Music: Passing of Buck

Eugene Edward Buck, the man who rode high and handsome as president of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers) while it grew into a $7,000,000-a-year business, lost his job last week. ASCAP’s directors elected in his stead Critic-Composer Deems Taylor.

The election meant, more than a change of seats, a change of viewpoint. It was the end of an era. Long, lean Songwriter Gene Buck had been since 1925 chieftain of ASCAP, the clangorous music-writing clan that embraces everything from Tin Pan Alley to Rachmaninoff. A friend of Victor Herbert, for 20 years Florenz Ziegfeld’s right-hand man, writer of 500 lyrics (Hello, Frisco!, Tulip Time), Buck served ASCAP from 1925 to 1929 without pay. Later he drew a $50,000-a-year salary, which he voluntarily cut to $35,000 a year ago, after ASCAP entered its losing music war with the radio networks.

When the networks won, ASCAP’s complexion changed. The Society was forced by the Government to accept a consent decree, calling for a more democratic form of organization; the Supreme Court upheld the power of the States to outlaw ASCAP by barring price-fixing; the networks won hands down in this fight against ASCAP’s high-priced terms. No longer a monopoly, it had to scratch for its feed. Its 1,510 members needed new dignity and new leaders. Genial, dictatorial Gene Buck stood for the old regime. Last month, at the annual ASCAP members’ meeting, in Manhattan’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, an enthusiastic ASCAPite proposed that the assembled members rise and intone “God bless Buck” three times. In the confusion that followed, President Buck blushed deeply. But it would have been no chant of hypocrisy. Gene Buck was eased out, not kicked out. He retains a seat on the board of directors, is being kept on “in an advisory capacity,” reportedly at $25,000 a year.

Multi-busy Deems Taylor steps into the presidency on a part-time basis,* and without salary. Feeling that “ASCAP ought not to be a one-man show,” he plans to build a smooth-running organization to do the active work. Quipped Mr. Taylor: “I hope to get the presidency to the point where I will earn my salary.”

For the third time in its 42-year history the Philadelphia Orchestra failed to keep an out-of-town date. The causes on previous occasions: a blizzard, a railroad wreck. The cause this time: wartime shortage of sleeping cars to take it to Worcester, Mass.

* Among the demands on Deems Taylor’s time: a new opera libretto, a book slated for fall publication, three radio programs, a farm in Connecticut.