reiner, the new conductor. The newspaper men who saw him during a brief interview in New York last fall carried away, most of them, the impression of an unusual personality, and I was more than ordinarily curious to see what sort of conductor he would turn out to be. He did not take long to show the stuff he was made of. Cincinnati has a find. Young as he is — and he is just thirty-four — Reiner is a conductor of great technical skill, marked individuality and extraordinary imagination. He reminds one uncommonly of Leopold Stokowsky; not in looks or gesture — the two men are miles apart physically — but in temperament. Their approach to music is much the same. Both convey a sense of restless, almost ferocious, nervous vitality. Both delight in emphatic rhythms and strong colors and both have a feeling for line that stresses the lyric element in everything they touch. [Taylor then applauds Reiner for an unusual program of compositions, none more than thirty years old, by Hugo Wolf, Ildebrando Pizzetti, and Ottorino Respighi. The Respighi work, “The Ballad of the Gnomes,” a new work by the Italian composer, was particularly liked by Taylor.] The Respighi piece is a free musical paraphrase of a gruesome Italian ballad of a gnome whose two wives, after undescribed orgies, hurl his tortured

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body into the sea and dance a frenetic bacchanale with the other gnomes. It is not exactly a bedtime story for the little ones as related in the original, but it possesses undeniable power and vividness. Here is none of the sundrenched sparkle and twilight charm of “The Fountains of Rome.” Reiner gave the piece an extraordinary reading; one that probed for every last bit of color and hidden melody and his orchestra played with a flexibility and kaleidoscopic brilliance that bespoke endless and successful rehearsals. The audience which had shown signs of looking askance at the comparatively aseptic Pizzetti was so excited over what it had been through that it quite forgot the scandalous heterodoxy of Respighi’s score and overwhelmed conductor and players with a roar of applause. And any one who has ever seen a matinee orchestra audience will appreciate just how stimulating Mr. Respighi’s newest opus must be. The Chicago Orchestra; Conductor: Frederick Stock (February 9, 1923— Abridged)  The Chicago Orchestra always plays a curtain raiser at its concerts. Sometimes it is a short suite or an excerpt from a longer work. More generally it is an overture. But whatever it may be it is always on the program — something that ends in ten minutes or so in order to open the doors for the late comers from the suburbs.  The Chicago Orchestra is deceptive to hear. The ensemble is so perfect and so effortless that one hardly notices at first just how perfect it is. When the orchestra is at its best — and it generally is at its best — it is like a great window that lets in the music so flawlessly, so utterly without shadow or blemish, that sometimes it is difficult to perceive. It is undoubtedly one of the world’s great orchestras. It is not a “brilliant” orchestra. One does not hear in the tuttis the shining golden flood of sound such as pours from the massed forces of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Instead, the tone is clearer, “whiter,” of marvelous clarity and silken smoothness. The brass, never rough, and perfectly blended, has wonderful depth and mellowness, and the wood wind choir is as perfectly unified and balanced as any I have ever heard. The strings are rich and warm in color and possess ample power and brilliance. Stock’s conducting is almost equally deceptive. If you watch him too closely at first instead of listening, it will take you a little time to realize that here is a conductor of the first rank. For he is neither particularly graceful nor to the audience particularly eloquent. You would know after watching him a while that he must have played in the orchestra himself, for he knows what it is that orchestra players want first of all on the conductor’s platform — some one to beat time. The Detroit Orchestra; Conductor: Ossip Gabrilowitsch (February 12, 1923— Abridged)  The Detroit Orchestra, under Ossip Gabrilowitsch, began its

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ninth program of the season Thursday night with Respighi’s “The Fountains of Rome.” Now, the classics are the composers to test a conductor. If you would know something of a man’s grasp of form, his breadth of musical vision and his comprehension of the less obvious spiritual implications of music, listen to what he makes of Bach or Beethoven or Brahms. But if your mission is to hear and, as best you may, appraise a strange orchestra, hear it play a modern work — the more modern the better.  For the music of to-day, with its delicate balance of tone color, shifting tonalities and ever increasing harmonic complication, will test certain phases of an orchestra’s playing ability as no other music will. So for a hurried listener the Respighi work was an ideal choice for an opening number. And it must be said that the orchestra played it admirably, creating an impression of general technical competence and good training that was only deepened as the evening wore on. This trip is getting monotonous in one respect. I went to Cleveland and found a good orchestra. I went to Cincinnati and found a good orchestra. I went to Chicago and found one of the best orchestras in the country. Now I have come to Detroit and found another good orchestra, and my vocabulary is wearing out. I have any quantity of excellent derogatory adjectives and qualifying phrases on hand and nothing much to do with them. The playing of the men shows usual surety and finish. Mr. Gabrilowitsch must be an excellent drillmaster. Under his hands the Respighi piece had a performance of clear outlines, beautifully graduated chiaroscuro and subtle atmospheric charm. The quiet close in particular was a lovely bit of polished orchestral playing. The Minneapolis Orchestra; Conductor: Henri Verbrugghen (February 14, 1923—Abridged)  The Minneapolis Orchestra under Henri Verbrugghen played in Milwaukee in the face of rather heavy odds. In the first place, Milwaukee concert goers are devoted partisans of the Chicago Orchestra, so that the audience, only moderately large, was inclined to be critical. Then, too, the Pabst Theatre, where the concert was given, offered playing conditions that were very far from ideal.  There were no platforms on the stage, so that the whole orchestra had to sit on the floor level, with the result that proper tone balance was extremely difficult. Moreover, the stage itself was so narrow and deep that the sound of the orchestra had no focal point. Under the circumstances, the performance that Mr. Verbrugghen and his men managed to give was really extraordinary and their evening was nothing less than a triumph. The audience that had clapped briefly and politely when the conductor first appeared, showed signs of startled appreciation after the “Freischuetz” overture. The final chord of the Beethoven

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fifth symphony was the signal for a storm of applause that was not stilled until Mr. Verbrugghen, after his fourth recall, had summoned his men to their feet to share the tribute. Despite the handicap of bad acoustics, it was soon evident that Minneapolis has a fine orchestra, excellent alike in material and playing qualities. Mr. Verbrugghen made an immediate and profound impression on his hearers. Everything he does is the projection of a strongly individual personality. He made the Weber overture a miniature drama — which, after all, it is — boldly drawn and full of sharp contrasts. His reading of the fifth symphony was equally bold in outline and powerful in its imaginative qualities, with something Greek about the steady, relentless march of its events. The St. Louis Orchestra; Conductor: Rudolph Ganz (February 16, 1923— Abridged)  A stolen rib is said to have hopelessly upset the housekeeping arrangements of our best known ancestor, and a broken rib made a considerable difference in the eleventh program of the St. Louis Orchestra. It, the rib, belonged to Michel Gusikoff, the orchestra’s concertmaster, and because he broke it he was unable to play certain solo parts in the programs as it had originally been planned. So the list presented by Conductor Rudolph Ganz last Saturday night at the Odeon was an emergency affair. It was, so to speak, minus a rib — which may have been why it sagged a little.  The first two numbers were works that New York seldom hears: d’Albert’s rather flashy “Improvisator” overture and Chaikovsky’s “Manfred” symphony. It was just like Chaikovsky to choose Byron’s poem for a subject. A despondent young man wandering about the Alps pitying himself until he dies of exposure and unrequited love is the very embodiment of the romantic pessimism that Peter Ilyich loved to express. The wonder is that in this instance he expressed it so badly. For the “Manfred” symphony is pretty dreary stuff. According to the program notes Chaikovsky “had the idea of destroying the last three movements” and one can only attest that it was a good idea and wonder what stopped him. It is not altogether easy to analyze the causes of the orchestra’s shortcomings, for there were distinct shortcomings in Saturday night’s performance. The Odeon is ill adapted for hearing music, and some of the tonal defects of the band might be blamable upon the hall. It is a cavernous place with a deep stage. The effect of this construction upon the listener is somewhat the same as if he were sitting inside a megaphone. The general tone quality of the band has sonority and excellent intonation but lacks refinement. Mechanically, the orchestra is good. The attacks are precise and the playing has vigor and alertness.

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Mr. Ganz gave the symphony a performance that was more conscientious than exciting. The pulse of “Manfred” moves at such a pedestrian rate that it needs a rather theatrical reading to make it effective. Mr. Ganz elected to play rather what Chaikovsky wrote, about as he wrote it, thereby compelling one reviewer to rejoice officially because he respected the composer’s wishes — and to wish secretly that he hadn’t.

“The Orchestra Next Door” (February 18, 1923) Note: Two days after his return from his Middle West foray, Taylor wrote a 4000-word Sunday piece about his observations, referring to differences between those regional orchestras and those of the East. He saw two significant differences, one being in program-making and the other in the musical education of children. Both these points relate to his sense that the Eastern orchestras already had a significant number of concertgoers, but that in the mid-section of the country, orchestras had to build their audience by generating interest (novel programming) and educating the young people about symphonic music. He summed up all that he had learned in a final paragraph. We have, so far, better orchestras than the Middle West — considered as instruments for playing symphonic music. We shall not have better orchestras much longer, though, because the Middle West now has conductors as good as ours. We have a comparatively small musical public, and we are content to let it alone. Generally speaking, we ignore children altogether. The Middle West has not ready-made public and so sets out to create one both for the present and the future. New York is to-day the musical capital of the world — and New York is not on the job. The Middle West is extravagant and young, and thirsty, and eager. The East is “cultured” and middle-aged and self-satisfied. They still come to us for the final stamp of approval; but the hope for the future lies with them unless we bestir ourselves. We guard the flame. They fan it.

“In Darkest Mahler” (March 9, 1923) Note: In view of the current abundance of performances and recordings of Mahler symphonies, it should be remembered that many critics early on were not great fans of the Austrian composer’s music. Among these most assuredly was Deems Taylor. Any orthodox musical review ought to contain a reasonably full recital of the facts of a performance as well as an appraisal of its merits. Accordingly, let us first set down some assorted facts concerning what happened at Carnegie Hall last night.

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Fact No. 1. Willem Mengelberg, conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra, thinks that Gustav Mahler was a great composer. Fact No. 2. He played Mahler’s third symphony five consecutive times last year. Fact No. 3. He had the Phiharmonic play Mahler’s seventh symphony in Carnegie Hall last night, and will repeat it this afternoon. Facts No. 4 to No. 7. The symphony had never been heard in New York before. It was first performed in Prague, by the Vienna Philharmonic, under the composer’s direction, in 1908. It is written in five movements and lasts one hour and thirty minutes. It is scored for strings, three flutes, piccolo, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, tenor saxhorn in b flat (it sounds rather like a trombone with adenoids), three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, four kettledrums, bass drum, side drum, cymbals, triangle, gong, glockenspiel, bells, tambourine, harp, mandolin, guitar, and cowbells. Fact No. 8. The only other number on the program was Beethoven’s triple concerto for piano, violin, and cello, with orchestra, played by the New York Trio (Clarence Adler, Scipione Guidi, and Cornelius Van Vleet). The reviewer’s estimate of the work and its performance should follow the facts. This will not take long. Merely because Mahler wrote a symphony one and one-half hours long, scoring it for a mammoth orchestra and had it played last night in a large hall by a first-class orchestra under a first-class conductor — granted these facts, we still fail to see why we should devote much precious space to saying that we found the work to be emphatically the most stupid piece of music that we ever heard. We could find no single musical idea in the whole affair that possessed a vestige of significance or vitality — with the possible exception of the theme of the “Merry Widow” waltz, which the composer writes into the last movement and develops with the utmost solemnity. We found most of the themes not only incredibly banal, but vulgar; we found their development long-winded and inept, and we found the scoring scrappy, muddy and ineffective. The performance by the orchestra was beyond praise. The players showed evidence of devoted and skillful rehearsing by Mr. Mengelberg, the horns in particular giving a wonderful exhibition of perfect playing. The other brass players, who probably had more hard work to do than they would have encountered in the whole score of “Die Meistersinger,” deserve the highest praise for what they accomplished. We forgot two facts. They are: Fact No. 9. There was a large audience, which recalled Mr. Mengelberg three times.

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Fact No. 10. There are six more Mahler symphonies that have not yet been heard in New York.

“Krehbiel Striking Figure Whom Friends Called ‘Pop’” (March 21, 1923) Note: Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923), writing for the Tribune, was considered the “dean” of music critics of the New York newspapers in the first part of the 20th century. It is likely that during Taylor’s year with the Tribune Sunday Magazine, he would have conversed with Krehbiel on occasion. Certainly this tribute to Krehbiel, soon after his death, has a very personal element. Thousands of people who had never met Henry Krehbiel, or even knew who he was, must have known him by sight. For he was some one to remember. You sat about half way down the left-hand aisle of Aeolian Hall — say about L-I — on a night when the Flonzaleys [string quartet] were playing, and across the aisle you saw a huge, patriarchal figure of a man, with a beautiful head that would have enchanted a sculptor, and a mop of excited, yellowish hair that no comb could ever hope to master. He was built on too generous a scale for any theatre seat, so that he was forever shifting from one uncomfortable position into another, and usually wound up by getting both feet out into the aisle. When the music began he would slump down into the seat as far as possible, his left shoulder drooping and his chin raised high; and he would listen so, motionless, until it was over. That was Krehbiel. You must have seen him at one time or another if you go to concerts at all, particularly if you ever went to the opera, chamber music or orchestral concerts. For he had four musical passions: Wagner, Bach, Beethoven and string quartets. To hear any one of these you could lure him out at any time and in any weather. One other passion he had — facts. There may be some debate as to what man in the world knew the most about music as an art and a science, but no one, I believe, not even Philip Hale, had Krehbiel’s stock of first hand and documentary information about musical happenings. This reviewer once wrote that all a music critic needed today was Grove’s Dictionary, Who’s Who in Music, and Henry Krehbiel’s telephone number. And on second thought, granted the third, I think one could dispense with the first item. For he was a walking encyclopaedia. Did you want the date of the first American performance of “Siegfried?” Pop Krehbiel knew it — offhand, probably, for he had been there. Or was it the name of Rossini’s cook you needed? He would get it for you or could tell you that the cook had no name. No need to ransack libraries for data

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concerning some resuscitated concerto grosso of Bach and Haendel. The lazy critic had but to ask Krehbiel. And we all did, time and again. And he never failed us. I think the best clue to the man as a whole lies in the fact that he was so cordially detested by so many musicians who had never seen him, and that most of the people who knew him loved him, and called him “Pop.” There were others to whom his name — as a critic, of course — was anathema. They called him unfair, and brute, and reactionary. I don’t think he was any of those things. He was handicapped, in the first place, by his literary style, which was rather ponderous and deliberate, and did not in the least reflect his own personality. He was a little too honest, perhaps, for when he disapproved of something it never occurred to him that there was any way to say so except in the most direct terms at his command. I think he was one of the youngest people I ever knew. Maturity softens facts, and tolerates mediocrity, and expects little. It is only youth that wants clear, hard truth, and wants everything to be perfect, and sees red when some one belittles its ideals. That was Pop. He loved music with a lover’s passion; and woe betide the vandal that besmirched his mistress! People forget, too — they always do, somehow — that he could love as violently as he detested. To the last day of his life he retained a youth’s capacity for unqualified enthusiasm. Last season, when Maria Jeritza and Feodor Chaliapin rose above our musical horizon, all the critics were enthusiastic. There were two in particular, who threw discretion to the winds and raved. One of them was Henry E. Krehbiel — and the other still feels proud and happy to have bubbled over in such company.

“De Pachmann” (October 12, 1923) Note: The world was full of great pianists in the early 1920s, with such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Artur Schnabel, Ignace Paderewski, Alfred Cortot, Josef Hofmann, and Walter Gieseking performing often in New York. Another important pianist, Ukrainian born Vladimir de Pachmann, had not performed in the city since 1912. He was known for his sensitivity in playing works of Chopin, but also for unusual eccentricities, such as stopping abruptly in the middle of a piece to start talking to the audience. For de Pachmann’s return, Taylor went to a sold-out Carnegie Hall to determine if the pianist had changed his ways. The review in the World, with its jolting first line, created a mild sensation, with many a journalist chastising Taylor for his apparent straitlaced approach. Heywood Broun, Taylor’s journalist officemate at the World, also attended and wrote in his column that “art ought to be exciting. And to us De Pachmann is essentially that. Sometimes he is irritating and distracting,

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but he is not dull.” Such can also be said of Taylor’s writing about the concert, which gained the approbation of Ralph Pulitzer, the World’s publisher. He wrote Taylor two days later with “a belated, but not the less enthusiastic, word of congratulation on your really admirable De Pachmann criticism.” Three thousand people saw murder done last night in Carnegie Hall. No, that won’t do for a beginning. It is the truth, but it sounds too sensational, blurted out like that. The truth so often does. The facts are more harmless. Let us set them down, as a good reporter should do. So, then: Last night in Carnegie Hall Vladimir de Pachmann, the famous Russian pianist, gave his first recital here in twelve years, before an audience that packed the parquet five deep with standees. Applause was frequent and enthusiastic and those who heard him before declared that his pianistic powers were unimpaired despite his seventy-odd years. Now to explain the murder. Probably it wouldn’t have seemed so shocking if there had been any preparation for it. But as any playwright will tell you, being told a thing isn’t at all the same as seeing it happen. And so, when people would laughingly quote this or that remark de Pachmann had made to such and such an audience, or would tell about the pair of socks he put on the piano at his Berlin recital, the truth somehow didn’t register to one who, as it chanced, had never seen or heard him play. Last night, therefore, was rather shocking to one listener. There was Carnegie Hall jammed to the doors and everybody talkative and a little nervous and excited, and there was the big platform with the brown velvet drapes, the two-sided chandeliers lighted, the center one dark, and under it a rather lonesome and scared looking grand piano — all, in fact, just as it is when Rachmaninoff or Paderewski or Hofmann or any other of the giants play. And then the brown curtains parted, and out came a chunky little old man with a head something like Franz Liszt’s portraits — the same high forehead, eagle nose and long gray hair. The audience burst into applause, very sudden and sharp applause, that cracked and rattled like machine gun fire. The little man put his feet together and clasped his hands, and bowed stiffly from the waist, looking very like the frog footman in “Alice” as he did so. The audience kept on applauding and he kept on bowing. Then he moved toward the piano and the applause went out like a snuffed candle. The house was breathless. The little man fiddled with the knob on the adjustable piano stool. He twisted it this way and that. Then he turned to the audience and swept his hands through the air, shoulder high. The stool was too high. Everybody giggled. Then he sat down and began to play Beethoven’s pathetic [“Pathetique”] sonata.

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He played the opening section, marked “grave,” with a cool, velvety perfection of touch that fell very gently and softly on the ear. It was effortless and perfect, and one did not mind the fact that it was admirable rather than moving. “That will come later,” one thought, and waited for the music to begin to weave its spell. But something happened. A phrase ended, with a brief pause before the next began, and in the pause the little man raised his hands from the keyboard and beat time as though he were conducting a band, and grinned at the audience. And everybody giggled again, and that was the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s pathetic sonata. There was more of it, but it didn’t mean anything. The spell was broken. He played the allegro. More gestures and comical faces and more giggles. He finished it. Applause. He stood up, bowed, and began to talk to the people in the front row. Everybody said, “Ssh!” so loudly that it was impossible to make out what he was saying. One caught fragments — “Wiz my fingers — most of ze time” — but nothing connected. “Is he — ?” asked the lady on the right. And one said, “No. He always does this, they say. He’s going to play the adagio now, and he’ll cut out this comedy stuff.” And so de Pachmann played the adagio from Beethoven’s pathetic sonata. It is short, and very simple — just a tune, really; and only a great man could have written it. For it has the miraculous power of suggestion that all great art possesses. It releases the imagination. It links you for the moment with eternal things: you glimpse something of the vast beauty and sadness of life. And in the middle of it the little man raised his hands and beat time, and grinned at the audience, and said something. And the man in the row behind one laughed aloud, and then everybody giggled. For the little man was really outdoing himself. And Beethoven died and went to hell, and everybody was frightfully amused at Mr. de Pachmann. When he had finished the sonata there was more applause as he left the stage. So he came back and bowed, twice, three times, and made a little speech to the people in the front rows. Then he sat down to play Chopin. He is the greatest Chopin player in the world, they say. He certainly has marvelous dexterity. His hands ripple and flash along the keyboard with uncanny accuracy, and they produce a beautiful sound. He began the nocturne in B major, No. 1 of the thirty-second opus. It is lovely, gentle, wistful Chopin. And after a particularly lovely phrase Mr. de Pachmann said, “Listen!” and played another lovelier one, and wagged his head comically and waved his hands and grinned at the audience and everybody laughed heartily. And he did the same with the second impromptu, and with the B minor prelude, and with the Allegro de Concert in A major.

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And then there was more applause, and another funny little speech, and a final group of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt. But one didn’t hear that. For one had gone out, feeling a little ashamed of caring so much about music in a world where so many excellent people didn’t mind a bit what happened to it.

“And tomorrow …” (November 4, 1923) Note: Eva Gauthier was a Canadian soprano who gave recitals regularly in NewYork. The songs on her programs often were by modern composers (Bartok, Hindemith, for example), as well as songs from countries around the Earth. Because she looked to the unusual in programming, her choices for her recital of November 1, 1923 in Aeolian Hall made it a historic occasion: For the first time in a concert recital, American popular songs were included, one song each by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Walter Donaldson, but three by George Gershwin, who accompanied Gauthier in his first appearance on a concert stage. Upon that very stage some three months later, he would premiere his “Rhapsody in Blue.” It appears that no other music critic except Taylor reviewed Gauthier’s recital. The final words of his review (November 2, 1923) were these: “The third group [of songs], to be vulgar about it, stopped the show. This consisted of five American jazz songs … with dazzling accompaniments by George Gershwin, the composer of ‘Swanee.’ The audience was as much fun to watch as the songs were to hear, for it began by being just a trifle patronizing and ended by surrendering completely to the alluring rhythms of our own folk music.” Three days after the recital, Taylor published the Sunday piece that follows, reflections on the concert, an article which Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin’s first biographer, stated: “In the crucial literature of our native music this … must go down as a seminal, a pioneer document.” As important as this piece is, unfortunately Taylor consistently left the “h” out of Gauthier’s name. It may be that Eva Gautier’s recital in Aeolian Hall will turn out to have been an historic event. Technically, at least, it was, for if I am not greatly mistaken it marked the first time in the history of American music that a group of American popular songs were included in a formal song recital program. It was an event not without humor. On the one flank the acrid dissonances and murky introspection of Bela Bartok; on the other, the Byronic romanticism of Schoenberg’s early “Gurrelieder;” and in between, unashamedly contemporary, six examples of genuine, home-brewed American jazz. Let us list the songs, for it may be that they may just possibly be the beginning of an epoch.

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First came the father of all modern jazz — “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee” possibly excepted — Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Next, “The Siren’s Song,” by Jerome Kern, with words by P.G. Wodehouse, from the musical play, “Leave It to Jane.” Then Walter Donaldson’s “Carolina in the Morning,” words by Gus Kahn; George Gershwin’s “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” from George White’s “Scandals,” the words by B.G. De Sylva and Arthur Francis [Ira Gershwin’s nom de plume in his earliest days as a lyricist]. Then came another written by Gershwin in collaboration with William M. Daly, “Innocent Ingenue Baby,” from the musical comedy “Our Nell;” the words were by Brian Hooker, whose translation of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” by the way, was half-way through its opening performance at the National Theatre even as Miss Gautier sang the song. Last came Gershwin’s famous “Swanee,” with words by Irving Caesar. For an encore Miss Gautier sang another Gershwin landmark, “Do It Again,” made famous by Irene Bordoni. Now it was extremely interesting, first of all, to see what that music did to the audience. It was not an average audience, for Miss Gautier makes little appeal to the listener who lacks sophistication and artistic curiosity. It was what might be called a “brilliant” house, made up, for the most part, of people who not only cared for music, but who knew something about it, with a fair sprinkling of poseurs, highbrows, and intensely classconscious cognoscenti. They heard Bartok and Hindemith with what may fairly be described as interest without much emotion; this was new music, and they were curious to hear it and desirous of understanding it. The Bartok folksong transcriptions stirred them a little — something strange, and a little sinister, but perhaps significant. After Hindemith’s “Auf der Treffe Sitzen Meine Ohrchen” they laughed a little and applauded encouragingly. “Durch de die Abendlichen Gaerten” left them, like the Elephant’s Child, “a little warm, but not at all excited.” A pause. The singer reappeared, followed by a tall, black-haired young man who was far from possessing the icy aplomb of those to whom playing on the platform of Aeolian is an old story. He bore under his arm a small bundle of sheet music with lurid red and black and yellow covers. The audience began to exhibit signs of relaxation. This promised to be amusing. And then Eva Gautier sang “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” She said it “straight,” of course, with none of the conversational lapses and vocal tricks and general air of confiding in the audience by which a professional musical comedy or cabaret performer puts over a jazz number. She just sang it as seriously and skillfully as she had sung Bartok’s “Harom oeszi Koennycsepp,” while young Mr. Gershwin began to do mysterious and fascinating rhythmic and contrapuntal stunts with the accompaniment. And when she had finished she faced a new audience. These people were amused, yes;

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they laughed gleefully as they applauded. But they were excited, somehow, too. Here was music they didn’t have to think about, or intellectualize over, or take solemnly. They didn’t have to do anything about it, in fact, except listen to it — which was easy — and enjoy it — which was unavoidable. And apparently it said something to them, touched some hidden spring that evoked a response as genuine as it was a little shame-faced. It was not alone the Americans who had fun out of it. I watched one distinguished European whose musical sophistication is proverbial. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” disturbed him ever so slightly; he looked a little bored and a little puzzled. At “The Siren’s Song” he looked approval of its delicate, almost pensive rhythms and charming melodic line, but was still obviously a little doubtful. But “Carolina in the Morning” did something rather drastic to him. Even as his face expressed incredulity and a faint disapproval his shoulders began to — well, “shimmy” is too vulgar a word to apply to a foreign visitor. Let us say, rather, that the music had acted as an irritant upon his nerve-centres, causing a reflex undulatory movement of both clavicles. At all events, by the time “Swanee” arrived, he was having as shamelessly good a time as anybody. It is risky to generalize, and I cannot be entirely sure that the jazz music did evoke the peculiarly personal response from the audience that I think it did. I know that it evoked it from me. I hear a good deal of jazz, and of course oceans of “good” music, but I had never before heard a concert singer take jazz in her stride, as it were, placing it beside other contemporary music without comment or apology. And I must say, that jazz group touched something that the other music didn’t. It had nothing to do with art, perhaps; it was a more purely human reaction, a thrill of sudden recognition of something native, something of which I was a part. Whether I happened to like this music, or approve of it, became somehow irrelevant; the point was that I understood this music inside and out, and it understood me. If an American, living in China and speaking fluent Chinese, should suddenly hear a stream of fluent American cuss words issuing from a wayside shrine he would probably experience a somewhat analogous emotion. Should I be ashamed, perhaps, to confess that ”Innocent Ingenue Baby” meant more to me than “Az oeszi Larma”? For it did. Not because of the words. Miss Gautier’s middle-voice diction is far from flawless, and her English was not always more intelligible than her Hungarian. No, it was the music itself. The Hungarian melody is a song of the people, and so possesses, as all such songs do, an elemental directness of expression that makes it intelligible anywhere. But so is “Ingenue Baby” a song of the people. As for Bartok’s arrangement, it was a message no doubt sincerely meant, but spoken in an alien tongue. It seemed centuries more sophisticated than the tune it was supposed to clothe, and its lovingly wrought

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dissonances and curious timbres made it remote and a little unreal — something to admire but not to handle. But the harmonies of “Ingenue Baby” belong to its melody; the two are inseparable. Each exists because of the other. And rhythmically, of course, the American song is far superior to the Hungarian. It seemed to one listener that the six jazz numbers stood up amazingly well, not only as entertainment but as music. Some of them had their vulgar moments — but it is not for a reviewer who hears the “Marche Slave” and the Fourteenth Rhapsody a dozen times a season to pen the subject of vulgarity. They were not weighty — but neither is “Lauf der Welt.” They conveyed no profound message — but neither does a good deal of “Also Sprach Zarathustra;” and at least they did not pretend to, as “Zarathustra” does. What they did possess were melodic interest and continuity, harmonic appropriateness, well balanced, almost classically severe form, and subtle and fascinating rhythms — in short, the qualities that any sincere and interesting piece of music possesses. Above all, their rhythms. There is nothing on earth quite like American jazz rhythm. Nobody has ever bothered to define “jazz” accurately, probably because most of the people who like it lack the vocabulary, and the people who could define it, hate it. It is generally taken to be synonymous with “rag-time,” which in turn is dismissed as another term for syncopation. But jazz is more than that. It partly is a school of orchestration, obtaining curious and sometimes beautiful effects through the copious use of muted brass, percussion, instruments, saxophones and clarinets in their extreme registers. However, as there was no orchestra on Thursday night, and as what Mr. Gershwin played was undoubtedly jazz, the scoring is not an essential element. Jazz is fundamentally and irreducibly two things. It is, first, syncopation — but not syncopation as the European understands the term. Schumann employed more syncopation, probably, than any other continental composer; but study Schumann’s music, and you will find that his syncopation is purely rhythmical. He subdivides the beats in his bar of music, rearranging the time values of the notes so that the strong accent of a phrase falls on what would ordinarily be the weak beat of a bar. American jazz syncopation, on the other hand, is partly harmonic, and is, I think, something quite new in music. Not only is the rhythm displaced, but the harmony, likewise; for a characteristic of this music is that the melody frequently anticipates the harmony by an eighth or sixteenth note, so that while the accompaniment is still on one chord, the melody has leaped forward to a note that belongs to a different accompanying chord that has not yet arrived. It is this device of harmonic anticipation that gives American jazz its almost irresistible forward-thrusting, “going” quality — and that is, incidentally, the

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despair of Europeans. One reason, of course, why the European has rarely apprehended this ingredient of jazz is because it does not always appear on paper. The American jazz composer is rarely a skilled musician, and generally has to leave the actual writing down of his music to a copyist; and as the copyist is usually a European whose sound musicianship includes a healthy disdain for newfangled rhythmic subtleties, the written notes of a jazz number are likely to bear very little relation to its sound when it is actually played by a good jazz performer. Compare Debussy’s “Minstrels,” or Stravinsky’s “Piano Rag-Music,” with “Do It Again” if you would see striking examples of how far even the cleverest Continental composers are from realizing the true nature of jazz. Both pieces contain some very good rhythmic syncopation, but neither is within a mile of being good jazz. The other feature of American jazz is its constant use of cross-rhythms. Three-against-two and three-against-four are employed with a freedom and nonchalance that must be dizzying to one who has been brought up to look upon the five-four movement of Chaikovsky’s “Pathetique” as the last word in rhythmic subtlety. Gershwin’s “Do It Again” is a striking example of cross-rhythms. It is written in four-four-time, alla breve, but abounds in clusters of quarter-note triplets that are as enchanting to hear as they are difficult to play right. In this one respect of cross-rhythms, at least, American jazz music is probably as intricate and sophisticated as any music being written in the world to-day. And so, after all, why not? Why shouldn’t occasional jazz numbers be placed on programs of serious music? It is folk-music if ever any music was, and I don’t see why the mere fact that its composers are alive should bar it from respectable society. If a singer can put a Negro spiritual like “Didn’t It Rain” on a Carnegie Hall program without being mobbed by the pundits, if Mr. Lauri-Volpi can sing an Italian jazz tune like “Donna e Mobile” at the Metropolitan and be solemnly appraised by the critics, why shouldn’t some one sing “Carolina in the Morning,” music that is just as sincere, just as good, and just as profound as the other two? Miss Gautier did a brave thing when she sang jazz the other night, and a thing that was worth doing. She and Gilbert Seldes of the Dial, who has long been a passionate champion of jazz and who wrote the program notes for her jazz group, deserve two small niches in the hall of American musical missionaries. Not that there is any need to magnify the importance of jazz. It is not the only music in the world, and it is not the best. I would flee an all-jazz recital as wholeheartedly as I would flee an all-Mahler recital. But it is something genuine and amusing, and utterly American — the only utterly American music that I know. One of the most deadening influences upon American musical composition to-day is our fearful artistic snobbery, our insistence upon dividing music into “classical” and “popular,” our assumption that

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he who would be serious must be solemn. After all, Shakespeare wrote “The Taming of the Shrew” as well as “Hamlet,” and art isn’t necessarily bad art merely because it makes you smile. If an occasional jazz number should creep timidly into our concert lives, who knows but that American audiences might learn to listen to music AS MUSIC, without bothering about its social position? They might even develop a critical sense. After learning to enjoy good music, even when it is light, they might learn to reject bad music, even when it is heavy.

“The Philadelphians” (November 21, 1923) Note: This review identifies a special event in New York music history: the arrival of a true harpsichord as part of an orchestral concert, played by the woman who would bring that instrument to prominence once again: Wanda Landowska. The comforting thing about Mr. Stokowski is that he never stays put. After having established himself more or less firmly in the public consciousness as a disciple of the ultra-modernists in music, he and his Philadelphia Orchestra proceeded to present a program in Carnegie Hall last night so utterly of the eighteenth century that Schubert’s unfinished symphony, which closed it, sounded daring to the point of recklessness. Much of the illusion was attributable to Mme. Wanda Landowska, who is not only a concert pianist in her own right but probably the world’s most celebrated harpsichord player as well, and whom Mr. Stokowski introduced to New York last night, honoring her with not one but three places on his program. She played a concerto by Haendel in B flat for harpsichord and orchestra, a concerto “In the Italian style” for harpsichord alone, by Bach — his only solo composition for the instrument — and Mozart’s E flat concerto for piano and orchestra. The evening gave many of the audience — this reviewer included — a chance to hear the harpsichord for the first time in their lives; for the instrument that Mme. Landowska plays is not the transmogrified piano that passes muster for a “harpsichord” at most modern concerts of ancient music, but a genuine reconstruction of the sort of instrument upon which Bach and Haendel played. It is somewhat smaller than a modern grand piano, although similar in shape, with a much thinner and less resonant keyboard, and its strings are sounded, not by being struck with felt-covered hammers, as in the modern piano, but by being plucked by quill, brass, or leather plectra. The instrument also differs from the piano in that it possesses little dynamic gradation — i.e., the performer may strike the key hard or softly without producing any very great difference in the intensity of the resultant

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sound. Mme. Landowska’s harpsichord has two keyboards, the upper one of which produces a quieter, thinner tone than the lower. She is a greatly gifted player, equipped with a finger technique whose velocity and surety are remarkable even in this day of technical prodigies, and the sense of style and breadth and nobility of phrasing that are the marks of a true artist. These qualities were evident to their most advantageous degree in the one number that she did not play on her special instrument; that is, the Mozart concerto. The two harpsichord pieces had, frankly, more historical than musical interest for this listener. It was not hard to see why the piano has rendered the earlier instrument obsolete. The tone of the harpsichord is pleasant but undeniably monotonous, sounding, as nearly as we can describe it, something like an overgrown mandolin. It possesses none of the variety of tone color that we have learned to expect of keyboard instruments to-day, and its volume may best be guessed from the fact that for the Haendel concerto Mr. Stokowski had to cut his strings down to a handful of violins and violas, four cellos, and two basses. The audience showed every sign of keen interest both in the instrument and performance, and recalled Mme. Landoswka repeatedly after her performance of the Mozart concerto.

“At the Vanderbilt” (December 13, 1923) Note: There were several groups in New York City that presented concerts of new music of all types. Taylor did review some of these, as in this case of the International Composers’ Guild, a concert of first performances in America. Here is evidence that even in the very first years of radio, attempts were made to bring music, new and old, to whomever was listening. Thousands of honest and God-fearing radio amateurs must have gone morosely to bed last night in the firm conviction that their receiving sets were hopelessly out of order. For the International Composers’ Guild concert was not confined to the Vanderbilt Theatre, but was broadcast as well; and whatever the merits of ultra-modern music, one has a suspicion that widespread popular appeal is not one of them. An ear attuned to “Peter Rabbit” must have listened with incredulity to Arthur Lourie’s “Syntheses.” Mr. Louie’s five brief piano pieces can scarcely be called catchy. Rhythmic unexpectedness to the point of incoherence seems to be a fetish with their composer, coupled with a determined, all-pervasive dissonance that is striking even in these anti-diatonic days. Syntheses is exactly the title for them, if you remember what “synthesis” means. The two Hindemith pieces were milder, but fell short of revealing the strong individuality that reports

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of his chamber compositions had apparently promised. The nocturne was the better of the two, despite lapses into commonplace, for it created a definite mood and maintained it, but the march was rather cheap, despite its harmonic complications. The best of the piano pieces were Bela Bartok’s [Hungarian] folksong improvisations. There were eight of them, mostly short; some, in fact, so stenographic as to be little more than announcements of their subject matter, and some rather inchoate, rhythmically; but they did have a quality of humor and imagination that the first half of the evening needed badly. Mr. [Claudio] Arrau played with devotion and considerable effectiveness. The three [Maurice] Delage songs sounded conventional and uninteresting. The Schoenberg work [“Hersgewaechse”] almost defies analysis, despite the fact that it was repeated at the urging of the audience, for the soprano part, which is decidedly its most important component, was utterly beyond the capabilities of Miss Leoni. It would probably take Mabel Garrison and Sigrid Onegin, singing in relays, to do it justice, for it is written in absurd disregard of the limitations of the voice. Some day, of course, its difficulties will vanish and its obscurities will become crystal clear. Until that day arrives, however, one humble Philistine must confess that he thought it strained and unimaginative. The real excitement of the evening began at the end, when Mr. Stokowski conducted some of his crack players in a superb performance of Stravinsky’s “Renard,” seconded by spirited and successful singing by the four soloists. The piece, which recounts a variant of the familiar tale of Reynard and the rooster, was done as a ballet by the Diaghileff company in Paris during the early summer of 1922. It sounded much better last night in its smaller and less pretentious setting. The music is Stravinsky at his wittiest and most sardonic, and is one more example of his ability to write delightful music with the utmost economy of means and his uncanny skill in scoring for small instrumental combinations. The audience received “Renard” with riotous delight, and were so insistent in their approval that Mr. Stokowski finally repeated it.

“An American Ballet” (November 29, 1923) Note: Cole Porter’s one and only orchestral work came after he studied music theory, harmony and orchestration in 1920 at the Scuola Cantorum in Paris. This was before he achieved fame on Broadway and while his wife, Linda, still had aspirations for him to become a classical composer. Darius Milhaud suggested to Porter that he write a short ballet, which would precede his La Création du Monde ballet, composed for the Swedish ballet, a short-lived group based in Paris.

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Porter agreed and composed Within the Quota. Porter’s work has disappeared, but Milhaud’s remains well known. “Within the Quota,” the ballet-sketch by Cole Porter and Gerald Murphy that the Swedish Ballet introduced at the Century Theatre last night, did not mark the beginning of a new epoch in music; in fact, it did not even usher in a higher and holier synthesis of the plastic and visual arts. But neither did it pretend to, and it was at least amusing and colorful, blessedly brief, and spiced with the satire that consists in presenting slightly exaggerated facts. Mr. Murphy’s scenario depicts an immigrant landing in America and meeting successively the types of Americans whom he has already imagined — an heiress, a kolored komedian, a cowboy and a shimmying jazzbaby. His more extended acquaintance with each is, however, interrupted by a grim figure, which in the Greek drama would be fate, but which in the present opus masquerades in turn as social reformer, revenue officer, sheriff and censor. A final American type appears in blond curls and pink sash — the movie queen, “America’s sweetheart.” Fate retires abashed and the alien at last is Americanized. The scenery, likewise by Mr. Murphy, is equally simple and to the point. It consists entirely of a newspaper front page of Brobdingnagian proportions, complete with red-ink baseball scores, extras, weather reports and headlines in chaste Gothic letters from a foot to four feet high — “Unknown Banker Buys Atlantic” is the largest, with “Rum Raid Liquor Ban,” “Auto King Pledges Boom,” and “Ex-Wife’s Heart-Balm Love-Tangle” also present. Mr. Porter’s music comprised some very good jazz and some polytonal dissonances that were evidently meant to be as funny as they sounded. The dancers seemed infinitely more at ease than in anything they have so far presented. Miss Ebon Strandin’s interpretation of the jazz-baby, in particular, evoking unmistakable signs of appreciation from an invigorated audience. The balance of the program was made up of “Man and His Desire,” “Skating Rink” and “The Foolish Virgins,” ballets that had been seen before.

