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...
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