Music: New Friends

Musical Jeremiahs have long wailed about high prices which keep music from the plain people, draw only the rich who come not to hear but to be seen. Not less sour is their estimate of the “virtuoso system” which rewards performers for their fine airs or interesting eccentricities, pays scant attention to their musicianship. Last spring bright, aggressive Ira Arthur Hirschmann, vice president of New York’s smart Saks Fifth Avenue department store, snapped: “It’s about time somebody threw the circuses out of the concert halls!”

Young Mr. Hirschmann banded together a non-profit organization of music lovers called the New Friends of Music, Inc., announced that they would run this winter a series of 16 concerts devoted to the more erudite chamber music and songs of Brahms and Beethoven. To attract sincere music lovers and discourage the carriage trade, they held their prices down to $1.10 top, promised to get not the most noted performers but the most competent. Old hands predicted ruefully that they would run aground. Last week when the New Friends opened the doors of New York’s big Town Hall, in surged 1,400 season subscribers and 75 others who bought their tickets at the door, all the hall would hold.

In his 34 years, Ira Hirschmann has plu ged into many ventures, seen most of them succeed. Son of a Baltimore banker, Adolph B. Hirschmann, he studied economics at Johns Hopkins, left at 17, took up music with Peabody Institute instructors. At 20 he got a job as office boy in L. Bamberger & Co.’s department store, Newark. There he helped build radio station WOR, annotated its Philharmonic Orchestra broadcasts for three years, was appointed sales and publicity director at 23. Six years later he took the same post with Lord & Taylor’s store, planned their crisp black and white advertisements, recommended more truthful copy, fewer superlatives. In 1935 Saks Fifth Avenue made him their vice president (TIME, Feb. 11, 1935). Between times he darted off to Europe every summer, predicted Hitler’s success six months before the event, advised New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in his 1933 Fusion Campaign, New York’s Comptroller McGoldrick in 1934. He lectures to retailing classes at New York University, serves as board chairman to the University in Exile, which provides teaching posts for top-notch German refugees. He headed the group of Philharmonic patrons who canceled their subscriptions when Germany’s Wilhelm Furtwängler was named Toscanini’s successor (see p. 51 ), was first to restore his gift when Furtwängler withdrew. Short, stocky, with a great black bush of hair. Founder Hirschmann plays a tough game of tennis, has “three hobbies: music, long tramps in the woods, helping penniless musicians.”