“Mr. Whiteman Experiments” (February 13, 1924) Note: Paul Whiteman’s Lincoln’s Birthday concert, entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” remains a significant event in the history of American music, providing, as it did, the premiere of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”  Immense, gigantic. From Brobdingnag, a land of giants in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

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The audience at Aeolian Hall yesterday was as unprecedented as the concert that collected it. There was the regular musical set, from Walter Damrosch and Ernest Bloch down to the critics, assembled out of curiosity to see what queer monster a serious program of jazz might be; and then there was another audience that had come over from the neighborhood commonly known as the Great White Way to see its beloved jazz make a debut among the highbrows. In the intermission, learned musicologists debated heatedly up and down the aisles, while upstairs two ladies came to blows over the question of whether or not it was good form to smoke at an afternoon concert. The occasion was a concert by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra. Mr. Whiteman, whose achievements in organizing and conducting contemporary dance orchestras have made him famous even in Europe, has theories regarding the so-called jazz band. He feels that the rhythms, melodies and instrumentation of our modern popular music contain the germ of a school of genuine American composition and his concert yesterday was designed not only to exhibit jazz as it is to-day, but jazz as it was and may become. One could have told that something unusual was afoot even before the playing began. For the staid rows of organ pipes that form the usual background of the Aeolian Hall platform were concealed behind a picturesque and elaborately decorated screen, and the orchestra, consisting mainly of wind and percussion instruments, with two grand pianos and a celesta thrown in, performed to an accompaniment of shifting colored lights. First a jazz band of the now obsolete pre-war type — piano, cornet, trombone and clarinet — played the “Livery Stable Blues” as a sort of horrible example, with the acrobatic and tonal contortions that have done so much to make “jazz” a synonym for vulgarity among the musical elect. This was immediately followed by an ancient jazz tune, “Mama Loves Papa,” scored and played in the modern and subtler style. A comedy group that followed revealed the Handelian origin of a certain fruit song [“Yes, We Have No Bananas”] and later permitted Mr. Ross Gorman to give an astounding exhibition of virtuosity upon the saxophone, oboe and clarinet. This was followed by a demonstration of good and bad jazz scoring, and a group of three modern pieces, including the famous “Limehouse Blues,” written and scored for a modern jazz orchestra. After Zez Confrey had displayed the possibilities of jazz playing on the piano, the first half of the program ended with a piece called “Russian Rose” that illustrated the modern arranger’s skill in working with borrowed material, the material in this instance being Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp minor prelude, Tchaikowsky’s “Marche Slave,” and the “Volga” Boat Song.

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The second half of the concert, equally entertaining, contained more solid material for the serious musician. After playing a symphonic rhapsody upon three airs by Irving Berlin, Mr. Whiteman introduced a suite of four serenades by Victor Herbert that were not only charming in thematic material but demonstrated the fact that Mr. Herbert’s skill in orchestration extends to handling the unusual instrumental combinations that a jazz band presents. This was followed by three jazz orchestrations of what Broadway calls “Standard selections,” the best being a delightful and irreverent transcription of MacDowell’s “To a Wild Rose.” Just before the closing number, a brilliant adaptation of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” George Gershwin played a “Rhapsody in Blue” of his own composition for piano and jazz orchestra. In a way this was the most interesting offering of the afternoon, for it was an experiment in treating the jazz instrumental and thematic idiom seriously, and it was by no means an unsuccessful one. Despite its shortcomings — chief of which were an occasional sacrifice of appropriate scoring to momentary effect, and a lack of continuity in the musical structure — Mr. Gershwin’s piece possessed at least two themes of genuine musical worth and displayed a latent ability on the part of this young composer to say something of considerable interest in his chosen idiom. In a hurried and necessarily brief chronicle such as this there is no chance to attempt detailed criticism or even to formulate conclusions. These must come later. Certainly the experiment was worth the trouble; and if noise be any criterion, yesterday’s audience — all of it — had a good time.

“Words and Music” (February 17, 1924) Note: Taylor sensed the importance of the Whiteman concert and wrote a Sunday piece that further elaborated his sense of where jazz fit into the world of serious music. Quite appropriately, he paid tribute to the often forgotten men of music — the arrangers, being aware that the “Rhapsody in Blue” had been arranged by Ferdie Grofe. The final line here, stating that Gershwin “may yet bring jazz out of the kitchen,” has been quoted often, reflecting that jazz had to become much more respected before it was accepted in the “living room.” Paul Whiteman called his jazz concert in Aeolian Hall Tuesday afternoon “an experiment in modern music;” and a very interesting experiment it turned out to be. For here was a program of American jazz in all its phases, assembled by an authority and played by one of the finest jazz bands in the world. It was jazz at its very best, perfectly played, and it gave the listener an opportunity to enjoy it under ideal conditions and weigh the chances of its

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becoming, as its proponents believe it will, a powerful influence in serious music. Those chances, I believe, are good. Certain elements in American jazz are decidedly worth study and are almost certainly bound to supply valuable ingredients to the music of the future. First and foremost of these is the striking novelty of its instrumentation. The American jazz band of to-day is something unique in instrumental combinations. It is emphatically not an orchestra in the ordinary sense of the term; and, almost equally emphatically, it is not a band. It is something between the two. Mr. Whiteman’s ensemble, for instance, contains a skeleton string section comprising seven violins and a double bass; its woodwind section includes a flute, an oboe, saxophones and clarinets; its brass section includes trumpets, trombones, horns, euphonium and tuba. It has a battery that includes timpani, and the personnel is further augmented by the inclusion of two pianos, a celesta, an accordion and one or two banjos. Such is approximately the combination, although, as a matter of fact, one of the characteristics of a jazz band is its entire fluidity. By an ingenious system of doubling whereby nearly every player performs in turn upon two or more instruments the jazz arranger is able to obtain a variety of tone color that would otherwise be impossible outside of a greatly augmented symphony orchestra. Mr. Whiteman’s trumpeters, for example, play Fluegelhorns as well; his two double bass players also play the tuba, and his three saxophone players, among them, play twelve different instruments. The method of scoring for this array of instruments is correspondingly different from regulation orchestral practice. In the orchestra the violin is the principal melodic instrument, just as the cornets and clarinets perform a similar function in the military band. In the jazz band the bulk of this service is performed by the saxophones, and less frequently by the trumpets, which are almost invariably muted. The violins are greatly reduced in importance, being used either as reinforcement for the saxophones or to perform obbligatos. The groundwork of the harmony is laid by the pianos, supported by the horns, with the bass part strengthened by the double bass, generally played pizzicato. The banjo is also valuable in establishing the harmony. It is, indeed, despite the fact that its presence is almost unnoticed, one of the most indispensable instruments in the band, for its steady, reliable “Plank-plank-plank-plank” sets the time so firmly that the more spectacular instruments are free to perform all sort of contrapuntal stunts above it without weakening the fundamental rhythm of the piece. The technique of the band is as interesting as its personnel. Mr. Whiteman’s men play with a crispness of attack and control of dynamics that many a symphony orchestra might envy, and his brass section in particular can produce a soft staccato that is not only beautiful in tone but has

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the sharpness and percussive quality of a fine string pizzicato. Several of the “effects” the players produce are novel in instrumental technique and could be introduced effectively into symphonic orchestral scoring. Among them are the so-called “lip-roll,” a one-note trill on the trumpets analogous to flutter-tonguing on the flute, an amazing control of portamento playing on the trombones, and a flexibility of tonguing on the saxophones that produces an uncanny imitation of laughter. Mr. Maxon, the first trombone player of the Whiteman band, sometimes thrusts the end of a phonograph horn loosely into the bell of his instrument, producing a tone that has all the gravity and weight of the trombone together with a horn-like quality that has none of the “brassiness” of ordinary trombone playing. Mr. Gorman, the principal saxophone player, manages in some mysterious fashion to produce a portamento effect that I never before heard on any keyed instrument. So much for the band. The most striking characteristic of the music itself is its ingenious and subtle use of varied rhythms. This has been discussed before at some length and need not be recapitulated here. What is more interesting at present is to speculate upon the possibilities and limitations of jazz. The Whiteman concert brought both these factors rather sharply to one’s attention. It showed, first, that the American jazz band and jazz instrumentation and jazz rhythms are all worth taking seriously. But it also showed, I think, that jazz will get no further in its present hands. Some of the music written by present-day composers — notably Gershwin, Kern and Berlin — has melodic, harmonic and rhythmic interest of its own, but in general when we talk about the fascinating color and lilt of jazz music we are talking about the man who scored it, not the man who wrote it. The real heroes of Mr. Whiteman’s afternoon aside from the players were Ferdie Grofe, Donald Clark, Ross Gorman and James Cassedy, who form his corps of arrangers. It was they who provided the shrewd touches of instrumental coloring, the fascinating interplay of contrapuntal embellishment that was the chief claim to interest possessed by much of the music. One of the heaviest handicaps under which American jazz labors is the fact that it is written by men who are, strictly speaking, not musicians at all. A few, like Jerome Kern and George Gershwin, really write their music, but the average American popular composer is totally illiterate, musically speaking. He plays the piano by ear, and sometimes only with one finger; he cannot write down his own music or read it when it is written for him. Orchestration is a branch of magic to him, and an orchestral score is something he may never have seen. He hears no music other than what he and his friends compose. I will cheerfully wager vast sums that there are a dozen fairly successful composers of popular songs in New York to-day

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who have never heard Brahms’s first symphony, or Chykovsky’s sixth, or “Til Eulenspiegel,” or “The Afternoon of a Faun.” Naturally, a man who attempts to compose music with such a lack of equipment will not get very far regardless of his talents. He is in the position of one who would attempt to become a poet without being able to read or write. Just as the poet might manage to improvise quatrains or even an occasional octave, he sits at the piano and picks out melodies that consist of rigid successions of four- or eight-bar phrases. He not only is unaware that there is such a thing as thematic development but he could not achieve it if he did know; for he cannot write his music down, and therefore cannot structure it, cannot retain it in his mind except in short fragments. Knowing nothing of scoring, he cannot write music with any scheme of instrumentation in mind. Everything he produces is vocal or piano music, and he must depend upon the cleverness of the arranger to make it “sound” and to make the accompaniment interesting. The arranger suffers from the exigencies of his trade. Clever as the scoring of last Tuesday’s music was, most of it was too clever. It was cabaret scoring, designed to capture and hold the attention of people who were occupied with eating, drinking, dancing and talking as much as with the music. It was brilliant, eccentric and nervous. No sooner would a certain ingenious effect begin to intrigue the listener and establish a mood than it shifted abruptly and gave way to another equally ingenious and equally brief. The net result was often very close to exasperation. That is why the musicians — the serious musicians — ought to take jazz seriously. It is a genuine contribution to modern music, but its present producers are helpless to advance it much beyond its present state. Its composers cannot do it. They lack resourcefulness and sophistication. Not hearing much music, they are constantly discovering harmonic and melodic devices that have been banalities in the concert hall for a quarter of a century, and, having no technical equipment, they can manage nothing more complicated than a simple verse-and-chorus structure. Rhythmical ingenuity they undoubtedly possess to the point of genius; and that is the thing that the trained musician would do well to learn from them. Nor can the jazz arrangers accomplish much. They are masters of their own form of instrumentation, but they do not compose the music they arrange nor do they possess the taste and opportunity to keep their ingenuity within bounds. The only way jazz can be incorporated into the body of modern serious music is to have it studied and written by composers who are also musicians. And that is why George Gershwin was such an important figure at Tuesday’s concert. He is a link between the jazz camp and the intellectuals. A composer of numerous song hits that testify eloquently to his popular

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talents, he is also a student and lover of serious music. His “Rhapsody in Blue,” for orchestra and piano, had all the faults one might expect from an experimental work — diffuseness, want of self-criticism, and structural uncertainty; but it also revealed a genuine melodic gift and a piquant and individual harmonic sense to lend significance to its rhythmic ingenuity. Moreover, it was genuine jazz music, not only in its scoring but in its idiom. It was crude but it hinted at something new, something that has not hitherto been said in music. Mr. Gershwin will bear watching; he may yet bring jazz out of the kitchen.

“At the Metropolitan” (“Samson et Dalila”) (February 28, 1924) One wonders sometimes whether Prof. Einstein hit upon his theory of relativity while attending an operatic performance. For at the opera, as nowhere else — except possibly at the dentist’s — one realizes that time is only relative, that the actual duration of an event has little to do with its apparent length. The second act of “Lohengrin,” for instance, seems hours longer to the consciousness than it actually is, and one totters forth from “Ernani” surprised to find that New York has altered so little with the passage of the years. “Samson et Dalila” too seems endless unless it is performed under perfect auspices. Even at its best, “Samson” takes very, very long to pass a given point, for the melodiousness of its score, while undeniable, is more or less innocent of dramatic implications, while the action up to the very last scene is mostly confined to the arms and thoraxes of the singers. Last night’s performance seemed a trifle long, it must be confessed: less by reason of any individual lapse than because of a general atmosphere of dolce far niente that hovered in the languid air. Orchestra and singers settled back comfortably, serenely assured that, after all, it was only good old “Samson et Dalila,” with nothing to do but sing a bit and then get home to a good night’s rest. And so, as William Winter remarked of “Brown of Harvard,” there was no acting. Mr. [Giovanni] Martinelli and Mme. [Julia] Clausson performed the usual brachial rites prescribed by tradition, and ventured no further. The others had less to do, and did it competently. Vocally, the honors rather went to Mr. Martinelli, who was in sonorous voice, and to Messrs. [Giuseppe] de Luca and [Paolo] Ananian. Mme. Clausson’s lower notes were good, but her upper register was more noticeable than impressive, while her singing as a whole seemed to lack variety. The audience, a large one, was far from languid. After Mr. Martinelli’s concluding B-flat in “Mon Coeur S’ouvre” (the only happening of importance, outside the thunderstorm, in the second act), a tumult and shouting arose from the standees that died only after Samson had interrupted his passionate embrace of Dalila long enough to bow to his admirers.

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“Pacific 231” (November 1, 1924) Note: The world of the orchestral tone poem met the industrial age in Arthur Honegger’s “Pacific 231,” an attempt to musically transform an orchestra into a surging locomotive. The ending of this review may seem a little strange, but there is a connection: the words are the final paragraphs in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 short story “.007, The Story of an American Locomotive,” which used locomotives as characters. The New York Symphony, which brought this work for a first performance in New York, had begun life as the Damrosch Symphony under Leopold Damrosch, and at this time remained the city’s second important orchestra, conducted by Walter Damrosch, Leopold’s son. It merged with the New York Philharmonic in 1929. The evening began calmly enough. It was the season’s opening concert by the New York Symphony Orchestra, and there was Carnegie Hall standing as usual, at Seventh Avenue and 57th Street, and in it was the large, familiar-looking audience that gathers for Mr. Damrosch’s concerts, with all the usual people in their accustomed seats, and the conventional crowd of late comers standing outside until the first movement of the Beethoven fifth should be over, and Mr. Damrosch conducting a vigorous and occasionally stentorian performance of the symphony, and half-turning to the audience he swung into the coda of the last movement; and there was much applause and bows from the conductor; and then there was Vaughan-William’s “Fantasia for double string orchestra on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (XVI Century),” with its flashes of Gothic splendor undimmed by a season’s silence and still as much too long as its title. Intermission, and after that, Debussy’s “l’Isle Joyeuse,” in a gorgeous new orchestration by Bernardino Molinari. It was all good to hear — but almost any symphony concert is good to hear. Then something happened. The next number, marked “New, first time in New York,” was “Pacific 231,” a symphonic movement by Arthur Honegger of the famous “Six” of Paris. He describes the piece as an attempt to express in music the “visual impression and physical sensation” of a heavy locomotive of the long-haul Pacific type. The orchestra began — a long, hissing roll on the tam-tam, over the heavy, thudding breaths of plucked double-basses, with a thin cloud of acrid violin harmonics overhead. The thing began to move. A steady, rasping, piston-like rhythm began in the low strings and spread among the violins, with scraps of themes flaring among the reeds and muted brasses. The rhythm continued, gathering momentum steadily and relentlessly as the weight of the orchestra began to tell.

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Sometimes the noise would slacken, as though the huge bulk were drifting, with only that fundamental ground rhythm going inexorably on its way. Then back came the orchestra, with ever-increasing power and speed, until the brasses broke into a wild shout of brutal triumph — a metal giant in his cups, happily roaring and hiccoughing in a sheer ecstasy of power. Then — a shriek from the piccolos, and amid a succession of huge, grinding chords, the thing came to a stop. This may be a purely personal reaction — it may be that locomotives thrill me too. But it seems to me that this piece of Honegger’s is highly important, the first completely successful attempt to express machinery in terms of music. It is not descriptive music as that term is generally understood; nor is it absolute music. It may not be music at all. But it does convey the rush and roar and black menace that Kipling conveyed in prose thirty years ago: “Nor, in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight yard, looking down upon the fourtrack way at 2:30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the White Moth that takes the overflow from the Purple Emperor tears south with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard clock makes the half hour, a far-away sound like the bass of a violoncello, and then 100 feet to each word:

With a michnai — ghignai — shtingal Yah! Yah! Yah! Ein — zwei — drei — — Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah! She climb upon der shteeple Und she frighten all der people, Singin’ michnai — ghignai — shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!

“That is .007 covering his 156 miles in 221 minutes.”

“The World’s Star Scribes Used to Report the Opera: Taylor Appears in Quick Change Act, Covering Opening in Some Good Disguises” (Nov. 4, 1924) Note: In 1924, the World had some of the finest newspaper columnists in the nation, including Franklin P. Adams (F.P.A.), Heywood Broun, Frank Sullivan, and Deems Taylor. They each had a special style and Taylor decided that for the annual ritual of reporting the Metropolitan Opera’s opening night, readers should have the viewpoint of each of these exceptional journalists. But instead of asking each of them to cover the event, he covered it for them. So the following morning, readers found the performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida” reviewed from five different perspectives: all the facts as the Associated Press might

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see it, in the poetical manner of F.P.A., a sports angle from Broun, a human interest one from Sullivan, and a music critique from Taylor himself. Why, mused The World music reviewer, does the burden of reporting the opening night of the Metropolitan always fall upon one unfortunate pair of shoulders? Why should not the story of so important an event be told, like the opening of the World Series, from several points of view? For instance: The Facts as the Associated Press Might Communicate Them  NEW YORK, Nov. 3 — Before a crowd estimated at 4,179, including a host of New York society notables, the Metropolitan Opera Company, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, General Manager, opened its season here tonight at the Metropolitan Opera House, on Broadway, between 39th and 40th Streets, with a performance in Italian of “Aida,” a grand opera in four acts and seven scenes, book and lyrics by A. Ghisanzoni, music by Giuseppe Verdi, both of Italy.  Among those singing in the cast were Elizabeth Rethberg of Dresden, Germany; Margarete Matzenauer of Budapest, Hungary; Giovanni Martinelli of Montagnana, Province of Venice, Italy; Giuseppe Danise of Salverno, Italy; Jose Mardones of Bilbao, Spain, and Louis D’Angelo of Los Angeles, Cal., U.S.A. The ensemble is alleged to have included 75 male singers, 75 women singers, 110 supernumeraries from Morningside Heights and Grant Street, 20 genuine colored actors from 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, a stage band of 22 players, 8 special trumpet players, and two white horses with pink eyes. Miss Florence Rudolph headed the ballet, which numbered 40 American dancers, all trained at the Metropolitan Ballet School under the direction of Miss Rosina Galli. The orchestra, of 59 pieces, was under the direction of Tullio Serafin, a new Italian conductor, who gave his address as 2131 Broadway. The performance began at 8 p.m., the estimated value of the jewels worn by the boxholders being $7,027,000.20. General Manager Gatti-Casazza, when asked his opinion regarding the future of grand opera in America, said in part, “I am very, very happy.” The Philosophical Angle, as F.P.A. Might Reflect It. Hark to the muse as she summons her creatures! Look at them flocking in lobby and aisle, Cramming the Met. to the ultimate bleachers — Callot and Bloomingdale, Onyx and Lisle! Drop your best curtsey and tip your new tile: (Oh, for the pen of a Chambers or Ouida!) Hail to the home of the Voice with the Smile!

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Why do they always commence with “Aida”? Art is a gospel; give heed to her preachers, Pundits of culture, messiahs of style; Come, let us kneel at the feet of our teachers. Up goes the curtain; be silent a while! Look at those prisoners, tramping in file! Why the Mills makeup? Can this be indeed A Proud Ethiopian’s little black chile? Why do they always commence with “Aida”? Ain’t there no others with notable features, Fit to be dealt from the top of the pile? Carmen, the pet of the highly-paid screechers; Tosca the virtuous; Venus the vile; Siegfried and Parsifal, guiltless of guile; Lohengrin’s swan, and his sisterly Leda; Don O. Giovanni, one gal to the mile. Why do they always commence with “Aida”?

The Human Interest Story, as It Might Be Told by Frank Sullivan  I was talking to Luigi the other day, and if you are looking for somebody who can trim it up the side without ever using the clippers, you couldn’t do better than Luigi, and he said:  “Frank, why don’t you go up to the Metropolitan Monday night?” “But opera costs a lot of money,” I said, paying the check. “Not much if you go with me,” he retorted, cashing it. So about 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon Luigi and I went up to Broadway and 39th Street, where a lot of people were standing in line. “Stand in line until you get to the box office window, and then buy standing room,” said Luigi. “I’ve got to meet a fellow, but I’ll be back.” So I stood in line behind a lady who was sitting on a cracker box, a Mrs. Trimble, I think she said her name was, or maybe it was Tompkins from Creston Avenue in the Bronx. Her little girls has been having a terrible time having her teeth straightened, but the dentist says you got to expect that with first teeth. The line was rather slow in moving so I decided to move up a little. In fact, I did move up, right in front of a gentleman wearing a straw hat. I picked myself up, however, with only a few minor fractures and contusions, but what was my surprise to see the line extending clear around the corner of 40th Street. Laughing heartily at my mistake, I strolled forward, and knocking down a little boy (he was no relation to Mrs. Trimble, by the way; it’s a small world, isn’t it?), took his place.

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Soon we entered the box office, which was not only so ornate as you would expect from an opera house that paid over $30,000 income tax last year. Still, you know what those lawyers are. But I digress. I put down $3.30, which Luigi had said was the price, and the darn fool in the box office gave me back $3.25 change. So I hurried on before he should discover his mistake, and do you know, the next thing I knew, we were all going under the East River, on the way to Brooklyn. It was certainly a joke on Luigi. As long I was there, I thought I might as well make a night of it, so I dropped into the see the Montauk Stock Company, and those boys are certainly a bunch of princes. The Show Itself, as it Might be Reviewed by Heywood Broun  It seems to me that the authors of “Aida” have fumbled the ball in midfield with nothing but their own ineptitude between them and a touchdown. The piece begins as an exciting study in miscegenation, gallops brilliantly as far as the middle of the third act and then strains a tendon and staggers off into a rather feeble and preposterous hokum story of lust and religious intolerance.  The plot concerns the struggle of two women for a man, and so long as the authors stick to that story they go bravely and far toward exploding the hoary theory that man is the pursuer. One woman is an Egyptian Princess; the other a mulatto girl who has been captured from a neighboring Ethiopian tribe. The Egyptian, Amneris, is in love with Radames, a young Egyptian Lieutenant. In fact, she would Radames than not. But so would Aida, the young African. I must say for the authors that they have not flinched from having the Lieutenant fall in love with Aida, and have, in fact, written one scene on the banks of the Nile that will probably attract the attention of Mr. Sumner [John Sumner was head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice]. But from then on, the interest begins to flag, and the piece eventually gets itself bogged in a sticky morass of anti-Ku Klux propaganda. As an example of dramatic construction “Aida” is as crooked as a Pharaoh game. Margarete Matzenauer, as Amneris, gave a performance that left a typical first-night audience stunned and breathless. Almost equally good was Giovanni Martinelli as Rhadames. Some of his high notes had all the lunge and terrific drive of a Babe Ruth going after a low one on the inside. Elizabeth Rethberg was engaging as Aida, but the rest were only fair. The horses were adequate. The Musical Side of the Evening, As Deems Taylor Did It.  Giving a new maestro “Aida” to conduct at his debut is a bit like asking Mr. Rachmaninoff to operate a player piano. With even a minimum of conductorial encouragement “Aida” comes fairly close to conducting itself and is accordingly

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hardly the perfect test of a new conductor’s abilities. But even handling such an opera, Tullio Serafin, who came to replace Mr. Moranzoni at the Metropolitan this season, made an impressive beginning. He has a mind of his own and the means of carrying out his intentions. Some of his tempi, notably in the Temple scene, were noticeably slower than those to which one has been accustomed, but they were obviously the result of intention rather than sloth.  For the most part, however, his “Aida” was distinguished for its healthy vigor and elasticity. His orchestral ensemble was precise and beautifully blended, and he gave signs, when the opportunity presented, of being able to work out details with great delicacy without sacrificing breadth and continuity. His accompaniments were excellent. He can lead singers while appearing to follow them, which is a rare gift, and the union between orchestra and chorus, in the big ensembles, was striking. [Note: Tullio Serafin would later conduct the premieres of both of Deems Taylor’s operas.] The remainder of the performance was one long since familiar. Mr. Martinelli and Mr. Danise, as always, studiously devoted themselves to singing, and earned their customary Presidential salute from a more than ordinarily demonstrative first-night audience. Mme. Matzenauer was an impressive Amneris, if one cares for impressive Amneri. Mme. Rethberg gave a distinguished performance in the title role, one that revealed greater dramatic effectiveness than we remember seeing her evidence, and of a vocal perfection that calls for superlatives. Her “Ritorno, vincitor” was a flawless and thrilling example of singing. The ballet was pleasing and agile. As always.

“Roland Hayes” (November 29, 1924) Note: Roland Hayes was the first African-American to rank with the top concert artists of his time, preceding Marian Anderson by several years. Though Hayes had given Carnegie Hall recitals before, this was the first time Taylor reviewed the singer. Hayes, son of an ex-slave, had spent some years at Fisk University. The sold-out concert, a benefit for the university, provided $5,000 (out of a total receipt of $6,200) for the university. I tried listening to Roland Hayes without watching him last night. There has been so much emphasis laid upon the fact that he is a Negro, and so much rhapsodizing over his singing as expressive of the essential tragedy of the Negro race, that I thought it would be interesting, for once, to concentrate upon the singer and ignore the man. So I sat in Carnegie Hall and watched the audience and listened to Roland Hayes. And having done that, I am convinced that Roland Hayes is an artist primarily, and a Negro incidentally, and that the essentially racial quality

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of his singing is something that exists chiefly in the imaginations of his more romantic hearers. Certainly there is little that one could call racial in the quality of his voice. To listen, not to look, while he sang his first three groups last night was to hear a beautiful tenor voice, silken smooth in mezzo forte, ringingly vibrant in the fortes, and trained to a perfect evenness of production in all its registers. If the voice could be tagged with any specific racial label, one might call it Irish. Once or twice, in negotiating an awkward group of syllables in a difficult tessitura, his tones did take on the “white,” wailing quality that we associate with colored singers. But even that is a quality that is found in many Russian voices as well. His diction is flawless. It is merely good English, good Italian or good German, as the case may be; and his style changes with the character of the song he sings. “Care Selve,” as he sang it last night, was Haendel as Haendel should be sung, and his interpretation of Wolf’s “Auch Kleine Dinge” was one of the most exquisite examples of pure lieder style that I have ever been privileged to hear. His singing of Negro spirituals, about which so much ink has been spilled, is thrilling for the very reason that he does not mar their beauty and deep feeling by adopting any fake “Negro” style of rendition. His tones, when he sings them, are just as beautifully “covered” as when he sings Brahms; and his method of interpretation is merely to sing them — like any other good songs — as sincerely and simply and beautifully as he can. His Negro dialect, in the spirituals, would be scorned by the average Nordic as not authentic. He pronounces “borne,” for instance, not “borne,” but “bawn,” as any Bostonian would; he says “that” and “the,” not “dat” and “de,” and manages generally to keep them colloquial in spirit without finding it necessary to revert to the lingual methods of the end man of a minstrel show. There is pathos in his singing, of course, in his voice and his interpretations; but it is the quality of tears that is in any flawless and lovely thing. Its effect may be enhanced by reflections concerning the lonely prophet of an oppressed race, but it does not depend upon them. The people who filled Carnegie Hall to the brim last night, and crowded in packed rows upon the platform itself, were there for one reason, and one only: because when art leaves the lowlands of mere polished excellence and rises toward the peaks of greatness, it appeals to something universal, something beyond the emotions and far beyond the intellect, something that you may be pleased to call the soul. And somewhere concealed, oddly enough, nearly everybody has one. It does not matter, particularly, whether Roland Hayes is black or white or green. What does matter is that he is an artist, and a great one.

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“The Chamber Music Society” (February 4, 1925) Note: The New York Chamber Music Society premiered Taylor’s most important orchestral work, “Through the Looking Glass Suite,” in 1919. Six years later the group premiered another Taylor work, “The Portrait of a Lady.” He was there as a critic to review one of his works, as he had several years before. The New York Chamber Music Society, which opened its tenth season last night at Aeolian Hall, now includes the New York String Quartet among its permanent members. Besides Carolyn Beebe, its founder, at the piano, the organization now includes Anselm Fortier, double bass, and a wind section comprising Lamar Stringfield, Bruno Labate, Gustav Langenus, Benjamin Kohon and Bruno Jaenicke. The advantage of having an organized string quartet as a nucleus was apparent from the outset of the concert in the surety of attack and tonal homogeneity of the strings, qualities that are frequently wanting in miniature orchestral combinations. The wind players likewise, being almost all members of the Philharmonic Orchestra, display the preciseness of dynamic balance, the easy rhythmic give and take, the mutual confidence that comes only of having weathered many orchestral vicissitudes together. Throughout the program, which opened with the lovely Schubert F major octet for strings and wind, and included Paul Juon’s divertimento for piano and wind and Novak’s piano quintet in A minor, the organization in its various permutations played with rhythmic vitality, tonal brilliance and fine musicianship. The evening’s “first performance” was Deems Taylor’s rhapsody for piano and string and wind quintets, “The Portrait of a Lady.” As one of Mr. Taylor’s warmest admirers, we had looked forward with considerable interest to hearing his new work; but its performance left us rather disturbed. Not, we hasten to add, because of the interpretation, which, so far as we were able to judge, was excellent; but rather because his music set us to musing upon the wide gap that lies between intention and accomplishment. We rather liked one or two of his ideas, but his handling of them struck us as rather fumbling and inadequate. The structure seemed so obvious, the seams so dismayingly apparent, we reflected, a little bitterly, upon the cleverness and resourcefulness with which Yuon had juggled the themes of his divertimento, and we rather wished, for Mr. Taylor’s sake, that the Society had forgotten to play the Schubert octet at all. The audience, probably composed of the composer’s relatives, greeted the piece with what seemed to us highly disproportionate cordiality.

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“The Dance of the Auer’s” (April 29, 1925) Note: In this review, one of his last for the World, Taylor uses a pun on the name of Ponchielli’s ballet music from the opera “La Giaconda” to focus attention on the great violinist and violin teacher Leopold Auer. It was to Auer that Tchaikovsky dedicated his violin concerto, but Auer refused the dedication after studying the score and determining that it was unplayable. The above title is not strictly accurate, for there was no dancing — except, possibly, offstage. But it was a party, at any rate, and a good one. It began some time before 8 o’clock, when the lobby of Carnegie Hall began filling up with a variegated crowd that had come on foot, in taxicabs and less promiscuous motor vehicles. The tickets read, “8.15 o’clock;” and as usual, following the jocose custom of the mysterious beings who direct the fortunes of Carnegie Hall, the programs read “8.30” As a matter of record, it was not until 8.50 that Frank Crowninshield groped his way to the edge of the platform through a jungle of tall palms, potted daisies, and what must truthfully be described by an ignorant reviewer as other spring flowers, and spoke as follows: “Ladies and Gentlemen: I have two announcements to make, both important. First, there will be no encores.” (Applause). “Second, in the first and last numbers on the program, Mr. Paul Stassevitch will replace Mr. Alexander Siloti at the piano.” (Terrific applause). Then after a brief pause a short, gray-bearded old gentleman, almost completely bald, came on, wearing, among other things, a pair of enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and carrying a violin; after him came two younger men, less bearded but otherwise more hirsute, likewise carrying violins; a tall young man with grayish hair, carrying nothing but bending a stern and purposeful eye upon a slightly abashed grand piano that stood meekly awaiting him, and a fifth individual whose apologetic and shrinking mien bespoke one whose humble function was obviously to turn pages. The audience’s greeting this time was of the sort to make a wearied recorder of events musical regret his prodigal waste of the word “thunderous” at previous occasions. The audience had thirty-five minutes of accumulated applause in its system, which it proceeded to express with deafening dispatch, at the same rising to its collective feet with a unanimity that could not have been more perfect had it been planned. The old gentleman bowed, and the two younger violinists beamed and beat upon their fiddles with reckless bows. Thus began the gala concert that Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist had arranged in honor the eightieth birthday of their master, Leopold Auer.

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To avoid the risk of having the occasion called meager they had collected as performers, in addition to their distinguished selves, not only Mr. Stassevitch, but Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Josef Hofmann and Sergei Rachmaninoff, so that the net visual effect of the evening was a combination of those sumptuous talking machine and reproducing piano advertisements wherein the dazed customer swims voluptuously in an aura of obliging virtuosi. You have probably heard of Prof. Auer. In his day one the world’s greatest violin virtuosos, he has become internationally famous in the late years through the incredible array of famous violinists that have come forth from his tutelage. It is the list that inspired George [and Ira] Gershwin’s deathless ballad, “Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha,” and includes not only Heifetz, Zimbalist, Elman and Seidel but a host of only slightly less notable artists. Prof. Auer has been living here since the rise of the Bolshevik regime in Russia, is still actively teaching, and is at present varying his professional duties by preparing to become an American citizen. Obviously he is not the man to sit by idly while his devoted pupils celebrate his eightieth birthday. So he contributed an added fillip of interest to the concert by playing at it himself. He appeared twice: in the opening number, Vivaldi’s F major concerto for three violins and piano, with Messrs. Heifetz, Zimbalist and Stassevitch, and in a later group, playing Chykovsky’s “Melodie” and a Brahms Hungarian Dance with Mr. Rachmaninoff as his accompanist. His tone is perhaps thinner and smaller than it was a half a century ago, when he was soloist at the Russian Court. But fifty years have not affected either his intonation or his artistry. In the Vivaldi concerto his clean, firm stopping, his phrasing, his command of light and shade, and his general sense of style, were still those of a great master. His two pupils, it might parenthetically be added, showed distinct promise. It was a long program and a varied one. Following the concerto, Mr. Zimbalist and Mr. Gabrilowitsch played the Brahms D minor sonata. After Prof. Auer’s group, Mr. Heifetz, accompanied by the protean Mr. Zimbalist, played a “Pensee de L. Auer” by Joseph Achron, and a romance and tarantelle by Prof. Auer (the Professor conducts orchestras, by the way, in his spare time). Josef Hofmann then played a group of piano solos, including the Liszt transcription of the “Liebestod,” after which Messrs. Heifetz and Zimbalist, aided and abetted by Mr. Stassevitch, concluded the evening’s events with a Bach two-violin concerto in D minor. The audience was so large as to occupy every available seat in the hall and crowd the standing space three deep; tickets downstairs were $10, and it is safe to say that there were few deadheads. Indeed, the event justifies that enviable line, “The reserves were called out to disperse the crowd,” for

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a band of about 200 would-be auditors lingered disconsolately in the lobby long after the concert had started and consented to leave only upon the urgent invitation of four hastily summoned but not very excited officers of the law. But for these 200 another country newspaper phrase would serve as an apt description of the evening, “A pleasant time was had by all.”

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Chapter

4

Vanity Fair Articles, 1927–1929

Introduction Taylor’s music reviews and criticisms, along with his increasingly wellknown work as a composer for theatrical productions, caught the attention of the Metropolitan Opera board members, who were planning to give a commission to an American composer to write an opera. Though the Metropolitan had produced some dozen American operas over the years, none had met with any particular success. It was Taylor that the decision-makers chose in 1925 for their first-ever commission. On February 17, 1927, The King’s Henchman, with music by Taylor and libretto by famed American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, premiered to glowing reviews, performances over three seasons, and a second Metropolitan commission. As a milestone in his composing career, it hit the heights; as a supplier of money for the Taylor bank account, it was a dud: Taylor received only $150.00 for each of the 17 performances. What helped him financially through the next two years while he was composing Peter Ibbetson, his second opera, was the income from his monthly articles for Vanity Fair, then America’s most insightful chronicler of the New York scene. In its 22 years of life (1914 to 1936), it published articles by the best new writing talent, both foreign and domestic, from Thomas Wolfe to Gertrude Stein to Aldous Huxley to Colette. Vanity Fair’s editor Frank Crowninshield, considered one of the greatest of literary magazine editors, welcomed Taylor as a contributor. Taylor wrote articles on a myriad of subjects, including: “The City That Died of Greatness: An Alarmed New Yorker Discusses What the Skyscrapers Are Doing to His Home Town” 101

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(emerging from Taylor’s original intention to become an architect when he entered NYU); “Grand Opera—Its Cause and Cure: A Guess at What Ails the Most Fashionable and Best-hated of Indoor Recreation” (espousing Taylor’s advocacy for more operas in English); “When a Good American Dies: A Few Speculations As to Why He Goes Direct to Paris, Rather Than to Berlin or Heaven” (indicating that Taylor, like so many of the New York arts scene, viewed Paris as the great center for culture). Three of the four Taylor Vanity Fair articles chosen for this book have a direct relationship to events in Taylor’s life: “Three Immortals of Church History,” tells of a student prank during his NYU college days; “What, in Your Opinion, Is the …” illustrates that an interviewee better be ready for the worst when he sees the result in print; “The Face on the Nursery Floor” gives advice to fathers on what to expect in a child’s first year. The fourth, written when movies began to talk, finds Taylor scratching his head and wondering about the future of “Drama’s Speaking Likeness.”

“The Three Immortals of Church History: The Inside Story of Kelley, McGook, and Brabbenheim, and What it Might Teach Us” (Originally published in Vanity Fair, May, 1929) Note: Deems Taylor attended and graduated (1902–1906) from New York University a few years after it opened its University Heights campus in the Bronx, which was only several blocks from his home. Even though he lived at home, he did join the Phi Upsilon fraternity. The “three immortals” story has all the flavor of having been developed as a fraternity prank upon an unsuspecting professor. Last week a man stopped me, seized my hand, and uttering loud and cordial cries, shook it with incredible vigour on Forty-fifth Street, just west of Fifth Avenue. As is my wont on such occasions, I cried gaily, “Why, you old — — — ! Where have you been keeping yourself?” — thereby gaining precious moments in which to strive desperately to recall where on earth I had ever seen him before. He turned out to be a former classmate, whom I had not seen in twenty years; I even remembered his name. As we were parting with the customary avowals to look each other up in some remote period designated as “next week some time,” he remarked, “remember me to Kelley, McGook and Grabbenheim when you see them.” Which is why I mention him at all. For the utterance of those three names suddenly unlocked a long-closed door, evoked distant days when all the world was young, lad — to be precise, twenty-four years ago, the occasion of the only genuine miracle in which I have ever been a participant. Know, then, that there was a course in our college curriculum known as Church History I. It was conducted by a reverend gentleman who had

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presented a large collection of theological works to the college library on condition that his course be made compulsory upon all Juniors. Inasmuch as Juniors are seldom noted for piety, the course would not, under any circumstances, have been a riotously popular one; and the fact that it was compulsory rendered it, in our youthful eyes, doubly repulsive. Luckily, however, Providence had seen to it that our instructor’s physical infirmities were appropriate to his lack of knowledge of adolescent psychology; for he was blind in one eye, rather near-sighted in the other, and was hard of hearing. To him, a student was merely a name in the roll-book, and he conducted his classes by calling upon these in alphabetical order. As the class was, perforce, a large one, only one-third of it could possibly recite at one sitting. Given these conditions, the course had not concluded the first term of its inception before the Juniors had worked out a system of at least partial escape from its attendance. The class divided itself into three alphabetical portions. If one’s name began with an early letter, say D, one attended the first sitting, answered the roll-call, and, being duly called up, recited. But at roll-call one also answered to the name of some classmate whose name began with one of the middle letters of the alphabet, and who was thus able to be absent without detection. The following week, and the week after, one stayed away, secure in the knowledge that his name would in turn be assumed by two other proxies. Thus everyone had two names beside his own, the attendance at classes was always perfect, and professor and students were equally happy. Now for the miracle. By the time that I became a Junior, this system had been in successful operation for some years. The only mishap had occurred the year before, when, owing to the instructor’s unwonted expedition in asking questions, he had exceeded the traditional alphabetical third that was his quota, so that a student named Bates, who had already recited, was obliged to rise again and recite in the name of a classmate of his named Miller. No ill results had ensued, however, and the incident had passed almost unnoticed. Not wholly, so, however; for one under-classman had heard the tale, and pondered it, as we shall see, with profit. At the first meeting of Church History I in my Junior year the professor called the roll alphabetically, as usual. Then, however, instead of proceeding with the recitation, he arose and made a brief announcement. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I understand that a number of students matriculated too late this year to be properly registered. If there are any of you present whose names do not appear on this roll-book, will you kindly give them to me now?” There was a moment’s pause; and then the genius to whom I have alluded above — his name was Christy — arose amid an awed hush and announced “Kelley — with an E; James Aloysius Kelley.”

