Music: Flat Foot Johann

From the guardian geese around the citadel of classical music there arose last week an anguished honking. An 81-year-old stockbroker named Alfred Lewis Dennis, member of Newark’s venerable Bach Choral Society, wrote a long letter, hissing with protest, to FCC Chairman Frank R. McNinch. Its painful burden: the swinging of classical music.

Broker Dennis advocated severe penalties for radio stations permitting such swing raids. Immediate cause of this protest was a broadcast swing version of Bach’s D Minor Toccata. Scolded indignant Mr. Dennis: “By no stretch of the imagination could such performances be tolerated except by people of no discrimination. If this is permitted to go unchallenged, swing renditions of the Mass in B Minor will follow. . . .”

Impartial observers reflected that if Bach’s three-hour B Minor Mass could be played in a swing version it would be a triumph of Yankee ingenuity.

The ruckus even drew some notice from the pontifical pen of New York Times Music Critic Olin Downes. Said Pundit Downes: “A four-voiced fugue, in the best Benny Goodman style, would be something, though just what defies the imagination of man.”