This Month

Casual access to music has always been hard to find in the United States. The café concert, where a family and its friends could idle away an hour or two, with a fairly good orchestra in the background, never dug itself into the American scene. The Continental always took it for granted; he listened to the music if he felt like it, talked if he didn’t. Without ritual of headwaiters and reservations, he picked a table as near or far from the music as he wished, moved on whenever he’d had enough. The music was offered for the price of his coffee or bock. He did not hesitate to denounce it if it failed to meet his standard. Neither reverent nor indifferent, he was willing to be diverted if the orchestra deserved his ear.

Beerbohm, in Zuleika Dobson, wrote of Oxford, “The Germans loved it too little, the Colonials too much.” That is somewhat the case with the American and his music — a blank or a project of pietistic appreciation. Radio, records, and dance bands serve him, but he has rarely a chance to be present where a small orchestra of good quality is playing. By a sufficient advance strategy, if he can afford it, he may book himself into a symphony concert during which he is forbidden to smoke, whisper, or cough. Even the Pops concerts of Boston, café tables and all, serve refreshments between “Pomp and Circumstance” and “Anitra’s Dance,” and anyone touching spoon to cup while the edification is going on is virtuously shushed by the congregation.

If Joseph Wechsberg’s gypsies (page 100) were set up in café circumstances in almost any American city and let alone by the management, all concerned would prosper. The trouble is that the management is not willing to run a mere café: it dreams of being a night club with a floor show, a velvet rope to keep customers away, a doorman and a master of ceremonies. There are in New York at this moment, well out of the midtown hubbub, gypsy orchestras playing in cafés, but they are hopelessly under the thumb of a master of ceremonies. (Master of ceremonies: a stage-struck individual of insufficient talent to go on the stage.) The master of ceremonies vocalizes on his own account, and to that end shifts the orchestra into the current, popular songs and instructs the audience in what comes next. He is not an actor, nor an entertainer, nor a musician. He is the great enemy of café life in the United States. If he were in radio, he’d be running a quiz show.

Too little is known about the private life of the radio quiz master. His playmates before the microphone wallow in self-disclosure. For years now, they have shown us that almost any simple question will stump them. Their geography is as bad as their history. They are short on vocabulary, reasoning power, and arithmetic. But they come forward eagerly to broadcast their inability. In consequence, radio has devised a special way of life for the people who answer the quiz master’s questions: giving enough wrong answers, they automatically become eligible for the grand prize and accrued jackpot.

The pattern laid down for the quiz master is less rewarding. He must display at all times enthusiasm and admiration for the contestants. He must be gratified that their woeful responses are not even wider of the mark. Their faltering “I dunnos” would do credit to Jeans or Eddington or Kieran, he should imply. Missed by a hair, but a splendid effort, he proclaims.

Dedicated to the reward of error, the quiz master can hardly escape a conditioned reflex peculiar to his calling. He will come in time, one supposes, to pulling on doors marked “Push,” accepting a biscuit Tortoni instead of ham and eggs, and thrusting costly gifts on the cab driver who lands him in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx. But before his reversal of values becomes complete, let him ponder the example of a heroic quiz master reported by R. J. Hicks (page 104).

Again on the gypsy music, it stands very nearly by itself as an all-night pleasure. If one first hears it in a café about nine P.M., he is likely to find, on next looking at his watch, that five or six hours have sped by. The Cuban danzon, built up throughout the night with imperceptibly increasing tension, achieves a similar dominance over the listener. Joseph Hergesheimer’s description of the danzon in San Cristobal de la Habana — a subtle and persuasive book — is worth rereading and, for that matter, a reprinting by Alfred Knopf.

It was in Hergesheimer’s Java Head, you will recall, that the Manchu princess married the Salem shipmaster and went to live in a McIntire house in Essex County. Her tiny brocaded slippers and exotic finery are still to be seen at the Essex Institute, only a few steps from the Peabody Museum’s scrimshaw work of which MacKinley Helm is writing (page 106). C. W. M.