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“Thank you, Mr. Kelley,” murmured the gratified professor. “Any others?” There were. We Juniors may not have been passionate about church history, but we knew a good idea when we heard one. Two others promptly arose and identified themselves as Harold K. McGook and Herman Grabbenheim. Then began the most delightful course in church history that any Junior class had ever taken, a year-long experiment in what might be called communistic creation. We had brought Kelley, McGook, and Grabbenheim into the world, and we were determined that they should be a credit to us. These three persons, who did not exist at all, soon became the realest people on the campus. Students laid bets, drew lots, threw dice, and played poker hands for the coveted honour of being allowed to impersonate one or the other of the distinguished trio. Precocious members of Phi Beta Kappa vied for the privilege of reciting for McGook, seniors volunteered to go back into Church History I and be Grabbenheim for a day. The three soon became prize students in the class, noted equally for their perfect record of attendance and the brilliance of their recitations. Kelley had but one parent, however, his original progenitor, Christy, who guarded his offspring as a tigress guards her young. So conscientiously, in fact, did he look after the mental and spiritual progress of his brain child that Kelley soon became a far more brilliant student of Church History I than did Christy. At the mid-term examination, for example, while McGook and Grabbenheim were being attended to by a committee of six volunteers, Kelley remained Christy’s exclusive protégé. The latter hurried through his own examination paper so as to have ample time in which to do Kelley justice; the result being that Kelley passed with honours, and Christy flunked. The mid-years over, Church History I became Church History II, with Kelley, McGook and Grabbenheim still faithfully in attendance. Then February gave way to March, and March to April. It was spring; and spring meant outdoors, and glee club trips, and the track team try-outs, and baseball. The Juniors began to be bored with Kelley, McGook, and Grabbenheim. A strange series of misfortunes overtook them. Kelley’s father died, I remember, away out in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Kelley had to go west for the funeral. McGook and Grabbenheim, as his boyhood friends, went out too, as pall-bearers. The three were gone for a fortnight. Only a few days after their return McGook broke his leg; and Kelley and Grabbenheim had to go down to St. Luke’s Hospital to read to him, the readings taking place, oddly enough, on the days when Church History II was in session. So serious did matters become that even the professor noticed that something was wrong. He must have brooded considerably over the falling off in the work of his star pupils, for one day, after Grabbenheim had been obliged to answer “not prepared” to a simple question regarding

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the Athanasian Creed, he horrified us by requesting Mr. G. to see him after class. We were saved only by the quick thinking of the captain of the football team, who arose hurriedly and left the classroom in a state of obvious physical torment. That evening the distressed professor received a note from Eusebius K. Grabbenheim, announcing that a sudden attack of appendicitis necessitated his son Herman’s withdrawal from college for the remainder of the term. Kelley and McGook still hung on, and for a time displayed their oldtime brilliance in class work. But the inevitable end was not long in coming. One May morning the professor, in tones of mingled pride and sorrow, announced to his regretful Juniors that our classmates would no longer be with us. He read us a joint letter from the two, in which they expressed their appreciation of what Church History II had done for them. So inspiring had been the course, they said, that they had decided to wait no longer before taking up what they now felt was their lifework. They were sailing that morning to become missionaries in China. For a time I used to wonder how they were getting along. Then I forgot them. Now that they have been recalled, it occurs to me that the story of their brief lives may contain a profound lesson for us students of democracy. Ours is, as we all know, a representative government, in which every statesman is merely the mouthpiece of those millions of citizens who have elected him. The system’s only defect at present is the fact that statesmen have an embarrassing propensity for forgetting whose mouthpieces they are. Take Mr. Hoover, for instance. At present he is functioning perfectly as the embodiment of the Republican party, and all is serene. But suppose, some fine day, he decides to be Mr. Hoover, and acts accordingly — is that fair to the party that elected him? Obviously not. On the other hand, one could not blame Mr. Hoover for yielding to the temptation to be himself instead of a figure of speech. The perfect remedy for such an unfortunate contingency would be to remove temptation by abolishing presidents entirely — as real persons, that is. Following the suggestion of the late Mr. Harding, the country’s Best Minds (first making sure, as he did not, that they are the best) could run the country with precision and dispatch through the medium of a series of Kelleys, McGooks, and Grabbenheims of their own creation. At the next presidential campaign, for example, the Republican candidate, Grabbenheim, would be composed of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Union League Club, the Anti-Saloon League, the right wing of the American Legion and the Methodist Board of Foreign and Domestic Missions. The Democratic candidate, Kelley, would be really the American Federation of Labor, the Knights of Columbus, the left wing of the American Legion, the National Association of Importers,

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and the Bartenders’ Union. I should put forward an independent candidate, composed of William Allen White, Walter Lippmann, Al Smith, Nicholas Murray Butler, Herbert and Osbert Swope and the works of the late Frank Moore Colby. Inasmuch as all campaign speeches henceforth will probably be made over the radio, the problem of personal appearances could easily be solved. The Republican speeches would be made by Major J. Andrew White, the Democratic by Mr. Graham MacNamee, and the Independent by Mr. Will Rogers. The candidates would make their public appearances solely on the motion picture screen. John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks impersonating Grabbenheim and Kelley throughout the country except in Chicago and New York, where the Beery brothers might make a more favorable impression. My own candidate, McGook, would be represented alternately by Charles Chaplin and Greta Garbo, and would probably have a walk-over. The president, once elected, would have not the slightest trouble in maintaining his identity. We could retain the services of Mr. Coolidge’s White House Spokesman, thus rendering it unnecessary for him to appear or speak in public. His administration being conducted by a committee of the country’s most prominent business men, would of course be in no wise distinguishable from those to which we have become accustomed. He might even go abroad during his term of office, and settle once and for all the perplexing international questions that have so complicated our relations with Europe. We would simply send over Charles Augustus Lindbergh, and in two years or probably less America would be the sweetheart of the world.

“The Face on the Nursery Floor: Observations by a Veteran Father (of a Year’s Standing) on Child and Parent Psychology” (Originally published in Vanity Fair, January, 1928) Note: Deems Taylor was married three times. His only child, Joan, resulted from his second marriage, which was to Broadway actress and playwright Mary Kennedy, the “M” in this piece. “M” had, for several reasons, determined to keep her pregnancy a secret from Taylor, whom she knew did not want a child. They had taken separate apartments in the fall months of 1926 for professional reasons — she to complete a play and he to write his first opera. They communicated solely by letter and telegram. Taylor received the surprise of his life on the evening of December 21, 1926, with a phone call from a close friend to tell him he was a father. My daughter and I met for the first time a little over a year ago. Having been an assiduous reader of magazine and other fiction for many years, I

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had a fairly good idea of the thoughts and emotions appropriate to such a meeting. Only a week before, I had been lent a novel that wound up in this strain: “The nurse approached, smiling, and laid a small bundle in his arms. He looked down, and caught the wandering glance of two very bright grey-blue eyes, set in a small, wizened face. A hand, incredibly tiny, incredibly perfect, reached out at random and wound around his forefinger. At the touch, a great wave of pity and tenderness swept over him. He trembled, as if with cold: the hot tears rushed to his eyes, and in a hoarse, broken whisper he murmured, ‘My son!’” Several factors, unfortunately, kept the meeting from proceeding according to the regulations. In the first place, the nurse did not approach smiling. She scowled rather menacingly, and said, “Please be quiet!” Then she escorted me to the elevator, took me up two stories, and motioned me to look through a large plate glass window into a room that looked something like the interior of a Pullman car without any seats but with baggage racks all over the walls. In every one of these was a very small child. Much as I hate to admit it, the famous paternal instinct promptly ceased to function, so that I had to make three wrong guesses before I succeeded in locating my own offspring. Even when I did look at the right basket, I could hardly murmur, “My son!” in the hearing of one who had just finished pointing out the fact that I had a Beautiful Little Girl. Moreover, no tiny hand wound around my finger; first, because my daughter was obviously asleep, and second, because I had met the nurse’s eye and had hastily revised my intention of taking the bundle in my arms. In retrospect my thoughts and emotions seem to have been equally unsatisfactory. Of the former I remember only an inward exclamation of “Thank God, she isn’t as red as I thought they always were!” Of the latter no memory remains save that of the chill of horror that swept over me when the nurse remarked encouragingly, “She’ll probably grow up to be a great singer.” One thought, however, I do remember. That was a resolve that never, under any circumstances, would I refer to my daughter in the public prints. This was one child of a journalistic father who was not going to be used for copy. And so she never was. That, however, was a year ago, and twelve months of parenthood have occasioned a number of observations and discoveries that it is perhaps my duty to give to the world. Motherhood has received favorable mention several times during the past few hundred centuries. But fatherhood, outside Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee, Balzac’s Contes Drôlatiques, Floyd Dell’s The Unmarried Father, and the collected works of Heywood Broun, has been generally ignored. The ensuing thoughts may seem to the reader a bit

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scattered and heterogeneous; they should be taken merely as a few field notes by a ringside observer in a hitherto neglected department of social science. First of all, let me point out that any father who has a daughter will enjoy a much more carefree and congenial home life if he refrains from quoting Schopenhauer on heredity — or better yet, if he refrains from mentioning the fact that he has ever read Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer is the lad who announced that girls inherit their intellects from their fathers. The problem this creates is fairly obvious. Any infant, as every woman knows, is endowed with phenomenal mental gifts, and no mother is going to make her daughter out a moron simply for the sake of putting the daughter’s father in his place. On the other hand, an ill-timed paternal reference, however justified, to the source of his daughter’s astounding mentality may be construed as derogatory to certain parties for whom it was never meant. On the whole, parents will find Wiggam’s The Fruit of the Family Tree the safest book on heredity from which to quote, as Wiggam tactfully decides that children skip a generation, and inherit solely from their grandparents. This book is particularly useful in families wherein neither parent has met the parents of the other. Furthermore, I am not in a position to announce that any man who can remain a fundamentalist after a year’s association with a waxing daughter is impervious to evidence. The first few weeks of my daughter’s life were not, I admit, strikingly Darwinian, so far as I could observe. On the other hand, my opportunities for genuine scientific observation were unduly restricted. I was never allowed, for instance, to swing her in midair clinging to a stick — an experiment that I had seen illustrated in a textbook on biology. I explained the scientific value of this experiment to her nurse, and even showed her the illustrations in the book. Her only response, however, was a brief and extremely unfair character sketch of the medical profession, coupled with a flat refusal to leave the infant’s side while I remained in the house. Later observations, however, have convinced me that man — meaning my daughter — traverses practically the entire animal kingdom during infancy. Her curiosity and destructiveness are, of course, conclusively simian. I defy anyone who is not at present inhabiting the Bronx Zoo to equal the speed and completeness with which she can disembowel a watch, a rubber ball, or a pillow, or reduce a book or a string of beads to its original elements. What she can do to a tea set by the simple expedient of pulling the table cloth must be seen to be appreciated. So far, of course, she is what the poets call a Little Helpless Child; and I await with interest to see what she will accomplish as soon as she begins to feel her strength. However, she displays one symptom that must be set down as canine. The acquisition of several teeth introduced her to the delights of chewing,

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an art that she practices with astonishing perseverance and success. So far she has eaten — or narrowly missed eating — with every sign of relish, one coat of paint from the sides and edges of a crib, one ditto from a nursery chair, two safety pins, the leg from a rubber dog, one cigarette butt, and eight cotton tufts from the under side of a mattress. I am convinced that in the branches of my family tree there lurk a marmoset, an Airedale puppy, and — judging from some recent vocal experiments — a macaw. Which brings me to the subject of speech. I know, at last, why in almost all languages a child’s father is either Papa or Dada, and its mother is Mama or mummy. The reason is a sordid example of adult conceit versus infant helplessness. Every child begins by saying either “papa” or “mama,” not, mind you, because it has its parents in mind, but simply because those two sounds are the easiest to make. Long study of my daughter has convinced me that what she really means by “ma-ma” is, “my teeth hurt.” What “papa” means I’m sure I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t refer to me exclusively for she applies the term likewise to a bowl of cereal, her mother, a bottle of milk, and the weather. It may be, of course, that her eyesight is defective. I doubt, in fact, if either of these words is a noun to her at all, for she employs them to round off the long sentences of obviously Russian or Czecho-Slovak derivation that form the bulk of her conversation. Both are probably akin to the Greek δε which makes so much trouble for all students of Xenophon. That is, they probably mean nothing at all. Her one authentic noun, which she evolved for herself after profound meditation, is “bah.” This does not, as might be inferred, refer to a sheep (the amount of sheep-herding done in the neighborhood of Forty-ninth Street and the East River being almost negligible), but to any object that can be grasped firmly in the right hand, such as a bottle, a pair of eyeglasses, a lock of hair, a celluloid duck, or an ear. The whole question of infant speech is, however, still an unanswered one. My own theory is that children have a perfect knowledge of the English language long before they consent to speak it. All this “ga” and “dada” and “bow wow” business is assumed, I am convinced, either to humour the vanity of the old folks or else to postpone as long as possible the dreary necessity of conversation. Judging from an expression that I have surprised at times in the eye of my daughter, I should not be in the least surprised to hear her burst into the Gettysburg address at any moment. I do know that I caught her one afternoon turning the pages of Ulysses with every sign of interest, while M. swears that she overheard her murmuring “My god!” as she gazed upon a portrait of her father that adorned the nursery table. Having mentioned the nursery, one might at this point take up the subject of Miss Legion, my daughter’s nurses. Having taken up the subject, however, there is nothing much to do with it — as any parent will doubtless

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agree — except put it down again as quietly as possible. A year’s experience prompts these three reflections:

a. You can have a nurse for your child, or you can have a child. You cannot have both. b. Somewhere in the world there is the perfect nurse. She is firm with the child, yet deferential to the parent. She is efficient without being devoid of human feeling. She is fond of the child without being convinced that she had it. She does not know much more than the doctor. She is a lady, and has given up trying to prove it. c. She already has a job. Here are a few further reflections — nothing important, merely random warnings to be included in any complete guide to fatherhood:

1. The problem of discipline is one that, at any cost, must be unloaded on the shoulders of the child’s mother. One of the poorest ways of teaching a child to drink out of a cup is to pretend to drink out of it yourself, the while murmuring, “M-m-m, that’s good!” and rubbing the abdomen with a circular motion. It amuses the child. That is all it does. 2. There is nothing in the superstition that fathers invariably carry pictures of their children in their watches. My friend A., for instance (his other initials are F.P.), carries a glazed and framed enlargement of his son’s portrait, but not in his watch. I carry mine in an inside pocket. 3. Nor is there much truth in the saying that “children always know.” My daughter can be relied upon to beam impartially upon all plumbers, gasfitters, installment-collectors, and delivery boys, and to howl like a banshee at the sight of anyone whom we are particularly anxious to impress. 4. Finally, fathers are by no means unreasonably insistent concerning the superior mentality of their offspring. Myself, I make no claims. I have registered my daughter at Vassar College. She enters in 1942, at the age of sixteen. If she is not up to it, she pays back my ten dollars, and we say no more about it.

“What, in Your Opinion, Is the — ?” (Originally published in Vanity Fair, April, 1927) Note: Taylor’s first opera, “The King’s Henchman”, with libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay, created a major triumph for the two when premiered in 1927. It was extolled by most critics as the best opera by an American composer yet. Granted that the competition had not been

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that great up to that point, nonetheless it had a sturdy libretto and exceptional orchestration, plus it did provide Taylor with the basis to achieve his “secret ambition.” Everybody has a secret ambition. Mine has always been to be interviewed. Privately, I had always dreamed of the day when I should lay my opinions before the public with the finality and fluency possessed by all persons who get themselves quoted in newspapers. I even used to make up questions to ask myself, and formulated a series of immensely pungent and illuminative answers. Well, I have been interviewed. And like most anticipated experiences, this one has been a bit of an anti-climax. In short, I have discovered why the hardened interviewee substituted mimeographed bulletins for conversation. I know the lingual paralysis that sets in after “Just how did you come to —?” No strangers to me are the mental collapse that succeeds “Could you tell us, briefly —?”, the softening of the brain that follows “What, in your opinion —?” I have tasted the fatal misquotation and the literal transcription that is more deadly than misquotation; and I have uttered the harmless quip of the afternoon previous that turns into the libelous asininity of the morning subsequent. There are various ways of getting yourself interviewed. The two methods most nearly infallible are to commit a murder or to announce yourself as a candidate for President of the United States. Other methods nearly as efficacious are to be married or divorced, to arrive on a transatlantic liner bringing some peculiar animal as a pet, to predict war between two fairly well known countries, and to be expelled from some college or university. But whatever you have done to engage the fickle attentions of the newspaper city editors, the genesis of your interview is always the same. Let us assume, for example, that you have written an opera. (Oddly enough, I did write an opera, and the libretto was by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and it was entitled The King’s Henchman, and if there were any justice in the world, Vanity Fair would have printed this piece before the Metropolitan Opera season closed, and it might have done us some good). The city editor holds a brief conversation with one of his staff, who returns to his colleagues remarking, morosely, “Oh my God. I’ve got to go up and get a story from some bird that wrote an opera or something.” He then calls you on the telephone, as follows: “Mr. Cmfwyp? This is the editor-in-chief of the morning Outrage speaking. We are very anxious to get your views on the future of opera on the radio. I wonder if we could send up Mr. Crumb, our star reporter to interview you?” “And about time, too,” you think to yourself. Aloud, you merely say, “Yes, I could give Mr. Crumb a few minutes, say about five this afternoon.”

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You then tidy up the living room, which has just been dismantled for the paperhangers, telephone for fresh flowers and a bottle of gin, rearrange the bookcase, taking out the best books and scattering them carelessly about, take all the music off the piano except your own, broach a fresh package of cigarettes, and sit, nervously awaiting the doorbell, from one to six P.M. Nothing happens. Worn out by your vigil, you sleep heavily and late. About eleven the next morning, as you are sitting, well soaped, in the tub, the doorbell rings. After shouting vainly for someone to answer it, you suddenly remember that the apartment is empty, save for the paperhangers, who are doing the right thing by the living room; and a sudden premonition causes you to leap from the tub, blot yourself hastily, and still rather damp and encased in a bathrobe, admit the visitor yourself. It is, of course, Mr. Crumb, of the Outrage, who proceeds to interview you, as follows: Question: How did you come to write your opera? Answer: Why, ah — I asked Mr. Ziegfeld if he would be interested in a musical comedy, and he said no; so I wrote a grand opera for the Metropolitan. Q. What is the period of your opera? A. Early Aztec. The Doorbell: Brrrr. (Business of answering door. Enter young man from the tailor’s, before he can be stopped, requesting them pants that was to be pressed. You give him some, to be rid of him, and resume.) Q. Why did you choose that? A. I didn’t. The librettist did. Q. What gave her the inspiration for her story? The Doorbell: Brrr. (Same business. Handsome stranger, inquiring if this is Mr. Cmfwyp. Beaming, you assure him that it is, and he hands you a summons. You kill him and resume.) A. An old Chinese legend. Q. What is the language of the libretto? A. Not a word is not of Aztec origin. Q. How many notes are there in the score? The Telephone: Brrrrr, Brrr, Brr. (You answer it.) A. Voice: “Is this the Sacred Heart Convent?” (You reply “yes” or “no,” as the case may be, and resume.) A. 822,347. Q. Is the music modern? A. It was finished last week.

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This done, Mr. Crumb takes his leave. But the interview, as he writes it, will not be like that. When it appears it will belong to one of the three major divisions, which may be classified as (1) Personality, (2) Exhibitionist, and (3) Factual. Class 1 can further be subdivided into two sections, depending on whether the interviewer has taken (a) a violent dislike to you or (b) an equally violent liking. You will not be able to tell, from his attitude, to which class his interview is likely to belong. Mr. Crumb, for instance, has been attentive and respectful, and you spend the rest of the day in an anticipatory glow. The glow fades next morning, when you open your copy of the Outrage and read his contribution: Example of Class 1 (Personality), Section A (Inimical) Interview “Sit down if you like — since you’re here.” The speaker grudgingly indicated a small, uncomfortable chair, he was a swarthy, beady-eyed, “artistic” looking individual of something over forty-five, short, inclined to stoutness, bald and bespectacled. He lounged against the mantelpiece, a cheap cigarette dangling from his pudgy, yellowed fingers, the ashes spilling untidily over his shabby blue dressing gown, and waited with ill-concealed impatience for the interviewer’s first question. Asked for details concerning the genesis of his forthcoming production, he hesitated uneasily, and then, picking his words with obvious care, replied haltingly, “Why — er, I was thinking of doing a musical comedy for Ziegfeld, but changed my mind and wrote a grand opera for the Metropolitan instead.” (Parenthetically, rumor hath it that the piece is still a musical comedy, that it was returned by the Ziegfeld office after a single reading, and that the Metropolitan officials are anything but overjoyed at their bargain.) The interviewer remarked that the period of the opera was reported to be early Aztec. “That’s a lie!” he shouted, flushing angrily. Then, struggling to recover his composure, he added, lamely, “that is, practically.” The doorbell rang, and he shuffled over to answer it. The visitor, evidently a collector from an installment clothing house, demanded, and after an ugly display of temper on the part of the “maestro,” received a bundle of half-worn garments. Judging from the steady stream of bill collectors that punctuated the interview, and the ever-jangling telephone, Composer Cmfwyp has not created any widespread favorable impression with his displays of “temperament.” Suppose, however, that your interviewer has been Mr. Gurk, of the evening Yawn, whose apparent impassiveness had masked a fatal devotion to you:

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Example of Class 1 (Personality), Section B (Adulatory) Interview “Won’t you — sit down.” Slender and compactly built, his broad, high brow surmounting a pair of keen dark eyes whose sternness was mitigated by the lurking hint of a mischievous twinkle, the composer, whose youthful, almost boyish appearance belied the two-score years chronicled in the telltale pages of Who’s Who, motioned me to a seat with a graceful wave of a slim white hand. He stood, drooping against the marble aloofness of the old-fashioned mantelpiece, the blue spirals from his cigarette coiling lazily about the ultramarine richness of his gorgeous brocaded lounging robe as he waited, composed and smiling, for the avalanche of questions to descend form the interviewer’s impatient lips. “My opera?” He smiled lazily. “Fancy anyone’s being interested in my poor efforts! A trifle, really; an artist’s self-indulgence, you might call it. They were all after me — the Ziegfelds, the Dillinghams, the Hammersteins, you know — to write music for their — revues, I think they call them. But I said no.” The twinkle broadened. “It was really naughty of me, for the sums they offered were scandalously large; but Art — ” A bell tinkled discreetly, and he broke off to answer it. Some poor fellow asking alms, evidently, for after a brief colloquy he dismissed the needy one with a generous gift of clothing. “The basis of our story? An old Chinese tale — or should I say tael?” he interjected, with that flashing smile that has disarmed thousands. He lighted a fresh cigarette and mused a moment. “Ah, China, the hum of the compound, the lights on the Hankow Road, the tinkle of bells in the joss houses, the bitterness, the sweetness, of the hateful, beloved East —.” He turned to me, “But you, my friend. You, I think — understand.” We were both silent. If, however, your visitor were Miss Bilge, of the Snooze, that would be something else again. For Miss Bilge is of the exhibitionist school of interviewers and is so enchanted with what she calls her style that you are lucky if you are mentioned at all: Example of Class 2 (Exhibitionist) Interview “Sermons in stones,” murmurs the Sage of the Concord, “and good in everything.” Ergo, unless the transcendentalist seer be, for once, guilty of psychic myopia, there must be good in interviews. So I pondered, standing before the as-yet unopened door of the studio home whence, by the mysterious alchemy of that process which, just how truly the hasty mouther of clichés dare not stop to realize, we call creative, has issued that opera (or should it not be, those opera?) whose

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imminent materialization is awaited with such anticipatory gusto by the cognoscenti musicali. Soon Cmfwyp himself would be standing before me. What a responsibility would shortly be mine! For in these journalist colloquies, these brief (alas! how hastily reasoned and inadequately penned) spiritual and intellectual contacts vouchsafed the readers of the diurnal press, it is the interviewer who must analyze and synthesize, exercising such interrogatory selectivity as will translate and transliterate the human actuality in terms two-dimensional and — more or less — amorphous. The moment approached, was here! The question? … “Let others reason and welcome; ’tis we musicians know.” Ah, Browning (Robert), you never faced a Cmfwyp! “Your work?” I ventured. He flashed an evasion. Pressed, he proffered details. Interesting (vulgar word!) but hardly the crux. The period, Aztec; the legend, Mongolian. Etymology and arithmetic, but not The Point. Defeat again. So this was genius! ***** Lastly, there is Mr. Klunk, of the evening Yell. His motto is Accuracy, Terseness, Accuracy; and he sticks to facts — after his own fashion: Example of Class 3 (Factual) Interview A libretto that contains not one word of Aztec origin is the feature of Henry F. Cmfwyp’s new Aztec opera, it was learned today from Mr. Cmfwyp himself. Interviewed by the Yell correspondent, the composer added that his work had been inspired by artistic rather than financial considerations, and that the period of the work was early Anzac. The score contains 833,347,000 notes, and the music, although modern, will be finished next week. Questioned as to the truth of Mr. Cmfwyp’s statement, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, said, “I have nothing to say.” My next interview is going to be mailed.

“The Drama’s Speaking Likeness: How Much Shall the Talking Movies Talk, and Whither Will Conversation Lead the Cinema?” (Originally published in Vanity Fair, March, 1929) Note: The transition from silent to sound films in the late 1920s took an entertainment medium to a new level of involvement for the viewer. Taylor wondered where it would all lead, and made a few guesses.

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The signs outside read: INTERFERENCE — A PARAMOUNT ALL-TALKING PICTURE; but the actual performance suggested an all-star benefit. For there was a prologue that began with Daniel Frohman and ended with Eddie Cantor (“By arrangement with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.”). Mr. Frohman — or rather his eight-foot cinematographic counterfeit — came out from an ambush of curtains and potted palms and delivered a phonographic address upon the wonders of the talking movies. A very good speech it was, too, his voice coming to the audience with the curious effect of being screened through bolting cloth that is common to all sound reproducing devices. The synchronization was perfect, the sounds he emitted being always appropriate to the formation and movement of his lips. Only once did he appear to disadvantage, what time the machine raced temporarily — the giant baritone suddenly degenerating to a frenzied shrill gabble that set the audience to giggling. But his smiling and utter unconsciousness that anything was wrong soon awed them into attentive silence. There were other brief offerings — cardiac ballads dealing with yesterday and faded roses, and a mercifully one-act playlet — and then Mr. Cantor. The secret of Mr. Cantor’s success lies probably in the very fact that I recall him with pleasure and gratitude without remembering one word of what he said or a note of what he sang. The feature film, when eventually it arrived, was good: a well acted and sufficiently plausible afternoon’s diversion, adapted from a stage play with approximate fidelity to the original, and possessing, therefore, structure, climax, and character drawing to a degree unusual in the movies. The technical limitations of the talking picture had been skillfully met; it was discoverable, but by no means obvious, that the sets were all studio sets, that characters in the distance or middle distance were always silent, and that conversation was confined to two, or at the most three, people at one time. The fact that the heroic-size, black and white, two-dimensional figures were uttering human speech seemed by no means incongruous. The prologue had seen to that. Fifteen minutes seems sufficient time in which to accustom the human mind to almost any conceivable convention, provided it be a consistent one. The spectator found himself listening to the actors as if they had been there in the flesh, admiring the fine voices and excellent diction of Messrs. William Powell and Clive Brook, the consistency of Miss Evelyn Brent’s villainess, and the charming but faintly amateurish palpitations of Miss Doris Kenyon’s heroine. It was much more like a play than a motion picture — all talk and action, and no music, save at the very end, when a postlude by a canned orchestra served to usher the audience out. Less than three years ago the Warner Brothers launched the Vitaphone, thus signalizing the entry into the commercial field of a device that had hitherto been but a laboratory curiosity. Today there are new, strangely

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worded signs all up and down Times Square, all up and down America, in fact, in front of every motion picture house of any pretensions: HEAR THEM TALK — COLLEEN MOORE WITH SOUND EFFECTS — AN ALL-TALKING PICTURE — COME IN AND HEAR THE SOUND PICTURES — A MOVIETONE MARVEL — THE VIKING WITH LOWELL SHERMAN ALL-TALKING. The big, solidly established producing corporations, which had just settled down to a permanent and immensely profitable routine of mass production, turning out their various stock models with a precision and dispatch rivaled only by the automobile plants, have awakened to find that the movies are back in their infancy; that those who make them must build new studios, buy new stories, hire new actors, engage new staffs, invent a new technique, please a new public — must, in short, revise every conviction they ever had regarding the administration of one of the largest industries in the world. It is revealing no great secret to announce that the motion picture magnates are going more or less mad. Now that they have them, they don’t want the damned talkies. But they’ve got to have them, for their rivals have them, and their public insists upon them. So, violently against their will, they must play the role of pioneer, groping their way through a virgin wilderness toward an unpredictable goal, sinking their capital in costly experimental plants to produce talking pictures whose gross receipts, fantastic as they are, still leave their makers millions of dollars on the wrong side of the ledger. Their present output falls into three main classes. First of all the “shorts” — one and two-reel exhibits exploiting famous personages (such as George Bernard Shaw’s famous and embarrassingly fatuous monologue), vaudeville acts, acted anecdotes, and miscellaneous jazz bands and vocalists. Second come the all-talking pictures, such as Interference. Last of all and more prevalent, are what they term “talking pictures” (as distinguished from “all-talking”). Of this class Alias Jimmy Valentine is a good example. For five-sixths of its length it is an ordinary silent motion picture, accompanied by a canned score into which have been injected such shouts and murmurs, automobile honks, locomotive snorts, and other noises as the director has considered appropriate. In the climatic scenes, beginning with the visit of the detective and culminating in the opening of the safe, the hitherto silent protagonists suddenly begin to talk, and continue to do so until the end of the film. It is a trifle early, perhaps, to begin predicting the future of an art that is barely three years old — a future that is the subject of the frantic guesses of those whose financial lives are dependent upon the accuracy of their judgment. However, this is just the time when one man’s guess is as good as another’s. So here, then, are the speculations of a rank outsider.

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First of all, notice that the partly-talking picture and the all-talking picture, while seemingly the same thing in different stages of completeness, are two entirely different things. In the all-talking picture the microphones must be used from beginning to end, in order to record the speech of the actors. Now a microphone is an object not at all like the human ear. In the first place, while it is keener than the ear in picking up sounds nearby, its range is more limited. Roughly speaking, it transmits sounds either at full intensity or not at all. This means that actors in the middle distance or in the background must be silent. A microphone near the camera would not pick up their voices, and one near the voices would convey their words much too loudly to be convincing. Moreover, the microphone exercises none of the unconscious selectivity of the ear. A human being, carrying on a conversation in a city room, hears a thousand extraneous noises — street-cars, taxicabs, whistles, distant voices — that his ear simply ignores. Not so the “mike”. The fact that a noise-producing object is out of range of the camera lens does not mean that it is inaudible to the microphone. All-talking pictures, therefore, must be made in sound-proof studios, where every sound that is not wanted may be excluded. Exteriors, long-shots, and scenes employing crowds, are therefore virtually out of the question, so that the all-talking picture is confined to comparatively few characters, working mostly in indoor scenes. But the big shortcoming of the all-talking picture is the absence of music, due to the necessity of recording speech throughout the action. No one who has never seen a private showing of a feature film can possibly realize the important part that music plays in the success of the average picture. Not only does it help the spectator to concentrate his attention, by furnishing employment for his ear as well as for his eye, but it adds an emotional drive that often makes the most implausible action momentarily convincing. By a droll paradox, the present-day movie — the lowest form of intellectual entertainment yet devised — is usually accompanied by a score that is an anthology of the world’s masterpieces of music. One watches John Gilbert and Greta Garbo wading through six reels of rubbish, and one hears, meanwhile, parts of Brahms’s second symphony, and the third act of Die Walkure. Naturally, one is hypnotized into believing that the sentimental nonsense depicted on the screen is emotionally important. The all-talking picture, on the other hand, must depend for its effectiveness wholly upon the intrinsic qualities of its action and dialogue and the enormity of that task may be divined by observing the dire happenings of any New York theatrical season. The film that talks only a little has consequently a great advantage over its more elaborate rival. It may have music throughout most of its length; it may employ all the spectacular effects of the silent picture — crowds, large

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exteriors, dissolves, fade-ins, double exposure, and the like — and may fall into speech at moments of real dramatic tenseness, those moments when spoken words are infinitely more effective than music or subtitles. The talking feature will, presumably, be embodied in all future elaborate films. The all-talking picture will probably break away to become an entirely separate art. I can imagine successful New York plays being canned and sent out to the provinces, thus dealing the ultimate death-blow to the theatrical road company. Its greatest usefulness, I should think, will be — at least eventually — in the preparation of brilliantly cast and acted version of the dramatic classics. Fifty years from now the average American public library in addition to offering its shelves full of the printed works of Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, and Shaw, may offer likewise a group of projection rooms and a complete canned collection of these same plays. One will go in, fill out a card, and forthwith see Romeo and Juliet, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Rosmersholm, or Man and Superman, produced on such an elaborate scale, and acted by such a distinguished cast, as the present-day drama lover can see only in his dreams. But even at that time such productions will be considered a branch of the theatre rather than of the movies. For the movies, I imagine, will still be in their infancy

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Intermission — An American in Paris

Introduction George Gershwin’s An American in Paris remains one of the most performed orchestral works by any American composer. Its premiere by the New York Philharmonic, then known as the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, occurred on December 13, 1928 in Carnegie Hall. The conductor was Walter Damrosch, a champion of Gershwin’s classical side, and in the printed program was Deems Taylor’s program note for An American in Paris. For much of the previous summer, both Gershwin and Taylor had been in Paris independently: Gershwin was completing his Parisian tone poem and Taylor working on his second Metropolitan Opera commission. It is known that, while there, he and Taylor met at several social gatherings before each returned to New York. “In the early fall of 1928,” Taylor later wrote, “George telephoned and invited me to go over the score of a new piece that he had just finished.… Naturally, I accepted the invitation, and also agreed to write the program note for the new work, which was called An American in Paris. Together we went through the score, George pointing out the main episodes as he had narrated them musically. I even pointed out a few myself.” Though program notes, even for premieres, usually have a tenuous hold on life, in this case Taylor’s description of the musical American in Paris — full of wit, cleverness, and insight — remains quoted often. Thanks to the New York Philharmonic Archives, which provided me with a copy of

From the liner notes written by Deems Taylor for the recording “Paul Whiteman and his Concert Orchestra in a Program of George Gershwin Music,” Decca DL 8024.



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the original Carnegie Hall program of the premiere, here is the complete original program note of Deems Taylor for An American in Paris.

Program Note for An American in Paris By its composer’s own confession, An American in Paris is an attempted reconciliation between two opposing schools of musical thought — a Pax Romana, as it were, imposed upon two customarily warring camps. It is program-music in that it engages to tell an emotional narrative; to convey, in terms of sound, the successive emotional reactions experienced by a Yankee tourist adrift in the City of Light. It is absolute music as well, in that its structure is determined by considerations musical rather than literary or dramatic. The piece, while not in strict sonata form, resembles an extended symphonic movement in that it announces, develops, combines, and recapitulates definite themes. Only, whereas the ordinary symphonic movement is based upon two principal themes, An American in Paris manipulates five. While Mr. Gershwin has been heard to hope — and probably not in vain — that his new work can be absorbed and enjoyed purely as a piece of orchestral music, he admits that An American in Paris (which, oddly enough, was largely written in Paris) follows a fairly explicit story. What follows is based upon Mr. Gershwin’s own version of the succession of events, augmented by a few details supplied by the helpful commentator and — as yet — unrepudiated by the composer. You are to imagine, then, an American, visiting Paris, swinging down the Champs-Elysées on a mild, sunny morning in May or June. Being what he is, he starts without preliminaries, and is off at full speed at once, to the tune of the First Walking Theme, a straightforward, diatonic air, designed to convey an impression of Gallic freedom and gaiety. Our American’s ears being open, as well as his eyes, he notes with pleasure the sounds of the city. French taxicabs seem to amuse him particularly, a fact that the orchestra points out in a brief episode introducing four real Paris taxi horns (imported at great expense for the occasion). These have a special theme allotted to them (the driver, possibly?), which is announced by the strings whenever they appear in the score. Having safely eluded the taxis, our American apparently passes the open door of a café where, if one is to believe the trombones, La Maxixe is still popular. Exhilarated by this reminder of the gay nineteen-hundreds, he resumes his stroll through the medium of the Second Walking Theme, which is announced by the clarinet in French with a strong American accent. Both themes are now discussed at some length by the instruments, until our tourist happens to pass — something. The composer thought it might be a church, while the commentator held out for the Grand Palais — where

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the Salon holds forth. At all events, our hero does not go in. Instead, as revealed by the English horn, he respectfully slackens his pace until he is safely past. At this point, the American’s itinerary becomes somewhat obscured. It may be that he continues on down the Champs-Elysées; it may be that he has turned off — the composer retains an open mind on the subject. However, since what immediately ensues is technically known as a bridgepassage, one is reasonably justified in assuming that the Gershwin pen, guided by an unseen hand, has perpetrated a musical pun, and that when the Third Walking Theme makes its eventual appearance our American has crossed the Seine, and is somewhere on the Left Bank. Certainly it is distinctly less Gallic than its predecessors, speaking American with a French intonation, as befits that region of the city where so many Americans foregather. “Walking” may be a misnomer for, despite its vitality, the theme is slightly sedentary in character, and becomes progressively more so. Indeed, the end of this section of the work is couched in terms so unmistakably, albeit pleasantly, blurred as to suggest that the American is on the terrasse of a café, exploring the mysteries of Anise de Lozo. And now the orchestra introduces an unhallowed episode. Suffice it to say that a solo violin approaches our hero (in the soprano register) and addresses him in the most charming broken English; and, his response being inaudible — or at least unintelligible — repeats the remark. This one-sided conversation continues for some little time. Of course, one hastens to add, it is possible that a grave injustice is being done to both author and protagonist, and that the whole episode is simply a musical transition. The latter interpretation may well be true, for otherwise it is difficult to believe what ensues: our hero becomes homesick. He has the blues; and if the behavior of the orchestra be any criterion, he has them very thoroughly. He realizes suddenly, overwhelmingly, that he does not belong to this place, that he is that most wretched creature in all the world, a foreigner. The cool, blue Paris sky, the distant upward sweep of the Eiffel Tower, the bookstalls on the quay, the pattern of horse-chestnut leaves on the white, sun-flecked street — what avails all this alien beauty? He is no Baudelaire, longing to be “anywhere out of the world.” The world is just what he longs for, the world that he knows best; a world less lovely— sentimental and a little vulgar perhaps—but for all that, home. However, nostalgia is not a fatal disease — nor, in this instance, of overlong duration. Just in the nick of time, the compassionate orchestra rushes another theme to the rescue, two trumpets performing the ceremony of introduction. It is apparent that our hero must have met a compatriot; for this last theme is a noisy, cheerful, self-confident Charleston, without a drop of Gallic blood in its veins.

