ARS GRATIA ADVERTISING

Most encouraging evidence that the jazz epoch has become history is the improved quality of the current radio broadcasts. Not that the ether is purged to a dull intellectualism, as those who have listened to recipes for cheese custard, and Swedish discuses, will be the first to deny. We still have our "mauvaises quatres d'heure" of advertising belch, Irish minstrels, and Poet Princes.

But the big money behind the business seems to have raised the average age of the Babbitts to seventeen instead of twelve. When the Metropolitan Opera Company can be heard without interruption for a whole Saturday afternoon, when we may enjoy the Philadelphia Symphony fifteen minutes nightly, when Koussevitsky is on the air from three to five every Sunday, there is certainly balm in our etherial Gilead. Those are, of course, the high spots. But the steady listener cannot have failed to appreciate the general improvement of the average program. Whether it is because the technical developments in both transmitting and receiving apparatus tend to encourage the public ear to expect better things, or because the tenor of the age is not in tune with staccato rhythms and the grosser tin-pan melodies is a matter for speculation. Certainly the technique of arranging musical instruments before a microphone has increased the illusion of reality almost as much as the widened tonal range of most of the modern receiving sets. With many of the earlier loudspeakers, the only sounds possible to their narrow compass were the modulations of the crooner (an express specialization for the radio) or the stridencies of the more African jazz. But dance music is returning to melody, popular singing to full vocal range, and pari passu the more artistic euphonies are coming into their own.