The Sublimating Baton

"He's had another seizure," said the ashen-faced concertmaster. "The maestro can't go on. Perhaps if you took a moment to look at the score . . ." The world's greatest undiscovered conductor rose from his seat on the aisle. "A score won't be necessary," said Walter Mitty quietly. "Where is the baton?"

James Thurber's pipe-dreaming hero never imagined himself conducting a symphony orchestra, but thousands of his spiritual prototypes have. To accommodate them, RCA Victor last week issued a package that encourages the hi-fi fan to do his armchair conducting openly and with proper equipment, rather than furtively with a pencil. The package: Music for Frustrated Conductors, complete with instructions manual and a 16 3/4-in. baton.

For his money ($4.98 list price, $1 more for stereo) the frustrated conductor gets some bandshell marshmallows--Richard Rodgers' Victory at Sea, Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, Fantasia on "Greensleeves"--preconducted for him by Arthur Fiedler, Morton Gould, Robert Russell Bennett. (Any armchair connoisseur of the Viennese repertory will find Conductor Fiedler's tempi in the Fledermaus waltzes aggravatingly slow, but Gould's version of Mexican Hat Dance is so inspiring that it may result in dislocated shoulders.)

On the theory that one out of every ten adult male Americans is a conductor at heart, if not in mind and basic education, Victor has issued 35,000 of the albums, happily expects to get demands for more. In Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, Victor is building a podium before a wall-sized photograph of the Boston Symphony, plans to invite passers-by in to conduct behind closed doors. Actually, home conducting may be a healthy thing, according to Manhattan Psychoanalyst Dr. Edmund Bergler: it provides the amateur with sublimating relief from the gnawing "infantile megalomania" that afflicts every man who ever wanted to lift a baton.

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