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For the moment, Paris is no more; and a voluble, gusty, wisecracking orchestra proceeds to demonstrate at some length that it’s always fair weather when two Americans get together, no matter where. Walking Theme number two enters soon thereafter, enthusiastically abetted by number three. Paris isn’t such a bad place, after all; as a matter of fact, it’s a grand place! Nice weather, nothing to do til tomorrow, nice girls — and by the way, whatever became of that lad Volstead? The blues return, but mitigated by the Second Walking Theme — a happy reminiscence rather than a homesick yearning — and the orchestra, in a riotous finale, decides to make a night of it. It will be great to get home; but meanwhile, this is Paris!

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Chapter

5

New York American “Words and Music” Columns, 1931–1932

Introduction Taylor’s second opera, Peter Ibbetson, premiered in February 1931, and for this he received national recognition by appearing that month on the cover of Time Magazine. This opera was even more successful than his first, with 22 performances over five seasons. But even with an increase to $250 per performance, opera still didn’t pay the bills. Commercial radio, in its initial years, did call upon Taylor to host some radio programs of classical music, but it remained his writing skills that kept the bill collector from his door. Concurrent to the arrival of Peter Ibbetson at the Metropolitan, the New York American, a Hearst newspaper, needed a music critic and it came knocking at Taylor’s door. He accepted with an annual salary of $20,000, which in those days of the Great Depression certainly put him in the realm of the better paid. He began his three-a-week columns in March and remained in the job for a year. Interestingly, during this time he chose to write more about non-music subjects than those of music. The examples of his American writings chosen for this book are of nonmusic subjects, and what unusual subjects these are. Two evolve from mail Taylor received: (1) a convict from Utah sending him a belt for his possible purchase and (2) an invitation to join the National Geographic Society. In another, he decries the chopping down of trees in Stamford, Connecticut, a town in which he had purchased a summer home. In two others, he 125

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writes of two men who remain famous for their unique talents: the comic genius that was Charlie Chaplin and the renaissance man that was boxer Gene Tunney. Two distinctly New York subjects complete the chapter: a factual, but often amusing, annual report of the New York Police Department, and a drama on Broadway in the Great Depression: feeding hungry people in Times Square.

“The Listener” (March 13, 1932) Note: Taylor, as the Vanity Fair article indicated, had a deep interest in motion pictures. In fact, in 1943, he would provide the text for the first pictorial history of the movies, entitled, not unexpectedly, A Pictorial History of the Movies. The book found a ready audience, with its 700 stills and commentary. A young Martin Scorsese discovered a copy in his Brooklyn public library and read it over and over, later calling it “The first course in my film education.” In this piece Taylor gives a film and a film genius the recognition deserved: Charles Chaplin in “City Lights.” Seven or eight years ago we all made the stupendous — if rather belated — discovery that it is not necessary to be solemn in order to be serious, that some of the more frivolous forms of entertainment can, upon occasion, be works of art. After that there was no stopping us. We discovered artists lurking in the most unlikely spots — in the comic sections, on the burlesque stage, in detective story magazines, and in Tin Pan Alley. Scores of worthy and bewildered hoofers, comic strip limners, movie pie-throwers, Mammy singers, and song-pluggers, whose sole ambition was to make the utmost possible money with the least possible expenditure of energy, were dragged from their lairs by the aesthetic plainclothes squad and frisked for hidden meanings, messages, overtones, and arrieres pensees of which they had been totally innocent. A second look revealing, naturally enough, that most of them were respectable but wholly uninspired purveyors of hokum, we indignantly kicked them all out, to the accompaniment of quite gratuitous upbraidings. Of all that legendary group of geniuses, only a handful survive to vindicate our once indiscriminate enthusiasm. Charles Chaplin is one. “City Lights,” his new picture, is the work of as authentic a genius as our times have produced. The reviews, while enthusiastic, gave little warning of the uproarious, Rabelaisian guffaws, the shrewd satire, the humanity and pathos, of this latest chapter in the career of a hero who is a combination of Til Eulenspiegel, Francois Villon, and the White Knight rolled into one.

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Chaplin’s, like all deathless comedy, is rooted in a profound pessimism, in the conviction that the last laugh is not with us. Fashions in spoken and written humor change constantly; the bon mot of one decade may be gibberish to the next. Slapstick humor never dies. The cave-man’s slapstick may have been different in pattern from ours, but its ultimate resting place has always been the same, and its arrival there always has been, and always will be, a signal of mirth. And of all slapstick humor, the highest form, the great, final, cosmic joke, is that the common man always gets kicked in the pants. There is no escape for him. He may tire of having it played on him, and revolt, but then, as in Russia today, he simply plays it on himself. It will always be so, I think, until there are no common men. Chaplin is no Canio [the clown in the opera I Pagliacci], however, all too aware of his own woes. He is that much more tragic figure, the victim who is unconscious of his own pathos. He does not laugh through his tears, for he has no tears to shed. He is the prototype, the silent spokesman, of the average man, the common citizen, Mr. Taxpayer, the man in the street — the little fellow who is yanked about by subway guards, robbed by politicians, drafted to fight wars that he did not start, who hears with infinite weariness and meekness whatever blows fate may elect to deal him, not knowing that there is anything else to do. He is taken to a night club, where, slightly plastered, he tries to eat spaghetti. Unfortunately, a long paper streamer, thrown by a hilarious patron, falls into the dish. So he eats that, too, patiently, uncomplainingly, munching for endless minutes in a vain hope that the thing has another end. He swallows a whistle, by mistake, and every breath thereafter is a shriek. You or I would make a great fuss, and yell for a doctor. He wishes merely to avoid making trouble for anyone. A tenor rises to sing, but is drowned out by that disastrous whistle. Its unwilling owner apologetically slinks out. But more trouble awaits him. A taxi driver, hearing what he thinks to be a signal, draws up at the curb and becomes abusive and threatening when he discovers that he is not wanted. In his agonized efforts to explain, Charlie becomes increasingly earsplitting, so that the wrathful departure of the taxi simply coincides with the arrival of all the dogs in the neighborhood. Desperate, but still apologetic, the poor wretch returns to the concert, followed by his troupe of unwanted pets. He is a nuisance, and he knows it, and he is helpless, and no one will aid him. If it were all not so horribly like life, I suppose it would not be so funny.

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It is slapstick humor, but it is not hokum. Chaplin the author is too true an artist ever to allow Chaplin the tragic comedian to lapse into sentimentality, to bid openly for the sympathy that we would rather give unasked. If he stands outside the window of the blind flower girl, wistfully trying to catch a glimpse of her, he is not allowed to be maudlin about it. A flower pot promptly falls upon his head and knocks him cold. He volunteers to stand up against a boxer hoping to win the purse and pay the girl’s overdue rent bill. But this is no success story; he is knocked out. The end of the picture is wholly beautiful and right. Having raised the money for the operation that will restore the sight of the blind girl, he has disappeared. One day, dirty, ragged, unprepossessing, he passes a florist shop, and there she is, happy and smiling. She sees him, and laughs; then, moved by pity for an old bum, impulsively offers him a flower and a quarter. She takes his hand to place the coin in it, the hand that she had so often touched when she was blind; and by that touch she recognizes him. “You!” she says. At this point, according to early reports, he swaggers bravely away, unwilling to disillusion her. But he does no such self-consciously heroic thing. He is a human being, not a hero. He hesitates, then nods, grinning. And there the picture ends. There is no hint of impending wedding bells. That is impossible; they know it, and you know it. She looks at him, grateful, bewildered, pitying, and a little repelled; and he gazes, nodding and grinning — a fixed fatuous, heart-breaking grin. And endlessly nodding … nodding. The lights go up, and some of the audience leave. You may stay for the next show if you like, and see Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is grand, but I didn’t stay.

“Words and Music” (March 30, 1931) Note: The Great Depression is the historical setting for the request that came to Taylor by a prisoner in Utah for some help in making a living. Especially interesting is the seemingly off-hand mention by Taylor of the then Senator of Utah, Reed Smoot. Smoot had co-authored the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill, which was working its way through Congress at the time of the Wall Street crash. It raised tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods to record levels. Signed by President Hoover in June, 1930, many economists believe it succeeded in protracting the Great Depression. Two letters arrived last week that are worth discussion. Number one, addressed to “Dramatist Deems Taylor,” is headed, “Utah State Prison, 1400 East 21st South Street” (and try to make a map of that address). It continues:

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Dear Sir: I am sending you under separate cover a Hand Made Horsehair Belt made in this institution. This prison is unable to furnish employment whereby the inmates may earn money for their own use. Under the prison regulations inmates whose conduct will permit are allowed to make, during their spare time, articles such as the indicated above. This acts as an encouragement to those who are now paying the penalty for their wrongs and are working and planning for the future when they are released to begin life anew. These articles are offered for sale, so that those who feel kindly disposed may purchase or otherwise dispose of the same. If this idea meets with your approval, will say that I have received around $5.00 for each of the few articles of this kind that I have been able to dispose of, but any amount that I may realize from sale, or otherwise will be sincerely appreciated by me. I am enclosing postage with article in case you desire to return same. Thanking you for any effort you may make in my behalf and awaiting your reply, I am, Very respectfully yours. (——) 4642.” The second letter is identical, except that it is addressed to “Composer Deems Taylor,” offers a silver bracelet for two dollars and is signed with another name and number. They are printed form letters, with spaces left for the insertion of dates, names, prices and descriptions of the articles. Now there’s a neat idea, something that we in the effete East probably haven’t thought of as yet. So far as I know an inmate of Sing Sing Prison is not encouraged to circularize citizens of Illinois — or Utah — offering handmade brooms and personally knitted neckties for sale “or otherwise.” I doubt if the State of New York undertakes to print form letters for its convicts, announcing that it cannot afford to give them a chance to earn pocket money, and how about the other states chipping in a little something to help out the prison administration? But out in Senator Smoot’s home state things are different. The State of Utah, having put a lot of men in jail, suddenly finds itself in the embarrassing position of being unable to do anything for them when it lets them out, and so turns to me for help. I only wish I could afford to do something; but I can’t. I have my own convicts to think about. By the way the Utah idea sounds like a wonderful way of relieving the unemployment situation. If any easterner finds himself unable to get steady employment, let him merely scrape together sufficient carfare to get him to Utah. Once there, let him pick whatever State law he fancies most, and break it. Forthwith the state of Utah will not only furnish him free board and lodging (what other states help pay for that, do you suppose?) but will set him up in the mail order business.

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“Words and Music” (May 8, 1931) Note: As a lifelong New Yorker, Taylor would naturally appreciate the variety of services of the city’s famed police department. A friend gave me a copy of the Annual Report of the Police Department of the City of New York for 1930, and I find it fascinating. It is a good sized book of 221 pages, bound in red cloth and embellished with portraits of the Mayor, Commissioner Mulrooney, and his deputies and inspectors; and it is worth your attention, if you can get a copy. You will be surprised, I think, if you read it, at the complexity of the organization, the multiplicity of the services that it undertakes, and the enormous size of its personnel—18,595, not counting the Commissioner. Also, if you will make an honest attempt to digest it, you will be inclined to agree with Mr. Mulrooney, that Vice Squad or no Vice Squad, the average cop must be a reasonably conscientious and honest citizen; that eighteen thousand of them couldn’t possibly be grafters and get away with the amount of work that this report says they accomplished. Not having read any previous reports of the Police Department, I do not know whether the style of this one is an exception or not. The report of the Crime Prevention Bureau, for instance, is not all statistics. It gets down to Typical Cases, some of which are pathetic, some of which are more or less diverting. There you may read of Peter, aged 12, who visited the office (the cad!) to complain of having been shot by a girl friend with an air-rifle; and what steps were taken to persuade the infant gun-woman to abandon her career. Another officer found a gang of boys, from 10 to 13, robbing slot machines. He made them join a boys’ club. They must have liked it, for later they visited him in a body. “Upon this occasion,” the report remarks, “the officer entertained them with ghost stories, interjecting some remarks about what becomes of boys who go in for a life of crime.” Far from being revolted by this idea of what constitutes entertainment, the boys left, “declaring that when they grew up they wanted to be policemen.” However, he had given them an exhibition of jiu-jitsu just before they left, which probably turned the scales in his favor. The Roll of Honor chapter is a thrilling bit of reading by virtue of the very matter-of-factness with which it records the cold nerve of men who attacked hold-up gangs single-handed, jumped on the running boards of fugitive cars, and chased armed men into hallways and cellars.

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Interestingly enough, the Department Medal of Honor for a living policeman (seventeen of the awards were posthumous) went last year to one who fired no shots. This was Patrolman Peter P. Franchini, who jumped into the East River after a drowning man on Christmas Day, 1929, got him to the dock, couldn’t get a foothold, and clung with his burden to an ice-covered ladder for half an hour until some other cops rescued the two of them. But the statistics of accidents, rescues, and arrests make the best reading of all. One could dig into them by the hour and unearth nuggets of human interest. The Emergency Squad, for instance, not only attended fires, parades, meetings, and manhole explosions, but found time to stop 144 leaks, right 32 overturned cars, release 7 boys from subway turnstiles, remove 10 animals from trees, and capture 2 steers. If you are a pedestrian, your best chance of getting killed by an automobile is to be a jay-walker. Three hundred and twenty-one of them made the supreme sacrifice last year, compared with the 162 persons who lost their lives in collisions and 208 who were killed at street crossings. Forty-two drivers were killed in collisions resulting from somebody’s unwillingness to cede the right of way to somebody else, 28 in collisions with trees and poles, and 20 in mix-ups over signals. There were 26,021 taxicabs in New York last year, and only 33 horse-drawn cabs. Thieves arrested for stealing automobiles numbered 2,496, while only 16 went after horses and wagons, and only 9 took motorcycles. Nobody stole either a push cart or a baby carriage. Apparently men between the ages of 31 and 35 swear harder than any others. Two hundred of them were arrested for profanity last year. Only twenty-five between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested for the same offense, and there were only nine who were sixty. Between the ages of thirty-six and forty you must be on the lookout for a tendency to fill garbage cans to within less than four inches from the top. Offenders of that dangerous age outnumbered the others four to one. It will be no surprise to most readers to learn that men between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five are the most attractive. Of the seventy-four men arrested last year for seduction, more than half were of that age. There were no women arrested for the same offense, thus proving that the movies must be all wrong. In several departments of law-breaking the Crime Prevention Bureau can point triumphantly to a record of one hundred per cent. You will be interested and pleased, I know, to learn that in all of 1930 not one person was arrested for (a) buying votes, (b) intimidating an officer, (c) horse-poisoning, or (d) evasion of the draft law.

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“Words and Music” (June 19, 1931) Note: Taylor had a special interest in Stamford, Connecticut, for in 1923 he had purchased an old colonial-style home there to be used as a summer retreat. We are having tree trouble in Stamford. There is nothing unique about it. It is a trouble that bothers most American towns and small cities in their march from rusticity to urbanism. Twenty-five years ago Stamford was a New England country town. It had a square, a town hall, a couple of trolley lines, and the conventional assortment of shops. The rich and great lived on Strawberry Hill, behind lawns whereon the cast iron deer grazed undisturbed. The proletariat lived on the other side of the railroad tracks, and the yokelry lived in the country, which began perhaps a quarter-mile from the city hall. Night life centered about the soda fountain in Lawrence’s drugstore, and ceased with the departure of the last trolley, about ten-thirty. After that hour, the only stay-ups were to be found in the Owl lunch wagon, which stood at the junction of Main Street and Park Place. Stamford had trees, about five thousand of them: elms, mostly, with a sprinkling of maples, oaks, and horse chestnuts. They were big trees, for Stamford is a pre-revolutionary town, and the layout of its oldest streets expresses old world — particularly English — ideas of civic elegance. And Englishmen love trees. Accordingly, the founders had kept what trees there were and had planted more. But Stamford has waked up. It has a new and very grand hotel, and several picture houses — one of which runs vaudeville — and several department stores, and bus lines, and a Chamber of Commerce, and a Real Estate Board, and Rotary and Kiwanis. It is widening its streets, and straightening them out, and laying new sewers and water mains. Now trees, as every lover of sewers, water mains, and concrete roads will tell you, are a great nuisance. Their roots go underground for considerable distances, and interfere with digging, and cross property lines in a most annoying fashion. They cause great trouble in street widening, inasmuch as their trunks are so bulky and immovable that motorists are constantly running into them, with the most disastrous consequences. Even overhead, they are an annoyance. Their leaves shed, in the Fall, all over the nice clean streets, and have to be swept up and carted away at a great trouble and expense. Moreover, their branches are a great menace to overhead electrical wires, particularly if the electric company hasn’t been able to afford to use insulated wire. Frequently, in

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storms, tossing tree branches break the wires, or short circuit them, causing whole sections of the town to go without current for as long as an hour at a time. In other words, by far the simplest thing to do with a tree, when you are modernizing a town, is to chop it down and then blow out the stump. And that is what Stamford, the ever practical, has been doing. The trees are beginning to disappear. Sections of town that had stood in the whispering shade of elms and maples for nearly two hundred years are beginning to emerge into the honest, uncompromising concrete glare of every cockney’s dream. Over on Bedford Street the effect is particularly striking. Near the Ferguson Library there used to be two enormous trees that were more or less a focal point. You could see them for blocks. They are gone, now, at least for practical purposes. About twenty feet of the trunk of each has been left—owing, perhaps, to a temporary shortage of dynamite. The result is not beautiful, but at least it is arresting, and at least you can tell that trees once stood there. Some of us, of course, object. We circulate petitions, and write letters to the Advocate, and pieces for the Guide. Last year someone did actually convince the Board of Selectmen that it was worth while to deflect the course of a sewer a few feet in order to save a two-hundred-year old elm. But we are a minority. The up-and-coming Stamford is probably going to do about as it pleases with those trees. I wonder whether this particular form of vandalism in American towns isn’t the result of a subconscious dread of being thought rural. Certainly a tree is a symbol of country life; and just as certainly, the average American hates to be considered anything but urban and sophisticated. He is determined that his town shall not be that most scorned and abject of places, a hick town; and in the process of urbanizing his environment he begins by eliminating, with an almost savage determination, anything that might be a reminder of his bucolic past. To him, a tree is something that goes with dirt paved streets, hitching posts, kerosene lamps, town pumps, wooden hotels, and other evidence of a backward civilization. Later — and in this country, generally too late — he goes through another stage. He visits Washington, and Paris, and Rome, and Munich, and Berlin. It begins to dawn on him that civilization does not necessarily stop at concrete pavements and municipal buses and filling stations and hot dog stands and radio shops with loudspeakers in the front doorways; that there is such a thing as civic beauty as well as civic convenience; that some of the most densely populated spots on earth pride themselves upon preserving certain reminders that the world can be soft and green as well as hard and dust colored.

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Thereupon he starts tree planting clubs, and puts up “Keep off the Grass” signs, and wonders, vaguely, why nobody ever told him that it takes a century to replace what can be destroyed in fifteen minutes.

“Words and Music” (July 27, 1931) Note: Deems Taylor’s nomination for membership into the National Geographic Society provided the basis for what I believe is one of the funniest pieces Taylor ever wrote. It may be overstepping the bounds of good taste just the tiniest bit to use one’s own column in a daily newspaper as a means of announcing a step forward in one’s professional career. The proper way to do it, I suppose, would be to telephone — or better yet, telegraph — the city editors of the New York morning papers to the effect that if they would send a reporter to meet me, say at the information booth in the Grand Central Station at eleven o’clock tomorrow, I would have an announcement of the utmost interest and importance to communicate to the press. On the other hand, there are drawbacks to that method. In the first place, the reporters probably wouldn’t be there. All the reporters I ever knew are asleep at eleven o’clock in the morning. Even the reporters for the evening papers are, although to the lay eye they may seem to be awake and walking about. In the second place, if they did show up they would expect me to have carbon copies of the announcement to hand about. And that’s a great deal of work. In the third place, I am a sort of newspaper man myself, and as such I have a proper newspaperman’s loyalty to his own paper. As long as this glorious thing has happened to me, why shouldn’t I announce it in this column and thus give The American a beat. Of course it won’t be one for long, as the other papers will be sure to lift it for their third editions. Meanwhile, however, The American will have beat the town, for a few hours at least, on one of the big stories of the year. So here it is. I hardly know how to begin. Perhaps the most direct way is to print part of the letter that brought the great news. It went like this: Dear Sir: I have the honor of apprising you that you have been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society by a member.… Among your privileges as a member will be your right to receive, without additional charge, the society’s unique and beautifully illustrated monthly, The National Geographic Magazine, which contains unbiased and fascinating information of immense value to those who, like yourself, are called upon to converse interestingly

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about near and distant land. … To avail yourself of this opportunity kindly notify me of your wish to enter the Society.” There is no initiation fee. Your dues of $3, which should accompany your application, discharge your financial obligations as an annual member for 1931, and bring you this year’s twelve issues of the magazine.… Please give your name exactly as you wish it to appear on your membership certificate, which will be sent you when your application has been confirmed. May I have the pleasure of presenting your name at the next meeting of the membership committee? Sincerely yours, O.P. Austin, Secretary.” Imagine that, and at my age, too! Why, I know people eighty years old — some of them are even explorers — who haven’t yet been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society. Naturally, I sat right down and accepted in no uncertain terms. As follows: Dear Mr. Austin: You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read your letter. To think that I, who haven’t opened a geography since I was twelve years old, should have been nominated for membership in your society. And by a member, too! People can talk as they like, I always say it’s much nicer to be nominated for a club by a member, instead of some outsider like Charles A. Lindbergh or Herbert Hoover or Smedley Butler. How did you ever guess that I am called upon to converse interestingly about near and distant lands? Why, only yesterday, over at Peggy Woods’s, George Metaxas was there, and George is a Roumanian, and so the conversation turned to Roumania. Frankly, I wasn’t a bit interesting about it, either. If I had only known then what I know now! Do tell me more about the society. Do we hold monthly meetings, and could I get on the entertainment committee, do you suppose? And do I get a badge or something, so that people can tell that I belong to the National Geographic Society without my having to bring up the subject? And have we got a grip? Forgive my running on like this. I know I’m not a member yet, but I’m really terribly excited about the whole thing. That reminds me, Mr. Austin. You spoke of my sending $3 dues, so that you can present my name at the next meeting of the membership committee. But suppose the committee should turn me down? What about my three dollars? I’d get it back, I suppose, but I would hate to have people know I had been rejected for membership in the National Geographic Society.

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In case the committee should blackball me, could you do this? Could you fix it so that even if I wasn’t a member my three dollars could be counted as a subscription to The National Geographic Magazine? Of course I know only real members are supposed to get it; but couldn’t you, just this once, pretend that you took subscriptions, like Harper’s Bazaar and the Cosmopolitan and those other vulgar commercial magazines? I’d be awfully grateful if you could manage it. Now, as to how my name is to appear on the membership certificate, in case I do get elected. How about ‘Deems Taylor, N.G.S.’? The letters look rather nice, I think, and when people asked me what they meant I could explain that I was a member of — we know, don’t we? Well, I must close. I’ll send you the three dollars just as soon as I can figure out what kind of club it is that first collects your dues and then elects you to membership. And I do hope you’ll call an early meeting of the membership committee to decide on my case. I’ll be on pins and needles until I hear from them.”

“Words and Music” (August 24, 1931) Note: Gene Tunney, who retired undefeated in 1928 as the world’s heavyweight champion after defeating Jack Dempsey twice, had a fondness for reading Shakespeare. William Lyon Phelps, a Shakespeare scholar at Yale, invited Tunney to address his class on April 23, 1928, while Tunney was still heavyweight champion. After speaking with the class informally about his love for Shakespeare, he said the following, as noted in Phelps’s book, Autobiography With Letters: Why have I been invited to speak at Yale? Surely not because I have anything important to say about Shakespeare. I have been invited because I am the champion boxer of the world. I am that now, and there is great interest in everything I do and say. I am followed around by crowds. But how long do you suppose that will last? It will last just as long as I am heavyweight champion. Ten years from now nobody will care what I do or what I say. It is important for me therefore to make the most of the present moment, for the present moment is all I have. The sports writers are after Gene Tunney again. Only the other day one of them pitched into him to the tune of a solid column of irony and disparagement, inspired, apparently, by the fact that Mr. Tunney had used the word “subconscious” in the course of an interview. He seemed to feel that such long words were a bit obscene on the lips of an ex-prize fighter.

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Accordingly, in the course of eight or nine hundred words, he gave the reader a chance to deduce (a) that Mr. Tunney is a seriously undereducated person who uses words far above his station; (b) that he is not exceptionally gifted as a pugilist; and (c) that he went down for a count of fourteen seconds in his lasts fight with Mr. Dempsey. I do not know Mr. Tunney very well. I once heard him make a speech at a luncheon, and listened to him talk to Charles Hanson Towne afterward. What little I saw of him seemed likeable. He appeared to be an earnest, somewhat humorless young man, very self-confident professionally and rather diffident otherwise; a young man possessed, one would say, of a good mind, which he is at present applying to belles letters and culture in general with the same seriousness and thoroughness that he formerly gave to boxing. Nevertheless, he is not popular among that group of vicarious athletes that is known as the Sporting Element. The fans wish him ill with startling enthusiasm; and the attitude of most sports writers toward him seems to lack something of the fine flower of dispassion and fair play that one rather expects from professional critics of any art. Consider the famous “long count” episode, for example. In the second of their two battles Mr. Dempsey knocked Mr. Tunney down with considerable emphasis. Under the rules, the former should immediately have gone to a neutral corner to await the count. Mr. Dempsey was slow in going, and the referee accordingly waited until he did go before commencing the official “one, two, three, four.” It is highly probable, therefore, that when Mr. Tunney rose to his feet at the official count of nine the actual elapsed time was fourteen seconds. And that is what the average sports writer still points out. What he does not point out is, first, that in delaying the count the referee was doing his simple and inescapable duty; and, second, that if Mr. Tunney had not waited until the last possible second before getting up he would have been a fool. Which is why I gather that the average sports writer, like the average fight fan, does not like Mr. Tunney. There are several possible reasons why. The first is that instead of fighting Mr. Dempsey to a finish, and knocking him out, as all previous challengers had done to all previous champions, Mr. Tunney fought a specified, limited number of rounds, and won on a decision. This is not exactly his fault. I imagine that he would have been delighted to fight Mr. Dempsey until one or the other was unconscious, had not the law decreed otherwise. But, his fault or not, he got the blame. Mr. Tunney’s second sin was that of flouting tradition. Theoretically, professional boxing is a pure sport, indulged in by heroes whose sole incentive is the glory of battle and whose financial gains are the unsought

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rewards of a doughty warrior. Actually, of course, professional boxing — or, as it is still romantically called, the Fight Game — is a branch of big business, whose devotees are actuated by a wholly uncomplicated desire to make as much money as possible with the least possible expenditure of time and effort. Mr. Tunney, grasping this truth, had the effrontery to act upon it. He fought until he had made — and retained — a large quantity of money. The proper thing to have done was to keep on fighting until some young man knocked him silly, devote a season or two to vaudeville, scatter his gains among several score of receptive pals and buddies and end his days sweeping out a speakeasy. Instead of which he grossly left the dear old game to shift for itself and retired to a comfortable independence. But Mr. Tunney’s greatest offense is his pursuit of culture. For a boxer, of all persons, to display any symptoms of intellectuality is fatal. The world does not care to have its heroes invulnerable. Wise athletes, from Achilles on, have taken good care to display definite and conspicuous weaknesses along with their conspicuous strength. A prizefighter is one who, by profession, is the master of most of his fellows in physical combat. Very good, says the average man. You are my master in that field, and I respect you. If you would have me love you, be sure to give me a chance to be your superior in some other field, for I refuse to love those to whom I cannot condescend. Wherefore the lucky champion is the one who is just a little bit dumb. If he can manage to be dumber than most of his public, so much the better. If Jack Johnson had been white he would have been America’s sweetheart, for, aside from his color, which complicated matters, he was the ideal combination; enormous physical prowess, coupled with an intellect humble enough to make almost any fight fan feel like a college president. Tunney, of course, is impossible. Not only can he lick the average fight fan, he can probably out-talk and out-think him. He actually pronounces, and possibly understands, words of three syllables — sometimes four. He reads books without a dictionary, goes on walking tours with novelists and has dinner with literary critics. A highbrow who can get two decisions over Dempsey! No wonder the fans are puzzled and resentful.

“Symphony of Street, More Dramatic Than Any Music: Breadline Tells Tragedy of Weary Humans Warring Against Undeserved Fate” (January 3, 1932) Do you remember the war years? Do you remember how, at some point during every theatrical performance, or during every opera performance or symphony concert someone was sure to come before the curtain to sell Liberty Bonds, or War Savings Stamps, or to plead for the Salvation Army

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or the Knights of Columbus or the Y.M.C.A.? And do you remember what a bore and a nuisance it was, and how only moral cowardice, and the realization that those were war times, kept you in your seat? These are war times, too; but I shall be more considerate than the TwoMinute Men were. I shall give you a warning. Having brought you here under the pretence of being about to deliver some weighty lucubrations on the subject of music, I am going to step out before the curtain and try to sell you something. If you want to escape, now is your time. They called me up from the office last week and asked me if I would go down to Longacre Square, take a look at the New York American Relief Fund lunch truck there, and write a piece about it. I went, reluctantly, and looked; and wrote the piece for Friday’s paper. For that one you can blame the New York American; this one is my own idea. Nobody asked me to write it, or expected it. There may even have been raised eyebrows in the Sunday department when this copy came down to fill the space that is supposedly occupied by Sunday music. I don’t care. For this once, the h… with music. You see, I didn’t really believe that men were starving in New York. People tell you those things, and you nod, and say, “Yes. Isn’t it terrible?” But down inside, you don’t realize it. You don’t believe it. Men. Homeless. Starving. Those are just words. I walked over to the east leg of the triangle that is formed by 47th St. and the confluence of Seventh Ave. and Broadway. There was a khaki-colored, snub-nosed army truck drawn up at the curb, with a big sign on its side, indicating that this was the lunch truck of the New York American Relief Fund. If you stepped up to the tailboard of this truck and reached out your hand, a man would give you a doughnut and a sandwich, each wrapped in waxed paper. Another man poured sweetened coffee from a five-gallon gasoline can into a good-sized paper cup, and handed it to you. There was a line of about 300 men moving slowly up to the tailboard of that truck. Some of them were bums; you could see that. You could tell, by looking at them, that they had no jobs, never had had one, and wouldn’t know what to do with one if you offered it to them. Twenty, perhaps, out of the 300. The others were not bums. They were not used to bread lines, and were not very good at getting into this one. One man stood, in an attitude of careless ease, smoking a cigarette and watching the line with complete detachment. He was neatly dressed and his overcoat, while a bit too thin for a chilly night, was clean and brushed. You would have thought him a slightly bored spectator, had you not happened to notice his hands. They were blue with cold, and they kept clenching and opening, and clenching and opening, endlessly, in an agony of nervousness. He looked idly around,

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caught me watching him, and looked away again. He looked around once more. No one seemed to notice him. He tossed the cigarette away, and moved, as if by accident, so that he was standing at the end of the line. He stayed there, moving up when the line moved, gazing abstractedly at the passing traffic, whistling softly to himself, pretending — chiefly to himself. I think — that he had no idea where he was. A boy came by, hesitated, looked at us spectators, turned red to the roots of his hair, scowled, and hurried on as if he had an important engagement on 47th St. He must have come back another way, for I saw him, later, near the head of the line. Two other boys came by. Neither had an overcoat, and only one had a cap. They were laughing, and pushing each other about in the manner of all young men of nineteen who are in good health and spirits. You were to understand that if they were not wearing overcoats, it was simply because they felt no need of them. I heard one of them say: “Come on; let’s fool ’em, and get in the line.” They were there when I left, their collars turned up, their hands jammed into their coat pockets. One was whistling. The other was crying. These people aren’t bums. They’re not loafers, or unemployables. They are not even misfits, drifters, in the great sea of casual labor that is known as “unskilled.” There are all sorts of people in that line — mechanics, bricklayers, chauffeurs, clerks, bookkeepers, accountants. They are not Reds; they are not even good Red material, I should say. They are not bitter enough — yet. Most of them are neatly, if not well, dressed, and they have no resentment against anybody. They are just people, caught in something that they do not understand, facing something that they never believed they would have to face — cold, hungry, puzzled and desperately frightened. I talked to one man, a toolmaker, who had spent the three past nights in the subway. He was grateful to the subway attendants for not throwing him out. He seemed bewildered by the fact that he could find no work — any work. He had been unemployed since August, and even now seemed unable to realize the fact. He sleeps in the subway, and his one meal a day is the doughnut, the sandwich and the coffee that he gets from the American lunch truck. I am inclined, unfairly, to be suspicious of relief agencies. I don’t know why. I think I suspect them, not of dishonesty (they are almost all scrupulously honest), but of a tendency to regard their fellow human beings as “cases.” These aren’t cases. These are people, like you or me; and if we don’t happen to be standing in line with them, it is because of our luck, not our superior merit or skill.

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I don’t suspect the lunch truck. It is impersonal, and it is good. The fact that it is an army truck — a regular army truck, with “Fort Jay” stenciled on the side — helps a great deal. Somehow it doesn’t seem so much like taking charity to go up to an army truck and be handed a sandwich and coffee; no questions, no comments, no thanks expected. Just something cold to eat, and something hot to drink, from nine to midnight. Go up to Seventh Ave. and 47th St. some night and see it for yourself. I can guarantee you a spoiled evening. I think that when you have had a good look at the line moving up to the tailboard you won’t need me to tell you to contribute to its maintenance. The address is on the side of the truck. If you haven’t time to copy it down, the address is: New York American Relief Fund, 220 South St. But don’t take my word for it. Go and see for yourself. The truck’s a better salesman than I am.

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Chapter

6

Chapters from Taylor’s Books: Of Men and Music (1937), The Well-Tempered Listener (1940), and Music to My Ears (1949); Several New York Philharmonic Intermission Talk Scripts; and His Final Article (1959)

Introduction In the early 1930s, radio had come of age at a time that Deems Taylor had proven quite convincingly that his abilities as composer and writer were significant. What brought radio and Taylor together was another of his gifts: his wonderful speaking voice and a sensitivity of not talking down to his audience. Throughout the late 1920s and into the 1940s, commercial radio relied greatly on concert music to fill its hours, many of these programs being sustained by the networks without commercial sponsorship. In fact, this was so on the evening of September 18, 1927, the first broadcasting day of the Columbia Broadcasting System, when Taylor narrated the performance of a shortened version of his opera, The King’s Henchman. For many music programs, Taylor’s dulcet tones and way with words were called upon by CBS and NBC to add interest for the listener. For example, 143

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NBC chose him to be the first host of the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera performances in their initial 1931–1932 season. He was commentator on numerous sponsored programs as well, such as the Prudential Family Hour and Philco Hall of Fame. There is no doubt that the listening public saw Deems Taylor as the spokesperson for classical music. But his most important radio role was with the New York Philharmonic, which had broadcast its Sunday afternoon concerts nationally on CBS from 1930 on, building the largest listening audience for classical music in the world. It is believed that some 7% of the U.S. population listened each Sunday to these concerts, which had no commercial sponsor. CBS recognized that the so-called “hole” in the concert broadcast, the intermission, needed something to keep listeners’ attention, so it decided to have musically knowledgeable persons give brief talks for the 15 or so minutes of the intermission. The first two individuals chosen by CBS proved too stiff, too scholarly, so it gave Taylor a turn in the fall of 1936. Within the first month of the Taylor talks, Alton Cook, the radio editor of the World-Telegram, made clear why many who heard Taylor were captivated: “Aware that most of us don’t care whether music is legato, rubato, or tomato, Deems doesn’t tell much about a sudden change of key after the crescendo in the piccolo. Technical talk or rambling biographies of the composers are eliminated. Taylor presents an amusing, casual discussion — all of it based on some bright notion that he wants to point out. His outlines of the music does make it easier to follow and he talks about composers as though they were actual men with human faults, such as stealing, lying, cheating — as well as musical geniuses.” Cook had obviously heard Taylor in his second broadcast, the one in which he presented a talk entitled “The Monster,” which was to become the most famous of all of Taylor’s writings, and which leads off this section. Taylor wisely extended the usefulness of his intermission talks (as well as some of his previous newspaper columns) by making them the basis of three successful books comprising short pieces that he referred to as “observations” about the world of music: Of Men and Music (1937, which went into 13 printings), The Well-Tempered Listener (1940, five printings), and Music to My Ears (1949). The following are selected writings from these books, as well as a few of the original scripts from the Philharmonic broadcasts whose content he chose not to use in the books. And then, in conclusion, there is the last piece Taylor wrote: “Sports for Art’s Sake,” published in Sports Illustrated in 1959. As a man who tried to bring so many into the world of classical music, why shouldn’t he reach into the domain of sports, which seemed furthest from music, to entice new listeners?

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“The Monster” (Of Men and Music) Note: On November 8, 1936, his first intermission broadcast with the New York Philharmonic, Taylor just spoke informally. It did not go well, so for the second he decided to write out his thoughts completely. The result was “The Monster,” a short biographical sketch of Richard Wagner that is still found in anthologies today as a superior example of its type. He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body — a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur. He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhaustive conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation; himself. What he thought and what he did. He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace. It never occurred to him that he and his doings were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books — thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them — usually at somebody else’s expense — but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family. He wrote operas; and no sooner did he have the synopsis of a story, but he would invite — or rather summon — a crowd of his friends to his house and read it aloud to them. Not for criticism. For applause. When the complete poem was written, the friends had to come again, and hear that read

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aloud. Then he would publish the poem, sometimes years before the music that went with it was written. He played the piano like a composer, in the worst sense of what that implies, and he would sit down at the piano before parties that included some of the finest pianists of his time, and play for them, by the hour — his own music, needless to say. He had a composer’s voice. And he would invite eminent vocalists to his house, and sing them his operas, taking all the parts. He had he emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder. He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan — men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it. What money he could lay his hands on he spent like an Indian rajah. The mere prospect of a performance of one of his operas was enough to set him to running up bills amounting to ten times the amount of his prospective royalties. On an income that would reduce a more scrupulous man to doing his own laundry, he would keep two servants. Without enough money in his pocket to pay his rent, he would have the walls and ceiling of his study lined with pink silk. No one will ever know — certainly he never knew — how much money he owed. We do know that his greatest benefactor gave him $6,000 to pay the most pressing of his debts in one city, and a year later had to give him $16,000 to enable him to live in another city without being thrown into jail for debt. He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. An endless procession of women marches through his life. His first wife spent twenty years enduring and forgiving his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend and admirer, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband he was writing to a friend to inquire whether he could suggest some wealthy woman — any wealthy woman — whom he could marry for her money.

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He was completely selfish in his other personal relationships. His liking for his friends was measured solely by the completeness of their devotion to him, or by their usefulness to him, whether financial or artistic. The minute they failed him — even by so much as refusing a dinner invitation — or began to lessen in usefulness, he cast them off without a second thought. At the end of his life he had exactly one friend left whom he had known even in middle age. He had a genius for making enemies. He would insult a man who disagreed with him about the weather. He would pull endless wires in order to meet some man who admired his work and was able and anxious to be of use to him — and would proceed to make a mortal enemy of him with some idiotic and wholly uncalled-for exhibition of arrogance and bad manners. A character in one of his operas was a caricature of one of the most powerful music critics of his day. Not content with burlesquing him, he invited the critic to his house and read him the libretto aloud in front of his friends. The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record — in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least. Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s great dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living. People couldn’t know those things at the time, I suppose; and yet to us, who know his music, it does seem as though they should have known. What if he did talk about himself all the time? If he talked about himself for twenty-four hours every day for the span of his life, he would not have uttered half the number of words that other men have spoken and written about him since his death. When you consider what he wrote — thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musico-dramatic masterpieces — when you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Eduard Hanslick, the critic whom he caricatured in Die Meistersinger and who hated him ever after, now lives only because he was caricatured in Die Meistersinger. The women whose hearts he broke are long since dead; and the man who could never love anyone but himself has made them deathless atonement, I think, with Tristan und Isolde. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and

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then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy. What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives? He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man?

