Singing Land
Let me go where'er I will I hear a sky-born music still.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the calm and cloistered air of 19th century New England, the Sage of Concord tuned his inner ear to the faint, sweet sounds that issued from his Transcendental trees and rocks. If he could hear sky-born music wherever he went, his friends and neighbors were less fortunate; they had to depend on the uncertain efforts of a handful of local groups, supplemented by occasional trips to Boston. In null century Concord, New Englanders do not find themselves so hampered--and Emerson would scarcely be left in peace to do his ethereal listening. Today's American, let him go where'er he will, hears the sound of music still--hardly celestial, but often sky-born.
If the explosion of painting in Renaissance Italy marked an "awakening of the eye," the explosion of music in post-World War II America suggests a massive unstopping of the U.S. ear. "Americans have discovered music," says Music Merchant Andre Kostelanetz, "like a people who have discovered red and blue and green where all had been black and white before." In its musical black-and-white era, the U.S. already had great symphony orchestras, great opera, great foreign artists--and it conquered the world with its jazz. What is different today is the extraordinary breadth of the nation's music production and consumption: operas and orchestras by the hundreds, musicians by the thousands, instruments by the millions--and blowing over it all. almost defying measurement, rising above the noise even of America's engines, the wonderful, relentless whirlwind of recorded sound.
Who Is Listening? The music boom sometimes seems less a cultural awakening than a mammoth assault of indiscriminate sounds on a public that no longer has any place to hide. Amateur psychologists say that the U.S. is becoming afraid of silence. Music in wild profusion volleys forth from phonographs, radios, television sets, jukeboxes. Piped music ushers untold thousands of Americans into the world (hospital delivery rooms), through it (garages, restaurants and hotels), and out of it (mortuary slumber rooms). Millions open their eyes to it, wrap themselves in it as they drive to work, turn out goods and services to a brisk, production-boosting beat (overall stitchers in Colorado stitch 10% faster to Ain't We Got Fun).
In this holiday season, the musical voice of Christmas carries to vacationers paddling beneath the surface of Miami pools (via underwater loudspeakers), to women in slenderizing salons, to celebrators in non-slenderizing saloons. In Philadelphia, worshipers can drop by the Arch Street Methodist Church and adjust a selector to the hymn of their choice. From the highest building in Salt Lake City, Christmas carols boom across the Salt Lake Valley. "I don't want to sound like Scrooge," complained an irate woman, "but damn it, I don't want to go without sleep until December 26th, either!"
The U.S. is producing more music and spending more for it than the rest of the world put together. But are many people really listening? Or are they turned into passive human receiving sets that vibrate with the sound but do not themselves hear it? "We do anything," says one Muzak executive, "to keep people from listening to the music. Any music that requires listening to understand is not for us." And to that a composer adds: "Our nation has been taught to shut its ears."
Bubbles v. Berg. Perhaps the best rebuttal to that argument is to be found neither in the echo chambers of recorded sound--which last week poured out seasonal items ranging from a tasteless Elvis Presley Christmas album (RCA Victor) to a breathtaking version of Bach's Christmas Oratorio (Decca Archive Production)--nor in a traditional music center like New York City, which last week heard U.S. Modernist Roger Sessions' new, knotty Third Symphony. The real answer is in the smaller cities and towns, which support nearly a thousand amateur and professional symphony orchestras plus masses of chamber ensembles, choirs, opera groups. Among them, they perform more of the standard repertory and give premieres of more new works than all the orchestras and opera houses of Europe.
Whatever their taste, the audiences are attentive to the music they are getting, and outspoken about it. In many cities a symphonic program must still be mixed with bubbly, musical-comedy club soda or the fruit salad of such musical cocktail shakers as Ferde (Grand Canyon Suite) Grofe; in most places the craggy complexities of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg are tolerated only in small doses, if at all. In St. Louis not long ago, the conductor of the Washington University Orchestra jokingly announced that the auditorium doors had been locked before he began a performance of a work by Austria's late Atonalist Anton von Webern. But Paul Paray, the French-born conductor of the Detroit Symphony, draws a comparison that has struck many another European observer. It is not what Detroit audiences have settled for, but what they are looking for, that impresses him: "French audiences are decadent; audiences in the U.S. are constantly in progress."
