"Indecent"

Looking for something to keep the police of Washington, D. C, busy in the summer, someone exhumed last week an old order forbidding "indecent music" (from the context evidently referring to music without words). There was some diversity of opinion as to what sort of music the police were supposed to suppress.

Said Mrs. Mina Van Winkle, chief of policewomen: "That tom-tommy sort of Oriental music that makes men forget home and babies."

Said the Assistant Corporation Counsel : "You know what I mean, that hootchy-kootchy sort of intonation."

Said Sergeant Rhoda Milliken, policewoman : "Any music played on a saxophone is immoral."

Pichetone

A box a yard wide, weighing eight pounds, containing a steel comb which is picked by minute pincers when notes are struck on the keyboard above--such is the Pichetone--instrument which Inventor S. Giley of Moscow declares will supplant the piano. Russian musicians assert that it has a tone superior to that of the ordinary pianoforte.

"Not So Good"

To Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, composer,* the masculinity of the London Symphony Orchestra is a "silly pity." Said Dame Smyth (to a Boston Transcript reporter) a fortnight ago:

"All Europe, except England alone, likes women musicians. . . . In all the famous Continental bands, at Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and Stockholm, women play as a matter of course --and play any instrument they please.

"Mozart, an Austrian (and in Austria there is no lack of temperament) complained that men play with 'less expression' than women. Here in England, where our performances certainly do not err on the side of unbridled passion, it seems what has been called 'a silly pity' to exclude the more emotional half of creation."

To this, Sir Landon Ronald, conductor of the London Symphony, made reply:

"It is a great mistake to mix women and men in an orchestra. I do not consider the life at all suitable for women, and I am not at all in favor of it. I conducted a mixed orchestra in Glasgow and Edinburgh, where 40% of the members were women, and it answered only fairly well. Women players, I admit, are more earnest and serious than men, but they are not so strong and their tone is not so good."

*Daughter of the late General J. H. Smyth, she is the composer of two symphonies, an overture to Antony and Cleopatra, a mass, the operas Fantasia, Der Wald, The Wreckers, The Boatswain's Mate, a string-quartette, four orchestral songs and some suffrage music.