Rhapsody in Steel

Cultural high at the World's Fair last summer was the $75,000,000 art exhibition. This year music is making a top-notch showing. This week Swift & Co. presented the Chicago Symphony in the first of a ten-week series of two-a-day free concerts on a shell built over the Lagoon. Also playing at the Fair is the Detroit Symphony, since mid-June an "exhibit" of Henry Ford. Another Ford musical exhibit was a 22-minute cinema for which a symphony orchestra played a special score composed by Edwin E. Ludig, musical director of Audio Productions, Inc., licensee of Electrical Research Products.

Leitmotif of Rhapsody in Steel was the assembly of a Ford automobile. Thus not only did Mr. Ford manage to exhibit a cinema which attracts 6,000 Fair visitors daily but he shrewdly outmaneuvered General Motors, whose concession to have an actual assembly line on the Fair grounds was exclusive. To compose his music authoritatively Mr. Ludig visited Ford plants, discovered that their music "was in a sort of whole tone scale with a lot of overtones." He adopted certain rhythms like the poundings of hydraulic presses, used them as contrapuntal accompaniments to string and woodwind melodies. The factory whistle gave him trouble until he found he could reproduce it by a piccolo, clarinet, oboe and tuba chord.

The cinema opens with a brass fanfare and a series of shiny Fords rolling toward the audience. One stops and its bumper becomes a pair of lips to announce what is to follow. Thereafter there are no spoken words or titles. The cellos are portentous when Henry Ford's face appears on the screen. It fades out to reveal a plant interior, flashes of molten metal, men at work. A bouncing little refrain is the motif of the Ford engine, repeated every time, the motor is shown. As the automobile is slowly assembled the music melodically suggests hammering, welding, tapping, grinding.

When Ford's daily quota of 5,000 automobiles is all but reached the whistle blows, the music slurs downward as wheels stop spinning. A worker shakes his head unhappily as he reads a sign: PRODUCTION TODAY, 5,000; COMPLETED, 4,999. When everyone has gone the "V 8" insignia on a Ford hood becomes an imp resembling a male Betty Boop who summons the Ford parts to assemble themselves. The accompaniment gaily plays snatches from Chopin's Polonaise Militaire, Beethoven's Ruins of Athens, Mendelssohn's Spring Song. The connecting rods do an authentic square dance to one of Mr. Ford's favorite oldtime tunes. Wheels and tires roll into place of their own accord. The motor's fan becomes a propeller as the imp flies the engine down into chassis. It was Mr. Ford's own idea to have the imp sucked out of the automobile body by "No-draft ventilation," to make him throw a nut at a window which does not shatter. With a flourish of trumpets, 4,999 changes into 5,000. As the grimacing imp changes back into an insignia the cinema closes with a happily synchronized major chord.

Composer Ludig for 14 years arranged the incidental music for the late David Belasco's plays. Modestly he says of his Rhapsody in Steel: "I tried to do something like Honegger's Pacific No. 231 but of course it is not as great music."

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