Musical Boosters. At the end of Emerson's life, the Boston Symphony was beginning to build toward the great orchestra it has since become. Today its delicate precision is balanced against the enthusiasm and erratic aim of the 60-member "Dime Symphony" of Hastings, Neb. (pop. 23,500), which for a 10-c- admission charge supplies the local population with two concerts a year. Somewhere between the Boston and the Dime lies a host of other orchestras of varying sizes and skills.
Most big city symphony orchestras are still headed by European-born conductors (notable exception: Leonard Bernstein, who is taking over the New York Philharmonic), but most of the smaller orchestras are now led by U.S.-born conductors. The orchestras are no longer the playthings of individual philanthropists; even in dollar-dizzy Dallas, the symphony campaigns to get a larger slice of its support from $5 contributors. Orchestras try hard to come closer to the public. Most of them, notably including Washington's National Symphony, give youth concerts; the New Orleans Symphony plays on Mississippi River boat rides, and the San Antonio orchestra often performs in a brewery.
A large part of many U.S. orchestras' support now comes from industry. Many businessmen count the quality of local symphony orchestras as a big factor in choosing new industrial sites, and cities take a real booster's pride in their orchestras. New symphonies have sprung up in areas where live symphonic music has never been available before, as well as in or near cities where big orchestras already exist but where people want more music of their own.
P:The Atlanta Symphony, organized by Brooklyn-born Conductor Henry Sopkin, is the only major orchestra within 500 miles, and it shares the personnel problems of many small city orchestras. "We're like a Triple A baseball team," says Conductor Sopkin. "We lose some players to the big leagues in Philadelphia, New York and Boston, but we can recruit from groups in Chattanooga, Tuscaloosa and Birmingham." Few of Sopkin's 78 instrumentalists can afford to live as full-time performers; some conduct church choirs, others work as shipping clerks, stenographers, factory hands. Nonetheless, the orchestra has an ambitious season schedule of 60 concerts (mostly standard repertory and pop), including a date at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. P:Los Angeles alone has some 50 suburban orchestras within commuting distance of the city, and many of them have been more ambitious in their programing than the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The 85-member Burbank Symphony has performed more new works (Lukas Foss, Haakon Bergh, Giuseppe Marino. Leo Shuken) in the last dozen years than the Philharmonic has in all its 38-year history.
61 7--Count 'Em--61 7. What has happened in the field of symphonic music has happened to opera: the oldtime major centers no longer perform the bulk of it, nor do they always lead the way in the performance of new and neglected works.
Last year (according to Opera News) 703 opera groups were onstage in 48 states, and home-grown opera was performed as frequently as imports. Today there is an active enough opera circuit to permit guest stars from the Metropolitan Opera to swing around the country in almost continual employment from Miami to Seattle.
Whatever serious music the U.S. small city or town is unable to drum up on its own these days, it can usually import through any one of the 20 management concerns operating in Manhattan (Columbia Artists Management, the National Artists Corp. and Sol Hurok among them control 90% of the business). The New York management outfits now give their clients a choice of 617 attractions, including 96 sopranos, 42 tenors, 101 pianists, 50 violinists, 65 instrumental ensembles, 47 vocal ensembles, four harpists, one marimbist and an assortment of special acts. Many younger artists use the local concert circuit to pick up experience, but many of the big names no longer want to tour widely. As a result, the big-time virtuoso recital is going out of vogue, and most communities want a group ranging from the Black Watch to the Juilliard String Quartet. This year there are about 1,200 cities and towns in the organized-audience, and they have collected in advance close to $6,000,000.
One of the newest additions to the tour list is Rangely (pop. 800), which lies in such an inaccessible corner of Colorado that artists must drive in from Utah. Rangely music lovers wired Community Concerts Association last spring that they had collected $2,000 and wanted a concert series. When Community turned them down on the ground that it was essential to have a piano in town, the citizens of Rangely took up another collection, bought a new Baldwin grand, and got their series, including a male quartet and a two-piano team (which trucked in the second piano).
Play It Yourself. Critics used to fear that so much professionally packaged music, plus the flood of LP records, would put an end to amateur music. The reverse has happened. Twice as many Americans (some 28 million) now play musical instruments as did 20 years ago; roughly 8,000,000 children are playing musical instruments in schools. "It's accepted by the kids now," says one music educator. "In my day it was considered sissy." The industry reckons that it will gross $470 million from musical instruments and sheet music in 1957. Sales of electronic organs alone have increased an estimated 600% in the past five years (says Hammond President Stanley Sorensen: "If you can get it in the house, you can sell it").
