SWING MUSIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 115, 18 May 1938, Page 4

SWING MUSIC

"THE PIED PIPER" CRAZE AND A TEMPO (From "The Post's" Representative.) j ' VANCOUVER, April 27. When Miss Helen Kane arrived in New York, as special envoy for the British Empire Exhibition, to be held at Glasgow, she was diverted from her official purpose to make a public protest against a practice that has spread across the country, of dance orchestras playing Scottish ballads to swing music, thereby destroying the tempo at which they had been sung for generations. Miss Kane at once earned the support of the Scottish societies of the United States and Canada, who) resented the mutilation of these immortal ballads. All to no purpose. The vogue started last summer, when a girl named Maxine Sullivan, daughter of a Pittsburgh barber, singing in an orchestra in that city, was induced to join a New York girls' band. Swing music had already become popular, but when Miss Sullivan ; converted "Loch Lomond" to the new tempo it became a craze. One hundred thousand copies of the gramophone record were sold immediately. "Annie Laurie" was also vociferously greeted. As we write, the psychologists and psycho-analysts are investigating the new craze, and agree that it has symptoms common to the mental disease of paranoia. They offer some consolation, however. When a craze of this sort is slow in developing, it usually lasts for a long time; when it springs up quickly and takes the country literally by storm, it almost invariably blows over quickly. :: The director of the Psychological Laboratory at Colgate University sums it up thus: "Your heart beats so many times a minute. Swing music is cunningly designed to a. tempo faster than 72 beats—faster than the normal pulse. And this explains, possibly, the old legend of the Pied Piper of. Hamelin, the musician who with his tunes lured away first the plague of rats that overran the town and then, when the thrifty burghers refused to.. pay his price, resumed his piping and marched away to the mountains, leading the laughing, hysterical children, enchanted by his music, to destruction."

No one seems to know why Scottish ballads were chosen to be the subject of such sacrilegious treatment. Orchestra leaders deny that there is-any' intention to mutilate them, however. On the other hand,, they condone the practice, and say that millions df.yoqng people who. were not aware bt -the existence of Scottish ballads now sing them through from end to end! "he protest of the Scottish societies is \Wst in thefervour with which young .people dance in postures that would do.credit to a Hindu Yoga. ;,,