Lacking the authority of real moving picture music (which a new composer must rise to invent) the safest way (not necessarily the _best_ way) is the middle course--one method for this, another for that. One of the difficulties is to arrange a music score for a theatre with a large orchestra, where the leader must plan his score--or have it planned for him--for an entire picture before his orchestra can play a note. Music cues must be definite: twenty bars of _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_, seventeen of _The Ride of the Valkyries_, ten of _Vissi d’Arte_, etc. An ingenious young man has discovered a way by which music and action may be exactly synchronized. I feel the impulse to quote extensively from the somewhat vivid report of his achievement, published in one of the motion picture weekly journals: “Here was a man-sized job--how to measure the action of the picture to the musical score, so that they would both come out equal at every part of the picture, and would be so exact that any orchestra might take the score and follow the movement of the play with absolute correctness. It was a question primarily of mathematics, but even so it was some time before a system of computation was devised before the undertaking was gotten down to a certainty. As an illustration, on the opening night of one of the most notable photoplay productions now before the public, the orchestra, notwithstanding a three weeks’ rehearsal, found at the conclusion of the picture that it was a page and a half behind the play’s action in the musical setting.” Then we learn that Frank Stadler of New York “provided the remedy for this condition of affairs.” It is impossible to resist the temptation to quote further from this extremely racy account. “He remembered that Beethoven had overcome the difficulty of proper timing for his sonatas by a mechanical arrangement known as the metronome, invented by a friend of his. This is an arrangement with a little bell attached which may be set for the movement of the music and used as an exact guide to the right measure, the bell giving warning at the expiration of each period so that the leader knows whether he is in time or not.” Mr. Stadler then began the measurement of a film with a metronome, a stenographer, and a watch. He found that the film ran ten feet to every eight seconds and he set the metronome for eight second periods accordingly. “The stenographer made a note of the action of the picture each time the bell rang, with the result that when the entire picture had been run Mr. Stadler had a complete record of the production. All that was necessary then was to select from the classics and the popular melodies the music which would give a suitable atmosphere and a harmonious accompaniment to the theme of the play, so synchronizing the music with the eight second periods that every bar of it fitted the spirit of the many score of scenes of the production.”