The family musicale has gone the way of family Bible-reading, but in its place are thousands of groups that give the weekend instrumentalist a chance to play anything from bop to Bartok. Madison Avenue admen get together to play igao's jazz, Menninger Foundation psychiatrists play Bach. In Chicago a group of Northwestern professors formed a combo called "The Academic Cats," and San Francisco Christmas shoppers are currently being assaulted by the excruciating street-corner sounds made by nine businessmen in "vaguely Franco-Prussian uniforms" who bill themselves as the "Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band" ("We take out our animosities this way; it's cheaper and more fun than psychiatry").
More serious-minded amateurs have organized themselves into the Amateur Chamber Music Players, an outfit founded by an Indianapolis incinerator salesman; the group lists the names, addresses and self-appraised musical ability of its 3,500 members all over the U.S. and in some foreign countries. Chamber music enthusiasts tend to sell their favorite music with a kind of missionary zeal. "There's a grapevine in chamber music you wouldn't believe," says Concert Manager Henry Colbert. "Let a group play a wonderful concert in Tulsa, and we get a telephone call the next morning from Buffalo asking for that group." Last summer an alfalfa seed dealer in Assaria, Kans. (pop. 200) spent his vacation money to bring a trio from the University of Wichita School of Music to town for a recital. Some 400 spectators sat on 100-lb. sacks of alfalfa seed to hear the delicately flavored music of Brahms, Schumann and Mozart.
Pros & Amateurs. One of the striking facts about the U.S. musical scene is that the dividing line between professional and amateur is becoming increasingly blurred. No longer is the amateur necessarily a man who plays privately with his family and friends; now he may take his music before the public. An amateur jazz group like Long Island's Farmingdale High School Band turns up with the Ellingtons, Armstrongs and Gillespies on such sacrosanct gigs as the Newport Jazz Festival. Amateurs sing from the opera stage, play in the concert hall.
Many critics think this is invigorating for American music. But the situation is not all rosy. While some amateurs work their way toward the pro ranks, a lot of pro musicians are unwillingly drifting toward amateur status. One of the depression pockets in an otherwise zooming boom: the U.S. keeps turning out more skilled instrumentalists than it can employ in their own lines. At best, only about a third of the band and orchestra men in the country make the bulk of their living playing. The remaining 175,000 are professional D.P.s who play in off hours or not'at all.
Paradoxically, the biggest factor causing musical unemployment in the midst of an unprecedented musical boom is also the factor that triggered the boom--music automation.
The Hi-Fi Age. The LP record and hi-fi are to U.S. music what the assembly-line system was to U.S. industry. No musicmaker, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band, is unaffected by vinyl, woofer and tweeter. Live music competes with hi-fi even harder than it used to compete with radio and old-style disks. The habit of splicing tape and gluing it together into the "perfect" performance gives listeners unreal models with which to compare concert-hall performances. And yet live music also benefits from the tremendous growth of musical enthusiasms that hi-fi brought about.
When Columbia introduced the LP record a decade ago (among the first disks were Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and "Emperor" Concerto, Ravel's Bolero), the U.S. was already primed for a revolution in sound. In 1947, the last year of the pre-LP era, the industry sold more 78-r.p.m. records than it ever had in its history. Within two years the entire industry had begun converting to microgroove--LPs (33 1/3 r.p.m.) for classical music and the 45-r.p.m. disks pioneered by RCA Victor for pop music. Since then, record catalogues have become jammed with upwards of 30,000 LP recordings and untold thousands of 45s, put out by 1.467 separate labels. Record clubs are booming, and more than half of all supermarkets now carry disks.
In the fevered heat of record production, the phonograph industry opened like a swampland plant. The number of phonographs owned in U.S. homes has risen 37% in the last five years, to an estimated 30 million this year. There are roughly 2,000,000 hi-fi rigs scattered about the country today.
Exploring the Ocean. "Music is an ocean," wrote Aldous Huxley not long ago, "but the repertory, the stuff that is habitually performed ... is hardly even a lake; it is a pond." The record industry seems determined to explore the ocean. Today the record buyer can choose from 26 versions of Beethoven's Fifth, seven Aidas, seven Bohemes, 18 versions of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, 18 versions of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.
