In regard to the hearing and publishing and general dissemination of your friends’ “popular” songs, I am afraid that my advice will be somewhat cynical. The process is something like this: / First, a word about the songs themselves. As you know, they seem to be practically all the same songs. The melodies are composed of little diatonic sequences, the harmonic textures are all grouped in very much the same root relationships, with a special emphasis on altered dominants. They all contain exactly the same number of measures in verse and chorus. You could make a machine to turn out popular songs mechanically at a nickel apiece. Let’s say three different types of “hot” I Love You, three different types of “blue” I Love You, and maybe a couple of nonsense songs. Of course, I am not telling you anything that you don’t know. I merely preface my remarks with these comments for the simple reason that since this is the case, every little town in the United States has someone who writes these songs, and New York is bulging with these compositions, and so is Hollywood. They are as stereotyped as our patent breakfast foods and women’s hair-do’s. << less