Dear TIME-Reader:

UNTIL a few years ago. a music critic could stay in New York and hear premieres of much of the best modern music in the U.S. But now original works are being played in so many places throughout the country that no critic can get to all of them to form his own musical judgment. TIME'S Music Editor Carter Harman, himself a composer of modern music, has found an electronic solution. By asking TIME'S correspondents to arrange for high-fidelity tape recordings of the concerts, he can sit in his acoustically draped office and hear true reproductions of the music on TIME'S new hi-fi and binaural Magnecorder. Harman is delighted with the results. Recently, unable to attend the premiere of Roger Sessions' new cantata, played by the Louisville Orchestra, he was still able to hear and review the work of his old Princeton teacher (TIME, Jan. 30).

For this week's report on rhythmical Trinidad (see Music), however, Harman took his ear directly to the source. From predawn, when a rooster, the only unmusical creature he heard on the island, awoke him, he roamed the carnival-crowded streets of Port-of-Spain to hear such exotic instruments as steel drums, bongos and bamboo tamboo. In a hidden grove of palms, he even heard a bootleg concert of the long-banned jungle drums. One night at Port-of-Spain's Little Carib Theater the island's wild and inexorable rhythms got to Harman. Like everybody else, he began to do the jump-up. "Trinidad's music," he says, "is extraverted stuff that knocks you off your pins. It makes you jump up; mine--well, you just sit down."

HISTORIAN Samuel Flagg Bemis' John Quincy Adams and The Union (see BOOKS) is the first major biographical work resulting from unrestricted access to the Adams Papers, currently being edited under a ten-year grant of $250,000 from TIME Inc. (TIME. Oct. 25, 1954). The vast and priceless collection of writings by Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams and Diplomat Charles Francis Adams is being microfilmed for circulation to libraries, private and public, and eventually will appear in 34 volumes of diary, 12 to 15 volumes of family correspondence and an even greater number, still unestimated. of general correspondence. Says Author Bemis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a previous volume of Adams biography: "TIME Inc. is performing a great service for historians and the public."

Cordially yours,

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