Music: The Seattle Treatment

As in many a U.S. city, the wonder was that Seattle’s symphony orchestra made such harmony on stage when there was so much caterwauling backstage, in the boxes, and in the business office.

Only one man was ever able to dominate Seattle’s unruly orchestra since Karl Krueger left it in 1932. Crusty, goat-bearded Sir Thomas Beecham raged at Seattle as an “esthetic dustbin,” but for two years during the war, he had musicians and sellout audiences on the edges of their seats (he sometimes stopped the orchestra in the middle of a movement to lecture the audience on its manners). Such other conductors as Basil Cameron and Nikolai Sokoloff had left Seattle shaking their heads and wringing their hands. Halfempty houses, rickety budgets, constant wrangling of the socialite directors or the insubordination among the musicians had made life unbearable. The last conductor to get “the Seattle treatment,” ruddy-faced Carl Bricken, 49, survived a petition signed by 50-odd members of the orchestra asking that he be sacked, but he finally quit on his own last January.

Last week, Seattle’s musicians were on the barricades again. They marched into a symphony board of directors’ meeting in the stuffy, ivied Rainier Club. They had a simple solution to the orchestra’s problem: if the directors would only just stay away, 40 members of the orchestra would run it themselves. They would plan the season, pick their own conductor.

Board President Louis La Bow said the meeting had been “a pleasant social gathering . . . most interesting.” But another board member was more frank. Said he: “The musicians have the gall to say—and believe—that they have had to play down to conductors for years, and that they must maintain their own high standards. I’d love to hear Beecham’s reply to that . . . They’re musical mobsters. They’re out to have Ali Baba for a chairman—there are just 40 of them.”

The pinch was that the directors had no better idea to offer. They had tried to raise $75,000, and fallen $50,000 short of their goal. So far all they have planned for fall is a series of three pops concerts, with guest conductors like Ferde Grofe and Morton Gould, and three children’s concerts. Admitted one director: “We have been guilty of not really analyzing the musical needs of Seattle.”

Whoever Seattle’s next conductor was, he would have to be a man who could be decorative at teas in the fashionable Highlands and Broadmoor as well as forceful on the podium. Said one Seattleite: “We ought to start him out right—with a baton of poison oak.”