Music: Opposing Ariels

U. S. schoolchildren will be asked to stay after school on ten Friday afternoons this winter but it will not be to clean blackboards or copy promises of good behavior. Their task has been allotted them by Conductor Leopold Stokowski who, finding it difficult “to give the hopeless generation new ideas,” declared last week that he would try to make children like modernistic music by having them listen to his broadcasts.

Seventy-year-old Walter Damrosch, whom a New York Times editorial called “Ariel” fortnight ago when he began again to waft and explain safe & sane music over the air to 6,000,000 children, fumed: “To force these [Stokowski’s] experiments on helpless children is criminal. Should cubism have been used to preach the glories of painting to our young people?”