From the start of the LP era, some recordmakers tried to get away from this highly profitable piling up of consistent favorites. Among the most daring of the explorers were the dozens of small companies formed with vast amounts of imagination and practically no cash. To snatch a piece of the market away from the majors (RCA Victor, Columbia, Capitol, Decca, London, Angel, Mercury, M-G-M), the new companies went in for such esoterica as the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), the Concerti Grossi of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), The Wood So Wild, by William Byrd (1543-1623).
When the standard repertory ran thin, the larger companies joined the search for oddities. Columbia President Goddard
Lieberson has given the record buyer his first good look at the music of his own time by recording such radical items as Schoenberg's Erwartung, Berg's Lulu, the complete music of Anton von Webern, Elliott Carter's first String Quartet. Composers who had only limited popularity in the past--Vivaldi. Berlioz. Bartok--came into their own on LPs; some who had never even been heard before in the ordinary concert hall, notably Guillaume de Machaut (1300-77) and Guillaume Dufay (circa 1400-74). appeared in the record catalogues. For the first time the listener had just about all of Western musical literature at his fingertips.
Not that his fingertips are reaching exclusively for the great or the serious. The proportions of the public committed to classical and to pop music have remained remarkably the same: over the last ten years classical sales have hovered around 20% of total record sales. A great many of the bestselling disks in the classical category (Christmas Hymns and Carols, Richard Rodgers' Victory at Sea) are classics only in the vocabulary of record companies. Many record executives still wince as if stuck by a stylus when asked to release out-of-the-way music rather than the profitable old favorites.*
But there is no doubt that the taste of the companies--and of the customers--is gradually improving. Says Columbia Artists President Frederick C. Schang Jr.: "They start listening to Mantovani. In time they want Kostelanetz, which is a step up. or maybe the Boston Pops. Then maybe they will venture on to a big-time symphony orchestra playing Tchaikovsky. After that, one of these days, they'll even go for Beethoven--and they are caught. That's the way it's done in this country."
New Revolution? How long can the record boom go on? Indefinitely, according to the industry's hopeful calculations. The prospect of new technical developments promises to open the market wider than ever. There are now some 40 stereophonic tape labels; Westrex and London Records in the U.S. have announced the development of single-stylus stereo disk systems.
But stereo tape is still expensive (as much as $18.95 for a recording of Brahms's First Symphony, v. $3.98 for the same symphony on LP). A better prospect for a new revolution in recordings : sound-plus-picture. Engineers are now working on a disk that will be keyed to a picture to be played on a television screen. The audiophile will see Harry Belafonte singing at the Waldorf as he listens to him, will watch the great operas unfold onstage as the music pours from his phonograph.
Love, Love, Love. Even without the advent of what might be called LL (for long-looking) disks, the record industry has profoundly influenced American pop and jazz artists. While in the early days of the microgroove decade the 45-r.p.m. disk was the major vehicle for pop singers, all of the more imaginative pop and show tunes are now recorded on LPs. The 45, with only three minutes to sell its wares, relies on the babbling lyrics and thudding beat of rock 'n' roll and kindred styles. But the LP provides time for the leisurely display of stylists and songs, has pushed the outer age limit of pop record buyers into the 405, and now accounts for two-thirds of cash pop sales.
At the other end of the scale, the average age of pop short-play customers has dropped steadily, is now computed to be around 13. That fact is enough to guarantee that along with the ballad there will always be the beat, whether it is rock 'n' roll or some such hybrid rockabilly or the new "rockahula"--Hawaiian rock 'n' roll. Beyond that, the industry is devoutly committed to the sentiments that Columbia's pop A & R (Artists and Repertory) Chief Mitch Miller once eloquently summarized as: "I love, you love, we all love, why do we love, who do we love, how much do we love, where do we love, why did you stop loving me?"
Not for Whisky Drinkers? Jazz now sticks almost entirely to LPs, which give jazzmen a permanent and handy record of what they are doing--and the chance to develop an extended musical idea on a single side. On the other hand, there have been too many mediocre jazz LPs (upwards of 300 new jazz disks each year) on which the sheer yawning playing space led instrumentalists into the dreariest kind of repetition.
