There were (and still are) two groups of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers—­the Friday afternoon crowd, consisting largely of stuffy dowagers, and the Saturday night clientele, composed mostly of persons genuinely interested in music.

The old society gals went to the Friday matinees because it was the thing to do.  While “that dear, handsome boy” and his men on the platform were discoursing Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner, the ladies swapped gossip, recipes and lamented the scarcity of skillful, loyal but inexpensive domestics.

It was at one of those whispering bees (your reporter, who was there, swears it really happened) that, during the playing of a gossamer pianissimo passage, a subscriber informed her neighbor in a resonant contralto: 

“I always mix butter with MINE!” Mr. Stokowski did not address the audience on that occasion.  He gave his first lecture at another concert, and then he scolded the women not for talking but for applauding.

Many of the Friday afternoon customers were in such a rush to catch trains for their Main Line suburbs that they seldom remained long enough to give conductor and orchestra a well-deserved ovation.  So nobody ever quite knew whether the dead-pan Stoky was in earnest or moved by an impish sense of humor when, following the usual thin smattering of applause, he said: 

“This strange beating together of hands has no meaning, and to me it is very disturbing.  I do not like it.  It destroys the mood my colleagues and I have been trying to create with our music.”

Shortly afterward, the Philadelphia Orchestra and its blond, romantic conductor invaded New York.  Their Tuesday night concerts at Carnegie Hall became the rage.  The uninhibited music lovers of this town not only applauded Stoky but cheered, yelled and stamped to express their frenzied approval.  He never lectured THEM.

But in Philadelphia he continued his extra-conductorial antics.  When the audience hissed an ultra-modern composition, he told them:  “I am glad you are hissing.  It is so much better than apathy.”  Another time, when they booed an atonal piece, he repeated it immediately.

He scolded the audience for coming late.  He scolded them for leaving early.  Once he scolded them for coughing.  They continued the rasping noise.  After the intermission, on Stoky’s orders, the 100-odd men of the orchestra walked out on the stage barking as if in the last stages of an epidemic bronchial disease.

All those didoes promptly made the front page.  Thereafter Mr. Stokowski, who had tasted blood, or rather, printer’s ink, came out on the average of once a month with a new notion to astound the Quakers.

He shocked them with a demand for Sunday concerts—­then a heresy in Philadelphia.  He changed the seating arrangement of the orchestra.  He discarded the wooden amphitheatre on which, since the dark symphonic ages, the players had sat in tiers, and put them on chairs directly on the stage.  Then he shuffled the men, making the cellos change places with the second violins, the battery with the basses.  There must have been some merit in all this switching, for several conductors copied it.