“Guide, Philosopher” (Of Men and Music) Note: Taylor had only one instructor for music theory — Oscar Coon — who for several months took the 23-year-old through several books on harmony and counterpoint. Later, Taylor would learn orchestration on his own, studying the scores of master composers as his source of understanding the subject. That Taylor believed he owed much to Coon is clear from the fact that he made this tribute to him the second chapter in Of Men and Music — just after “The Monster.” I never hear the prelude to Lohengrin without thinking of Oscar Coon. If any reader happens to come from Oswego, New York, there is a faint possibility that the name might be vaguely familiar. The rest of you, I’m sure, never heard of him. I shall not forget him, because he was my music teacher — about the only one I ever had. He came, as I say, from Oswego, New York. Where he learned music I don’t know. I do know that he was a bandsman. He had played second trumpet in the famous band conducted by Patrick Gilmore in the seventies and eighties, and later with Cappa’s Seventh Regiment Band, an almost equally famous organization of the nineties. At the time I knew him he was working as a copyist and arranger for a music library. Unlike most good musicians of his time, he was not a German. He spelled his name C, double-O N, and spoke with an uncompromising Yankee accent that scorned any such alien affectations as pronouncing European names in any but the American fashion. He didn’t go so far as to call Bach “Batch”; he called him Bok. But Beethoven was “Bee-thowe-ven” and Wagner was “Wag-nurr,” and no foreign nonsense about it.

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He lived on West Twelfth Street, New York, in a ramshackle old building just off Fifth Avenue. The ground floor was given over to piano warerooms, and the upper stories served as offices, studios, and living quarters, according to the needs and habits of the tenants. He lived in one room whose principal articles of furniture were a cot and a bookkeeper’s desk, at which he stood to write music. He subsisted, so far as I was ever able to discover, on Scotch whiskey and bananas exclusively. How long this diet had been going on, I don’t know. He was born in 1833, and should have died of dyspepsia about 1870. On the contrary, when I first knew him he was seventy-five and grumbling over the fact that he might have to go back to Oswego and take care of his two older sisters, who seemed to think that they ought to have a man in the house. He wore his white hair rather long, and wore a flowing white beard and mustaches, which gave him the appearance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. If King Lear told the stories that my music teacher did, and swore the way he did, he was a far more fascinating character than Shakespeare has allowed us to discover. Don’t get the impression that he was a drunken eccentric. On the contrary, he was a tough-fibered, intellectually honest, fiercely independent upstate Yankee. He was also a profound and devoted musical scholar, and a charming and gallant person. As a teacher he had the knack of imparting knowledge, not with the air of Jehovah handing down the Decalogue, but in terms of casual conversation. By nature he was a liberal. He had a horror of extravagant terms either of censure or approbation. I studied harmony and counterpoint with him, and I remember several occasions on which I brought in what I was sure were perfect exercises in harmony, and perfect workings out of problems in counterpoint, and stood, wrapped in the most completely false assumption of modesty, waiting for his words of praise. And once or twice, when I was right, when the harmony exercise was entirely correct, when even he could find nothing to rewrite in the working out of the counterpoint, he would pay me the highest compliment of which he was capable: “Say, you know, that’s pretty good.” And nothing that any person — or continent — could say to me could puff me up as did that grudging accolade. I studied with him all of one summer and part of a winter, and as I look back now I realize that the hours I spent with Oscar Coon were among the happiest and most profitable of my life. Lohengrin makes me think of him because it evokes a passage from a treatise on orchestration that Coon once wrote and published. It runs as follows: Richard Wagner, without doubt the greatest living master of instrumentation, has taxed every instrument to its utmost. He has sounded them from their lowest note to the top of their compass, made them breathe a zephyr or blow a hurricane, caused them to give ‘sweet

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sounds long drawn out’ [sic] or rush with the speed of lightning — in short, everything which human endurance and mechanical skill has [sic] made possible on musical instruments he has succeeded in drawing from them. In consequence of this his enemies accuse him of creating many difficulties and much noise. However that may be, he has written much music which can hardly be surpassed. What can excel the ethereal beauty of the introduction to his Lohengrin, or the massive grandeur of his Tannhäuser Overture? Although he may be regarded as a mere charlatan — a musical maniac — by those who have not the ability to appreciate his music; still, the time is not far distant when his genius will be universally admired. This was in 1883, the year of Wagner’s death. The passage has always stuck in my mind because while I know, as we all do, in principle, that there was a time when Wagner’s right to rank among the world’s greatest composers was disputed by a great many people, Oscar Coon was one of the few I had ever met who had actually lived through that period, who had ventured to consider Wagner a genius in an era when it took courage and independence to do so. I remember his telling me how, as a very young man, in New York, doing Lord knows what to make a living, he used to save up and go to the concerts given by a co-operative orchestra called the Philharmonic Society. This was about 1852 and on two of the programs of the Philharmonic Society appeared the introductions, respectively, to Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. They were not placed along with the other music, however, but were played at the very end of the concert, with a five-minute intermission separating them from the other works performed. A note on the printed program called attention to this intermission and requested that those of the audience who did not wish to listen to this new music avail themselves of the opportunity to leave the hall. (Behind that polite and rather plaintive request I sense a grim scene — the directors of the Philharmonic Society taking their courage in their hands and putting on the music of this wild man, hoping to goodness that the subscribers who didn’t like it would go peaceably, instead of staying around to boo and throw things.) Coon had three gods: Wagner, Shakespeare, and Bach. There was no musical instrument of any sort in his room, except an aged but respectable cello, which had no strings, and which he couldn’t have played if it had had any. But that didn’t matter. I have walked into his studio and found him reading a Wagner score, or one of Bach’s preludes and fugues, with the absorption that you or I might give to Sherlock Holmes. He had no need to play, or hear played, the music that he loved best. Something inside him played and sang as he read along to himself.

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He has been gone some time now. He died, at an incredible age, several years ago. I can only hope that his tolerant spirit will forgive my waiting so long before laying this small verbal wreath upon his grave. I wish it were a bigger one.

“… Fine Frenzy Rolling” (Music To My Ears) Note: Through the help of Oscar Coon’s tutelage, Taylor became a fine composer. Here he makes it clear that this is a vocation where sweat and inspiration go hand in hand. Of all creative artists, composers seem to be the least understood. Their mental processes and methods of work are apparently a mystery not only to the public at large but even to fellow artists, such as painters and writers. The average imaginative painting of a composer such as Beethoven or Wagner or Chopin generally shows him being kissed delicately on the brow by a highly photogenic girl labeled “Inspiration,” and surrounded by a cloud of pictures of moonlit landscapes and volcanoes and swimming female figures, either rising into a cloud of smoke or falling out of one, or various other images that, however alluring, seem more calculated to interfere with his work than to help it. Of the novels concerning composers, only one that I have ever read, Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, showed any particular awareness, on the part of the author, that the hero had any connection with the human race. The playwrights are the worst offenders. I remember one play whose principal character, a composer, worked on a symphony throughout three whole acts, during which he kept his unfinished manuscript on a table in the middle of a room that was apparently the gathering place of the entire neighborhood. Every five minutes he would interrupt an animated conversation to press his hands to his forehead, rise, to the table, and write down four notes. I forget exactly what happened at the end; as I remember, the symphony was a success and he died — of surprise, I imagine. I had a letter on this subject from a teacher in the music department of the Pennsylvania State College, who wrote: As a teacher of the more technical phases of music, I come upon an attitude of mind on the part of the students that is at times very disheartening. I find my students on the whole extremely reluctant to accept the fact that here and there the composer has done something in his composition which must have been very consciously achieved at the time. In my form and analysis class, where the structural features of music concern us so much, students constantly come back at me with the remark, ‘Do you mean to tell us that the composer actually

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thought about that when he did it?’ I take pleasure in insisting that the composer’s job requires the use of considerable gray matter and that he deserves credit for doing so, but my students won’t follow me. They pay excellent lip service to the contention that music, to be really enjoyed, should be followed both emotionally and intellectually, but they refuse to believe that this axiom operates in the creative processes. The fight between technique and inspiration is a very old one, and has been going on in all the arts ever since there were any. In the field of music particularly, there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to how the artist goes to work. The listener hears the finished product — a symphony, a concerto, an opera, what not — and if it’s a good one he is moved by it, is carried away emotionally. So he immediately assumes that the composer was equally carried away — sat down and dashed the whole thing off in a white heat of inspiration. According to this romantic conception the composer’s brain and will power have very little to do with his work. He is suddenly overtaken by inspiration, hears angelic voices dictating themes and development and orchestration, then goes to his desk and takes it all down, like a sort of aesthetic stenographer. If you think it over, I believe you will realize that this ouija-board theory of composition won’t hold water. Naturally, no composer can think up a theme by the pure exercise of his mind. In a sense, every composer is inspired, in that his themes, even his bad ones, come into his mind through no exercise of his own will. But once he has captured his themes and written them down, what he achieves with them is matter partly of instinct and largely of hard intellectual and physical labor. To understand how he goes to work, suppose we take the analogy of an architect who dreams of building a great cathedral. He sees it, in his mind’s eye, complete, towering above the houses that surround it, the setting sun gilding its towers and pinnacles, and great streams of worshipers entering its portals. But then to make that dream, that inspiration, a reality, he must sit down and draw plans and figure proportions and areas; he, or his engineers, must cover pages with calculations of stresses and strains, and cover other pages with estimates of building costs; and his draughtsmen must prepare hundreds of blueprints of plans and elevations and full-size detailed drawings. While his first inspiration may dominate all these activities, its actual working out must be done in cold blood. A composer works like that, too. He may be fired by the ideas for a great symphony. In a vague way his inner ear may hear the thing complete. But there’s nothing vague about the hard work he has to put in, in order to get that symphony down on paper. I sometimes think that music, which is the most intangible of all the arts, is also the most laborious. A while ago,

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just out of curiosity, I counted the number of notes on the last page of the score of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. There are 284 of them — and Mozart’s orchestration, as you know, is extremely light. A single page of the “battle” section of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben — page 60 of the miniature score, if you’re curious — contains 714 separate notes. And that is a score of 139 pages. Now, every note on every one of those 139 pages had to be calculated, in its relation to the other notes, and in relation to the tone quality, range, and technique of the instrument that was to play it. Then every one of those notes had to be set down, by hand, and placed accurately on a given line or space. Try copying — not originating, just copying — one page of a full orchestral score some time, if you want to understand why composers can’t afford to spend all of their time in a frenzy of inspiration. On the other hand, of course, knowing the rules doesn’t make a composer. When we speak of someone’s writing a first movement of a symphony in strict sonata form, we sound as if we were describing an extremely arbitrary and mechanical process. But what even the teachers forget sometimes is that the forms and the so-called rules of music — of any art, for that matter — were not invented by any one person. They are the result of a process of evolution; they are the thing that, up to now, has worked best. A long line of composers, given two musical themes, has instinctively tended to state them and contrast them and develop their emotional possibilities along certain common lines. And the sum of all these instinctive gropings for logic and balance and effectiveness is what we call sonata form. When our architect is dreaming of his cathedral, he knows that it will have a nave, a transept, and an apse. In other words, he conforms to a predetermined ground plan. He doesn’t find this a handicap. On the contrary, relieved of the necessity of worrying about his fundamental plan, he is all the more free to let his imagination deal with his elevation. And so the composer who writes a piece of music in one of the traditional forms starts out with the knowledge that his ideas, developed within that frame, will reach their most effective expression. Once in a while he may find that the frame doesn’t fit. And so, almost unconsciously, he alters it. If the change is a good one, it will tend to become a permanent contribution to the technique of his art, and succeeding generations of composers will find a new rule in the book.

“Getting It Said” (Of Men and Music) Note: It is quite possible that Deems Taylor, in writing this short piece, was ruminating on his own fate as a composer. In fact, it is probably only because of his “Through the Looking Glass Suite” that his name will remain in the pantheon of composers.

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Rezniček’s overture to Donna Diana is one of a number of what might be called musical headstones over the graves of departed music. That is to say, it is one of a group of compositions that are the sole surviving parts of forgotten larger works. There are a good many of these in the literature of music. For example — a very obvious example — who in this generation heard a performance of the opera Poet and Peasant, whose overture is still the delight of military bandmasters; or of another opera, Jocelyn, whose incorrigibly popular Berceuse has almost attained the dignity of a folksong? When Donna Diana was produced, less than half a century ago, it was hailed as a masterpiece. Now there’s nothing left of it, except the overture. It’s a little saddening to think of all the hard work and anguish and hope that went into the making of these operas, and oratorios, and symphonies, that are now gone with the wind, remembered only by their fragments. But there’s another side to the picture. I once heard a friend of mine say that every composer has just one thing to say, and spends all his life trying to say it perfectly. That statement is possibly a little too sweeping to take literally. It’s hardly accurate to say that men like Bach, and Beethoven, and Wagner had only one thing to say. But it is true that every one of them had his own particular manner of musical speech … the thing that we vaguely call style … the thing that makes you say, hearing a piece of music …“Ah, that’s Bach … that’s Beethoven.… There speaks Wagner.” Even these giants didn’t always succeed in being completely themselves. Every one of them has plenty of forgotten music in his repertoire. So it is small wonder that a lesser man succeeds only occasionally in uttering the particular thing that is himself. But it is heartening to realize that when a composer does succeed … if only for sixteen bars of a song, one movement of a suite, one overture … when he does write something that makes you say, “I don’t know just who that is, but he is somebody”… the world doesn’t allow it to die. Rezniček wrote a vast quantity of music that we no longer have time to hear. But in one little overture he did say a completely charming, perfect, personal thing; and we are still glad to listen to him as he says it.

“Bach in the Groove” (The Well-Tempered Listener) Note: The Philharmonic intermission talk of December 11, 1938, the basis for this piece, was also selected as the best intermission talk of the season by Max Wylie, the editor of Best Broadcasts of 1938-39. Wylie identified what he believed was part of Taylor’s success: “Without any of the pinguid pomposity of the self-important critic, without any of the genuflection of the sentimentalist, his expressions and opinions tumble out of him with a youthful enthusiasm that proves his enjoy-

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ment in what he is doing and invites others to share in it.… But he never offends, because he is everywhere good-natured.” Wylie then identifies that this particular talk emerged from an “amusing fight then waging between the classicists and the musical roughnecks over the latter’s right to ‘swing’ Bach. The classicists claimed it was a slander and a shame and an outrage. The ‘cats’ claimed it was nobody’s business but their own and that they would swing Bach or anybody else who had written anything worth swinging.” Taylor obviously saw the possibilities to weigh in on the argument, and have a little fun in the process. Never one to be particularly fond of jazz, he certainly didn’t find a value in taking a “great” tune and subjecting it to distorting arrangements. But calling it “trash?” There was a great uproar, not long ago, over the question of the desecration of the classics by jazz bands. It all started when the president of the Bach Society of New Jersey sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, complaining of the practice of playing the music of the classic masters, particularly Bach, in swing time. He said specifically, that on two recent occasions he had heard a jazz orchestra giving its own rendition of Bach’s Toccata in D minor. “All the beautiful fugue effects,” he wrote, “were destroyed by the savage slurring of the saxophone and the jungled discords of the clarinet.” What started the discussion was his proposed remedy, which was — I quote from his letter — “that any station that violates the canon of decency by permitting the syncopating of the classics, particularly Bach’s music, be penalized by having its license suspended for the first offense. A second offense could be punished by revocation of the license.” Somehow I cannot help feeling that the proposed remedy for the offense seems to be a little out of proportion to the enormity of the crime. If you’re going to suspend the license of a broadcasting station for permitting Bach to be played in swing time, what are you going to do to a station for permitting swing music to be played at all? (You might offer the owner of the station his choice of either listening to nothing but swing for, say, twelve hours, or a month in jail.) You can’t legislate against bad taste. The minute you start regulating people’s likes and dislikes in music or books or what not, you’re confronted by the question of who is to decide what is good and what is bad. And you soon discover that there’s no Emily Post of the arts. Besides, I am not so sure that Bach himself would fall on the floor in a fit if he heard a swing version of his Toccata in D minor. If there’s one thing I’m pretty sure of, it is that the so-called classic masters were not aware that they were classic masters. As Gilbert Seldes once wrote, “The Japanese are not Oriental to themselves.” The casual way in which Bach and Handel and Haydn and Mozart turned out suites and fugues and symphonies seems

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to me to indicate that they didn’t take themselves with quite the deadly seriousness with which some of us take them. They wrote good music, and I think they knew it, but I don’t for a minute think that they looked upon every note that they composed as a direct message from Heaven, never to be touched or altered. Take, for instance, Bach’s Third Suite in D major. Of what does it consist? First, an overture, in the style that a then ultramodern French-Italian composer named Lully had made popular. Next an air. This particular one happens to be one of the greatest melodies ever written. But it happened to be written because, in the suite of Bach’s time, a slow melody was usually the second number. Then follow two gavottes, a bourrée, and a gigue — or, if you want to spell it in modern English, a jig. Now much as I hate to point it out, those last four pieces were equivalent, in Bach’s era, to jazz. They were popular dances of the day. They may sound very dignified to us, but the fact remains that when Bach wrote them he was thinking, not in terms of immortal music, but in terms of dance tunes. If there had been such a thing as a rumba or a tango when Bach was living, you may be sure that a Bach suite would have included a rumba and a tango. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that it’s a laudable thing to play swing versions of the classics or that anyone ought to try not to be revolted by hearing a piece of familiar and beautiful music distorted. But the distortion itself, while it may be a nuisance, is hardly a crime. Furthermore, if you’re going to be completely consistent about this question of altering a composer’s original work, where are you going to stop? After all, a so-called “swing” version of a piece of music is merely a debased form of a set of variations; and if it’s wrong for a jazz band arranger to write his particular variations on a theme by Bach, why is it right for Brahms to write his particular variations on a theme by Haydn? There is a very obvious answer to that, of course, which is that the Brahms variations are great music and the jazz band’s variations are trash. But while you and I may believe that, we can’t prove it. We can only say, in the last analysis, “That’s what I think.” Most people would agree that we were right in an extreme case such as I have chosen. But cases are not always extreme. There is, for instance, a swing version of a Bach prelude and fugue that Paul Whiteman frequently plays, called “Thank You, Mr. Bach.” To me, it’s a delightful and witty piece of music and does Bach no harm. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that Bach would have been enchanted with it. But I’ve no doubt that a vast number of persons whose opinions are just as good as mine would find that particular piece a horrible desecration. I believe in letting people hear these swing monstrosities because I believe that it’s the best method of getting rid of them. Occasionally, out of morbid curiosity, I, in common with the president of the Bach Society of

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New Jersey, have listened to some of those arrangements; and what strikes me about them is their spectacular dullness. There’s one in particular that you’ve probably heard — the one that goes, Martha, Martha, dum-dedum-dum — you know the one. Well, you don’t have to know that that’s a distortion of “M’appari,” from Flotow’s Marta, to know that it’s bad. The most harm it can accomplish is to give a few innocent people the impression that “M’appari” is equally dull; but that impression will last only until they hear the real “M’appari.” Meanwhile, the swing arrangement will long have been one with Nineveh and Tyre. A great deal of this hatred and denunciation of swing arrangements rises, I’m sure, from a fear that they will do lasting damage to the music upon which they are based. I don’t think there are any grounds for that fear. A real work of art is a good deal tougher than we assume that it is. Great music, like great painting and sculpture and literature, can stand an incredible amount of mauling. In fact, I’d go so far as to venture the opinion that one test of the greatness and vitality of a work of art is whether or not it can stand being burlesqued. One of the big musical comedy hits in New York at this moment is the new Rodgers and Hart show, The Boys from Syracuse. That, in case you happen not to know it, is nothing more or less than Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, adopted for the musical stage. And the title will give you a pretty clear idea of just how respectful that adaptation is. Yet nobody, up to now, has claimed, or will claim, I think, that The Boys from Syracuse harmed Shakespeare. The same is true of music. You can’t spoil anything really great. If you could, think of what the motion pictures have been doing to the music of the masters ever since the first silent films. In putting together scores for the pictures, the arrangers long ago discovered that Bach and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Wagner and the rest had written much more graphic and colorful and dramatic action music than they could hope to contrive. So they used their music without scruple — and still do — to go with any and all kinds of films. And what has happened to the masters? The answer is summed up very well, I think, in a letter from one of my correspondents, a college student. He writes: “What if Cab Calloway did, for a change, decide to arrange the B minor Mass as he arranges the Hi De Ho Miracle Man? Has any permanent or temporary harm come to Bach? I, for one, would hate to admit it. I am quite confident that the B minor Mass will last longer than Mr. Calloway. And so with the movies. What matter if they do use the second movement of the Beethoven Seventh and make ‘hurry up music’ out of it? How long is the life of a film? If Beethoven can’t stand such competition, I’ll take Hollywood. But I’m sure that will not be necessary. I, for one, will still climb to the top shelf of Carnegie Hall and feel lucky to have a seat.”

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Yes, but, as we all say, “It isn’t that I mind so much. I can hear that stuff without harm, because my taste in music is already formed. It can’t be corrupted. But think of the others. Think of the thousands of children whose taste is being ruined by that jazz stuff. Think of the thousands of men and women who are eager to hear music but don’t yet know the good from the bad. It’s the damage to their taste that worries me.” So far as the children are concerned, if you don’t want your child to be corrupted by listening to jazz and swing arrangements, keep him out of night clubs. If, on the other hand, he insists on listening to them over the radio — may I might point out that the average parent is physically stronger than the average child? Whether or not he is to listen to any given program is partly, at least, your problem. As for the grownups, nine times out of ten, while you are busy worrying about what’s happening to somebody else’s taste, you would discover, if you could meet him, that he was engaged in worrying about what’s happening to your taste. So don’t waste too much energy worrying about other people or becoming indignant over cheap music. If your favorite night club or radio set insults your ears with a swing arrangement of Bach, don’t get red in the face and roar, and write to the Times. Just exercise the right of individual censorship that is the glorious privilege of every American. In the first instance, call for your check, pay it, rise, and stalk majestically out into the night — not forgetting to tip the hat-check girl. In the second, just lean over, and unostentatiously turn that small knob marked STATION SELECTOR.

“The Brave Days of Old” (Of Men and Music) Note: The expectations of a concertgoer today is that the sounds emanating from orchestras and soloists are those of professional musicians performing on instruments that have reached a peak in evolution. Though we may question interpretations, we expect excellence in performance. Well, that wasn’t the case for the musical world that existed during the life of many of the great composers. I had a letter a short time ago that raises a question that I don’t remember ever having heard discussed at any particular length. In writing of the relation between the composer and his public, my correspondent said: “Isn’t it possible that one reason why the greatness of certain works by the earlier composers failed to be recognized at once was the fact that they were badly played?” That question opens up a wide field of speculation. One of the striking characteristics of this musical generation, particularly, I might say, in America, is the fact that in the performance of music we take the mechanical perfection of the instruments, and the technical perfection of the performer, entirely for granted. When a famous violinist or pianist plays a new

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concerto, we assume, as a matter of course, that the instrument upon which he plays is capable of producing the required sounds, and that he himself is capable of playing any sequence of notes that the composer may choose to write. The day of the old-fashioned virtuoso, who dazzled his hearers with acrobatic musical feats, is entirely over. We’re no longer interested in the fact that a musician can play or sing very loudly and very fast. What we say now is, “Granted all that, how expressively does he sing or play?” That was not always so. We can only guess, of course, at what the earlier performances of some of the familiar masterworks must have sounded like; but the history books do occasionally let slip certain isolated facts that justify us in the suspicion that, up to the very third quarter of the nineteenth century, a composer not only had to struggle to get his ideas down on paper, but then had to worry about getting a decent performance. Nobody claims that certain musical instruments, as they exist today — the harp, for instance — have reached their final pitch of mechanical perfection. But it is hard for us to realize how enormously improved they are over what our forefathers had to cope with. Consider the pipe organ, for instance, for which Bach wrote his contrapuntal masterpieces. The wind for it was provided by a huge pair of bellows, the handles of which had to be yanked up and down by one, sometimes two or three men. The player was more or less at the mercy of these organ pumpers. If they worked the bellows in a regular rhythm, supplied the organ with a continuous supply of the right amount of air, a long, sustained passage might sound reasonably like what the composer had written. But if they pulled the handles irregularly, or waited too long between pulls, that same passage would emerge as a series of gasps and grunts and moans that would drive a modern organist to murder or suicide. The action of the organ was entirely mechanical, and the weight of the action was determined by the number of pipes that were playing at any one time. If one stop — that is, one set of pipes — necessitated a pressure of four or five ounces in order to depress the keys, the minute the organist coupled in another stop, the key pressure increased. If he threw in all the stops at once, he might have to exert a force of one or two pounds in order to depress one key; or, granted that he had the strength to do that, if he had forgotten to notify the organ pumper that he was coming to a full organ passage, there might not be enough air in the wind chest to make the pipes sound at all. Not only that, but the action was noisy, as it involved a whole machine shop of arms and levers, and the pipes were slow in responding to the keys, so that very rapid passages were likely to have notes missing. Compare that primitive mechanism with the modern organ, wholly electrical in its action, with motored blowers automatically supplying just the right amount of air, with three, four, sometimes five banks of keys, and

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with pipes running into the thousands, supplying a range of power and tone color of which Bach never dreamed. And don’t blame the modern organ for the fact that it is usually housed in a motion-picture theatre, and is used more for jazz than for Bach. The fact that the movie-house organist spends most of his time playing “Mother Machree” with chime effects doesn’t alter the other fact that the instrument upon which he commits this outrage is a mechanical miracle that Bach would never have hoped to see this side of heaven. The piano upon which we now play Bach and Mozart is not the clavichord or so-called pianoforte for which those composers had to write. That was an evolutionary instrument, halfway between the harpsichord, with its jacks and quills, and the modern piano. It did possess a rudimentary dynamic range — its very name, pianoforte, is the perpetuated boast of its inventor that it could play both soft and loud; but its tone was a pale, characterless tinkle, compared with the singing thunders of a modern grand piano. Whenever I hear a good pianist play Mozart’s G major Concerto, I can’t help wishing that Mozart might be in the audience to hear it as it sounds, not on the instrument for which he was forced to write, but the instrument of which he must, wistfully, have dreamed. Orchestral composers had their troubles, too. Their stringed instruments, of course, were perfection, the finest ever made; but wind instruments were anything but perfect. The ancestor of the tuba, in the brass choir, for instance, was a thing called, appropriately enough, the serpent. It was built of wood, covered with leather, was pierced with finger-holes, and in general appearance resembled the death agonies of a boa constrictor. The sounds it emitted, indescribably horrible in themselves, were not even in tune; for the finger-holes were placed, not where they would produce notes of the correct pitch, but where the player’s fingers could reach them. This same habit of favoring the player’s comfort over the laws of acoustics made the flutes and clarinets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries instruments whose intonation would make a modern symphony subscriber squirm. In Weber’s overture to Der Freischütz there is a passage for bassoons in octaves. It takes the second bassoon player down to his lowest possible note, the low B flat. But on the way up, while the first bassoon plays the octave B natural, the second bassoon plays nothing at all; not because Weber didn’t want it, but because the bassoon of the 1820s had no low B natural. Neither the trumpets nor the horns, almost up to Wagner’s time, had valves. They were so-called “natural” instruments — which is to say that they could play only bugle calls. They couldn’t play an ordinary diatonic scale, let alone a chromatic one. In other words, when a composer of those days wrote for brass instruments, he couldn’t write scales, except for the highest and loudest

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notes of the instruments, and he couldn’t change key without changing the instrument. If Richard Strauss had been born in 1764 instead of 1864, he never would have written the horn and trumpet parts of Ein Heldenleben, for the simple reason that there existed no instruments that could have played them. Even as late as 1845, Wagner, in writing Tannhäuser, does not dare take it for granted that any particular opera house will have more than two valve horns. His score calls for two valve horns, to play the sharps and flats, and two natural horns to play the open notes. But imperfect instruments were not the chief affliction of the classic composers. The quality of the average performance must have been something that we wouldn’t tolerate in a high school orchestra. Consider the simple fact, for instance, that the vibrato, in violin playing, is a comparatively modern invention. You’ve noticed that when a violinist draws his bow across the string, the finger of his left hand that is resting on the string doesn’t remain motionless. It vibrates. It is that vibration of the left hand that gives the tone the undulatory, singing quality that makes the violin such an eloquent instrument. Now players of the elder days of orchestral music didn’t bother with any such nonsense. The violinist clamped the fingers of his left hand on the strings, and held them there, and sawed wood with his right. And only if you’ve ever heard the sound produced by a class of beginners in a conservatory, playing violins in unison, without vibrato, can you realize what a dead, depressing sound that is. A second violinist or viola player in a modern symphony orchestra is an artist in his own right. He plays the supporting, rather than the leading roles; but there is no question of his technical mastery. In the orchestras of the good old days, a second violinist was somebody who wasn’t good enough to be a first violinist, and a viola player was a disappointed second violinist. The great English composer, Henry Purcell, confines the violin parts of his works largely to the limits of the first position; because, as he himself said, he didn’t dare take them out of the first position for fear they wouldn’t play in tune. In orchestral works written before Beethoven’s time, the cellos almost invariably play in unison with the basses, partly because that was the custom, but also because no composer thought of trusting the cellos to play melodic passages. I’ve often wondered what the fugal passage in Beethoven’s C minor Symphony, and the double-bass recitatives in the Ninth sounded like at the first rehearsal. Musicians who had spent their lives playing an endless succession of “vump, vump” bass parts must have swooned in terror at being asked to play eighth- and sixteenth-note scale passages in quick time. Rehearsals for Schubert’s C major Symphony (the 1828 one) had to be abandoned temporarily because the string section announced that the music couldn’t be played.

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There is an amusing example of orchestral incompetence in the score of Liszt’s E flat Piano Concerto. In the original version he has a short section in which the triangle is supposed to play a little rhythmic pattern all by himself. But even after several rehearsals, at the first performance the triangle player was so terrified by his sudden emergence into prominence that he missed his cue and never came in at all. So, in the revised edition of the score, the original triangle passage has been handed over to the flutes and oboes. Another one of those is in the overture to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. In one place the theme of Senta’s ballad is given to a solo oboe. The passage ends on a high C and a high D, both of which notes ought, logically, to be played by the oboe, and which any modern oboist would play as a matter of course. But if you’ll look at the score you’ll find that Wagner suddenly brings in the flute to play the last three notes of the phrase. He did this because, at the first rehearsals, the oboe player wasn’t able to play those notes without breaking. It’s a familiar matter of history, of course, that as late as 1862, another of Wagner’s works, Tristan und Isolde, had to be abandoned as unplayable after fifty-four rehearsals. It was not only the orchestral musicians who hampered so many great composers. The soloists and the singers were just as bad, sometimes. The Tristan rehearsals were given up, not only on account of the orchestra, but because the tenor Ander, who was supposed to sing Tristan, couldn’t learn the role. He spent a winter at it, and finally announced that as fast as he learned one act he forgot another, and threw up the part in despair. In 1881 Tchaikovsky dedicated his violin concert to Leopold Auer, the great Hungarian virtuoso and teacher. Auer refused to play the first performance and turned down the dedication, on the ground that it wasn’t violin music, and couldn’t be played anyhow. Incidentally, he spent the later years of his life teaching that same concerto to such pupils as [Bronislau] Hubermann, [Efrem] Zimbalist, and [Jascha] Heifetz. The general level of performance, in the past, must have been far below what we now take for granted. Thirteen or fourteen years ago I heard a performance of Bach’s B minor Mass in Carnegie Hall, by the Schola Cantorum, numbering about two hundred and fifty voices, with an orchestra of nearly one hundred musicians. The soloists were, of course, skilled and highly paid artists — many members of the chorus, as a matter of fact, ranked as professionals. And I couldn’t help comparing that performance with an account I once read of the first performance of the B minor Mass, in St. Thomas’ Church at Leipzig. It may not be strictly accurate as to details, as I haven’t the description handy; but in general, it related how no pains had been spared to make the performance a brilliant and sumptuous one. The orchestra had been augmented to more than thirty players, the chorus numbered nearly forty, and two of the

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soloists were professionals. I’m pretty sure that what Bach had heard was not as good as what I heard. There were other factors about those early performances that must have been disturbing. Apparently the public of those days was satisfied more or less by the sheer sound of the music. Expressiveness doesn’t seem to have counted for much, and such a thing as “interpretation,” as we understand the term, must hardly have existed. Notice the simple, but rather significant fact, that music, from Purcell to Bach, was printed, as a rule, without any marks of expression whatsoever, beyond a simple indication of the speed at which it was to be played — and not always that. The fortes and pianos and crescendos and rallentandos that we expect to find in a modern piece of printed music were simply not there. Of course, that lack has been a golden harvest for the editors of the classic masterworks; but it also makes one wonder what the average performance of a Bach suite must have sounded like in those days. Nor would the conductor, in a case like that, be much help. Strictly speaking, there were no conductors in those days, as we understand the word conductor. Mendelssohn was about the first musician really to conduct an orchestra, to play upon it as one plays on an instrument. The conductor was a time-beater, sometimes using a violin bow as a baton, or a roll of paper, or leading the orchestra from his place at the harpsichord. Sometimes, when merely waving something wasn’t enough to keep the orchestra together, the leader would pound on the floor with a cane. The great French operatic master, Lully, used to conduct performances of his operas in this manner; and at one performance pounded his foot by mistake. The foot developed gangrene, and he died of it. You remember that passage in Thayer’s biography of Beethoven that describes the first performance of his Ninth Symphony? The orchestra numbered about seventy-five players, and Beethoven himself conducted. That is, he stood in the orchestra pit, turned the leaves of his score and beat time. But since Beethoven was by that time stone-deaf, the official leader of the orchestra, Umlauf, instructed the orchestra to pay no attention to Beethoven, but watch him. At the end of his scherzo, the audience burst into thunders of applause, but Beethoven, whose back was to the house, stood, still turning the pages of his score, until his friend, Fraülein Unger, plucked him by the sleeve and turned him around, to bow. That is a pathetic, a tragic incident. But part of the tragedy is what the performance must have been like, despite the applause of the audience. To grasp the musical standards of Beethoven’s time, try to imagine a first performance, in Carnegie Hall, of a new symphony by a great modern composer, at which a deaf man is placed on the conductor’s stand, with the

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orchestra under orders to take its cues (no time for shading or details, of course) from the concertmaster. I think there is no doubt that the average concert played today, by a first-rate symphony orchestra under a first-rate conductor, offers a performance that, in technical smoothness, beauty of tone, and variety of light and shade, is something of which an eighteenth-century listener could have had no possible conception; that the great masters of the past, whatever they may have heard in imagination, as they wrote their scores, never in real life heard the perfect performances of their works that we now take so for granted.

“Richard Himself” (Of Men and Music) Note: This interview of Richard Strauss, and the following five pieces, all center on a specific composer. But they are not biographical in the sense they give an overview of the man’s life. Instead they present a point-of-view, something about the essence of the individual’s world as a composer. I never did see Shelley plain, but I once had tea with Richard Strauss at his summer home in Bavaria. Tea and an interview. It was several years ago, when I was music critic of the now unhappily extinct New York World. Perhaps, in the interests of honesty, I might qualify that statement about interviewing Strauss. The actual asking of the questions was done by the late Harry O. Osgood, of the Musical Courier, who had made the appointment with Dr. Strauss and took me along, introduced me, and conducted the ensuing conversation with pyrotechnic fluency that made any display of my own rather disheveled command of the German language mercifully unnecessary. However, I would have asked the same questions that Osgood did if I could have had a few days in which to commit them to memory, and I did understand Strauss’s answers with practically no outside help; so, for publication purposes at least, I like to think of it as my interview with Strauss. When you see Garmisch, where Strauss spends his summers, you begin to understand his success. No wonder he can write music there! The only mystery, in fact, is that any of the inhabitants waste time doing anything else. It is a toy village at the extreme southern end of Germany, about four hours by rail from Munich, set down upon a plateau about three miles wide, as flat and green as a pool table and ringed in by the Bavarian Alps. There are no foothills to these mountains. They rise from the flat ground with a smoothness and swiftness that give dramatic emphasis to their towering immensity. Beyond them are other peaks, all snow-capped and gleaming, the farthest ridge of all marking the boundary line between Germany and

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Austria. One might easily be crushed by the huge impassiveness of these masses of rock and ice, as well as be exhilarated by their beauty; but it seems impossible, that anyone could live unmoved in their presence. From his study window Strauss can look out upon a willow-fringed river, two miles of meadowland, vast black stretches of pine forest, seven mountain peaks, and a glacier. The comparative failure of the [Strauss] “Alpine” Symphony becomes understandable. No man living could quite translate that view into terms of music. We had a little trouble in finding the Strauss villa. We had heard of Garmisch solely because Strauss lived there, yet not all of the inhabitants of Garmisch, apparently, had heard of Strauss. The first three people of whom we asked the way were regretful but vague, and the fourth, a housewife whom we interrupted in the process of chasing a goat out of her garden, was positive but, as our subsequent wanderings proved, highly inaccurate. Most of the Garmisch villagers were aware in a general way that the Herr Doktor was a famous composer; but his local fame seemed to rest chiefly upon the fact that he is the best skat and pinochle player for miles around. The Villa Strauss finally revealed itself as a baroque structure surrounded by rather extensive grounds and almost completely hidden from the road by maple and linden trees. Strauss’s horror of unexpected visitors was evidenced by a high stone fence that completely surrounded the property, pierced by an equally high iron gate ornamented with ferocious signs about being ware of dogs. Set into the gate were a push button and an apartment-house telephone. Our companion pushed one and applied his ear to the other, with prompt results. “She says he’s out,” he remarked to us and then explained to the gatepost that it was two Herrn from New York, who had an appointment with the Herr Doktor for 4 o’clock. The gatepost relented on the spot and asked us to come in and wait. A starched little maidservant emerged from the house, opened the gate for us, and led us down a graveled walk to where some iron chairs and a table clustered sociably under a tree at the edge of a little lawn starred with buttercups and cornflowers. The Herr Doktor was writing letters, she thought. She would call him. To be a good interview, this chronicle should go on from here to relate how I put Dr. Strauss at his ease when he appeared, what he said to me, and with what brilliant sallies I kept the conversational ball rolling. But in such respects this is not going to be much of an interview. As I explained before, my companion did most of the talking, my sole vocal contributions, as I remember them being to say “Es freut mich sehr” upon being introduced (that may be bad German, but that is what I said) and to murmur “Leider nein” when Strauss asked me if we were related to Loomis Taylor of the

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Metropolitan Opera House. Otherwise I listened and tried to look like a German-speaking music critic. Dr. Strauss hadn’t been writing letters, after all. He came round the corner of the house in golf trousers and a beautiful plum velvet smoking jacket, to explain that he had been pruning the fruit trees in the back garden. He looked tanned and healthy, easily a decade younger than his actual years, and was cordial and talkative. He was likewise extremely diplomatic at first. His answers to all questions regarding his recent American trip were deliberate and for the most part carefully noncommittal. Had he enjoyed the trip? Yes, greatly. It was a wonderfully gratifying experience. How about music in America? Did Americans seem more interested in music than when he toured in 1904? A shrug and a smile: possibly; one could hardly say. What about the orchestras? Here he grew more positive. “Excellent. A very high standard of playing.” His remarks about opera in New York, and particularly his views upon the language in which opera should be given, were his most interesting contributions of the afternoon. He admired the gorgeousness of the Metropolitan Opera House productions and the perfection of organization that enabled the Metropolitan to perform eight different works in a week, but he did not think much of the Metropolitan staging. “They have no dramatic instinct there,” he remarked. “Everything is the singing — always the voice.” Jeritza, he thought was a great artist — the greatest Salome, perhaps, that he had ever seen. One of us — it hardly matters which — happened to ask him if he had seen the Metropolitan production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and thereby incidentally elicited his views regarding opera in English. No, he had not seen Così fan tutte in New York. “It was very fine, I hear, but I should not care to see it. The Metropolitan is too big for such a work. It must have been lost there. Besides” — he grew animated — “I understand they gave it in Italian. That was a mistake, a great mistake. A work like Così fan tutte, where the words are so important and where there is so much parlando recitative, should always be given in the language of the country where it is being performed. What interest can there be for the audience to hear those long parlandos in Italian? There is no musical interest in such passages. Unless one understands every word the characters are saying, they are bound to be boresome — sehr langweilich!” Asked to name some other works that should be done in English in New York, he considered a moment. “Well, The Barber of Seville, for one. That is full of recitativo secco. It should surely be done in English. Any opera buffa where the individual words are important should be done in English in New York, or not at all. My own operas? With Die Rosenkavalier that is not particularly necessary, perhaps; but Salome — yes, the words are very important in Salome; that might be sung in English. And if they ever give

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my Ariadne auf Naxos, they should certainly give it in English, for that is modeled in form after Mozart.” At this juncture the starched little maid appeared to announce that tea was served, and would the Herrschaft come in and have some? They would, and did. Unfortunately, my recollection of the rest of the afternoon is a little dim. I do recall that Frau Strauss was there, speaking excellent English that fell soothingly upon the ear of one of the Herrn from New York; that I was further comforted to discover that Dr. Strauss’s English was about on a par with my brand of German; that the widow of Johann Strauss was also there, very interesting, and interested, and apparently immortal; that the tea included whipped cream, an unheard-of delicacy in Germany; and that a pleasant time was had by all. We did see the dogs of which the signs on the gate had spoken so threateningly. They were rather small and brown, and they slept, prodigiously chained, in two small kennels beside the front door. At that same front door occurred one of those small incidents that are remembered for years afterward. As Dr. Richard Strauss, Director of the Vienna Opera, composer of Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, and other works too numerous to mention, approached the threshold of his own home, he paused and wiped his feet carefully upon a small square of dampened doormat that lay before the door. Advancing a step, he wiped his feet once more, this time upon a small dry doormat. Stepping across the doorsill he stopped and wiped his feet for a third and final time upon a small rubber doormat that lay just inside the door. A weight fell from my shoulders that will never again rest upon them. Strauss may be a good conductor and a great composer, and I shall always respect him, but I could never again be afraid of him. For in that moment I saw, for a flash, the truth. Here was no Titan or demigod; before me stood only a married man.

