Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

Those Who Think That Good Popular Music Ended At "Missouri Waltz" or Even "Annie Laurie.'' Should Read This Article in Defense of the Modern Songs — It Will Change a Lot Of Ideas Another Article by TED WHITE RECENTLY, making a plea for tolerance of crooners, I presented -the claim that there was room enough in the ether for all manner of singers. Sow I want to do the same for popular songs and modern music — and ask you to give them fair consideration. Popular songs of the day are overbrimming with philosophy. Never have the tunes people sing afforded more food for meditation. Song has donned an air it never had previously — a vulgar audacity, a proud carriage of the city streets which testifies to the progress — or what name have you for it? — of civilization. It speaks the slang of the rialto while retaining a certain delicacy, a touch of romance, in the way Francois Villon's poetry does. Our songs today express ardor, dash, and with a very mixed language, wit and eloquence. They fail when they try to be sublime. But in irony they are splendid, and it is right that they should be so. The most skillful painters never placed the high light on canvas, never better chose the point to which to direct the gaze and mind of the spectator than have the Gershwins and other soundpainters of our contemporary life. Yet louder and louder grow the outcries of some outraged listeners and old-time musicians who, in their inability to move on with time, look backward to the good old days and the good old airs of their fathers, quite forgetting there may be merit in the aspirations and the songs which express these aspirations, of their sons. "Synthetic" some of them call modern music, and they are right. It IS synthetic in the sense of being manufactured, perhaps even forced, because music no longer is simple and inevitable as it was once, growing out of the unconscious minds of generations follow ing upon each other, singing the same folk-songs and the same tunes. The secret of the charm old music has for us is that we feel and hear in it a style of composition which men have had time to refine and embellish upon these old folk-airs. The old-world symphony, growing from a simple folksong, was built as an old-world cathedral was built — slowly, to last forever, and decorated inside and out, where it could be seen and where it could not be seen, from the crypt to the roof. The modern composer has neither time nor energy for this delightful kind of building. He is too busy calculating and prefiguring a fast-changing public taste. His musical method is like the skyscraper — it is nine-tenths structure. So much effort has gone into the building of it, elaborately orchestrating it, making it fit to outstartle anything else which has already startled the public to the point of satiation; it is so new, and must be popularized so quickly, before it is out of date, that nobody is very much interested in the character of it. But why refuse to accept it without trying to understand it and the world it mirrors? A listener is confronted at every turn of the dial with radical musical novelties about which his inherited taste in music teaches him nothing at all. He knows that in the past there were novelties, too, that Wagner and Debussy were the objects of such villification and sneers as even the poorest modern stuff today has never suffered. The pace of change in their cases was so much slower that their acceptance did not seem to cause a radical change in music, but believe it or not, they are two of the gentlemen who brought on modernism. Wagner's thunders and Debussy's rebellious disharmonies expressed the changing spirit of their generations — (Turn to Page 30) Page Eighteen RADIO DOINGS