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The U.S. is producing more music and spending more for it than the rest of the world put together. But are many people really listening? Or are they turned into passive human receiving sets that vibrate with the sound but do not themselves hear it? "We do anything," says one Muzak executive, "to keep people from listening to the music. Any music that requires listening to understand is not for us." And to that a composer adds: "Our nation has been taught to shut its ears."
Bubbles v. Berg. Perhaps the best rebuttal to that argument is to be found neither in the echo chambers of recorded sound—which last week poured out seasonal items ranging from a tasteless Elvis Presley Christmas album (RCA Victor) to a breathtaking version of Bach's Christmas Oratorio (Decca Archive Production)—nor in a traditional music center like New York City, which last week heard U.S. Modernist Roger Sessions' new, knotty Third Symphony. The real answer is in the smaller cities and towns, which support nearly a thousand amateur and professional symphony orchestras plus masses of chamber ensembles, choirs, opera groups. Among them, they perform more of the standard repertory and give premieres of more new works than all the orchestras and opera houses of Europe.
Whatever their taste, the audiences are attentive to the music they are getting, and outspoken about it. In many cities a symphonic program must still be mixed with bubbly, musical-comedy club soda or the fruit salad of such musical cocktail shakers as Ferde (Grand Canyon Suite) Grofe; in most places the craggy complexities of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg are tolerated only in small doses, if at all. In St. Louis not long ago, the conductor of the Washington University Orchestra jokingly announced that the auditorium doors had been locked before he began a performance of a work by Austria's late Atonalist Anton von Webern. But Paul Paray, the French-born conductor of the Detroit Symphony, draws a comparison that has struck many another European observer. It is not what Detroit audiences have settled for, but what they are looking for, that impresses him: "French audiences are decadent; audiences in the U.S. are constantly in progress."
Musical Boosters. At the end of Emerson's life, the Boston Symphony was beginning to build toward the great orchestra it has since become. Today its delicate precision is balanced against the enthusiasm and erratic aim of the 60-member "Dime Symphony" of Hastings, Neb. (pop. 23,500), which for a 10¢ admission charge supplies the local population with two concerts a year. Somewhere between the Boston and the Dime lies a host of other orchestras of varying sizes and skills.