Music: Sound Pictures

Charles Wakefield Cadman considered, George Gershwin dickered, Irving Berlin contracted last week to write musical themes for the new sound-pictures, the audible cinema. The field offers each composer good opportunity to apply his peculiar virtuosity. Each will certainly receive rich fees. The movies can afford to pay. A single picture house, the Roxy Theatre, in Manhattan, rarely receives less than $110,000 a week from admissions. Its income for four weeks of Street Angel (with Movietone) was $479,000. That, however, was a record run.

Irving Berlin’s deal was with United Artists Corp., to write a musical revue based on “Say it with Music,” popular song of his first Music Box Revue (1921). Associate producer is to be George White (Scandals), who last week declared that he was quitting the stage for sound-pictures. So the genre of the proposed Berlin work is obvious, quite like the music of The Cocoanuts, which he composed for the four Marx brothers and the Follies of 1927, which he made for Florenz Ziegfeld. How much Composer Berlin will get for this work neither he nor President Joseph M. Schenck of United Artists last week would say.

Fox Case Corp. (makers of Movietone) three weeks ago offered George Gershwin tens of thousands to let them use his tiresomely admired “Rhapsody in Blue” and to write incidental cinema music for them. He was cagey about terms and coy about the picture work. Although he publicly declared that he would not write music for the cinema, last week he was still considering Fox offers.

That Charles Wakefield Cadman was considering the cinemas came as surprising news. He writes orthodox music; the Metropolitan Opera produced his Shanewis. His principal resemblance to Composers Berlin and Gershwin is in his face: the three men have aqueline, bony faces, high foreheads, strong jaws. Musically, the three are scattered. The two Jews write so that people sing their songs. Cadman, although by no means profound, writes for listeners. The Gershwins and Berlin are in the market places, night clubs; he in the parlor and concert hall. Berlin is admittedly no musician. But Gershwin is. And both are nimble tumblejacks with chords. Cadman, people find, who have followed his 25 years of music from organ compositions to Indian songs and finally operas, is rigid in his style. They ask: Can he adapt himself to popular sound-pictures; will he debase himself to commercialism? Few of them know that he lives in Hollywood.