POUNDING MUSIC

"German music is fat and heavy-weight," says Mr. Ernest Newman, distinguished music critic of the London Sunday Times, now visiting New York. Contrasted with the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, Mr. Newman says those of the French musicians, Bizet, Debussy, and Ravel, are "thin" and "lightweight". Music, then has weight? Modern developments in music prove that Orpheus was an amateur, and that Mozart and Chopin had the merest smattering of musical structure.

The psychologist of today exhibits the phenomenon of "color hearing" as one of the marvels of the age. In listening to a symphony the people who possess this strange faculty are said to see all the colors of the spectrum succeeding each other in harmonious arrangement. Some tones, they say, are red, others voluptuous purple. Even the ordinary man is now familiar with languid blues in music.

Science has succeeded in photographing tones. Now that it is known to possess weight, the physicist will find no rest until he has tabulated the specific gravity of all the sounds from a milligram bird's twitter to a hundred-ton football cheer. Modern ingenuity has learned to "can" music. Certain modern composers have succeeded in extracting the melody from it, and producing compositions of pure noise. Music may be bought by the sheet, the roll, or the disk. Perhaps the time is not far distant when it will be priced like cabbages, at so much a pound.