Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 3, No. 7 (1929-04)

220 The Phonograph Monthly Review April, 1929 make The Phonograph Monthly Review avail- able in every music store throughout the country. But it is very difficult to convince some of the dealers of the great advantages they can derive from putting the magazine on sale. We know that there are at least fifty thousand people in the United States who would want the magazine if they only knew of its existence. Our task is to make the magazine known to these people through the dealers’ shop where they buy records. We have never made an appeal to our sub- scribers before, but now I am asking you one and all if you will not give us your co-operation in this campaign. So many of you have been so liberal with your praise of the magazine and your .admiration of its aims in private letters that I am hoping you will give a material expression to your appreciation by showing your dealer a copy of the magazine, if he is not familiar with it, and tell him something about the magazine and its purpose, and what it can do for him in arousing new interest in the phonograph and recorded music. It is not only to our advantage that the magazine increase its already rapidly growing circulation, but to our readers, the dealers, and the entire phonograph world. During the last year we nearly trebled our circulation, and as you have observed we have many improvements in the magazine—a new cover, adding eminent writers to our Staff, etc., but of course we realize that there are still many further improvements that can be made when we obtain a still greater circulation and additional advertisements. With the increased revenue then at our disposal we can fulfil more completely the mission we have set for ourselves. We have tried to do the very best we could, considering the comparatively limited opportuni- ties we have had. It is no easy matter to bring a publication safely over its first and second years, and we have all had to make no small sacrifices to do so. But we have succeeded in doing so and in establishing The Phonograph Monthly Review as a firm and significant factor in the phonographic and musical world. We who have organized the magazine will never cease our efforts until we succeed in bringing the magazine to every American music lover who wishes to keep abreast of the current phonographic progress. With the assistance of our many friends we hope to reach new fields and new opportunities, and I can assure you that we shall do our share in giv- ing you a larger and better magazine. The Growth of Discord in Music By ALFRED H. MEYER T HE music lover returns home from his concert. Or he goes to the store to hear the latest batch of records from his favorite forward looking conductors. In many cases he comments, “I like much of it, but why is it so full of discord? I can not hear it without being annoyed. Some- times it gives me actual pain. Is there a reason or a need for it all?” To proceed from the general to the particular, I once heard a very pleasant elderly lady address a manager in this fashion, “Wlhy can’t musicians nowadays play more music which is really ‘the concourse of sweet sounds’?” Thus certain elements in the general public. But there are also well schooled musicians who represent the same point of view. When this is the case, they do not stop with asking questions, they declare- dogmatically, “This is all wrong”, speak of the music of the present as “alleged music”, assure all those who will listen to them that it was not thus in the “good old days”. All this would be more plausible if the supposedly learned ones did not forget or ignore certain pa- tent facts. There never have been any “good old days’’. The phrase always refers either to an earlier period in the life of the individual who uses it, in which he was so attuned to his environment as to give it his fullest appreciation, or to a still earlier period which the reading of books has presented to the individual as one of great glamor. There have always been individuals who have been so perfectly at- tuned to the past that the present irritated them. But let us—parenthetically—be fair to them: their present condition need almost never be attributed to just “natural cussedness , as seems sometimes to be assumed; it is usually due to the fact that for some reason for which they may or may not be responsible their experience has not kept up with the march of events, and when they awaken with a start to find them- selves lagging behind, they are quite naturally irritated. Never has it been otherwise. In the case of music, all of us who are forty years of age or older (perhaps also some younger ones) can remember the days when Debussy—most of whose music now by common consent is considered a con- course of sweet sounds” was held to be decidedly “queer” and dissonant and unintelligible And there are authentic cases of learned musicians noisily blustering out of con- cert halls when Wagner was played, as late as ten years after his death. To proceed still farther back, a very scholarly authority “corrected” certain passages of Beethoven; Bach came near being “fired” from one church position because his music “obscured” the choral tune of the German church hymn, which of course meant that his listeners wanted these tunes treated more simply. And to cap a climax by going still farther back, in’the period of old Greek music in which unison singing was the rule, the doubling of the song in that simplest of intervals, the octave, was a matter to be handled with great care!—To turn from negative to positive, a student recently expressed a profound philosophy (of which more later) when she asked quite simply, “We get used to music just like everything else, don’t we?” If we substitute the word “discord” for the word “music” we are at the nub of the whole matter. . . What then is discord,—or dissonance, as the musician calls it? The uninitiated will of course assume that it is easy to give an answer. The matter however is really not quite so simple. The dictionaries do not help much. Webster’s definition, absolutely truthful, presents rather than solves the problem of absolute and final answer,—”a combma-