Is U.S. music bad, or is it just not getting a hearing? Of 739 pieces sung or played in Manhattan's three biggest concert halls last year, only 45—less than 7% —were composed by Americans. Outside New York, artists and conductors were even less apt to be venturesome.
Composer Douglas Moore,* director of Columbia University's music department, says that more U.S. music is worth a hearing, but is not getting it. In this week's Saturday Review of Literature he put the blame on the music industry's "scramble for the big money," in which "the old and the familiar" sell best.
Said he of phonograph records: "What moves across the counters? Two or three symphonies and concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky and a few familiar favorites which are recorded and rerecorded with increasing splendor. Do you want to buy a serious composition by an American composer? Have you ever tried?"
Of concert tours: "If a flyer is taken with an American composition it had better be flashy, glib or cute. It must make an instantaneous hit on its first hearing or it will never get another."
Of radio: "Better plan to sit up late evenings because up to 11:30 the advertising executives have the field and you know about their taste. . . ."
Of opera: "They are just the same as they were when grandma was a girl, and American composers are strictly taboo."
Of symphony orchestras: "It is dollars to doughnuts that [the] conductor, preferably a foreigner for foreigners are so glamorous, has been selected from the stable of one New York manager whose favorable notice is the sole means of entrance to the field."
When U.S. music gets played, said Douglas Moore, it is usually "as a gesture thought to involve sacrifice on the part of the artist, the manager and the audience." His conclusion: "If a slogan of 'It's not necessarily bad because it is American' were to be adopted, there might be some improvement."
*Whose Symphony No. 2 was given its first U.S. performance last week by Alfred Wallenstein's Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.