Try This on Your Whistle

The radio, the phonograph and the better movie houses seem to be achieving the popular education in music that they set as one of their chief goals. At a local movie house the other night there was a waiting line, and as several hundred people stood about, somebody started to whistle. He rendered the "Arlesienne" Suite of Bizet, correct as to all its tricky intricacies. Somebody responded with the third movement of the Beethoven Fifth. Presently there was a lusty twittering all through the lobby: one heard the Tschaikowsky Sixth, the "Meistersinger" Prelude, the Brahms Third, the Ravel Bolero, the Gershwin Concerio in F.

Now it is easy to smile at these and say they are pieces that have been played to death; but when this much is said, it must also be added that they are excellent music. That a dozen or so whistlers casually toss them off waiting to get in and hear the Tehaikowsky "1812," together with a ballet performance of the Rimsky-Korsakoff "Scheherazade," indicates a great change from, let us say, ten years ago. At that time, even if there had been a few who could have whistled this music, they would have been razzed into silence by the crowd. But now the crowd regarded it as casually as they did. Acquaintanceship with tunes, of course, is not taste. If we have not developed a nation of music critics, we are well on the way to developing a nation of music sharks.