Music: Gene Buck Goes to Town

Generalissimo of the clangorous army of Tin Pan Alleymen is long, lean, grey Songwriter Gene Buck, president of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers). ASCAP holds performing rights to a mighty volume of sound: 1,270,000 musical compositions. Last week in San Francisco, at the word from Generalissimo Buck, ASCAP shock troops made a vigorous sortie. Their enemy was Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), formed by radio chains. Sooner than sign contracts to pay bigger fees for ASCAP tunes after next Jan. 1, the networks vow to use music from BMI, which by then will control 10,000 numbers. Melodious and wonderful was ASCAP’s assault. At the San Francisco Fair, in its closing week, ASCAP gave two free concerts, the like of which the West Coast had never heard.

In the afternoon, in open-air Federal Plaza, 25,000 people heard the San Francisco Symphony play U. S. music, with such composers as Howard Hanson and William Grant Still conducting their own pieces. Edwin McArthur conducted Deems Taylor’s Circus Day. The amplification was tinny, airplanes zoomed, firecrackers popped, a military band zing-boomed past but everyone thought the concert was swell. The evening shindig filled the Coliseum (capacity 15,000) and Festival Hall (3,000), left more than 5,000 people clamoring outside. For the 33 numbers on the program, ASCAP and Tin Pan Alley had shot the works. Composers like Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg played the piano. Old (78) Carrie Jacobs Bond accompanied a singer in her End of a Perfect Day, and launched her latest effort, The Flying Flag. Old W. C. Handy played his St. Louis Blues on the cornet. Tunes like Star Dust, Smiles, Sweet Adeline, Kiss Me Again on a program which five times mentioned ASCAP’s full name, suggested what radio would be like without them.

Generalissimo Buck saved his biggest guns for the last. George M. Cohan sang his Give My Regards to Broadway, his Yankee Doodle Boy, his Grand Old Flag. Then a dark little man, introduced by Mr. Buck as “the nearest thing to a genius we have in this country,” walked to the centre of the stage. As Irving Berlin began singing, the audience rose, joined in the music by the hundreds, then the thousands, until 15,000 voices were swelling God Bless America, an ASCAP song.