“About Bernard Herrmann” (Script from Philharmonic Broadcast April 14, 1940) Note: Bernard Herrmann, who would compose some of Hollywood’s greatest film scores, including Citizen Kane and Psycho, gained his great facility as a composer by writing “yards and yards of background music for various radio dramatic programs.” On the day of this intermission talk, Hermann’s cantata “Moby Dick” was being performed by the Philharmonic. You’ll recall that from time to time I’ve been talking about the aspiring composer, and what he can and should do in order to get a start in his career. Now on the second half of today’s program we’re to hear a largescale work by an American composer, Bernard Herrmann. And it occurred

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to me that this event gives me a chance to turn that discussion from the academic to the practical. So last week I got hold of Mr. Herrmann and asked him three questions; When did you start composing; What was your musical education; and Just when and how did you get the first public performance of something you had composed? Here are his answers. As a youngster, Mr. Herrmann had taken violin and piano lessons. When he was thirteen years old he read Hector Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration, and forthwith resolved to compose music. With no knowledge of theory or of orchestration beyond reading scores, he wrote a number of pieces, including, among others, an overture to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. None of these was performed. Suspecting that a little more theoretical knowledge wouldn’t do him any harm, he took some lessons in harmony and counterpoint from his piano teacher. And always, he went to as many concerts as he could, following the music from miniature scores whenever he could get them. Then he entered De Witt Clinton High School in New York, where, encouraged by Doctor Jenesen, the head of the music department, he played various instruments in the school orchestra — just how well, he doesn’t say. He also wrote a concert overture, based on high school songs, which was played by the school orchestra one morning at assembly. He says it was pretty bad, and wasn’t repeated. During his high school period he fell in love with Debussy and Ravel, and turned out a mass of what he calls “impressionistic stuff,” under their influence. He also began a symphony, written on the largest size music paper he could find, and calling for the biggest orchestra that the mind of man had conceived up to that time. This, together with numerous other works, was started, but never completed. Graduating from De Witt Clinton, he entered New York University, where he studied music under Philip James and Albert Stoessel. Leaving N.Y.U., he went to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he studied musical form with Bernard Wagenaar and conducting with Albert Stoessel. His ambition was to be a conductor, and with the approval of the school he and his friend Charles Lichter formed a chamber orchestra and gave student concerts, playing works by themselves and their friends. At this time he was about nineteen years old, had been composing music for six years, and, thus far, had had nothing played in public. He had conducted in public, however, at a concert of the League of Composers, where among other things, he directed an octet by George Antheil. Through this performance the two met, and became friends. One fine day the author and playwright, J.P. McAvey, came to Antheil and asked him to compose a ballet for his forthcoming Americana review. Antheil at the time was busy writing his opera, Helen Retires, and had to refuse the commission. However, he suggested that Bernard Herrmann was just the man

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to write the proposed ballet. Just how he arrived at this conclusion even Mr. Herrmann doesn’t know, inasmuch as up to this time Antheil had never heard a note of his music. A meeting was arranged between the budding composer and the producer, and Herrmann got the job. Incidentally the commission also solved, at least temporarily, the problem of how to make a living; for McAvey engaged him, not only to write the ballet, which was danced by Doris Humphries and Charles Weideman, but to conduct it as well. He got twenty-six weeks’ work out of it. During the run of the review he met Hans Spialek, George Gershwin’s favorite arranger. Spialek proposed that they form a chamber orchestra to perform deserving but unplayed works. They did so, Herrmann supplying the conducting and Spialak finding the financial backing for the venture. The first season they finished sixty dollars ahead, the second season, three hundred dollars behind. Spialek took the occasion to point out the precariousness of the existence of anyone who tried to make a living as a composer and freelance conductor, and urged Herrmann to make practical use of his talent for orchestration by making jazz arrangements. This he did, doing considerable orchestration for a number of popular composers, among them Vincent Youmans and Johnny Green. When Green went over to CBS as one of the staff conductors he took Herrmann with him as arranger and assistant conductor. He has been with Columbia ever since, conducting and writing yards and yards of background music for various radio dramatic programs. He has found time, during the past few years, to compose an impressive number of serious works, including a sinfonietta for string orchestra, a “Currier and Ives” suite for orchestra, a symphony, a violin concerto, and today’s dramatic cantata, “Moby Dick.” Incidentally, he has never conducted any of his own compositions on a CBS program. I asked him how he managed to get “Moby Dick” accepted by the Philharmonic Symphony. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t very complicated. I showed the score to Dave Taylor here at Columbia [Davidson Taylor was head of music programming at CBS and no relation to Deems], Dave liked it, and mentioned it to Mr. Barbirolli [John Barbirolli, the Philharmonic’s conductor], who said he’d like to have a look at it. I met him and went through the score with him and he said, “I like it, and I’ll do it.” “And that was that.” Well, that’s how one American composer got started on his career. His wasn’t like anyone else’s start. In fact, I never heard of any two composers who started out in the same way. That’s why it’s so hopeless to try to give specific advice to any aspiring young artist. However, there is one feature of Mr. Herrmann’s entrance into the ranks of professionals that is common to the careers of all the composers whose beginnings I know about.

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And that is, that by the time his chance arrived, he knew his business sufficiently well to make good at the job. I know that sounds like something out of an old-fashioned copy-book. But who am I to say that the copy-books are always wrong?

“About Samuel Barber” (Script of Philharmonic Broadcast April 4, 1937) Note: This intermission talk never made it into any of Taylor’s books. Here he chides the symphony-going public for not wanting to hear music by American composers, but instead to seek hearing over and over the familiar works of Beethoven, Mozart, and others of the European composing worlds. He uses a symphony by the young Samuel Barber as an example of what will probably happen to any new American work fortunate enough to be performed by a major orchestra. On the first half of today’s program you heard a symphony by a young American named Samuel Barber. Now I happen to have a personal interest in Mr. Barber’s career, largely, I suppose, because he makes it possible for me to boast a little. Eleven years ago I conducted a sort of criticism class among the best composition pupils at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. They’d bring me original compositions, or I’d assign something for them to write; and then we’d sit down and criticize the pieces, not for form or technique, but simply as aesthetic productions. Were they any good as music? And there was a sixteen-year-old boy named Sam Barber in that class; and I pride myself that I must have been one of the first few who said, “Watch that kid. He has something.” And I still think he has something, a very brilliant and important future among the world’s composers. [Another student in Taylor’s Curtis class was Marc Blitzstein.] Now apropos of that symphony of his, I’d like to read you a part, a very small part, of an intensely interesting letter that I received a few days ago. I regret to say that it’s anonymous; and I wish it wasn’t, because I’d like to compliment, by name, the author of one of the most well thought-out and provocative letters I’ve had in a long time. Today I’ve only time to discuss a few sentences from it. Some day I hope to come back to the rest of it. Those sentences are as follows: He writes, I should like to take a shot or two at that old question, why can’t the American composer stand on the same step with his European contemporary? The plaintive answer that he doesn’t get a chance to be heard in his native country isn’t accepted any more. All he has to do is write, and he’ll find a chance to get heard. And it is my guess that he doesn’t write or compose one quarter of the amount he should. If

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the output of an American composer could be placed alongside the output of a European, how would it compass…. Quantity is lacking in the case of the American composer. If you fire often enough at a target you’ll learn to hit the bulls eye. Now I want to begin my answer to that by saying that I agree. American composers, as a rule, don’t write enough. But I have a theory or two as to why they don’t. One reason is the economic one, of course, he must spend a large part of his working time in making a living, before he can sit down to compose. That, of course, is largely true of all composers, European as well as Americans. But the European has one advantage. It’s no disgrace for an artist to be poor, in Europe; in fact, it’s rather expected of him. It is a disgrace here. It’s a sign of incompetence for anybody to be poor in this country. When I say that a composer who doesn’t own a dinner coat is at a great professional disadvantage in America, I’m speaking in deadly earnest. And before you begin to disagree with me too indignantly, think it over. But let’s not argue. Let’s concede that I’m wrong about that. He ought to spend all his time composing, and think nothing about money. Now nobody works without some incentive. It may be money, it may be fame, it may be the simple satisfaction of feeling that one is a useful member of the community. To be played, I should say, is probably the most powerful incentive to work that a composer can have. But my correspondent says that he is played. Technically, he is perhaps right. New American works are beginning to figure fairly prominently on our symphony programs. But there’s a catch in that. Suppose we trace the probable course of this symphony of Mr. Barber’s. I may be entirely wrong, but if it shares the typical fate of American compositions, this is what is going to happen to it. It was a success at its first performance in Rome. It was a great success at its first American performance, in Cleveland. It’s been a success here. So the word will go around among the conductors: here’s a new American work that is worth playing. Next season you’ll find it on the programs of most of our major symphony orchestras. The season after that, it will be played by a number of the minor orchestras. And then it will be through. On the shelf. Some other new American piece will be programmed by some prominent conductor. It, in turn, will sweep the country for a season or two. Then it, too, will join the Barber symphony in the storehouse. Yes, the American gets played, but he only gets played once. And that is not because his music invariably deserves oblivion. And it’s not, as I so often hear, because our symphony conductors, being most of them foreign-born, discriminate against American music. Many of them

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have no sympathy with American music, I grant you, but that fact alone shouldn’t keep it off their programs. If I am not mistaken, Mr. Toscanini, in all the years that he conducted this orchestra [1928–1936], conducted exactly two American works. A few years ago he took this great American orchestra on a tour of Europe, during which the orchestra played not one note of American music. Is that his fault? No. Did any great number of you complain about it? Did the directors of this orchestra protest? Certainly not. When any American symphony orchestra goes through a season without playing any American music, does the board of directors of that orchestra go into action? No. Do the subscribers complain? No. When men like Rodzinski, or Barbirolli, or Stock do program a large number of American works, what reception do they get? Complaints, usually, because they neglected the Brahms third. Do they get any requests for repeats? No. Is it because the music isn’t good enough? No. A good fifth of the European music you hear during the season of any American symphony orchestra is there — why? Because, as Theodore Thomas one said, “popular music is familiar music.” You like some music because it’s great. A good deal of it you like because you’ve heard it before. You’re used to it. You write to me, and say, in effect, “give me my Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and you can have all this modern trash,” just as a hundred and fifty years ago you were writing to someone else, “give me my Palestrina and Bach and Haendel, and don’t bother me with your Mozarts and Beethovens.” Now I’m not pleading for ultra-modern music now. I’m not arguing the possible merits of anything that sounds strange to your ears. I’m pleading now for that new American work about which you say, as you come out of the concert hall, “You know, I liked that. I’d like to hear it again some time.” And so you would, but do you ever ask to hear it again? No. So when it is never heard again, do you ever wonder what became of it? No. You stick to the old favorites, and tolerate a few novelties, on condition that you are not asked to hear them more than once. Meanwhile the American composer is very wickedly not turning out the vast quantity of music that he should; perhaps because he knows that if he writes one symphony it will be played — once — by every orchestra; and if he writes ten, they, too, will be played — once. But no one of the ten, regardless of its merits, has a chance in a million of getting into the permanent repertoire of any orchestra. Why should he break his heart writing ten, when one will do, for oblivion? No, the American composer decidedly does not stand on the same step with his European contemporary. The attitude of his own countrymen is hardly one calculated to make him feel like an important or even moderately useful person. He knows that among you — and by you I mean

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you — not one in a hundred honestly cares a tinker’s dam about American music. You get up committees, and you give lunches, and you make speeches, and you give prizes — in fact, you do everything except the one thing that would give him a little hope and self-respect — arrange matters so that a new piece of American music could be heard more than once by the same audience.

“Bandmaster” (Of Men and Music) Note: On March 9, 1932, three days after the death of John Philip Sousa, Deems Taylor spoke about Sousa on a national broadcast honoring the composer. “Bandmaster,” this loving tribute to the “March King,” had its origins in comments that Taylor made that evening. One of Taylor’s talents was the ability to put a lot of meaning into just a few words, including this example of such pithy terseness: “Sousa was no Beethoven. Nevertheless he was Sousa.” I read an editorial on band music recently, in which one sentence began, “While it can hardly be said that John Philip Sousa was a great musician” — I am not so sure of that. So much depends upon your definition of greatness. For me, a great musician, like any other great artist, is one whose name identifies his work. There is another type of artist who survives: the one whose work identifies his name. Scattered through the pages of aesthetic history you will find a host of men who had the luck to turn out one work of genius. Thomas Gray was — who? The man who wrote Gray’s Elegy. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám does not survive because its translation is one of the works of Edward FitzGerald. On the contrary, FitzGerald survives because he wrote the translation. Mention the name of Henry Bishop to the average person, and that which you have mentioned will probably kindle no light of recognition in his eye. To identify Bishop, you must explain that he wrote “Home, Sweet Home.” In these cases, and a good many others, the work is more famous than the man. The light in which he stands is a reflected one. The truly great ones survive without explanatory footnotes. We say, “a play by Shakespeare,” “a symphony by Beethoven,” or “a statue by Michelangelo.” We do not ask, “What play?” or, “What symphony?” or, “What statue?” We take it for granted, hearing the name of the artist, that any work of his is worth our attention. Even his failures, whose actual merits warrant them no such distinction, usually survive because they bear his name. That name is, if you like, a trade-mark; and, like any good trade-mark, is a guarantee of worth.

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Sousa was no Beethoven. Nevertheless he was Sousa. When you said “a Sousa march,” the phrase meant something pretty definite to almost anyone who heard you. He did not ask, “What Sousa march?” It did not matter. Any one of them bore the impress of a vigorous, clear-cut, and decidedly original musical personality. They were not — they are not, for that matter — “festival” marches, or any other concert variant of the original form. They were intensely practical. Sousa started as a navy bandmaster (that is, after he had left off being a boy violinist), and did most of his work in the open air, and in motion. The marches he wrote, first for the Marine Band and later for his own, were intended to set the pace for marching men. They were for the feet, not for the head. They have a deceptive simplicity, those Sousa marches. Their tunes are so uncomplicated, so easy to catch, so essentially spontaneous and diatonic, that one can easily underrate them. Simple as they may be, they are Sousa’s tunes, and no one’s else. It took only a minor grade of inspiration to write them, perhaps. It is none the less genuine inspiration. His career is not unlike that of Johann Strauss, Jr. Like the Viennese, he wrote operettas (you may still remember El Capitan) whose scores always contained at least one number couched in the composer’s characteristic rhythmic idiom. In Strauss’s case, it was a waltz; in Sousa’s, a march. Gradually each man became famous for that particular sort of instrumental number, and grew to specialize in it. Strauss became the Waltz King: Sousa became the March King. A composer whose music is in the permanent repertoire of virtually every brass band in the world may not be a great musician, but he is none the less someone to take into account. I have heard The Washing Post March played in Munich, and the High School Cadets played in Paris. The Stars and Stripes Forever, it is safe to say, is better liked in many lands than the actual Stars and Stripes themselves. Wherever men march, they march, sooner or later, to the music of John Philip Sousa. We do rightly, of course, to judge a man by his reach as well as his grasp. It is only fitting to admire Beethoven and Wagner for their pretensions as well as for their achievement. They dared more than other men. If they won greater glory, they also risked a more disastrous failure. Yet I think it is not always necessary to be technically “great” in order to be immortal. The giants of art stir our hearts and souls and imaginations. Sousa stirs only our feet. Nevertheless, he does stir them. Wherever he has gone, I am sure he has found a welcome. There is a dining hall in the Elysian Fields, marked GRADE A COMPOSERS ONLY. If you could look in at the door tonight, you would probably see him there; perhaps not at the speaker’s table, with Wagner and Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Debussy and the rest, but

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somewhere in the room — at a small table, possibly, with Herbert and Strauss and Delibes. “However did he get in here? asks some disapproving shade — a smalltown Kapellmeister, probably. “He was a good craftsman, and did an honest job, no doubt. But so am I, and so did I. Yet when I applied, they blackballed me. Who got him in?” The guide smiles. “The marching men. The men who have had to go long miles, on an empty belly, under a hot sun, or through a driving rain. They made us take him in. They said he made things easier for them.”

“Piotr the Great” (The Well-Tempered Listener) Note: Taylor’s “Something to Whistle,” in Chapter Three, stated his belief that it was “tunes” that guaranteed a classical composer’s works would survive. Now Taylor was himself a composer of no mean accomplishment. However, one can’t help but recognize in the final paragraphs of this tribute to tuneful Tchaikovsky a somewhat sad regret by Taylor that such a gift had not been bestowed on him. Speaking of Russians, I had a letter a while ago from a young woman who is terribly worried about her musical taste. She writes, in part, “Did you ever hear anybody say that if you liked Tchaikovsky’s music it was a sure sign that you were immature as far as music was concerned? Well, it’s being said, and being said by people who are spending time and money taking music courses in well known colleges. Just because I like Tchaikovsky’s Sixth symphony, they tell me I am immature; and I won’t be grown up, musically, until I’ve grown to dislike him.” I have heard that said a good many times, by a good many people, over a period covering a good many years; and I’ve often wondered just why it is that poor old Tchaikovsky is always singled out, not only by a certain proportion of the public, but by certain of the critics, as a sterling example of everything obvious, sentimental, and superficial, somebody who can be seen through by anybody possessing adult musical intelligence. I thought once that possibly it was because Tchaikovsky wrote a certain amount of music that really is pretty bad. But then, so did most of the great men. If you have ever heard Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, or his King Steven Overture, you are aware that there were moments in even Beethoven’s musical life, when he was somewhat less than divinely inspired. Then there is Wagner’s American Centennial March — which you have never heard — concerning which the composer himself said that the only good thing about it was the five thousand dollars he got for writing it. And he was right. If Tchaikovsky had his off days, so had plenty of others. That, therefore, can’t be the real reason why he is despised.

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I think the truth is that a good many people who are suffering from exactly the complaint of which they accuse my correspondent — that is, musical immaturity — rather look down upon Tchaikovsky because he is so simple and direct that he sounds obvious. They tend to think that if he were saying anything really worth while, he ought to be more difficult to understand. As it is, he hardly ever said a complicated thing during his whole musical life. Take the way he writes for the orchestra, for instance. Compare a page from the “Pathetique” Symphony with a page from Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Tchaikovsky asks for nothing more than the conventional symphony orchestra. Strauss’s score calls for that, plus an extra flute, two extra oboes, an English horn, and E-flat clarinet, a bass clarinet, an extra bassoon, a contrabassoon, four extra horns, two extra trumpets, an extra tuba, and two harps. Tchaikovsky’s writing for the instruments is almost childishly simple. He uses scarcely a combination that a first-year student of orchestration wouldn’t understand at a glance. The writing is so technically easy that almost any competent orchestral musician could play his part perfectly almost at sight. Strauss’s score, on the other hand, makes demands upon the instruments such as no composer ever made before. He takes them from the bottom to the top of their register, and writes passages that require a perfect technique to negotiate. His part-writing is a maze of complex counterpoint that is as fascinating to study as it is difficult to follow. On the other hand, these marvelous contrapuntal passages sometimes do come off, and sometimes don’t. The score of Ein Heldenleben contains pages that are miracles of orchestral writing; but it also contains pages that are sheer “paper music” — that is, music that looks great in print and doesn’t come out in performance. I remember one wonderful passage of the bass clarinet, that takes the player from his lowest clear to his extreme top register, in sixteenth and thirty-second notes. There’s only one trouble with that passage: along with the bass clarinet, three trumpets, a couple of trombones, and thirty-two violins are playing something else — forte. For all the difference the bass-clarinet player makes in that passage, he might just as well be in the musician’s lounge, having a smoke. The concluding chords of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra are marked double pianissimo. They have never been played that softly, and never will be, because two of the instruments on those chords are piccolos, playing in their extreme top register; and the piccolo player has not yet been born who can play his top D-sharp and F-sharp anything but pretty loudly. But poor old Tchaikovsky, elementary as his scores may look, is just as great a master of orchestration as Strauss. He may not get all of Strauss’s effects, but he doesn’t make Strauss’s mistakes, either. Every bar of his music “sounds,” as the conductors say; that is, every note written for an

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instrument to play will, if it is played as he directed, be heard by the listener. I know of no composer, with the possible exception of Wagner, whose orchestral writing is so completely free of deadwood and occasional miscalculations as to balance. Tchaikovsky is obvious, of course, in another way. He is incorrigibly melodious; and this, at a time when a good many composers seem to be running dry of themes, is not fashionable. The second theme of the “Pathétique,” the main theme of Romeo and Juliet, the theme of the first movement of the B-flat minor Piano Concerto — why, they’re tunes! Not only are they tunes, but they are tunes so simple and easily grasped that you can whistle them practically after one hearing. They can’t be good. Now I don’t say that Tchaikovsky, in music, is to be compared with Shakespeare, in the drama. Just the same, let me draw a comparison between the two for a moment. Read any play of Shakespeare’s, and you’ll find him full of clichés — stock phrases and figures of speech that are so much the common coinage of the language that they possess no particular literary value whatsoever. Let me quote the sort of thing I mean — these are all phrases from Macbeth: The milk of human kindness Even-handed justice The primrose way What’s done is done Scotched the snake, not killed it Can such things be The slaves of drink Make assurance doubly sure The crack of doom Those are all commonplace enough. Yet, to me, they are the most exciting thing about Shakespeare, because none of them had ever been said until he said them. They are a few out of hundreds of similar phrases that he invented and added to the English language — so many of them that I doubt whether any English-speaking person can carry on one day’s conversation without quoting Shakespeare. They are Shakespeare’s immortal contribution. The plays are great; but long after the plays are forgotten, those humble phrases will still be spoken, as long as there is an English language to speak. Now Tchaikovsky, to a lesser degree, is like that. The themes — tunes, if you like — that form the backbone of his work are simple in conception, comparatively uncomplicated in their development, easy to grasp at a first hearing. The theme that I mentioned from the “Pathétique,” for instance. You hear it once, and you say, “Yes, yes, I understand. Anybody could write

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that.” The catch is, that nobody did, until Tchaikovsky wrote it. And nobody wrote dozens, scores of others, until he thought of them. Anybody who tries to write music, as I do, approaches music — or, rather approaches composers — with a certain degree of professional intimacy. That is not a boast. I’m merely saying that even a bad actor has a keener appreciation of the fine points of good acting than most dramatic critics. I think I understand Tchaikovsky fairly well. I listen to his music, read one of his scores, and I have a fairly good general idea of what he was trying to do and how far he succeeded. But there’s one thing about Tchaikovsky, as about any other first-rate composer that will always be a mystery that I never shall know. Where did he get those tunes? And where could one get some more? I don’t say that they are equal to Beethoven’s or Mozart’s or Wagner’s finest inspirations. I don’t say that any generation may not tire of them. But by the time it does, another generation will have come along, for whom they will still possess beauty and eloquence. So let young Miss Blank’s musical friends be not too scornful of her immaturity. It may be that she knows instinctively something that they have not yet learned: that when a man has something to say, he is a true master of his craft if he can manage to say it simply and directly.

“Transplanted” (Of Men and Music) Note: During the early part of the 20th century, competitions to elicit new orchestral works from American composers were held regularly in this country, initiated by a variety of organizations including music clubs and the two major networks, NBC and CBS. Taylor participated as a judge in a variety of these. Here he identified both the “behind the scenes” struggle of the judges and how politics raised its head even in such a competition. Then he wondered why the works of some excellent composers disappear into the mist of concerts past, citing the example of Charles Martin Loeffler, the winner of this particular competition. The Chicago North Shore Festival of Music, held in the late spring, generally at Evanston, Illinois, has been an annual feature of Midwestern music for a good many years. In 1923 the directors of the festival announced a competition for orchestral works of symphonic dimensions, and offered a substantial money prize for the best work of this kind by an American citizen. I was music critic of the New York World at that time, and they asked me to be one of the judges. We spent a good part of the winter and early spring wading through manuscripts — as I remember, there were nearly seventy entries — and finally agreed on five that we thought were the best. It had been arranged that the five best compositions submitted were to be played by the Chi-

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cago Symphony Orchestra, under Frederick Stock, at the closing concert of the festival, and that the judges would then render their decision and award the prize. The names of the five composers were unknown to us, and would not be made public until after the winning composition had been announced. In order to have plenty of time to make up our minds, the judges met in Chicago a few days before the last concert, heard the five works rehearsed, and then heard a special private concert reading. Then, on the morning of the last day we solemnly assembled to make our choice. Two or three of the five were well worth playing by anybody, and afterwards were played, by several American orchestras. But one work in particular struck us as being head and shoulders above the rest. It was a symphonic poem, called Memories of My Childhood, with the subtitle, Life in a Russian Village. As I have said, we didn’t know who the composer was — the works were all submitted under assumed names — but we didn’t have to know his name to know that he was obviously a master of symphonic form and of orchestration. It seemed inevitable that his work would win on the first ballot, and that our meeting wouldn’t take over fifteen minutes. That is not exactly what happened. You may remember that in the early twenties we enjoyed a witch-hunt in this country that hadn’t been equaled in excitement and gusto since the Salem affair, a couple of centuries ago. Only this time it wasn’t witches we were hunting, but Communists. Thousands of eminent citizens, including an attorney-general of the United States, never retired for the night without looking under the bed for a Bolshevik. The excitement had died down somewhat by ’23, but even then — as even now — the quickest way of winning a political argument was to call your opponent a Communist. And as he looked again at the title-page of the work that we all thought was so good, one of our judges suddenly smelled tainted gold. “Life in a Russian Village,” indeed! was the general purport of his remarks. Did we actually mean that we were going to sit there and award this prize to some Russian immigrant, presumably unwashed, probably with whiskers, and indubitably in the pay of Lenin and Trotzky, some insidious alien who was adopting this dastardly means of taking the breath out of the mouths of honest American composers? A thousand … oh, fifteen hundred times … no! That, of course, was exactly what the rest of us did mean that we were going to sit there and do. There was, consequently, a fairly animated discussion. First we asked our superpatriotic colleague whether he didn’t agree that this was the best piece of the five. Yes, he did; but that wasn’t the point. Then we pointed out that, after all, any American citizen was eligible for the prize, that all contestants had to submit documentary evidence of their

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citizenship, and that if this man turned out to be an alien, we could take the prize away from him and probably put him in jail. We also pointed out that we were there to discuss music, and not politics. But our friend was hard to convince. It was obviously his conviction that if we awarded the prize to the composer of Life in a Russian Village, a large Russian army was going to arrive and put Evanston to the torch before midnight. I can’t give you all the arguments pro and con. The memory of the details of that day are a little dim. I do remember that it was a very long day, and that we finally won. About six o’clock, only two hours and a half before the concert, our all-American judge reluctantly yielded to superior numbers and strong lungs, and consented to cast his vote for Memories of My Childhood. To do him justice, I must say that when the envelope containing the composer’s real name was unsealed, and he discovered that the prize had gone to Charles Martin Loeffler, a man who had sat at the first desk of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for twenty-one years, who had not a drop of Russian blood in his veins, and who had been an American citizen for more than half his life; when he discovered that, I must say that his face took a mean revenge, and turned the color that is usually associated with Communism. The case of Loeffler has always been rather a mystery to me. Here is a man who seems to me to belong in the very first rank, not only of American composers, but of contemporary composers anywhere. Yet many people who pride themselves on their interest in American music know little or nothing about his work, and can talk at length about American composers without mentioning his name. Yet if he is not an American composer he’s a composer without a country. He was born French — or, rather, Alsatian, as you might suspect from his name — in 1861. His early childhood, as the Evanston prize-winner commemorates, was spent in Russia; later, he spent some time in Hungary. As a young man, he went to Germany, where he studied the violin with the great Joachim. At the age of twenty he came to this country, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1882 he joined the first violin section for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and occupied the first desk, with Franz Kneisel, until 1903, when he resigned, to give all his time to composition. He retired to a lovely old colonial manor house in Medfield, Massachusetts, where he remained until his death in 1935. There couldn’t have been a more devoted and loyal American than Loeffler. He was an American citizen for the greater part of his seventy-four years, and wrote every bar of his music in this country. All of his music is written against a rich intellectual background. Not that it sounds cerebral and thought-out; but literary and pictorial ideas have always been its inspiration. His compositions are always superb

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examples of workmanship, and some of them are really masterpieces. The Memories of My Childhood is Loeffler on his pictorial side. Some of his other orchestra works include The Death of Tintagiles, inspired by a play by Maeterlinck; A Pagan Poem, based on one of Virgil’s Eclogues; La Bonne Chanson, after Paul Verlaine; La Villanelle du Diable, another Russian scene, The Night Watch of the Ukraine; and a gorgeous eight-part mixed chorus, written to commemorate a friend who was killed in the war, entitled, For One Who Fell in Battle. All this music has been played, from time to time, and has been praised. But not played or praised nearly as much, to my mind, as it deserves. Americans who know his music are inclined to classify him, almost subconsciously, as a French composer; and the French call him an American. Someone has evolved a theory that famous men are men of talent who happen to have been lucky enough to be born at just the right time; that Napoleon, for example, born twenty years earlier, would have been too old to take advantage of the last days of the French Revolution, and would have lived and died an obscure Corsican military officer. And that is possibly Loeffler’s trouble. He was born a little too early. His music, most of it written between 1903 and 1925, is composed in the cool, impressionistic idiom that we used to call “modern French.” When it was played, the critics recognized its value, and praised it. But the general public here didn’t warm to it. It spoke a language that we weren’t used to; it sounded foreign. Nothing that we were accustomed to associate with American. And so, while we admitted that, technically he was an American composer, we didn’t quite believe it. But the past fifteen years have exposed us to so many varieties of musical speech … every man for himself, so to speak … that we’ll accept anything from anybody. We no longer ask for labels. And Loeffler’s manner of musical expression, which once seemed so Gallic to us, is part of the vocabulary of all composers, French, Irish, German, or American. If more conductors would give Charles Martin Loeffler a new day in court, give him the hearing that we would give to a brand-new talent, he would, I think, come into his own; and we might find that we have — long have had — an American composer who belongs, not alone to us, but to the world.

“The People at the Other End” (Of Men and Music) Note: Many of Taylor’s insights into the world of radio and concert music — gained from extensive first-hand experience — were gathered together in this piece especially written for Of Men and Music. Here he also encapsulated the experiences gained from being the intermission commentator for the New York Philharmonic Sunday broadcasts.

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It is nearly time for the fresh crop of prophecies concerning the imminent extinction of orchestra concerts and opera. Every time the radio or the gramophone is improved, someone prophesies that anew. It will not happen. The time is not far off when the electrical reproduction of any voice or single instrument will be indistinguishable from the original, even at close hand. It is at hand, for that matter. Twice, on days when the radio was left running and the announcer’s voice came over particularly well, I have thought there was a salesman downstairs, and have rushed down to throw him out. Once it was a piano that deceived me. I would have sworn that someone was playing in the living room, except that our piano is in tune. But I have never for a moment been deceived into thinking that the Philadelphia Orchestra or the Philharmonic-Symphony was playing downstairs. Not only because the probabilities are against such a thing’s happening, but because of the size of the sound. An orchestra, even when playing under its breath, is a large sound, just as any radio set or gramophone, however loudly it plays, is a comparatively small one. Consequently, any reproduction of the sound of any large group of singers or instrumentalists, no matter how perfect in quality, will always be a miniature — something heard, so to speak though the small end of a telescope. There will always be an audience for the real thing. The only other time I tried my hand at prophecy was in 1922, when I made the New York World the repository of a brilliant analysis of the radio situation. I forget the details, but I do remember proving, incontrovertibly: (A) That radio reception would never get any better than it was then, which was terrible; (B) That performers would soon get tired of speaking and singing for nothing, and would demand adequate payment for their services, which would make broadcasting unprofitable; (C) That since broadcasting was being carried on solely for the purpose of selling radio sets and accessories, as soon as everybody had a set, broadcasting would be superfluous; and that, therefore, (D) The whole business would blow up in about three years. Altogether, it was an excellent prophecy, greatly admired at the time, particularly by its author, who carried it about with him and would read it aloud on any or no provocation. Just how closely it anticipated the present facts of radio is something we won’t go into, if you don’t mind. It is enough to say that during the winter and spring before this book was assembled I talked, every Sunday to an invisible audience that had gathered to hear the broadcast programs of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York. That audience was estimated, by radio engineers, to number nine million people. Assuming that every concert given by the Philharmonic-Sym-

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phony since its founding, in 1845, was attended by twenty-five hundred people (a lavishly generous estimate, by the way), something over eight million people have heard the orchestra in the flesh, as it were, since that year. In other words, one Sunday afternoon broadcast is heard by more people than have heard the orchestra in concert during the entire period of its existence! Now radio presents an interesting paradox. It is listened to by the largest audiences that ever assembled in the history of the world; and it is at the same time the most intimate form of entertainment in the world; for when one plays or sings or talks over the radio, he’s doing so, not to millions, but to the average number of people around the average radio set … in other words, he plays or sings or talks to about three people. And these average three are not in the least conscious of being a vast public. They are not influenced by the reactions of the people around them, as they would be in a concert hall, because there aren’t any; and they listen to a speaker, if at all, not as a remote, impersonal figure gesticulating upon a platform, but as a conversationalist sitting in the room with them. And they answer back. Not orally, of course, but by mail. During the Philharmonic-Symphony season I received between six and seven thousand letters — a very small so-called fan mail for a variety show or comedy program, a very large one for a symphonic hour. For the public that listens to the Philharmonic-Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera over the radio broadcasts is the most sophisticated radio public in America; and as such it is not addicted to letter writing. It might amuse you to know something of what it said in such letters it did write. One thing that overwhelms me in reading radio mail is the extravagant estimate many people have of the knowledge, wisdom, and powers of a radio commentator, to say nothing of their overestimate of the number of minutes and hours there are in his day. During the season I received about seventy shipments of manuscript music, ranging from single sheets to bundles of orchestral scores. Their composers wanted me to tell them, first, what I thought of their music; second, how to get it published. Five wanted me to have them put at once on the programs of this orchestra. Seventy-nine people sent song poems, either to be criticized, sent to a publisher, or set to music. One author wrote, simply, “Please write some inspiring music to this.” (I regret to say that up to the moment I haven’t been able to think of any.) Five people had Stradivarius violins which they wanted appraised, eighty-nine singers wanted interviews, seventy-eight singers wanted to know how to get to sing in radio, and fourteen pianists wanted to play for me. Two young women wanted a complete list of books to start a music library, a lady in a neighboring city wanted me to come over and help select a piano for her daughter, another lady wrote from Annapolis to

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tell me to have two tickets in her name at the box office in Carnegie Hall for next Sunday’s concert, and a young woman in Chicago wrote, “My life’s ambition is to be a conductor. Do you think I am nuts?” Big game hunters like to hold forth about the thrill of waiting for the leap of a hungry tiger in the jungle. If any big-game hunter wants a real thrill, he ought to sit at a microphone some Sunday afternoon, with the consciousness that thousands of hungry wolves are ready to leap at his throat at the slightest mistake in facts or slip of the tongue. My worst blunder, of course, was in carelessly saying that Oscar Hammerstein first produced Strauss’s Salome in America, and that the Metropolitan never gave a public performance of it. As several score of purists had considerable fun in pointing out, Salome was publicly performed at the Metropolitan on January 22, 1907, and Hammerstein didn’t produce the opera until 1909. I had a very good excuse for that mistake, although I must admit that it eludes me at the moment. Other slips that received instant correction were listing Glazunoff and Schillings as living composers, and calling Leopold Auer a Russian when he was a Hungarian. The Don Quixote controversy was a historic one. I pronounced it “Quick-sawt” and several dozen correspondents pointed out that the only proper pronunciation is “Kee-ho-té.” I promptly hurled the Century Dictionary, the Standard, and Webster’s New International at their heads. All three support my pronunciation, so I’m still sticking to it. All three dictionaries failed miserably to back me up when I said adult one Sunday, instead of adult. Either the dictionaries are wrong, or I was. I also said “orghy” one Sunday, instead of orgy; but nobody caught me at that except my mother. Aside from these breaks, I seem to have come off pretty well, except that I once tossed off the statement that Jean Cocteau was a member of les Six in Paris. Etienne Auric promptly wrote to me from East Orange, New Jersey, to point out that Cocteau was not a member, and that his uncle, Georges Auric, whom I had forgotten to mention, was. Thus confessed and — I hope — shriven, let me say a few things about the audience. One of them is the discovery, or rather the confirmation of a suspicion, that a good many people are unable to listen accurately. I happened to say, one Sunday, that most people would agree that the four most eminent living composers are Sibelius, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Ravel. Whereupon a surprising number of correspondents commented more or less heatedly upon my choice of the world’s greatest living composers. Now I had very carefully not said “greatest,” I wanted to keep out of just that controversy. I said “eminent”; and “eminent,” according to Webster’s New International, means “high in public estimation.” I wasn’t discussing their merits, only their reputation. One lady was so agitated that she sent me her own list of the world’s greatest composers. According to her, they are Mas-

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cagni, Stravinsky, Chaminade, Paderewski, and Whistler. I don’t know yet whether she meant Whistler and his mother or Whistler and his dog. There is one type of letter that I find really annoying and rather disquieting. This is a sample: “Dear Mr. Taylor: I am a student at blank high school, and am making a music project of the lives of famous composers, living and dead. If you could send me any information I would appreciate it very much. Thank you, etc.” Now that is so naïve that you smile at it. But you stop smiling when letters like that come in by the dozens every week, from high school and college students all over the country. They’re doing projects, or term papers, or notebooks, and they want you to sit down and write them facts, dates, statistics, personal opinions, biographies, and whatnot. And virtually everything they want to know they could find out, if they weren’t too lazy and badly taught, by spending a couple of hours looking through dictionaries and encyclopedias. And their teachers encourage them to do it. Half the time, the letter closes: “My teacher says I can have an extra credit if you will sign this information.” Many of my friends, who are writers, tell me they are similarly pestered. The thing is getting to be a national racket. When I went to high school I did my own homework. Such an overwhelming majority of the letters expressed appreciation of the fact that the concerts were available on the air, that it is a little disproportionate to refer to the handful that did not, except that they possessed a certain interest as curiosities. First prize, so far as I am concerned, goes to a gentleman from Winnipeg, who wrote, “Your program for next week is rotten.” Inasmuch as that particular program consisted of a Dance Symphony by Aaron Copland and Honegger’s King David, neither of which had ever been played by the Philharmonic-Symphony, and I am sure had never been played in Winnipeg, one could not but admire his clairvoyance. A lady from Philadelphia wrote, “As for the Philharmonic, if I lived in New York, I’d give up my subscription just on the strength of the wretched programs.” I decided to answer that one, and after considerable pondering suggested that she ask for her money back. As commentator I naturally received a few individual brickbats. Some were scoldings, based on the assumption that the choice of conductors and the making up of the programs were entirely in my hands; others were simple and heartfelt expressions of personal aversion. I had devoted one intermission to a discussion of Wagner’s character (it appears in this volume under the title of “The Monster”). One lady who was moved to write about it ended her letter, “You are a liar, a traitor, a snake, and a moron.” I have a suspicion that she didn’t care for that talk. Incidentally, I quoted her letter on the air, and the following week received a second communication from her, expressing her unaltered opinion that I was still a liar, a traitor, a snake, and a moron.

