A Letter From The Publisher, Nov. 14, 1949

One evening a fortnight ago a tall, slim, sandy-haired man in street clothes sat on a desk in the wings of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House and watched the Sadler’s Wells Ballet performance of Apparitions. From time to time, when she wasn’t on stage, prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn came over to talk to him. TIME’s Chandler Thomas, having sat through five performances of different ballets out front, wanted to see how ballet looked from backstage. He was getting ready for this week’s cover story on Miss Fonteyn.

As TIME’s Music writer, Thomas covers the entire field of music journalism. It is a field of many levels, and almost all of Thomas’ time is spent investigating them. His work in New York might call for a night at the opera, followed by a Greenwich Village jam session. It includes interviews with a composer about forthcoming compositions, listening to the new records and spotting the new in music and the great in musical performances. Last summer he took a trip to the music festivals at Amsterdam and Salzburg.

Sometimes Thomas’ investigations are long and painstaking. In the case of his cover story on Toscanini (TIME, April 26, 1948), he had had two years in which to become intimately familiar with the great conductor’s work. The National Broadcasting Company studios are just across the street from the TIME & LIFE building, and Thomas used to run over for Thursday afternoon rehearsals of Toscanini’s NBC orchestra. There, in the control room, Thomas had a rare musician’s-eye view of Toscanini at work and an unequaled chance to note his careful preparation, his humor, his likes and dislikes, and his perfectionist’s way of evoking great music from his musicians.

But not all music news happens in New York. TIME’s story last week of Dr. Gustavus Capito of Charleston, W. Va. is a good example of the kind of coverage TIME’s Music department attempts. Dr. Capito used to get a lump in his throat when he listened to Smetana’s Moldau. He wondered why some American composer couldn’t write as good a piece about the Kanawha, the river that flows through his home town. He offered to pay the conductor-composer of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra $1,000 for the kind of composition he had in mind. A fortnight ago the biggest Charleston symphony audience in history heard the result with great pleasure.

It is Chandler Thomas’ job to tell you about all the news in music: the rise of an attractive new jazz singer like Mindy Carson (TIME, Aug. 1); an account of the monumental recording task which Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska undertook in her 70th year (TIME, June 20); the controversial case of Composer Arnold Schoenberg (TIME, Nov. 15, 1948). This week the news is the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company, the impact it has had on New York and will have on all the cities on its tour.

Chandler Thomas comes by his job quite naturally. His mother was a pianist ; his father was a journalist on the New York World and the Seattle Times. Thomas played trumpet in dance bands around his native Seattle, went to the University of Washington, took up classical music (piano and composition), and became a reporter for the Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. A U.S. Army Air Force pilot during the war, he spent three years as a member of a guerrilla army in the Philippines. As deputy chief of one of the commands, he had 28,000 men under him. He kept up his music by playing the pianos he found occasionally in Filipino homes, and by learning to play the native agong (a cross between a cymbal and a drum). He has taken up piano and composition again and is currently working on a string quartet.

Cordially yours,