Seventy years after the event, the artistic motives behind Whiteman's “Experiment in Modern Music” remain obscure. The program was hardly experimental. Aside from Gershwin's Rhapsody, it consisted of entirely familiar material, the only innovation being its concert-hall setting. It clearly was not modern music of the kind that New Yorkers had only recently heard. Critics were still reeling from the local premières of Le sacre du printemps, Herzgewächse and Octandre. Most of Whiteman's concert consisted of a series of fox-trots which the band could have played in its usual dance-hall setting. This normal stylistic range was only slightly broadened by the presence of a couple of comedy numbers and Victor Herbert's Suite of Serenades, a new work based on old materials by a composer who was already old-fashioned. The concert seems in retrospect to have been a pretentious showcase for a successful dance band. Yet the audience, much of which was drawn from the world of classical music, and many of the critics as well, took a good deal of it seriously.