Wineroom 'Rags' Source of Evil

Indianapolis, 1913

Scientist Dissects Festive Syncopations and Finds They Spur Lower Emotions

EFFECTS ON MORALS LURING

Beware of "Portamento" and Chromatic Slides if You Want to Be Good

A few months ago, when Superintendent Hyland of the police started war on winerooms, he found most of his efforts futile until he struck at what appeared to him to be the heart of the evil — the wineroom music.

Raids had been made repeatedly upon places of doubtful moral character. Persons caught there were arrested wholesale. Some convictions were obtained against proprietors for violation of the Nicholson law. But such fines were promptly paid and offenses repeated. Persons arrested in the places, it appeared, had a right under the state and city laws to go there as much as they liked. If nothing further than being there was proved against them, City Court ignored the charge.

They went back. Then the ukase against music was issued. It caused consternation in the places aimed at, as well as in the first-class cafes and hotel dining rooms, but it necessarily had to include all to reach the ones desired. And it proved effective.

Now comes the question, "Where is the psychological point to the superintendent's order?"

WHAT IS THE LURE?

And again, "What is the mystic lure of music that, in the verbiage of the legal lights, aids and abets the evils that thrive in winerooms?"

Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast, but does it have some of the quality of an affinity, to attract those of evil intent?

More to the point, is music bad?

Or is there merely bad music that is bad?

Or do bad persons like music?

Or what?

And if so, what is bad about music — the melody, the rhythm, the words of the song, or all of them, or none?

There are different views. Not long since a minister was quoted as saying that if composers would only disassociate suggestive words from some of their more lively compositions of ragtime, or, at the least, nonsensical words, and set religious rhymes to their music, their names would go down in history.

There are two attitudes of the day toward the rag from different angles.

HERE'S HOW SCIENCE SEES IT.

A scientific study of the effect of music has been made by Henry W. Stratton, a writer in the Arena, who discusses his observations under the title of "Music and Crime."

He has found by experiment in one of the state prisons that many criminals are exceptionally good musicians. They are of two classes.

First, those whose knowledge of music extends no farther than the popular songs of the day and whose associations with such songs have always been of questionable character. They absorb the sensuous quality of music and can not be morally improved by it because the quality does not contain the necessary musical ingredients to lift them to a higher plane of emotion.

In such songs, this writer says, it frequently happens that where the melody is good and would of itself awaken refining impulses the words produce the opposite effect.

"Again, popular song rhythms are calculated to spur only the lower emotions," he says.

"If a tune is catchy the charm lies largely in its rhythm; the unusual syncopations act upon the listener at unexpected and unnatural parts of the measure and excite unhealthy, unmoral tendencies."

The second class of criminal musicians are scheduled as "darlings of society" who have learned to be musically voluptuous. They yield easily without question to all kinds of music and are unable to resist its enervating influences, They are mastered by their musical sensation.

Mr. Stratton has analyzed ragtime — picked it to pieces — to determine what about it is bad. He finds that a deleterious effect upon the moral nature of a listener is produced by voluptuous slides from one tone to another, called portamento.

"It induces languor and suggests to the mind a relapse from moral discipline," he says. Chromatic passages also tend to promote immorality, he thinks.

RAGTIME GETS THE HOOK.

All this is rather a condemnation of music which is abnormally syncopated, Which contains too frequent repetitions of the portamento and which brings chromatics into frequent play. No class of music quite answers the description so well, perhaps, as the rag.

But one might want to know what makes syncopations, chromatics and slides act so upon the human organisms.

Under the head of "Emotion," an encyclopedia says:

"Unconsciously the spectator, after hearing a musical concert sings and acts cerebrally, and a tenseness of the vocal cords and the whole muscular apparatus of the body results from the imitative effort to make the necessary sounds and to reproduce the necessary movements."

Music, itself, one might deduce, may entice the hearer to attempt an action of the emotion it contains.

But there probably are other conditions to be noted in a consideration of the effect of music in winerooms. Some kinds of music, per se, it is agreed, have bad effects.

A combination of this kind of music and of intoxicating liquors may have a worse effect; then, again, in an open room, it adds privacy to conversations over tables usually located too near one another to otherwise afford privacy. Again, it seems to be a lure for patrons, and, if patronized alone in winerooms and heard there frequently, would tend each time to recall other similar associations.

Altogether one might draw the conclusion that bad music in bad places is bad for good and bad people; bad music in good places is little better for either; good music in bad places has all odds against it; and good music in good places is better for both.

—The Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis, November 23, 1913, page 14.