QUITE AMAZING

All musical America is watching Serge Kousseyitzky. In Moscow he was no anomaly. To the intelligentsia there, "the best of times" had been followed so swiftly by "the worst of times" that incongruities became the normal order. In Paris, too, metropolitan tastes prepare for strange blendings of the new with the old. But anywhere in America his prototype simply did not exist. In New York he might have appeared with least outrage to the imagination. Even in Chicago his tendencies could have been understood as the blind graspings of virlle but untutored genius. But in Boston, of all places, the appearance of this rank innovator is nothing short of cataclysmic.

In Koussevitzky Americans see a musician brought up upon Mozart, Beethovan, Wagner, Chopin, who ought, to their way of thinking, oppose jazz music in mortal combat. With Americans it is the rule that only those to whom the wall of saxophones, the blare of trombones, and the clash of brass are indigenous, can see in jazz anything but degenerate sensuality. Not so Koussevitzky. Without forsaking the classics, he calls jazz "good music". So pronounced became his modern tendencies that Moscow thought him too radical, and he left Russia. But he went, not to Paris, where he was indeed invited, nor to New York or Chicago, where it might have been expected his sympathies would have drawn him. He came instead to Boston--to staid, conservative Boston--to the capital of New England where the criterion of what should be done is ever what has been done! But great as is this initial wonder, it grows dim in comparison with the miracle that Boston likes him, flocks to hear him, and refuses to be shocked.