Baltimore Lynching

Another lynching was done in Maryland last week, this time not on the ragged Eastern Shore but in the proud old city of Baltimore. The Baltimore Civic Opera Company was responsible when it put on a one-act affair called Swing Low. In it Tenor A. Roy Williams, blacked up as a Negro, was making harmless love to Soprano Elsie Craft (also in blackface) when an operatic mob appeared to drag him offstage to a hanging.

Two Baltimoreans, Pianist Emmanuel Wad and Playwright Elmer Greensfelder, wrote Swing Low. The title refers not to the hanging but to the recurrence of the spiritual ''Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" which impressed the audience as being the finest bit of music in the opera.

Radio's High

A new high in radio advertising was reached a month ago when Liggett & Meyers Tobacco Co. started Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasting six nights a week for Chesterfield cigarets (TIME, Nov. 27). This week Cadillac Motor Cars and Lucky Strike cigarets overtook Chesterfields. Cadillac started a rich symphonic series for Sunday nights (6 to 7 E. S. T.). Bruno Walter conducted the first concert, Jascha Heifetz fiddled. Conductors to come: Artur Bodanzky, Eugene Ormandy, Walter Damrosch, Fritz Reiner, Sir Henry Wood,

Artur Rodzinski. Vladimir Golschmann, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Nikolai Sokoloff, Tullio Serafin. Soloists to come: Rosa Ponselle, Yehudi Menuhin, Efrein Zimbalist, Josef Hofmann, Jose Iturbi, Vladimir Horowitz. Lily Pons, Lucrezia Bori, Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Rethberg, Tito Schipa, Richard Bonelli.

Finished with Baron Munchausen (Funnyman Jack Pearl), Lucky Strikes undertook to sponsor the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts hitherto paid for by National Broadcasting out of its own pocket as a sustaining program. The Metropolitan will be on the air Saturday afternoons and for special matinees, starting on Christmas with Hansel und Gretel. The Lucky Strike contract is worth at best $100,000 to the hard-pressed Met.

Experiments By Whiteman

On a blizzardy afternoon ten years ago Paul Whiteman asked New York music critics to listen to an "experiment in modern American music." The critics expected nothing but jazz which they thought had no business in a formal concert hall. But Whiteman had a surprise in store. He played George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and the critics forgot their prejudices. As a result Gershwin started writing for symphony orchestras. Symphonic jazz became epidemic and ''experimental" concerts a Whiteman specialty.

Last week Paul Whiteman presented one more experiment in Manhattan for the benefit of the Church Mission of Help, a Protestant agency which concentrates on unfortunate girls. A girl was the white hope of the concert--21-year-old Dana Suesse who, like Gershwin, started her career in Tinpan Alley.* The new Suesse opus was called Valses for Piano and Orchestra and the composer, dressed in tight white satin, played the piano part herself. It all sounded very much like Ravel, with misty strings and florid piano decorations. In her 'teens, soon after she left Kansas City, Dana Suesse wrote several good tunes: "Jazz Nocturne." "Whistling in the Dark," "Ho Hum" (which, thanks in part to Rudy Vallee's plugging, earned her $10,000). There was nothing tuneful about the Valses but they were ambitious enough to build up for Dana Suesse the nickname "Girl Gershwin." The rest of last week's program held better entertainment. There was a potpourri of oldtime waltzes; a lightning performance of "Wabash Blues" by Miki Pingitore, the hunchbacked banjo player who has been with Paul Whiteman since his orchestra started. There was more new music : A Deserted Plantation by Negro William Grant Still was well made but unexciting; Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater was a pleasant development of the nursery song, done by Al Rinker. Whiteman, 104 pounds lighter than he used to be, had his big band in top form. His knees would not stay still. His baton, long as a violin bow, cut the air like a whip. Several times during the evening he looked up at a right-hand box. grinned a great grin. Sitting there proudly were his father and mother who had come on from Denver to celebrate their golden wedding.

*Tinpan Alley got its name in the days when New York's music publishers were bunched on 28th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Custom then was for vaudevillians to go the rounds looking for songs. Few could read music. Pluggers taught them by ear, banging away all day long on tinny old uprights. Now the music publishers are scattered up & down Broadway and Tinpan Alley, as such, has vanished.

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