To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

Now that the war is crowding so many important stories off the front page of your newspaper, we can't help feeling that our nonwar departments have a greater responsibility than ever to keep you well-informed on the news of progress in Industry, Science, Medicine and the Arts--news that keeps right on happening, war or no war.

A case in point is TIME'S Music Department, which week by week is chronicling for you a revolution in the folkways of America. And perhaps our cover story on Symphonist Sir Thomas Beecham makes this a good week to tell you about it.

Thirty years ago music in this country was either something highbrow that happened to a few rich people at the Metropolitan or else it was something lowbrow called ragtime that nobody took seriously. Most Americans thought of music as something from the Old World--of tenors as Italians, of sopranos as big, blonde German women. And the best of our popular music came from Vienna.

Within a generation all this has changed. The U.S. now supports more symphony orchestras than all the rest of the world put together. High school children can recognize as many classics as the average music teacher could two generations ago--and highbrow musicians, in their turn, are much more familiar with our popular songs and less Olympian about them. And so the primary concern of our Music department today is with reporting the new impact of music on American life as it wells up from the great national pool of melody which is broadcast, phonographed, sung, hummed and played, danced to, talked about and argued over in almost every American home.

The team that is tackling this job for you is headed by Editor Wilder Hobson, author of a highly entertaining history of syncopation, American Jazz Music--a phonograph addict who plays the trombone with more vigor than skill. The Music researcher is Mary Gleason, who studied at Smith, Columbia and Trinity College, Dublin, was secretary to the dean of the American University of Beirut, Syria, and later researched for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in London.

But the most important member of the team is Writer Winthrop Sargeant, who has been something of a musical prodigy ever since, at the age of ten, he conducted the People's Symphony of San Francisco through his own composition, A Legend of the Black Forest. For nine years he was violinist in front rank symphony orchestras conducted by Toscanini, Rodzinski, Bruno Walter and Walter Damrosch--but by contrast he has also played in hotel dance bands and in the pit of burlesque and movie houses. He studied for two years in Paris and Vienna--worked on the scores of several Broadway shows--and for a decade headed the department of theory and composition at the New York Philharmonic Scholarship School.

What makes him a three-letter man is that, besides all his knowledge of both classical and popular music, Sargeant is also a journalist. He worked for three years on New York newspapers, for a year as Music Editor of International News Service. He has contributed to The Saturday Evening Post, The Nation, The American Mercury, The Musical Quarterly and Theater Arts. And he is the author of the first authoritative analysis of America's own "musical language"--Jazz, Hot and Hybrid.

With such a team covering the music front, I think you can be pretty sure that whenever, music touches the core of American life you will find the story in TIME--whether it happens in the Metropolitan Opera or on Beale Street--on either side of the musical railroad tracks.

Cordially,

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