New System

Last week in Manhattan, a dubious audience strained expectant ears, saw musical instruments, were invited to hear musical tones, which most of them had never dreamed existed. On the stage of Carnegie Hall, Leopold Stokowski, able conductor, master of the unexpected, stood in command before the Philadelphia Orchestra, presented Julian Carillo's/- "System of the 13th Sound." Concertgoers, bred in a world where the finest division of music is the halftone, in which the chromatic scale has a total of twelve tones to the octave, heard, or tried to hear, quarter-tones, eighth-tones, three-quarter-tones and sixteenth-tones, and a chromatic scale in which Mr. Carillo claimed he crowded 96 tones into a single octave. At Conductor Stokowski's command, specially trained musicians first produced on the familiar violin, cello and horn, intervals smaller than the semitone. Then new and strange gifts to Orpheus from Mr. Carillo were played: the arpacitera, a mastodonic zither, tuned in 16ths; the octavina, a towering double-bass guitar, capable of eighths; a guitarre adapted to produce quarter-tones.

Through the two movements of Mr. Carillo's Concertino Mr. Stokowski led the orchestra into strange and subtle effects of fractional tone. Of the audience, some saw prospects of infinite, new subtleties of music; many found their ears too coarse for the 96-tone octave, only heard slightly distorted semi-tones.

/- Mr. Carillo, able Mexican composer of ultra-modern music, first presented his system through the League of Composers at the Town Hall, Manhattan, March 13, 1926. Last week's performance, was the first time his work has been actively endorsed by a leading Symphony Orchestra, was the first presentation of his ideas in a work of symphonic scope.