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As I said, it is out of proportion even to mention the adverse mail. The overwhelming majority of one’s radio correspondents are friendly and generous. One thing that amazed me is the enormously increased interest in music among men, particularly among classes of men that are, in this country at least, traditionally uninterested in music. I had letters containing not only intelligent, but often deeply thought discussion of musical matters, letters that revealed a genuine love and understanding of music, from lawyers, insurance brokers, printers, garage proprietors, traveling salesmen, day laborers — every trade and profession that one could imagine. American women have always supported music. It is the interest that American men are taking in music today that so particularly interests me. I think we have the radio to thank for that. What they used to say about newspaper work can also be said about talking on the radio; “It must be wonderful to meet so many interesting people.” It is wonderful.

“Bill of Fare” (The Well-Tempered Listener) Note: Taylor, both in his years of attending symphony concerts as the World’s music critic and his six years with the New York Philharmonic, had a lot of time to mull over the question: “Just what does constitute a good orchestral program?” In his estimable way of finding an unusual comparison to make a point, he suggests that conductors and chefs have similar things to consider in planning their respective goals of a good program and a good dinner. Just what does constitute a good orchestral program? What elements must a conductor consider in making up the list of numbers that he will conduct at a given concert? The best clue to the answer lies, I think, in a field that at first blush doesn’t seem to have much connection with music, and that is — cooking. What makes a good program is precisely what makes a good dinner. Analyze that statement, and you will find that it isn’t nearly as foolish as it sounds. After all, what does make a good dinner? Let us see. We begin with something mildly nourishing and easily digestible — oysters or soup, for example, or both. Next, if the dinner is an elaborate one, we have something a little more solid and highly flavored — good, but not too much: an entrée. Then comes the main course, whose principal object is nourishment. After that, something green, perhaps, and then something sweet, or, if you like cheese, something sharp and exotic. In any case, something to hold the attention of an appetite that has lost its edge, that is more interested in flavor than substance.

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In short, a good dinner provides the elements of variety, cumulative interest, climax, and relief; and those are just the elements that should be present in a good concert program. By the way, when I say “concert” program I mean just that: a program designed to hold the interest of an audience of average listeners, possessing average good musical taste. I am not concerned here with special audiences, who bring a ready-made interest in some one kind of music. After all, there are people who can make an entire dinner out of Swedish smörgåsbord, or caviar and champagne; but they’re not sufficiently numerous to play any important part in this present discussion. Take first the question of variety — which includes contrast. A good symphony program, in my opinion, should not be confined too strictly to one style, one composer, or one period. It shouldn’t be devoted entirely to works of the middle seventeenth century, it shouldn’t be all suites, or all marches, or all symphonies. Nor should it, as a rule, be confined to the works of a single composer. For my tastes, the only composer who can stand the strain of providing an entire program is Wagner; and allWagner programs are generally popular for the reason that he covers so much territory, expresses so many different moods, conveys so many different atmospheres, writes in such a wide variety of forms, and has such an extraordinary command of orchestral tone color. Outside of Wagner, any other one-composer program is likely to be dangerous, because there is always the risk that, hearing just a little too much of one man, you begin to be conscious, not only of his genius, but of his mannerisms. The question of cumulative interest is even more important, and is the element whose neglect makes bad program makers out of so many great conductors. A program, again like a dinner, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The heaviest number, like the heaviest course, should not come at the beginning; first, because the audience may not be quite settled down to serious listening, and second, because even if the audience is receptive, it is liable to find the rest of the program an anticlimax. Nor should it come at the end, because the audience, having been listening for an hour or so, is growing tired. Its attention is beginning to flag, so that Beethoven’s Seventh or Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben may find its listeners restless instead of absorbed. Somewhere just past the middle of the program, in point of time, is the best place for it, the place where musical appetites are whetted, and not yet jaded. To retain the interest of an audience, two works whose prevailing mood — particularly if it is a quiet one — is identical shouldn’t come together. Nor should an obscure, or highly ultramodern piece come too near the close. The longer people listen, the less tolerant they grow, the less willing to bother with musical riddles.

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One of the most important problems that a program maker must face is that of fatigue. An audience does grow tired. No matter how wrapped up you are in the work, no matter how anxious to pay strict attention to every note, you cannot concentrate fully on a given piece of music after the lapse of a certain length of time. One of my favorite stage works is Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. It was years before I could sit through the second act without falling asleep. Because it bored me? Certainly not. I had listened so hard to the first act that I was exhausted. Now that I’ve reached the point where I know the first act almost by heart, I can really hear the second act. In fact, last year I even heard the third act. So much for theory; now for practice. Suppose we analyze an actual program — in my opinion, an admirable one — that was played by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, under John Barbirolli, during the spring of 1938. It began with a suite of dances by Purcell. These possessed the element of novelty, which is always a good beginning, but a novelty only in matter, not in style. The themes were new, but the style and idiom were more or less familiar, and so didn’t demand too close analytical attention. Then we had a Chopin concerto. Here was beautiful music, written in a manner that was in strong contrast to the somewhat archaic style of the work that preceded it. It was lengthy, but its length was counterbalanced by the fact that, in addition to hearing the music itself, the audience had the interest and pleasure of hearing a beautiful performance of the solo part by Josef Hofmann. Then a recess — the intermission, a few minutes in which to relax our concentration upon the music. The second half opened with Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, the heaviest number on the program, and placed in exactly the right spot. We had had a rest, our minds were warmed up, and our faculties of attention were at their peak. After the symphony, we were, whether consciously or not, a little fatigued. We needed something to stimulate us a little. So Mr. Barbirolli gave us the Shepherd’s Fennel Dance of Balfour Gardiner, in other words, a complete novelty. We were immediately interested, because it’s always a little exciting to meet a new musical personality, or a new expression of a known musical personality. Moreover the piece was not so drastic in its modernity that we became worn out trying to tolerate it. Then, the end of the program. For this we needed something not too old fashioned in its idiom, because our minds must be kept awake by now; not too modern on the other hand, because we were in no mood to solve puzzles; not too quiet, because by now we were easily depressed. So Mr. Barbirolli, being a superb program builder, gave us the theme and variations from Tchaikovsky’s Third Suite: music that has no cosmic message, that presents no problems, that asks nothing

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of us but to sit back, listen, and enjoy. Which, as I well recall, is precisely what we did.

“Tolerant Ear — I” (Of Men and Music) Note: This piece and the following one resulted from two intermission talks in Spring 1937 that Taylor devoted to the issue of the music of modern composers. As a composer, Taylor could not but be interested in where classical music was heading. It was an era when composers of concert music veered away from the melodic toward the dissonant, or at least combinations of tones that most often did not cascade gently upon the ear. Taylor believed that music should have “tunes.” Still he believed in the necessity for new composers to have their chance, and his pronouncements about the modernists evidenced his even-handedness and fairness. If Ralph Waldo Emerson is not the patron saint of all those who write on controversial subjects, including music, he ought to be. For it was Emerson who invented that God-given line about consistency being “the hobgoblin of little minds.” My other favorite author is Walt Whitman, with his “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself ” — or words to that effect. All of which is a more — or less — graceful way of leading up to the fact that, having just pleaded for a revival of intolerance in listening to new music, I am about to plead, with equal eloquence, on the other side. In short, while I do feel that a good many of us could afford to be a bit more honest in expressing our musical dislikes, we might, on the other hand, be a little slower in forming them; we ought to be quite sure that we know what it is that we do not like about music that repels us. Let me get to my text. It is a letter from a radio listener to the Philharmonic-Symphony concerts, and reads, in part, as follows: I have been listening for many years to the works of the great masters as rendered by the best orchestras on two continents, and think I know a little about good music. But I am unable to appreciate the modern composers. Such music seems to me to be without melody, harmony, or form, and literally gives me a pain. And yet there must be something in it, or the great orchestras would not play this kind of music. What must I listen for? How should I listen? There must be something I have missed, and I am sincere in my desire to know what it is. I am sure there are thousands like myself, asking the same questions. Could you say a few words on this subject some time? I

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feel that many of your listeners would be grateful for some advice on this point. Naturally, I cannot undertake to write an exhaustive and authoritative treatise on How to Listen to Modern Music, for the three excellent reasons that I haven’t space enough, you haven’t patience enough, and I don’t know enough. But I might be able to make a few suggestions that would possibly be useful to anyone hearing ultra-modern music for the first time. First and foremost, when you sit down to a piece of ultra-modern music, try to rid yourself of … fear. I make that suggestion in all seriousness. Don’t be afraid. It may seem silly to imply that people are frightened by modern music. Just the same, I think they are. A good deal of the fury with which people denounce the new and unfamiliar in art is the result of a very real terror. Let me illustrate. When I was a good deal younger than I am now — in fact, when I was four years old — my most precious possession was an iron fire engine drawn by two galloping iron horses. That engine and its horses never left me. It stayed with me through the day and went to bed with me at night. One day, when I was supposedly playing with it, contentedly, my mother came into the room and found me dissolved in tears. After a good deal of questioning she found out what the trouble was. I forget how I worded my explanation, but the gist of it was that I had just realized that when I grew up I wouldn’t be able to play with my fire engine any more. She tried to comfort me by assuring me that I could have my engine as long as I liked; that I could play with it even when I was grown up. “But,” I said, miserably, “I’m afraid I won’t want to.” I think that particular fear lies at the root of a great deal of people’s unwillingness to give even a first hearing to modern music. It’s a sort of “I’m-gladI-don’t-like-lemonade-because-if-I-did-I’d-drink-it-and-I-hate-it” attitude. How many times I’ve heard people say, “Well, if this is music, what’s going to become of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Wagner?” We’re really afraid of getting to like this new stuff, for fear that it might destroy our taste for the older music that we’ve known and loved all our lives. Or, if our reactions are a little less naïve, we have a subconscious — or perhaps conscious — fear that if too many people grow to like this new music the old will lose its popularity, orchestras will stop playing it, singers and instrumentalists will stop putting it on their programs, and we shan’t be able to hear the classics any more. Now granted that you may be haunted by that fear, look about you — or rather, use your ears. Is Bach extinct because Strauss wrote Ein Heldenleben? Is Beethoven on the ash-heap because Stravinsky wrote The Rites of Spring? Is Wagner no longer heard because Debussy wrote Pelléas et

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Mélisande? Has Brahms been scrapped to make room for Shostakovich? If the history of the race tells us anything, it tells us that art is not a branch of the automobile industry or the millinery trade. This year’s model does not render last year’s model obsolete. The music you have always liked will continue to be played. There is no limit to the library of the world’s music. There’s plenty of room on its shelves for new scores, without throwing out any old ones. Another thing of which not to be frightened. Don’t be too much impressed by what people have to say about how this ultra-modern music marks a complete smashup of all our previous conceptions of what music ought to be, the destruction of all pre-existing laws of melody, harmony, and what not. Some of the most repellent characteristics of much modern music have been in existence for centuries. In the Confucian temples of China, for instance, the priests sing certain prescribed hymns in unison; but every priest is at liberty to choose whatever key is best suited to his voice. That’s polytonality. The so-called harmony of the Middle Ages would sound unbearably awkward and ugly to us. There is much talk of twelvenote scales and quarter-tones today. In Hindu music today, as there always has been, there are sixty-three well-defined different scales. So don’t get to thinking of this break-up of existing musical theories in terms of the fall of the Roman Empire or the destruction of civilization. It’s only the breakup of a lot of rules made up by people who weren’t composers. The so-called laws of musical theory are rules of procedure, codified from what composers of the past did more or less instinctively, in order to allow composers of the present to write music that will at least be inoffensive. Great music can be written that conforms to the strictest rules ever laid down. But the fact that music conforms to the rules is no guarantee that it will be great. Bach and Mozart and Beethoven broke as many rules in their day as Schönberg is breaking in his. Most great composers are aesthetic anarchists; so don’t let people scare you by tales of the Red menace. Particularly, don’t let us critics frighten you. The people who stand most stubbornly in the way of progress in any art are generally the very people who know most about it. They know what rules are being broken, and are correspondingly horrified. The general public likes the new work or doesn’t like it, and so keeps it alive or kills it. Furthermore, if you honestly want to understand this new music, don’t pay much attention to what its composers have to say about it. Every artist desires ardently to be understood, and his natural impulse is to burst into words in order to help you see what he is driving at. But music happens to be a language — a very definite language — for the expression of just those ideas and moods and emotions that cannot be expressed in words. So don’t trust words. If a piece of music can be completely expressed in words, and

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the intellectual ideas of which words are the supreme medium, there never was any need to compose it. And don’t wonder what Beethoven or Wagner would have said of it. If what their fellow composers had to say of their music is any criterion, Beethoven and Wagner would loathe it. Don’t take the word of the past, no matter how great a past. Ancestor worship does not make for a healthy nation or a healthy art. God help us if the younger generation ever stops being the despair of its grandparents, or turns out no music of which its spiritual ancestors would have thoroughly approved. Another thing. If music means anything to you, if it is a source of pleasure, inspiration, or spiritual nourishment to you, you owe something to music. It is your duty to help to keep it a living, growing art. You must not be selfishly content merely to sit in the shade of the tree. Water it occasionally. The least you can do, as a lover of music, is to be willing to listen to what a new composer has to say, whether you like it or not. People write me despairing letters, pointing out our dearth of great composers, our lack of a Beethoven, a Wagner, or a Brahms. I don’t say that that is true or not true. I don’t know. But if it is true, at least let us make it possible for the great man to get a hearing when he does arrive. And make no mistake. When he does arrive, many of you will not like him. To some of us at least, Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun is one of the loveliest pieces of music ever written. Even those who may not care for it hardly find it ugly or incoherent. Yet at the first performance of the Faun there was a riot in the hall. The audience laughed and yelled and hissed and whistled so loudly that the piece went virtually unheard. That was in 1894, less than half a century ago. The human ear is a very adaptable instrument. “All right,” you say, “I’ll listen. Now what do I listen for?” that question is not so easy to answer. Or perhaps it is. I think I would say, listen for the same things that you expect to find in any piece of music; but don’t make your definitions too rigid. There are four elements that are present in any piece of good music: melody, which is design; harmony, which is color; rhythm, which is proportion; and form, which is the ground plan. Listen for them. Ask yourself, does this music contain themes that possess a definite contour and outline, regardless of whether they happen to please me or not? Do they exist? Granted that its harmonies may offend my ear, is there any element of contrast among them? Is there any discernible difference between one ugly chord and another, or is the general impression of all this cacophony one of monotony? Does the music possess some underlying rhythmic pattern that keeps it going, or does it give the effect of moving in a circle? Does it possess any plan that I can discern, no matter how unfamiliar or unlike the traditional forms? Does it seem to possess a beginning, and middle, and an end, or does it just start and stop?

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Now a word of warning about the harmony. Bear in mind that in recent years composers have taken to using strongly dissonant chords very often not as harmony is conventionally used, but to give an effect of color. It is a device that is hard to explain in words. One simple example is the silverrose theme in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, where the celeste plays a series of chords that has nothing in common with the harmony of the strings that underlie it. If you’re familiar with that theme, you can’t deny that the dissonant harmonies give it a silvery, metallic quality that has nothing to do with the tone quality of the instruments that are playing it. Look for a similar intention in a piece of new music before you decide that the composer was just trying to annoy you with a series of discords. One thing about form. Music has always been inspired by the mediums through which it is transmitted — in other words, has always been written for whichever medium would give it the most performances. If Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven wrote a great many symphonies and string quartets, one reason is that almost every wealthy man of their times maintained a private orchestra or a private quartet. He would order a new symphony or a new piece of chamber music much as you would order a new overcoat. Today there are no more private orchestras and very few patrons. But one medium that is becoming increasingly hospitable to composers is the theatre. Of fifteen works by modern composers played by the PhilharmonicSymphony Orchestra during the season of 1936-37, only two of them were absolute — that is, abstract — music. Five were program music — told a definite story — and eight had been written for the stage, and particularly for ballets and pantomimes. Now stage music must base its form, not on a musical structure, but on a dramatic one, which is frequently quite foreign to musical logic. To develop a musical idea clearly and coherently takes a certain amount of time; but when music accompanies a dramatic story, or the gestures of a pantomimist, it must frequently turn in its own length, so to speak, long before it would naturally do so. The consequence is, that when such music is played on a concert stage, with the pantomime or the ballet as a clue to what it is trying to express, it is often likely to sound formless and incoherent. Parts of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and The Rites of Spring, for instance, are almost meaningless without the accompanying stage action. This is no fault of the music; it is the fault of playing the music out of its proper place — exhibiting the costume, so to speak, without bothering to bring on the actor. Bear that handicap in mind when you listen to a new ballet or pantomime in concert form. And now, having dutifully listened, suppose you still don’t like this new music? Hear it again. Give it several hearings, if you possibly can, no matter how much they may hurt. And then, if you are absolutely sure that you

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really don’t like it, or that you really do, don’t be afraid to say so. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Don’t pretend, either way, out of deference to your friends, or a fear of being thought old-fashioned. Furthermore, if you dislike one ultra-modern work, don’t take it for granted that no ultra-modern music is for you. On the other hand, don’t assume that every new piece, however outrageous, is the voice of the future. The proportion of rubbish to great music that is being written today is what it always has been: about ninety per cent. When we hear two men speaking in a foreign language, if we don’t happen to know that language, everything they say sounds like gibberish. Only after we have begun to grasp their language can we decide whether they are talking wisdom or nonsense. Composers today are experimenting with a new musical language. There is as yet no dictionary for it, and no way of studying it except to listen to it without panic and without mental reservations. And the more we listen, the better able shall we be to weigh and estimate the value of what present-day composers are saying. Some of them are just talking pig-Latin; but others may be saying something that we may all, some day, be grateful to hear.

“The Tolerant Ear — II” (Of Men and Music) Perhaps it would be well, in pursuing this discussion further, not to use the term, “modern music.” It is vague at best, and no two people necessarily agree as to what they mean by it. One man’s conception of a modern composer is Shostakovich, while another’s may be Strauss or Debussy — or even Bach. It is safer and more precise, I think, to be simple; to group all unfamiliar works under the general head of “new” music. It is important and only fair, as I said before, to give this new music a hearing. Let us assume that you have done so; and the next time we meet you say, “All right, I listened, as you suggested, and I still say it’s nothing but ugliness and noise.” That is exactly why I suggested that you make it a point to hear a piece of new music at least twice before you make up your mind about it. Your first impression is only a reaction; and a reaction is not an opinion. While first impressions of people you meet may be the ones you come back to as you get to know them better, your first impression of music that you meet for the first time is not necessarily a safe guide. Theodore Thomas, when he was doing missionary work for Wagner’s music in this country, placing Wagnerian excerpts on his programs over the protests of his subscribers, once said, “Popular music is familiar music.” You know yourself that certain songs or dance tunes that you heard as a child have an emotional effect on you that may be all out of proportion to the actual merit of the music. You like that music because it’s been with you a long time. Its tunes have

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worn little tracks in your brain, and once they start, they glide through your head easily, gently, without friction. Now along comes a new tune, by a new man, who has a new musical vocabulary. There’s no mental track for it to run. It has to plow its own track. And that, almost literally, hurts your mind. You resent it, and you say, “I don’t like that music. I don’t want to hear it.” And I ask you, “Why?” And you say, “It’s ugly and noisy.” That sort of reaction means very little. The great handicap under which the new music and the new composers labor today is the lack of intelligent criticism. Opinion about it is roughly divided into two camps: the people who rave about it simply because it is new and swallow anything, so long as it isn’t like anything else ever written; and the people who simply refuse to have anything to do with it. Both groups are doing nothing for music. As I said before, I believe, of the music being written today, exactly as of the music that was being written a hundred years ago, that ten per cent is good, and ninety per cent is rubbish. But it’s that ten per cent of good that it is important to unearth, if only to get rid of the rubbish. The way to do that is to make some effort to understand what the composer is trying to say — if he is trying to say anything at all. In the previous chapter I compared hearing new music to overhearing a conversation between two men speaking in a foreign tongue. Let me carry that analogy a little further. We assume that they are speaking in Russian. You don’t know a word of Russian, and the sound of it grates on your ears. You say, “That’s a hideous language. Nothing anybody could say in a language like that could possibly be worth listening to.” Then, suppose you take the trouble to learn a little Russian. As you study it, its sounds grate less and less on your ear. Finally you know enough Russian to understand the conversation of these two men, and you discover that one of them, as you suspected all along, is talking complete nonsense. The other man, however, is saying some tremendously important and interesting things; things that you might have missed; things that may mean a great deal to you. And so I repeat: before you dismiss a piece of new music, be sure that you understand it. The mere fact that you like it or don’t like it is of no importance to me or anybody else. But if you can tell me exactly why you do or don’t like it, that is extremely important, not only to me, but to the composer and to music in general. Because the final verdict on every work of art is delivered, not by the critics, not by the experts, but by the public. If Beethoven has survived a hundred years it is because successive generations of ordinary listeners have heard something in his music that meant something to them. Ah, but that was Beethoven! Nobody could fail to recognize his greatness, at once. Oh, yes, they could. The history of music is a chronicle of the

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human animal’s incredible capacity for being wrong about it. That is why a criticism such as this one must not be taken too seriously: The old masters allowed themselves a certain license, to be sure, but always made the ear the judge. But now that barbarians have begun to write music, we get passages that make us shudder. From two fragments of this new quartet we can decide that the composer (whom I do not know and do not want to know) is only a piano player with a depraved ear. That is not a letter from an outraged radio fan, nor is it taken from a contemporary newspaper. It is an excerpt from some observations by an eighteenth-century Italian music critic, named Sarti, concerning Mozart’s D minor Quartet. Even professional musicians are not always sound in their judgment. Listen to this: Yesterday we studied the new symphony of Brahms — a composer who is praised to heaven in Germany. I don’t understand his attraction. In my opinion he is dark, cold, and full of pretense, of obscurity without true depth. I think Germany is on the decline musically, and that the French are now due on the scene. That is Tchaikovsky, writing about an eminent contemporary. And here is what one of Tchaikovsky’s fellow composers, Taneieff, had to say about Tchaikovsky’s own Fourth Symphony: The first movement is too long in proportion to the others; it gives the effect of a symphonic poem to which the composer has slapped on three more movements and called it a symphony. The rhythm is repeated too often and is tedious. There is one defect in this symphony to which I shall never become reconciled: every movement contains places that remind one of ballet music. I don’t want to labor my point, but let me give you one more excerpt: Some assert that it is just this symphony which is his masterpiece, that this is the true style for high-class music, and that if it does not please now, it is because the public is not cultured enough, artistically, to grasp all these lofty beauties. Another faction denies that the work has any artistic value, and profess to see in it an untamed striving for singularity.… By means of strange modulations and violent transitions, by combining the most heterogeneous elements, a certain undesirable originality may be achieved without much trouble; but genius proclaims itself not in the unusual and fantastic, but in the beautiful and sublime. A third party, a very small one, admits

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that the symphony contains many beauties, but concedes that the connection is often disrupted entirely, and that the inordinate length of this, the longest and perhaps most difficult of all symphonies, wearies even the cognoscenti, and is unendurable to the mere musiclove. It fears that if Beethoven continues on his present path both he and the public will be the sufferers. That is an early nineteenth-century critic discussing the first performance of the “Eroica” Symphony. There is no need to remind you of the sort of comment that Wagner’s music aroused when it was first played, or of Gounod’s famous characterization of the Franck D minor Symphony: “The affirmation of incompetence pushed to dogmatic lengths.” Please do not assume that I am trying to imply that because good music has been abused, abused music is good; that a new symphony is a masterpiece simply because people say hard things about it. All that I say is, when you hear a new work, don’t assume that it’s worthless merely because it comes into more or less violent collision with some of your preconceived ideas as to how good music ought to sound. The great English critic, Ernest Newman, in his enchanting book, A Music Critic’s Holiday, remarks: It is a curious thing, the cynic may reflect, that the music of every period lacks melody as compared with the music of the past. Yet there is any amount of melody in music. The explanation of this strange circumstance seems to be that melody is always in the music of the generation before, never in the present generation. People who reject Stravinsky or Schoenberg because they have no melody hark back regretfully to the melodies of Richard Strauss. But it was only a few years ago that we were being assured that Strauss had no melody — that there had been no melody in music, in fact, sine Wagner and Brahms and Schumann. Yet one seems to remember that Wagner and Schumann in their day were accused of melodic poverty or melodic ugliness; and no doubt the charge goes back long past St. Cecilia, to the very days of Tubal Cain. The music of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart will never be written again. They said what they had to say, in the vocabulary of their times, and they said it perfectly. If they were alive today they would not use that same vocabulary. I have often wondered what our verdict would be if some conductor were to discover a Tenth Symphony by Beethoven, and present it to us as the work of a little-known contemporary composer. I have an idea that while we might find in it much that was impressive, we would criticize the composer’s form and style as being utterly old-fashioned. Hearing Beethoven’s music, and knowing that it is Beethoven’s, we

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accept the way in which he expresses himself as appropriate to him and the age in which he lived, just as we accept the language of Shakespeare in his plays. But a modern playwright, such as Maxwell Anderson, writing a play in verse, uses an English vocabulary that is utterly different from Shakespeare’s. Beethoven’s greatness is in the spirituality and eloquence of his musical ideas, not in the particular set of harmonies or the conventional turns of melody that he employs. The harmonies — or lack of them, if you like — in a piece of new music that sound so grotesque to you are merely the language in which the composer is expressing himself. You must hear deeper than that to discover whatever greatness his music may possess. Not that it necessarily possesses any greatness at all. I am no devoted admirer of the new music. An enormous proportion of it strikes me as being highly tentative and empirical, and I frequently suspect some of its composers of trying to find a substitute for creative talent. Even so, no one who pretends to a love for music has any right to dismiss a new work without a fair hearing. Let me quote Newman again: The greatest geniuses … have always been rather conservative, and, indeed, have always come at the end of a long period of development, never at the beginning of one. It is generally the men of the second or third order who experiment, and in no case do they use their medium with the ease and variety and force with which the geniuses use theirs. That, I believe, is true. On the other hand, these contemporary experiments in broadening the language of music are not particularly new; they have been going on for some time (Le Sacre du Printemps, for example, dates from 1911). And, even granted the synthetic quality of much of the new music that we hear, it is quite possible that the period of development to which Newman refers may be nearing its close. It is wholly possible that before very long, composers will arrive on the scene to whom these new harmonies and rhythms and melodic twists are not experiments, but their natural musical speech, composers whom even the most stubborn conservative will recognize as men of genius. Which is why I say, keep on listening. You owe it to the future. The great men may be here now, unrecognized. Even if they aren’t, see to it that when they do arrive, they don’t have to face an audience that has made up its mind before hand not to give them a hearing. Suppose, however, that a new piece of music remains stubbornly incomprehensible even after a conscientious hearing; is there any way of arriving at a defensible opinion of it?

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There is no sure way, of course; but one or two things may be useful. When you hear a particular piece by a new composer, does the music annoy you? Does it make you angry? If it does, give it a second hearing. There may be something in it. For nothing is more irritating than a new thought. It strikes a part of your mind that has never been disturbed before … and you draw back. Try again. The second time it may not be so bad. If the piece bores you, however, if you can honestly yawn at it, without having your temperature rise by a single degree, the chances are that you’re safe in letting it go. Another thing: let us assume that you have heard a work by a new composer. You didn’t like it. A week or so later, you hear another piece. And without knowing who wrote it, you say, “Oh, Lord, that must be that frightful Russian, what’s-his-name.” If it is by him, go back and give the first piece another hearing. For if a composer possesses enough individuality to make you recognize his style, he is, however irritating, a personality. And personalities are rare, and precious, in music. There’s one other thing to listen for. It is hard to define. The easiest way of expressing it is by asking the question: does the music seem to run under its own power? In other words, does it give the impression of possessing some spark of life of its own, something that makes it go without your being conscious of the composer constantly trying to push it along? Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps is a good example of what I mean. You may like it, or you may hate it. In either case you cannot deny that the music has the breath of life in it. You haven’t the feeling that it is about to fall to the ground at any moment. You may wish it would, but you have no hope that it will. It soars, like an airplane, not like a kite.

“The Violent Ward” (The Well-Tempered Listener) Note: In this, and the following piece, as the dark clouds of World War II assembled, Taylor remembered how musical censorship operated in the United States in the previous war, particularly on music of German composers. For example, during and after World War I, German operas were banished from the New York scene. Taylor maintained that music itself is apolitical; it is the words or nationalistic emotions associated with it that gives a political connection. Taylor suggested that one should listen to music as a pure language unto itself, and be grateful to those who composed and performed it. He didn’t stand back from defending this position. When Erika Mann, daughter of author Thomas Mann, wrote to the New York Times stating that since Richard Strauss was part of the Nazi world, his music should not be played, Taylor addressed Mann’s belief on

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a Philharmonic broadcast, stating that there isn’t enemy music, but “there may be enemy words set to music.” “There may soon be no other place in the world where music can be heard without the intervention of politics, where men can be free in mind and spirit to soar aloft as they feel like soaring. This may be the only country left where that can be done, and it is our responsibility to see that it can be done here. We have got to do in the twentieth century what Germany did for human culture in the nineteenth century, and we have got to prepare ourselves for it.” Those are not my words. They are from an address by George Sokosky, speaking before the Philharmonic-Symphony League of New York. Let me point his words by another quotation, a letter from a professor of sociology in a Midwestern university: My wife’s cousins are Swedish. During the Great War one of them took on a German war orphan whose father had been a Communist. He supported and educated the boy, who proceeded to become a one hundred per cent National Socialist — that is, Nazi. Recently he visited his benefactor in Sweden. The victrola was playing a record sung by Taube, the famous Swedish tenor. When it was mentioned that Taube was Jewish, the young man immediately plugged his ears. On another day a similar record was played, and he was allowed to express his appreciation of it. Later he was told that this was also sung by a Jew. Shortly after he was found in the grove near by, on his face, weeping because he had enjoyed the singing of a Jew. Even as recently as five or six years ago, if I had received that letter I wouldn’t have quoted it, though it did come from a man holding a responsible academic position. It would have sounded too fantastic to be taken seriously. But unfortunately we are now living in a fantastic world, a world in which intelligent people seem honestly to believe that they can detect hostile racial and political characteristics in pieces of absolute music; a world in which one of Russia’s most brilliant young composers, Shostakovich, undertakes to abandon thematic development and to write music with no two bars alike, because thematic development is a bourgeois theory; a world in which the German government decrees that the music of the Jewish composers Felix Mendelssohn, Jacques Offenbach, and Giacomo Meyerbeer may not be played, forbids the conducting of any German orchestra by a Jewish conductor, and confiscates the works and copyrights of Johann Strauss — because he had a Jewish stepdaughter; a world in which an important Italian newspaper announces that no true Italian can laugh at the Ritz Brothers, the Marx Brothers, or Charlie Chaplin. It is quite pos-

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sible to say, with a straight face, that the day may come when the political opinion of Mickey Mouse may cause him to be banned by half the governments of Europe. Imagine the most fantastic conclusion at which the human mind is capable of arriving, and you can no longer say that it will not be taken seriously in some quarter of the earth. Now artistic censorship has always existed in one place or another, even censorship of music. Verdi’s opera, A Masked Ball, dealt with the assassination of an Italian state official. The censor, deciding that it might put ideas into people’s heads, banned it until Verdi’s librettist changed it to a story of the assassination of the governor of Boston. The King, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, had to be demoted to Duke before the shocked censor would allow it to be produced. In Russia, up to 1918, a folk song called Dubinushka could not be sung in public, because it had been the battle song of the attempted revolution of 1905. Notice, however, that in all these instances, what the censor was really after were the stories or the words or the events behind the music. The music was forbidden merely because it was associated with those stories or words or events. Now I may or may not agree with censorship of that sort, but at least I can understand it. I can perfectly comprehend the purpose of a censorship of ideas, and I can even admit that, for a time at least, it works. But I cannot comprehend the workings of a mind that thinks it can regulate abstract thought and emotion. All of us, in our esthetic criticism, do a certain amount of loose talking. I have heard Arnold Schönberg called an anarchist and a Bolshevik by people who found a certain lack of charm in his music. But it never occurred to me — nor, I think, to them — that because they hated Schönberg’s music they honestly thought he was planning to assassinate the President and overthrow the government. Apparently, today, there are people, millions of them, who believe that a composer’s race and political opinions can be deduced by listening to his music. This belief leaves me honestly bewildered. If there is an art in the world that has nothing to do with definite thoughts and images, it is music; and among composers who rise above mediocrity it has very little to do, as well, with race, or even nationality. Pretending to think otherwise does no one any good, in the long run. If a man whom you hate builds a beautiful house, you are doing a very dangerous thing to go about saying that it looks like a dog kennel. In the first place, you are fooling very few people. Most of them know, when you say that you hate the house, that you’re merely announcing that you hate the man. In the second place, if you refuse to see any merit in a work of art because someone you dislike created it, in other words, if you let your emotions replace your critical sense, before very long you will have no critical sense left. And that is what is happening today. Vast numbers of persons, for one reason or another, are deliberately

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destroying their sense of taste, are trying to forget that they ever knew what music is. And what is it? Let me give you another quotation, this one from Cecil Forsyth’s Music and Nationalism. He says: The painter, the sculptor, and the poet gather in the things which they can see and touch and hear. They pass these sense-impressions through their minds, and bring forth a version of them colored and modified by their own personalities. The musician, wholly self-centered, passes through the same process, but the creative act begins in a quite different manner, in that he looks for his stimulus to nothing outside his own personality.… Lock the painter, the poet, and the sculptor up within four bare walls: give them light, paint, canvas, pen, ink, paper, clay — and in ten years they will produce nothing but from memory. Lock the musician up with his pens and paper: rob him of every external impression possible: take away even sight and hearing — and he will continue his artistic development unchecked by his surroundings.” I believe that. Take a piece of music like the Beethoven Fifth Symphony. What possible connection can you find between those sounds and any person, place, or definite literary or political idea? Or take Stravinsky’s Firebird suite. It doesn’t even pretend to be absolute music; yet if you were hearing it for the first time, and knew neither its title nor its story, how sure are you that you could invent the correct story to go with it? The other arts all possess a degree of definite outline and expressiveness that do make it possible to use them for propaganda of one kind or another. You can easily make a Communist play or a Fascist motion picture, depending on the choice and implications of your story; you can write democratic poetry, or a proletarian novel, or a socialist essay. You can even put up a Communist or democratic or Fascist building, identifiable as such by the swastikas or fasces or liberty caps or hammers and sickles with which you ornament it. But how under the sun are you going to write music expressive of proletarianism, or Fascism, or socialism, or New Dealism, or any other ism? If you could, the evidence would certainly be found in the music of Richard Wagner. In 1849 Wagner took part in a revolutionary uprising in Germany. A revolutionist, in the Germany of those days, was a Democrat — or even a Republican — in other words, the equivalent of what we would call today a Red. The uprising failed, and Wagner had to flee the country. Four years later, in 1853, while he was still a political exile, still a Red, he started composing his great tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelungs. By 1857 he had got as far as the middle of the second act of Siegfried. Then, despairing of ever getting the cycle produced,

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he stopped short, halfway through the Forest Scene. Not until eight years later in 1865, did he pick up the work again where he had left off. But by that time he was back in Germany, under the subsidy and protection of King Ludwig of Bavaria. And he was a wholehearted royalist, if we are to judge from his letters. Now if music could be expressive of political and sociological opinions, one ought to be able to listen to the forest music of Siegfried and, up to a certain point, say, “Ah, that’s proletarian music”; and after that point, be able to say, “Ah, there speaks the economic royalist.” But one can do no such thing. I defy anybody, who hasn’t been told, to pick out the place where Wagner stopped work on his score in 1857. I am not denying that a composer’s political convictions can arouse emotions which he attempts to transmit in music. But you can’t read art backwards. You can’t deduce the cause from the effect. If you see a woman weeping, you cannot always be sure whether it is because she has lost her lover or because she has been peeling onions. Nor do I believe that race counts for much in writing music. In the Orient, perhaps, where people hear little music except that which has sprung up in their particular corner of the earth, musicians do tend to go on creating the sort of music they have always heard. But in Europe, where for centuries people have been hearing music written by all sorts of other people, and in this country, to a lesser degree, it seems incredible to me that a man should reveal his blood stream by the music he happens to write. Suppose, without ever having heard them before, and without knowing who their composers were, you were to hear three violin concertos in succession: the D major Concerto by Beethoven, the E minor Concerto by Mendelssohn, and the D major Concerto by Tchaikovsky. Search your esthetic soul and tell me, if you can, that you are absolutely positive that you would know, from the music alone, that the first concerto had been written by a German, the second by a Jew, and the third by a Russian. One of the musical gods of Germany today, as he has been for three generations, is the great Aryan composer, Richard Wagner. Now for half a century there has been a theory, among a certain school of musical scholars, that Wagner’s real father was not, as the records have it, Police Actuary Carl Friedrich Wagner, but the actor, Ludwig Geyer. The theory has never been proved correct, but neither has it ever definitely been disproved. It is still a subject of violent controversy. Now Geyer is said to have been a Jew. Suppose that tomorrow documents should be discovered that proved, beyond the possibility of refutation, that Geyer was a Jew and was Wagner’s father. Wagner’s music would instantly become anathema in the country of his birth. Yet would one note of his music be changed? Would it sound any different? Would it suddenly convey meanings that had hitherto been

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obscured? As a matter of fact, if music could reveal its composer’s race beyond any doubt, the Wagner-Geyer controversy would have been settled long ago. Wagner’s music would sound definitely Aryan or non-Aryan, and that would be the end of it. In fact, I think it is the suspicion that their citizens will not detect the difference that causes certain countries to censor the music of certain musicians on racial grounds. Incidentally, when we read of nations that suppress the music of undesirable composers, let us not laugh too loudly. Let us cast our eyes — or those of our parents — back to the brave days of 1917 and 1918, when the music of Richard Strauss and the operas of Richard Wagner could not be played, when Beethoven was tolerated only because we discovered that his ancestry was Dutch. We think ourselves broad-minded and tolerant, willing to listen to music for its own sake and for its own, musical, message, unaffected by the bigotry and pathological nationalism of Europe. Perhaps we are. But we have been poisoned by that virus in the past, and we can be poisoned again. If we are to keep our love of music pure, we shall have to do something beyond merely taking that purity for granted.

“Euterpe and the Gestapo” (The Well-Tempered Listener) Suppose we look a little further into this question of subversive music. When the preceding chapter appeared in its first incarnation, as a broadcast, its reception was not unanimously uncritical. The following is fairly typical of the point of view of the dissidents: “May I take the liberty,” this particular correspondent writes, “of differing with your conclusion that music can never be proletarian, or royalist, or Nazi, or have any other ‘ism’? Can you say that La Marseillaise was not a revolutionary piece of music? Is it not almost a cliché now, among writers on the French revolution, to refer to the influence of De Lisle and ‘that terrible song’? Can you listen to Finlandia and not recognize that, from their point of view, the Russian police were justified, first, in suppressing the title, and then the music itself, as subversive to Tsarist Russia? If music is entirely art, why was the ‘Eroica’ dedicated to Napoleon, and why did Beethoven tear up the dedication when Napoleon became emperor? If there is no politics, why, years later, when Beethoven learned of Napoleon’s death, did he say that he had already written the funeral march for that tragedy? What is the meaning of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, if it is not political? Would you say that the Internationale is not proletarian music? In Hemingway’s play, The Fifth Column, the leading character, hearing the song being sung off stage, says ‘the best people I knew have died for that song.’” I think I can answer that. The words of La Marseillaise are certainly revolutionary, but I still think that anyone who had never heard of the

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song, hearing the music alone, for the first time, would not necessarily find it to be anything more than a stirring march. I believe, too, that if Sibelius had called his composition, not Finlandia, but Orchestral Rhapsody No. 1, the Russian police would never have dreamed of suppressing it. What they did suppress, as my correspondent points out, was, first, the title. What they suppressed later was the fact that no Finn could hear the music without being reminded of the title. In both these cases, what gives the music its supposed political flavor is the set of words with which it is associated. But that’s a literary idea, not a musical one. As far as Beethoven’s dedication of the “Eroica” to Napoleon is concerned, the significant fact about that, as I have said previously, is that Beethoven changed the dedication, but not the music. If the slow movement is really a funeral march for Napoleon the tyrant, did it begin as the funeral march for Napoleon the liberator? Let me say again, that while I don’t for a minute deny that a composer’s political convictions may arouse in him a set of emotions which he turns into music, I do maintain that all that the music can communicate is the emotion, not the views, that inspire it, and that the music may turn out to be equally appropriate to express an entirely different set of views. That is why, when we do want music to express definite ideas, patriotic, economic, or whatnot, we have either to give it a provocative title, or set words to it. As evidence of that necessity, consider the fact that when an American hears a certain tune, he recognizes it as My Country, ’tis of Thee; when an Englishman hears the same tune, he thinks of God Save the King; and when a German hears that selfsame tune, he sings Heil dir im Siegerkranz. Take the Fifth Symphony, which, my correspondent is convinced, is political in its intentions. According to Lawrence Gilman, various commentators, at various times, have heard in the Fifth Symphony the summons of fate, the repercussions of one of Beethoven’s unhappy love affairs, a martial celebration, and the note of the yellow-hammer heard in country walks. As for the Internationale, when I first heard that tune, I had no idea what it was; and while I rather liked it, I must confess that it did not in the least make me think of Karl Marx. I was honestly surprised to discover, later, that its words were revolutionary. Not long ago I heard it, embodied in the first-act finale of the musical comedy, Leave It To Me — the tune that is, not the words. The audience neither rushed to the stage to lynch the actors, nor rushed out of the theater to lynch the New York police force. They accepted it as a pretty good marching tune, and let it go at that. I had much the same experience with the Horst Wessel Song of Nazi Germany, the music of which strikes me as being dreary and uninspired, and utterly inexpressive of the sentiments conveyed by the words. One piece of music has always struck me as a superb example of how unsuccessful a tune can be in expressing the words with which it is linked.

