1924 was a definining year for American music, as practitioners on all fronts—classical and popular, theatre, dance hall, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz (the most recently emerging “modern” craze)—increasingly found themselves at odds with each other and challenged both artistically and financially by the changing landscape of their field brought on by the onslaught of records and radio: "The Menace of Mechanical Music", as John Philip Sousa The Etude Jazz Problemcalled it. Some, like Paul Whiteman, attempted a rapprochement with his Experiment In Modern Music (wherein he premiered George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue) in February and his ongoing campaign to "Make a Lady out of Jazz". Between June and September Etude Magazine undertook a multi-issue study of "The Jazz Problem". In March a contingent from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, successfully lobbied Congress to amend copyright law to ensure ASCAP members would be fairly ASCAP composers Washington D. C. 1924compensated when their music was performed on the radio. And in April "The Father of American Musical Theatre" Jerome Kern (back row, third from the left) actually banned the music from his currently Broadway musical Sitting Pretty from being performed by dance orchestras and on radio at all! "It is about time", he declared, "that someone should take a stand against the maltreatment of music by the average jazz orchestra. Jazz is not a style of performing music. It is a degradation of style…"
