Nickel Serenade

Manager Ralph Black of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra needed a gimmick to back up his theory that most people simply do not know a good bargain in music when they see one. After all, he thought, $7.20 for a student's season ticket to his orchestra's concerts was really dirt cheap. With the help of a slide rule, stop watch and timing book, Manager Black last week worked out his gimmick.

A nickel's worth of jukebox tune, which runs about 2 1/4 minutes, costs 2.2-c- a minute, he calculated. Buffalo's ten-concert season costs (at two hours for each concert) a little more than half a cent a minute. Black's conclusion: the jukebox player pays about four times as much for his scratchy grind music as he would for live symphonic music. And that is not all, reported Black. If the orchestra, like a jukebox, should stop playing every 2 1/4 minutes, "the student would have to make 53 trips to the podium during the symphony season and drop a nickel in [Conductor William] Steinberg to get the orchestra started again."

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