Music: Music for the Millions

This season some 2,000 U.S. cities and towns, with audiences totaling close to 3,000,000 people, have bought their music on the painless, pay-as-you-go packaging basis known as the “organized-audience plan.” Two giant A & Ps of music, Community Concert Service and Civic Concert Service, handle 90% of the bookings; some 2,500 artists, separately, in ensembles and in orchestras, crisscross the nation to serve up the music.

What kind of service are the audiences getting? Last week familiar charges and countercharges were flying thick & fast.

Beethoven at Last. To Virgil Thomson, critic of the New York Herald Tribune, who devoted three tart Sunday columns to the subject, the biggest audience in the U.S. is getting very poor service indeed. He had a flock of letters from readers telling him, “How right you are!” Both Ward French, president of Community, and Marks Levine, board chairman of Civic, were ready to tell him how wrong he was.

Critic Thomson conceded the real accomplishments of the organized-audience plan. Music has been brought to many a U.S. community that had never heard Beethoven or Mozart beyond the range of a radio or record-player. Hundreds of young virtuosi who might otherwise be pounding nails instead of pianos for a living are playing recitals and concerts, building careers. And it is all done without local deficits. Individual “members” in each city pay their “dues” of $6 ($5 plus $1 federal tax) to their own community association, the number of members determines how much can be spent for artists, and the artists are engaged only after the money is in the bank.

But Where’s Stravinsky? Critic Thomson’s biggest quarrel was over programs. Artists “at the level of fame” of Flagstad, Heifetz, Horowitz and Rubinstein could “do as they please.” But, he charged, the programs of artists at a lower level are “censored in a most arbitrary fashion” by the New York concert services (who promptly denied it). “With concert business bigger than ever (by volume),” wrote Thomson, “the concert repertory gets smaller year by year. There are only five piano sonatas by Beethoven that the central offices will accept without a row. No long work by Schumann is considered by them to be good business out of New York, except the Carnaval, and they usually demand extensive cuts in this. Any Bach suite is frowned upon, if played entire . . . The Schubert sonatas are out of the question . . .” All this was “an injustice . . . not only to artists but also to the public.”

Actually, Thomson had some of his facts wrong. Community could prove by its 1949-50 programs that its 37 touring pianists played twelve Beethoven sonatas (out of 32).

Thomson would have been on stronger ground in citing the absence of contemporary music. Community’s 1,000 audiences did not see Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schoenberg or Britten on any pianist’s program. They heard the music of only three contemporary U.S. composers, Morton Gould, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson himself. Fourteen touring symphony orchestras served soothing programs made up mostly of Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Stravinsky cracked a few programs with his Firebird suite (1910).

The organized-audience plan, says Community’s Ward French, simply aims to bring “music to the people. All you can do is find out what they will accept and give it to them . . . Concert associations cannot be musical workshops for experimental music. This job must be done by endowed workshops and specialized audiences.” Thomson takes his stand with Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, who insists that if the U.S. is to develop a great musical culture it must hear new music.

Longhairs & Pinky-Crookers. Where did the organized audiences stand in the argument? A few answers from around the circuit seemed to back up the New York managers.

In Alton, Ill. (pop. 32,176), Paul S. Cousley, local president of the Community group, said, “The few complaints we’ve had have come from merchants who think we’re sometimes getting a little too longhair.” In Chillicothe, Mo. (pop. 8,649), Owsley Welch had the same report: “If we have a criticism it’s that the programs are usually a little heavy for Chillicothe.” In Streator, Ill. (pop. 16,442), Linden Mulford laid it down: “All we have in Streator is middle-class people, and if you give them all longhair stuff, you’ll find only the pinky-crookers at the concerts.”