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Find some friend of yours who doesn’t know the story of Tannhäuser, or, if he does know it, has never seen a performance of it. Then play him, either on the piano or on a phonograph record, the first part of the overture. I think he might recognize the Pilgrims’ Chorus as religious in character, and he might even identify, as fantastic, the Bacchanale music that follows. But when he hears the theme that follows, I am almost positive that he will hear it as a stirring military march. I would give odds of a hundred to one that never, in his wildest guess, would he describe it for what it is supposed to be — a hymn to Venus. Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture is based upon four German students’ songs. The one with which the overture concludes is the famous old Latin song, Gaudeamus igitur. As a matter of fact, when I hear that song, I think of it as Cantemus, Psi Upsilon, because the first time I heard it, it was one of the songs of my college fraternity. Another of the airs that Brahms uses is called Was kommt dort von der Hoh, but I can’t think of it as that, because I was brought up knowing it as The Farmer in the Dell. One of the commonest mistakes we make, in listening to music, is that of reacting to the literary associations of the music, in the belief that we’re reacting to the music itself. To me, music has many of the characteristics of textile fabrics. A piece of absolute music, such as a symphony, is like a wonderful Persian rug: meaningless — that is, meaningless in any intellectual sense — and beautiful. Program music is like a richly ornamented cloak. As long as it is being worn by someone, you are aware that it fits its subject. But look at the cloak without knowing the wearer and you will realize that you cannot, with any positivenesss, describe that wearer. You cannot be sure even of his height and weight, to say nothing of the shape of his nose, or the color of his hair and eyes. When people speak of subversive music, you will always find, as I say, that they are talking about music that has words to go with it. Talk of political music, and you are probably talking of music that quotes familiar airs that possess historical or patriotic associations. But those associations have nothing to do with music. That is why all the well-intentioned attempts to find or write a new American national anthem have failed, and will probably continue to fail. People criticize The Star-Spangled Banner on the ground that it is hard to sing — which is true; or that it was originally an English drinking song — which is likewise true. As if that mattered. When we hear The Star-Spangled Banner, we’re not listening to music. We are listening to ideas and images and recollections and associations that go back a hundred years. But when we do listen to music, as music, let us not listen to titles, or words, or the spelling of composers’ names. A great work of art, if it is truly great, is always bigger, and better, than the artist who made it. Once

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a piece of music is written, it escapes from its creator. It takes on a life of its own, and is not concerned with his race, or politics, or intentions. It reflects only the intensity and sincerity of his emotions, not their object. And if it speaks to us truly and beautifully, nothing that we can do or say will change it. It remains always true and beautiful, no matter whether its creator be Jew or Gentile, patriot or enemy alien. Do I seem to labor my point, to worry unnecessarily for fear something should make us lose our musical tolerance? In the last chapter I made passing mention of our attitude toward German music during the World War. Let me allude to it again. Keeping in mind Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Brahms Violin Concerto, the Schumann Piano Concerto, and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyl, and Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, read this: Every conductor, musician, or singer who renders German music in public enacts the role of a Prussian spider that attracts musical flies to his weaving way.… For Americans to listen to German songs composed before the Franco-Prussian war is, in the present crisis, highly demoralizing to patriotic sentiment. Such music creates sympathy through sentimental channels, while the music composed since 1870 is militant, anti-democratic, and psychologically inimical.… The same music that was innocent yesterday can be fraught with the most insidious meaning today. It makes no difference, in this connection, how long a composer has been dead.… German music is German through and through. It is made in Germany. And at this terrible crisis it cannot be heard in America except when Americans are ready to part with their birthright for a mess of musical pottage cooked in the Kaiser’s kitchen and served in helmets stained with the gore of women and children along a frontier of two thousand miles. In extenuation they offer us Beethoven’s symphonies!” That, dearly beloved, is a short extract from a long article, by an otherwise sane American, that appeared in the columns of the Kansas City Star a little over two decades ago. In quoting it I intend no disparagement of the Star. Dozens of similar articles appeared in dozens of American newspapers twentytwo years ago. Twenty-two years is not a long time. I wonder if it has been long enough for us to have acquired clearheadedness and a sense of proportion as completely and permanently as we like to think we have. I don’t know. I can only hope, without much conviction, that we shall never go mad again.

“The Judgment Seat” (The Well-Tempered Listener) Note: Music critics may be in relatively small numbers in this world, but for anyone wishing to consider this profession, Taylor here neatly

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sums up the necessary qualities. After “The Judgment Seat,” will be found Taylor’s “home study course” for becoming a music critic, something he wrote in 1924, toward the end of his days as the music critic for the New York World. People who want to become music critics have my sympathy and commiseration. Sympathy, because it is not hard to understand why the trade sounds like an alluring one: the privilege of hearing all the great music and all the great performers, and being paid for doing it; the sense of power that comes of having one’s opinions printed and taken seriously. Commiseration, because these aspiring Solomons don’t know what awaits them. The fact remains that anyone who is or ever has been a music critic is besieged with questions and requests for advice from all sorts and conditions of persons who think it would be fun to sit in judgment upon the creators and interpreters of the most intangible of all the arts. They all ask the same three questions: how can I become a music critic? What qualifications must I possess? What use is a music critic, anyhow? The answer to the first is short and simple. If someone asked you, “How can I become president of Sears, Roebuck & Company?” what would your answer be? My guess is that it would be the obvious one, “Get a job with Sears, Roebuck & Company.” And to anyone who asks, “How do I get to be a music critic on a magazine or newspaper?” the answer is precisely the same: “Get a job on a magazine or newspaper.” Any paper, any job — advertising, circulation, general news, sports, rewrite. The kind of job doesn’t matter in the least. What does matter is having your foot in the door, in being in a position to see your chance when it arrives, to seize it — and to make good with it. And that brings us to the second question. What makes a music critic? What does he have to know, and how does he learn it? Let me try to define the ideal music critic. In the first place, like the dramatic critic, he has a double responsibility. He must be able to appraise not only the merits of a new work of art, but the merits for its performance. A literary critic, or a critic of painting, needs only to say, “Soandso has written a good book,” or, “painted a bad picture.” The music critic must be able to judge, not only the quality of the music, but how well or ill it was sung or played. His technical background, therefore, must be extensive. To begin with, he must know a lot of history — the history of the art itself, the history of the instruments, of the orchestra, and the lives of the great composers and interpreters. Naturally, no ordinary human being could retain all these facts in his memory, but he must at least have studied them with sufficient thoroughness to be able to know where to lay his finger on them when he needs them. I have known only one critic who,

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apparently, never needed to consult a book. That was the late Henry E. Krehbiel, of the New York Herald Tribune. A famous colleague of his once remarked that the only library a music critic needed was a set of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Pop Krehbiel’s telephone number. [Note: Taylor’s memorial tribute to Krehbiel is in Chapter Three.] Our ideal critic must know a good many things besides history. He should be familiar with the works of the standard orchestral repertoire; roughly speaking, that means upwards of two hundred compositions that he should have heard, either in actual performance or on records, or, if that is impossible, that he should have studied and attempted to play over for himself. That also means that he must know enough about musical notation to be able to follow an orchestral score with some degree of ease. Besides that he must, of course, have a thorough knowledge of the various musical forms, including some acquaintance with harmony and counterpoint. Besides being familiar with the orchestral repertoire, he must know the famous piano and violin concertos, and a vast number of the smaller works that make up the literature of these instruments. He must be on speaking terms with the great string quartets, and other familiar chambermusic works. He must be acquainted with the stories and the scores of the standard operas, as well as the better-known songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, Fauré, and a host of other song composers. He ought to be enough of a pianist to be able at least to thumb his way through a song accompaniment or a piano arrangement of an orchestral work. While he need not actually play the violin, he should know enough of its technique to be able to tell good playing from bad. The same holds true of singing. Most of the critics I have known could not by any stretch of the imagination be called singers, but they have known enough of the technique of the art to be able to diagnose correct and faulty vocal production. So much for his technical equipment. But we cannot stop with discussing what he should know. We must also discuss what he should be. And here we enter a field of which the average would-be critic never thinks at all — and which is the most important of all. While anyone who is willing to study hard enough and listen faithfully enough can acquire all of the knowledge that I have just outlined, he may, nevertheless, never manage to become a good critic. For critics, like poets, are born. The primary and the indispensable qualification of a good critic of any of the arts is the possession of a critical mind. Now that sounds like defining a thing in terms of itself; but let me explain. William James once divided human beings into two categories: the tender-minded, and the toughminded. The former, he said, is the person whose mind is dominated by his emotions, the person who believes something because he wants it to be true; the blind partisan, the person who embraces an artistic or political

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faith and is, by that act, automatically rendered incapable of seeing any flaws in it. The tough-minded person, on the other hand, is the one whose mind insists on functioning without regard to the wishes of its unfortunate possessor; the person who, upon being confronted with an irrefutable fact, is able to admit that fact, even though it runs contrary to his secret hopes and convictions. If you can listen to the playing of a string quartet composed of your mother, your sweetheart, your elder brother, and your best friend, and say — if not to them, at least to yourself — “That was terrible!” If you are able to do that, if your judgment functions without regard to your prejudices, then you can hope to be a real critic. Notice that I say, “if not to them, at least to yourself.” For there is another qualification of a real critic. A good critic has a sense of proportion; which means, first, that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, is willing to admit that his own opinions are not necessarily the last word on the subject. It means, second, that he is merciful. He tempers his verdict according to the pretensions of the culprit. He doesn’t blame a waltz for not being a symphony, and he doesn’t abuse a street fiddler for not being Mischa Elman. It is only the very young who think that it is hypocrisy to keep silent, sometimes, when the raw truth would only hurt without curing. A true sportsman doesn’t shoot sparrows with an elephant gun. Which brings me to another point. “Criticism” is not synonymous with faultfinding. A good critic is on the alert, not only for faults, but for merits. He must be capable, not only of disapproval, but of enthusiasm. He must be capable, not only of saying that something is worthless, but that it is wonderful — if it is. That sounds so self-evident that it’s hardly worth saying, but it is, nevertheless, one of the hardest parts of a critic’s job. In my own brief experience of five years at music criticism. I found that one of the easiest things to do was to dissect a bad performance or a bad piece of music, because that required little more than an exercise of one’s analytical faculties. The difficult thing was to explain a great piece of music or a great performance; for when you have to do that, you have to communicate an emotion from yourself to a reader. And right there is where you must be, not only an appraiser, but a writer. And there is the last, and by no means the least, of the qualification of an ideal music critic. He must be able to write, and write well. He must be able to re-create emotions through the power of words. He must be an enthusiast about music who can contrive to make his subject always interesting, regardless of what his topic of the moment may happen to be. If he is bored at a concert, he must be able to make even his boredom interesting. Otherwise he will not be read; and a critic without readers is an actor without an audience. He must know how to structure a criticism,

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arranging his details so that the general impression of what he writes is the one he wanted to convey. I once wrote a review of Gilbert Seldes’ book, The Seven Lively Arts. About a week after it had appeared I had a note from Mr. Seldes, in which he said, “Thanks for the review. The others all said the book was fifteen per cent bad. You said it was eighty-five per cent good.” I never forgot that note. It is fatally easy, in criticism, to devote so much space to minor flaws that there is no room left for the major merits. Now needless to say, there is no such thing as the ideal critic I have just outlined. When he does appear, he will probably be drawn instantly to heaven in a chariot of fire. Nevertheless, he does exist as an ideal, and an astonishing number of critics come nearer to approximating his qualifications than you would think. Especially in this country. I have been on both sides of the fence, knowing the critics, first, as colleagues, and latterly, as prosecuting attorneys; and I have read oceans of criticism, here and abroad. And I honestly believe that, on their average, the American and English music critics, for general knowledge and experience, for fairness, conscientiousness, and writing ability, are the best in the world. One reason for their pre-eminence, I think, is that, whereas the average Continental critic spends three fourths of his time hearing only music and performers from his own country, we hear music, and interpreters, from every country on the face of the globe — with the possible exception, of course, of our own. It is all the more to the credit of American music critics that they work under two handicaps that hardly exist on the other side of the water. One is the heartbreaking necessity for speed. The conditions under which a New York critic works are rather typical of the rest of the country. If you are working for a New York morning paper, your review of a given musical event must reach the composing room on the average about midnight. If you leave the concert hall or the opera house, say, about ten-fifteen, you have until quarter of twelve to finish your copy. In other words, you have just one hour and a half in which to sort out your impressions of what may be a new work or a new performer, plan what you’re going to say, and write a critical article that — presumably — is going to influence the opinions of several thousand people. The marvel is that our critics can do it at all, let alone that they do it so well. Even the critic who is lucky enough to work for an evening paper is not really much better off. His copy must be in before nine the following morning, which means that he must either sit up half the night or get up when he hears the milkman. His other handicap is the vast quantity of music that he must hear. People who have never done musical criticism, and who are fond of music, often say, wistfully, “How I envy you, being able to hear so much music!” what they don’t realize, what nobody who has not tried it can realize, is

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that the one luxury forever denied to a music critic is that of being able to hear music. He must listen, with his mind, every second of every minute that he spends at a performance, if he is to do his job well. If a new piece of music is dull, or one of the performers is incompetent, he can’t just doze, or let his mind wander until something interesting commands his attention again. He must listen attentively to the bad as well as to the good. He cannot sink back and be carried away by a beautiful passage or a wonderful bit of singing or playing. He must analyze it — and worse than that, analyze himself. “Why do I like that? What is that violinist’s particular quality? What is that pianist doing with that Beethoven sonata that Soandso didn’t do last week?” He must do this, night after night, week after week. Here, he gets no respite. In Europe, he does, for musical events don’t tread on one another’s heels so thickly as they do here. A foolishly conscientious critic in a musical center like New York or Chicago can attend and criticize two hundred musical events in the course of a single season of eight months, and still leave two or three hundred to be covered by his assistants. The nervous strain is something that you wouldn’t believe if you have not experienced it. And so, around about the middle of January, with the season nearing its third quarter, if your favorite music critic is a trifle less readable, a little more savage than he was last fall, don’t judge him too harshly. Be a little sympathetic. He is merely on the way to his annual nervous breakdown, all in the cause of your information and entertainment.

“Words and Music” (New York World, December 21, 1924) A correspondent from Hunter College writes in to ask our advice as to what sort of course of study she should pursue in order to fit herself to be a music critic. After thinking very hard for several minutes we have evolved the following home study course, which ought to fit any aspirant for the task of covering a New York concert season:

1. Obtain a position as Prohibition enforcement agent and hold it for one month, or until you no longer mind being a social outcast. 2. Induce your friends to gather in your living room every night to play blind man’s buff with you. Keep this up until you are reasonably confident of being able to leave Carnegie Hall in the middle of a slow movement without tripping over an usher or otherwise attracting attention. 3. Make derogatory remarks about all your best friends, and then practice winning them back. This will save you from embarrassment in the presence of opera singers and other natural enemies.

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4. Learn to smoke Italian cheroots with straws down their middles — or at least learn to stay in the same room with someone who is smoking them. This will enable you to keep on good terms with Bill Guard of the Metropolitan press department. 5. First catch a bad cold, then hire some one to play you piano arrangements of all the symphonies until you can avoid coughing during the quiet passages. 6. Get the most uncomfortable chair you can find and sit in it. Hold your hat and overcoat in your right hand and a program and set of program notes in your left. Practice until you have learned to sleep in the chair without dropping either the overcoat or the programs, and without snoring. This is invaluable for recitals. 7. Memorize the first twenty-four bars of the following: Liszt B minor and Beethoven “Appassionata” piano sonatas: Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” violin sonata and Paganini’s “Palpiti;” Haendel’s “Hear Me, Ye Winds and Waves,” Franck’s “La Procession,” Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum,” and Hageman’s “At the Well.” Thus equipped, you will be able to follow any piano, violin or song recital without a program. 8. Work cross-word puzzles until you have discovered twenty-five synonyms for “rotten.” As a post-graduate course, you might try memorizing the following rules: When an orchestral conductor inspires in you no comment whatsoever, remember the he “conducted with vigor;” when a singer has no voice but is obviously doing his best, he “possesses a good sense of style;” when a violinist is utterly uninteresting, he “displayed good intonation;” when a pianist is a bore, he “revealed an excellent technical equipment;” all accompanists are “sympathetic,” and any opera performance “was heartily applauded.” Do not be afraid of using these little life-savers whenever you need them. Nobody will be able to prove you wrong, and you will become known as a “constructive” critic.

“Sport For Art’s Sake” (Sports Illustrated, December 14, 1959) Note: This is Taylor’s final published article and it is appropriate that it be on opera. According to his daughter, the late Joan Kennedy Taylor, he was proudest of his work as a composer, especially his two operas produced by the Metropolitan. He did, however, write two others, The Dragon and Ramuntcho, the latter mentioned below. This is a fine farewell to the writings of Taylor, for it provides good examples of the two aspects that make Taylor’s writings so readable: they are laced

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with information that would be enjoyed by more than just music aficionados, and there is always present that Taylor humor. In the last few years sporting events have been bursting out all over the musical comedy stage. It may be said that Damn Yankees, that happy mixture of baseball and Gwen Verdon, sparked the current vogue for musical athletes, but we have also had harmonious basketball players, swimmers and race track touts, as well as boxers, singing and dancing the legends of their respective sports. Except for football (which was put on the stage years ago in George Ade’s The College Widow and has now been revived in Leave It to Jane, the musical version), these sports are new to musical comedy. But the new development on Broadway is an old story in grand opera. I myself have located 15 different varieties of sporting events in what is called “sarious” music — the bullfight in Bizet’s Carmen, for instance, all the way to Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, Honegger’s Rugby and the crap game in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, the last of which is in part treated like a fugue, though none of the players rolling the bones seems to appreciate it. In my earlier years I put a complete game of pelote, the Basque national sport, into my opera Ramuntcho, authentic in all respects except that it was played indoors, while pelote is classically an outdoor sport. And new forms of sport are constantly appearing in opera itself. At the festival at Spoleto in Italy this year bridge made its first appearance in opera in A Hand of Bridge, the collaboration of Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber. All the action in this brief opera takes place around the card table. Two suburban couples who play bridge together every night sing their secret thoughts as they shuffle, deal, bid and pass. “I’m dummy again, I’m always dummy!” warbles Sally without sorrow. “I want to buy that hat with the peacock feathers.” Her husband, Bill, is dreaming about his mistress and not paying much attention to his cards: he sings absent-mindedly, “If I could only take you home with me and strangle you in the night!” The other wife, Geraldine, totally unaware of the lethal thoughts of her partner, sings of her longing for love. And the remaining member of this sinister suburban quartet, a young chap named David, sings dreamily, “Every day another version of every known perversion. If I were rich as Morgan I would still play bridge every night with Sally and Bill.” Obviously, a bridge game of this sort needs the services of a Charles Goren to analyze the hands; the players themselves seem hardly to know what was bid. But opera has always had a weakness for crooked card games. In December 1910, in New York, the audience at the Metropolitan was electrified on the opening night of Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West when poker first appeared at the Met. Emmy Destin was playing la fanciulla del West, or

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Minnie, the girl of the golden West. Caruso was Ramerrez, alias Johnson, the road agent. Pasquale Amato was Jack Rance, the sheriff. When Jack Rance corners Johnson in Minnie’s cabin, she makes the lawman a proposition. They will play poker for Johnson, the best two hands out of three. If Minnie wins, Rance will allow Johnson to escape. If Rance wins, the tenor is to hang and Minnie is to become Jack Rance’s girl. It is possible that Puccini had no idea whatsoever of how poker was played. Minnie wins the first game. Rance wins the second. In the third game Minnie draws a weak hand and being a resourceful girl, pretends to feel faint and asks the gullible sheriff to get her a drink. While his back is turned she hastily stuffs her cards into her blouse. From her stocking she pulls out five brand-new cards, which she has apparently carried there for precisely this emergency. When Rance returns she shows him this substitute hand — three aces and a pair. Johnson is free, and so is Minnie — the crook. The moral perplexities involved in crooked card games in opera are so complex that we must return to this phase of the matter later; for the time being, it is enough to point out that Puccini needed an expert on cards, and it may be that there should have been an Ernest Hemingway on hand to write about the bullfight in Carmen, an expert on archery in William Tell and an authority on fencing in most operas. For the composers of operas had a weakness for this sport, which they generally introduce in the guise of a duel. Sometimes the principals in these events are really mad at each other and are not engaged in what would be called a sporting event. There is a magnificent fight of this sort in the first act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, where the Don, attacked by the father of Donna Anna, whom he has wronged, engages the old gentleman in a duel and runs him through. But more often the action is arbitrary, as is the match in the last act of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino (The Force of Destiny), between Don Carlo and Don Alvaro. Not that we actually see them fight. After spending some 48 bars insulting each other they rush offstage to combat, Don Carlo singing, “Vengeance.… My sword shall slay you!” After a spell of sword clashing, Don Alvaro appears alone. To make it crystal clear that he has won, we hear Don Carlo say, “I am dying.” When Leonora asks Don Alvaro what has happened, he says, “He provoked me.… I killed him.” Leonora: “Who was he?” Don Alvaro: “Your own brother.” Leonora: “Great Heaven! (runs hastily to the woods).” In Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onégin the hero and his best friend, Lenski, have quarreled over what the baritone and the tenor always quarrel about in opera. Lenski challenges Onégin, and the two meet in a deserted spot. Before shooting, they sing together:

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“My foe! So now we stand here parted By thirst for blood and even death, Where once, in friendship open-hearted, We each would give our dying breath To save the other.”

Onégin fires first, and Lenski drops dead, Onégin rushing to him and saying in a croaking voice: “Dead!” At least that is what is supposed to happen. On one unfortunate occasion at the Metropolitan the property man forgot to load Onégin’s pistol. As they came to the end of their song (“Shall we not join hands, hands of gladness? No. No. No. No.”) and fired, nothing happened. At last the resourceful Lenski clasped his side, exclaiming, “My old heart trouble!” and fell dead anyway. It will hardly be believed that an innocent sport like angling can be fixed, but it can be done in opera. In Rimski-Korsakov’s Sadko the hero announced to the people of Novgorod that he is going out on Lake Ilmen to catch three fish made of solid gold. When this is greeted by three rousing jeers, Sadko bets his head against the wealth of the merchants of Novgorod. He then goes out in a canoe, drops his net and, sure enough, catches the three golden fish, enriching himself and bankrupting the merchants. But what he hasn’t bothered to tell anyone is that the Princess of the Sea, a submarine cutie who is in love with him, has arranged to have the fish swim into his net any time he would like to have them. The same sort of dubious sporting event appeared 77 years before Rimski-Korsakov in Karl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz (The Freeshooter), which we are told won the greatest applause in the history of the German theater on its opening night in Berlin. Max, a young forest ranger, has been having a batting slump — hasn’t shot anything for some time. If he doesn’t win tomorrow’s shooting match he stands to lose his girl, Agathe, and his job as well. Like many contestants in operatic sporting events, he makes a deal with the devil’s disciple, who gives him seven bullets. Six of them will hit anything he wants. But the last shot belongs to the devil. Max scores bull’seyes with the magic bullets, but the last shot hits Agathe. Everything is all right, though, for Agathe carries a charm that is proof against all magic. Something of the same sort would have come in handy at the most famous shooting match in opera, that in Rossini’s William Tell. Rossini himself was certainly no sportsman — once when he was writing a song in bed, it fell to the floor, and he wrote another rather than pick it up — but William Tell is full of action. The tyrant Gessler hangs his hat on a pole and orders all citizens to bow to it. Tell refuses and Gessler sentences him to shoot an apple off his son’s head. As the apple is being placed on Jemmy

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Tell’s head, the archer, pretending to select an arrow, conceals another under his coat. “Be immovable, and incline thine eyes toward the earth,” Tell says to his son. “One movement and thy doom is sealed.” Reluctantly, he draws his bow, takes careful aim and splits the apple. As he faints during the scene of general rejoicing, the extra arrow falls out of his jacket. “What’s that for?” Gessler wants to know. Now if Tell had any sense, he would have replied, “Oh, just a spare” — something like that. Instead, this being opera, he sings, “Per te, s’egli era estinto!” (For thee Gessler, had I killed my child!) Gessler: “Trema!” (Tremble!”) Tell: “Io tremar?” (I fear not!) Gessler: “Put him in irons.” Wagner loved hunting scenes. In the famous night scene that opens the second act of Tristan und Isolde the women stand listening to King Marke’s hunting horns as he rides off to the hunt; and the spectacular hunt meet in Tannhäuser is tagged with wild scenery, horses and a pack of hounds. It may be that the effect is never what the composer intended. Isolde is waiting for the sound of King Marke’s hunting horns to die away so that she can signal to Tristan to come over for a spot of necking. But it is never made clear why Marke should be riding away with his followers in the dead of night. What is he hunting — owls? And I remember a glamorous performance of the hunt scene in Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan years ago when one of the hounds slipped his leash and wandered around the stage. He sniffed one of the trees in Joseph Urban’s superb forest set, turned to the audience and the rest of the pack with an expression that plainly said, “Hey, fellers, look a real tree!” and performed the customary ritual to the vast entertainment of the audience but to the ruination of the mood of that scene of the opera. If all other forms of competition failed, Wagner could always come up with a singing contest. In Tannhäuser the knights compete in making up songs on a given topic, the topic, in this instance, being: The True Nature of Love. The first competitor, Wolfram, sings of the joys of austere, platonic, spiritual love, preferably unrequited. We know, however that Tannhäuser, who has spent a year with Venus in her grotto, does not share his sentiments. Remarking something to the effect that “if you want to worship cold perfection, take a look at the stars,” Tannhäuser replies [with a passionate outburst] and goes on with his explicit conception of the nature of love. “By now Tannhäuser has lost control of himself,” says the austere Ernest Newman. “Madly he sings his song from the first act in praise of the goddess of earthly love, the fountain of all grace and beauty and joy; he ends with a cry to all poor mortals who have never known her love to fly with him to the hill of Venus. At this unblushing revelation of where he had spent the time of his absence from them, the assembly breaks up in horror. The ladies leave the hall with gestures of dismay.”

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Wagner’s other singing contest makes up the whole plot of Die Meistersinger. But of all the sloppily run contests! In Act One, Pogner announces a forthcoming song contest, the prize being the hand of his daughter, Eva, provided she consents — which, of course, renders the whole offer a swindle. Walther, who has had his eye on Eva, decides to take the examination for the title of Mastersinger so he can compete in the contest. He flunks miserably, thus eliminating himself. But in Act Two is it obvious that Walther and Eva are going steady, which again makes the approaching contest meaningless. In Act Three, to nobody’s astonishment, Walther walks off with the prize, leaving us with the spectacle of a useless contest with only two entrants, won by a competitor who is ineligible. There is a good deal of this sort of thing in Wagner: the scene in Parsifal, when the hero, poaching on the grounds of Montsalvat with his bow and arrow, brings down a stuffed swan; and the garden scene in the same opera, when the magician Klingsor throws the javelin at Parsifal, but it stops in mid-air and Parsifal makes a sensational barehanded catch. It may be that contests which are so mysteriously decided cannot really be called sporting events, but they serve, at any rate, to indicate the extent of something like sport in opera and the strange changes that take place in sport when it unites with music. One of these weird games that exist only in opera appears in Schwanda, the work of the Czech composer Jaromir Weinberger that was first produced in Prague in 1927. In the course of the action we find Schwanda, the bagpipe player, in Hell (never mind how he got there). The devil, who is bored, hints that a little bagpipe playing might be fun. Schwanda refuses. Then the devil tricks him into signing away his soul. Just as the devil is about to arrange a little party for Schwanda and a few intimate friends, Babinski strolls in. He is a friend of Schwanda’s (and never mind how he got there, either). Babinski proposes a game of cards. The devil accepts with alacrity. He names the stakes: if he wins he gets Schwanda’s and Babinski’s souls. If he loses he forfeits half his kingdom and Schwanda gets his soul back. The game that follows is odd even by the standards of these queer contests we have reviewed. They keep calling out numbers, and the devil keeps drawing fresh cards out of his boot. Just as he is about to declare himself the winner, Babinski thrusts his hand into his boot and draws the winning card. The moral seems to be that for once virtue has outcheated the cheater and that rigged games don’t work. There is at least one honest card game in opera. It is the game that Alfredo Germont plays against Baron Duophol in the second act of Verdi’s La Traviata. In Flora’s mansion (after the masqueraders pretending to be matadors from Madrid have sung of killing five fine bulls in one day’s

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contest) all sing: “La palestra dischiudiamo agli audaci giuocator” (Let us throw the portals open to the gamblers who wait). We learn that Alfredo takes Baron Duophol for about $800, but only because his luck is good. No funny business with cards in boots or stockings, or pacts with the devil. But what sort of game are they playing? The cards are cut and presumably dealt. “On this,” sings the Baron, “I stake a hundred louis.” Alfredo sings that he’ll see him. Then a kibitzer named Gastone cuts the cards again and sings to Alfredo: “Un asso … un fante” (An ace … a knave…). “You’ve won it.” “Wilt double?” says the Baron Alfredo wilt. This time Gastone sings: “Un quarto, un sette” (A four, a seven). “Victory is mine!” sings Alfredo. It is all pretty puzzling. Nothing in the game is the least like the conversation of my card-playing friends. Honest the game is (by operatic standards), but it is impossible to avoid a suspicion that Verdi was making it up as he went along. The moral standards of players in contests in opera are deplorably low, whether they are hunting, shooting, fencing or engaged in singing contests: somebody cheats in almost all the games, or, if not, the games don’t make much sense. Sport in opera plainly needs some rules.

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Bibliography

Pegolotti, James. Deems Taylor: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Taylor, Deems. Of Men and Music. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937. ____________, The Well-Tempered Listener. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. ____________, Music to My Ears. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949. ____________, A Pictorial History of the Movies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943.

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Index

A Adams, Franklin P., xi, 5 Aida (Verdi), Metropolitan opening night (1924) production of, 90–94; San Carlo Opera production of, 43–44 Algonquin Round Table, xi, 59 American composers, difficulties getting performances by, 170–173 American in Paris, An (Gershwin), Taylor’s program note for premiere of, 121–124 American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, xiv ASCAP, see American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Auer, Leopold, concert in honor of, 97–99

B Bach, Johann Sebastian, “swinging” the music of, 154–158 Barber, Samuel, New York Philharmonic performance of symphony by, 170–173

Benchley, Robert, xi, 9 Blitzstein, Marc, 170 Boris Godunov (Moussorgsky), see Chaliapin, Feodor

C Card playing in opera, 214–215, 218–219 Carmen (Bizet), Esther Ferrabini performance in, 44–45; Geraldine Farrar’s last appearance in, 57–58 Censorship of music, 199–204 Century Magazine (1914), poem from, 4–5; article from, 10–11 Chaliapin, Feodor, performance in Boris Goudonov by, 52–53 Chamber Music Society of New York, see Portrait of a Lady Chaplin, Charles: comments on performance in City Lights, 126–128 Chicago Opera Company, 56 Chicago Orchestra (1923), review of, 65 Cincinnati Orchestra (1923), review of, 64–5 City Lights, see Chaplin, Charles

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224  •  Contents Cleveland Orchestra (1923), review of, 63–64 Composing music, difficulties of, 151–153 Concert programming, suggestions for, 186–189 Coon, Oscar (Taylor’s music teacher), 148–151

D Damrosch, Walter, see New York Symphony De Pachmann, Vladimir, recital by, 71–74 Detroit Orchestra (1923), review of, 65–66 Don Giovanni (Mozart), see Sports in Opera, 215 Dueling in opera, 215–216

E Echo, The (Taylor), 1 Eugene Onegin (Tchaikovsky), see Sports in Opera, 215–216

Gauthier, Eva, commentary on recital of, 74–79 Gerryflappers, 57 Gershwin, George: accompanist in Eva Gauthier concert, 74, 77; importance as composer, 87– 88; premiere of his Rhapsody in Blue, 82–84; work with Taylor on program note for An American in Paris, 121–122

H Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit (Taylor poem), 5–8 Hand of Bridge, A (Barber), see Sports in Opera, 214 Hadley, Henry (conductor), 60 Hayes, Roland, recital of, 94–95 Heifetz, Jascha, see Auer, Leopold Herrmann, Bernard: early experience as composer, 167–170 Hess, Myra, concert of, 59 Hofmann, Josef, see Auer, Leopold Honegger, Arthur, see Pacific 231 Hughes, Charles Evans, 11–12 Huneker, James Gibbons (music critic), 41

F Fanciulla del West, La (Puccini), see Sports in Opera, 214–215 Farrar, Geraldine, see Carmen (Bizet) Ferrabini, Esther, see Carmen (Bizet) Fisk University, 94 Forza del Destino, La (Verdi), see Sports in Opera F. P. A., see Adams, Franklin Pierce Freischutz, Der (Weber), see Sports in Opera, 216

G Gabrilowitsch, Ossip, see Detroit Orchestra; Auer, Leopold Ganz, Rudolph, see St. Louis Orchestra Garden, Mary, see Salome (Strauss)

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I International Composers’ Guild, concert of “new music” by, 80–81

J Jeritza, Maria, first Metropolitan Opera performances by: Die Tote Stadt (Korngold), 48–50; Tosca (Puccini), 50–51

K Kaufman, George F., 1 Kennedy Mary (Taylor’s second wife), 106

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Contents  •  225 King’s Henchman, The (Taylor), 101, 110, 143 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, see Tote Stadt, Die Krehbiel, Henry (music critic), tribute to, 70–71

Music to My Ears (Taylor), chapter from, 151–153 Musical instruments, improvements over the years, 158–164

L

National Geographic Society, membership in, 134–136 Nationalism in music, 204–207 New Republic, article from, 33–35 New York American, 125; articles from, 126–141 New York Chamber Music Society (1925), 96 New York City, police department annual (1930) report for, 130–131 New York Philharmonic: intermission commentary for, 143–144; reviews of, 59–60, 68–70; two intermission broadcast scripts for, 167–173 New York Symphony, 89 New York Tribune Sunday Magazine, 9; articles from, 11–32, 36–40 New York University, Taylor as student in, 1, 5–8, 58–59, 102–106 New York World, 41; music criticisms from, 43–99

Landowska, Wanda, New York concert with real harpsichord by, 79–80 Lane, Franklin K. (Secretary of the Interior, 1916), 20–21, 24 LeBaron, William, 41 Life (1911–1912), poems from, 2–3 Loefffler, Charles Martin, tribute to, 178–181

M Mahler, Gustav, New York premiere of Seventh Symphony by, 68–70 Manhattan Opera House, 43–44, 56 Mann, Erika, 199 Martinelli, Giovanni, see Samson et Dalila Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Die (Wagner), see Sports in Opera, 218 Metropolitan Opera productions, reviews of, 48–53, 57–58, 88, 90–94 Midwest Orchestras (1923) 61–63; comments on and reviews of, 63–68 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 1; see also King’s Henchman, The Minneapolis Orchestra, review of, 66–67 Modern music, concerns of Taylor about, 189–199 “The Monster” (Taylor essay on Richard Wagner),148–151 Music criticism, Taylor comments on, 207–213; Taylor guidelines for, 212–213

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N

O Of Men and Music (Taylor), chapters from, 145–151, 153–154, 158–167, 173–175, 178–186, 189–199

P Pacific 231 (Honegger), 89 Parker, Dorothy, xi, 1 Parsifal (Wagner), see Sports in Opera, 218 Pertile, Aureliano, 51 Peter Ibbetson (Taylor), 125

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226  •  Contents Philadelphia Orchestra, reviews of, 47–48, 79–80 Pictorial History of the Movies (Taylor), 126 Politics in music, 178–181, 199–207 Porter, Cole, “Within the Quota” ballet music by, 81–82 Portrait of a Lady (Taylor orchestral work), Taylor’s review of, 96 Pulitzer, Ralph, 72

Sports in opera, 213–219 Stamford, Connecticut, 58–59; urbanization of, 132–134 Stock, Frederick, see Chicago Orchestra Stokowski, Leopold, 79, 81 Strauss, Richard, 199–200; as conductor, 47–48; interviewed by Taylor, 164–167 “Swing” versions of the classics,” 154–158

R

T

Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 98; recital of, 51–52 Radio concerts, 143-144; Taylor’s experiences as commentator for, 181–186 Ramuntcho (Taylor), see Sports in Opera, 214 Reiner, Fritz, see Cincinnati Orchestra Ross, Alex (New Yorker music critic), 59

Tannhäuser (Wagner), see Sports in Opera, 217 Taylor, Deems, opinions on arrangers of orchestral works, 85–87 arranging classics into popular versions, 154–158 audience disinterest in American concert music, 170–173 becoming a music critic, 207–213 being interviewed, 111–115 censorship in music, 199–204 difficulties of composing music, 151–153 experiences as New York Philharmonic intermission commentator,181–186 fatherhood, 106–110 “breadlines” during the Great Depression, 138–141 Gene Tunney, boxer and renaissance man, 136–138 jazz, 84–88 membership in National Geographic Society, 134–136 modern music’s demands on listener, 189–199 motion pictures’ (silent to sound) future, 115–119 nationalism in music, 204–207 naturalization ceremonies, 19–24 need for tunefulness in classical music, 53–56 patriotism, 36–40 prison economics, 128–129 programming a concert, 186–189

S Sadko (Rimsky-Korsakov), see Sports in Opera, 216 St. Louis Orchestra (1923), review of, 67–68 Salome (Strauss), Mary Garden’s appearance in, 56–57 Samson et Dalila (Saint-Saëns), review of, 88 San Carlo Opera production, review of, 43 Scorsese, Martin, see Pictorial History of the Movies Serafin, Tullio, 94 Shaw, George Bernard, 60 Siren Song, The (Taylor orchestral work), Taylor’s review of, 60 Smart Set, poem from, 3–4 Smoot, Reed (Utah Senator in 1931), 128 Sokoloff, Nicolai, see Cleveland Orchestra Sousa, John Philip, tribute to, 173–175 Sports Illustrated, Taylor article from, 213–219

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Contents  •  227

reviewing performance of own orchestral work, 60, 96 results of “the official mind,” 15–19 social changes in American life, 11–15 sports in opera, 213–219 war’s casualties, 32–35 Taylor, Joan Kennedy (Taylor’s daughter), reflections on infant years of, 106–110 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich, tribute to tunefulness of, 175–178 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), satirical analysis of portion of, 10 Tote Stadt, Die (Korngold), New York premiere of, 48–50 Traviata, La (Verdi), see Sports in Opera, 218–219 Tosca (Puccini), see Jeritza, Maria Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), see Sports in Opera, 217 Tunney, Gene, 136–138

V Vanity Fair, 101; articles from, 102–119 Verbrugghen, Henri, see Minneapolis Orchestra

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Verdi, Giuseppe: compositional ability to excite audience, 45–47

W Wagner, Richard, 149–150, 202–204, 217–218; “The Monster,” 145–148 Well Tempered Listener, The (Taylor), chapters from, 154–158, 175–178, 186–189, 199–212 Whiteman, Paul: concert premiering Rhapsody in Blue, 82–84; instrumental make-up of orchestra, 85 William Tell (Rossini), see Sports in Opera, 216–217 Within the Quota (Porter), see Porter, Cole World War I: censorship in music, 199–201; visit to injured French soldiers by Taylor, 33–35

Z Zimbalist, Efrem, see Auer, Leopold

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