Music: No Strike

The strike that threatened to replace the orchestra of every musical show in Chicago with an electric piano (TIME, Aug. 25) and to spread throughout the music centres of the East (TIME, Sept. 1) has been checked at its source. The players' salaries are to be increased from 7 1/2% to 10%.— The agreement will be in force for one year, after which another squabble will be in good order. Mean- while, Chicago musicians are the highest paid in the world. Weekly they collect a minimum of $72.10, a maximum of $92.50.

Carnegie Doomed

Manhattan's musical landmarks, famed for generations, are rapidly passing. Aeolian Hall will be turned into a "5 & 10" (TIME, Aug. 25), the Metropolitan Opera House, even, is threatened with replacement by something beautiful and modern (TiME, Aug. 25). And now Carnegie Hall, for 34 years easily the most distinguished setting for concerts in Manhattan, is to be sold, razed to the ground. This according to reports current in the world of real estate. In its place an office building, or an apartment house, of the zone-law, or neo-Babylonian type, will rear its tiers of terraces.

The Carnegie Foundation has looked over its accounts. The result has been painful. The old Hall makes no money. In fact, it causes a total loss of some $15,000 every year. And so it must go. A history of Carnegie Hall would be a history of modern music. Tchaikovsky conducted his own works there in 1891. Since that time, every composer of any importance has had his compositions performed at Carnegie, and many distinguished moderns have appeared on the bare wooden platform in person. It has also been used as a synagogue and as the scene of stormy political meetings.

Voluptuous Modernity

Aldous Huxley, nephew of the great Darwinian, smart, fashionable, blasé, ice-cold, most devilishly clever of all the devilishly clever young littérateurs who make the waterside, of Chelsea inundate all London with lavender and mauve intellectual meanderings, has written down his opinion of the popular music of today. The essay has been published—in Vanity Fair. It defends the thesis that the evolution of popular music has run parallel, on a lower plane, with the evolution of serious music. Beethoven, ultimately and indirectly, is responsible for all the lan- guishing waltz tunes, all the dramatic jazzings, all the negroid music of the contemporary theatre and dance hall.