Tune Detective Radio has figured largely among the activities of Dr. Sigmund Spaeth, handyman and jack-of-all-trades among U. S. musicians. Last year Dr. Spaeth directed for National Broadcasting Co. a “Keys to Happiness” program of piano instruction
(TIME, April 6, 1931) which brought in 4.000 fan letters a week. Since last November Dr. Spaeth has been broadcasting as the “Tune Detective” in a 15-min. program (Tuesdays at 10 p. m. E. D. S. T.). Last week he added a new one, the “Song Sleuth” (Thursdays, 8:15 p.m.). NBC sustains them both but hopes for sponsors.
The Tune Detective is expert in tracing down the ancestry of current songs. In lectures and pamphlets Dr. Spaeth has explained his method, which anyone can learn, of separating a song into melody patterns, which may run from two notes to the whole chromatic scale. Some songs come piecemeal from the classics, like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” which is found in Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu. Others are scrambled together like “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” which contains bits from Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, “My Bonnie,” “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party” and “An Old-Fashioned Garden.” As Tune Detective, Dr. Spaeth sings, plays and analyzes snatches from current popular songs. Some 2,000 people, most of them men, write in weekly to ask questions, make suggestions. Most obvious recent song-pilferings, says Detective Spaeth, were two tunes by Charley Tobias and Peter De Rose, “One More Kiss and Then Good Night” and “Somebody Loves You.” After Dr. Spaeth exposed these, the publishers righted matters simply, by adding on the sheet music the names of Lou Herscher & Art Coogan, and Charles Maskell, who had composed the originals:
“After All I Adore You” and “I Want the Twilight and You.”
Last week Song Sleuth Spaeth turned to song lyrics, dealing in his first program with animal lyrics. Greatest and most universal of these, said he, is “Frog Went a-Courtin’,” which is paralleled in the current “Wedding Party of Mickey Mouse.”
Sigmund Spaeth, 47, earned the right to be called Doctor by writing a Ph.D. thesis at Princeton on “Milton’s Knowledge of Music.” He has taught school, worked for Life, the New York Times, the old Evening Mail, the Boston Transcript. He is a half-brother of Princeton’s large-bodied, large-voiced Professor John Duncan Spaeth, famed Shakespeare man and chairman of Princeton’s rowing committee. Shrewd, energetic and talkative, he describes himself as “writer, broadcaster,lecturer, composer, arranger and general showman and entertainer.”
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