While jazz records are selling better than ever, new music rooms close as fast as they open. In cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, there is almost no audience for live jazz. The trouble, thinks Critic Nat Hentoff, is that the nightclub is not the place for jazz, certainly not the low-keyed, modern variety. Says one player: "Let's take jazz away from the whisky drinkers." More and more jazz fans seem to prefer taking their jazz--and their whisky--sitting in front of their hi-fi sets.
The center of the live product is New York, headquarters of the Modern Jazz Quartet, best and most imaginative of the "chamber jazz" groups, and of Trumpeter Miles Davis, most talented of the postbop generation of blowers. New York jazzmen are forever plunging into love affairs between jazz and classical music. Some of these experiments are stimulating, some dreary, but all point to a challenge. Until now, U.S. music has been most creative in the gold and blue, hot and cool wails of jazz. Has the U.S. developed a formal musical voice other than that of jazz and of pop tunes? In the midst of the music boom, what of the serious American composer?
Shameful Labor. For one thing, the U.S. composer has never been so highly regarded by the public. Lowell Mason, the early 19th century's leading U.S. musician, recalled that he kept his name off a musical tome because "I was then a bank officer in Savannah and did not wish to be known as a musical man." A century later, Composer Charles Ives gave one reason why he had decided to go into the insurance business and write music on the side: "As a boy I was partially ashamed of music . . . Most boys in the country towns of America, I think, felt the same way." The young composer today works under no such hazard: boys as well as bank directors respect him.
The U.S. artist longs for the freedom of living in a garret. But like his fellow citizens, he wants his garret air-conditioned and his rent paid. U.S. composers justly complain that 1) only a few of them can make a living from their music, and 2) all of those belong to a generation that has already had its chance. They include Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Norman Dello Joio, William Schuman and Gian Carlo Menotti in the list.
The economic facts are indeed tough. The U.S. composer must himself pay the costs of having a score and orchestral parts copied (about $1,000 for a symphony). In Europe, publishers bear the cost of copying. All the composer is likely to get in royalties from a performance is between $25 and $50.
The fact remains that seriously intentioned U.S. composers manage to get along, what with commissions, grants, recording fees and, in most cases, supplementary jobs. Ready to take the place of the middle-aged U.S. composers is a host of younger men--Seymour Shifrin, Andrew Imbrie, Ned Rorem--who are experimenting in a wide range of styles. Some follow the "neoclassic" Stravinsky; others work in variations of the tonal-row technique of Schoenberg. Still others experiment with the weird harmonies obtainable on tape and electronic instruments. Wrote 43-year-old Composer Roger Goeb (Homage a Debussy, Symphony No. j) in an open letter to his public: "If at times we seem to be making raucous noises, please don't think we do it to drive you away . . . There are some rather raucous happenings in our time."
Despite such raucousness, U.S. composers--technically the best-educated in the world, and perhaps overeducated--are deeply preoccupied with theory and "schools." But they are also the most responsible, says Composer Milton Babbitt, 41. "Oh, they may take a fling, and write something just to be different, but they take another look and blame it on 'drinking too much the night before.'" Whatever the U.S. composer turns out --whether it is night-before or morning-after music--he is more than likely to get at least a first hearing. With dozens of award committees poring over scores, no real talent is likely to go undetected. The modern composer's most serious trouble has often been a barrier of strangeness between himself and his listener. In odd ways and places, the barrier shows signs of breaking down. Composer William Schuman, who is also president of Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, recalls the shock of recognition he felt as he walked by an Atlantic City bar to hear first a few strains of his own Undertow, then a bit of his Sixth Symphony, and finally a snatch of his Credendum issuing through the door. When he stopped in for a beer, he discovered that his music, gunned up electronically and chopped into scene-size bites, was being used as the accompaniment for a TV drama.
Serious music that is suitable for a thriller, or a saloon, may not be a bad omen for the future. For, as Emerson said: "Art should not be detached."
Let me go where'er I will I hear a sky-born music still.
* A case in point: the fate of Angel Records, which did more than most companies to add distinction to the LP repertory (Gieseking's Debussy, Callas' Tosca, Beecham's Abduction from the Seraglio, the Boccherini quartets). Despite five years of artistic brilliance and at least moderate financial success, Angel this month was handed over by its British parent company (Electric & Musical Industries, Ltd.) to another E.M.I, subsidiary -Hollywood's big, successful, commercial Capitol Records. Out as Angel's bosses went Dario and Dorle Soria, remarkable husband-and-wife team whose flair had kept Angel flying high.
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