JAZZ is all things to all ears. To the theological dogmatist it is a
new guise of the ancient devil, to be fought as a satanic agency.
To the pagan, if he is minded to interpret novelties in the language
of social ethics, it is the symptom of a glorious release from the
bonds of moral restraint. The musician, if he is one of the old
school, looks upon it with mingled amusement and disgust; if he
is of the modernist persuasion, he beholds in it rich possibilities
of a new style. The conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
Serge Koussevitsky, during the season of 1925-26, received more
than one letter from indignant subscribers to the New York con-
certs of his famous band, in which the blame for the "crime wave"
of that year was laid to his introduction of so much modernistic
music.

The theme seems predestined to violent variations, as well as
to strange confusions. The discussion begins as one in musical
esthetics, and before we know it we are listening to a moral dia-
tribe. This deviation from the path of pure music is by no means
limited to the non-musical. Players, composers, critics, teachers--
these have all contributed to the discussion of jazz their quota of
irrelevances. Jazz was a fad that wouldn't last. Jazz was the salva-
tion of the art. Jazz was the intrusion of the cheap dance-hall into
the sacred precincts of the symphonic concert auditorium. Jazz

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