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Whatever serious music the U.S. small city or town is unable to drum up on its own these days, it can usually import through any one of the 20 management concerns operating in Manhattan (Columbia Artists Management, the National Artists Corp. and Sol Hurok among them control 90% of the business). The New York management outfits now give their clients a choice of 617 attractions, including 96 sopranos, 42 tenors, 101 pianists, 50 violinists, 65 instrumental ensembles, 47 vocal ensembles, four harpists, one marimbist and an assortment of special acts. Many younger artists use the local concert circuit to pick up experience, but many of the big names no longer want to tour widely. As a result, the big-time virtuoso recital is going out of vogue, and most communities want a group ranging from the Black Watch to the Juilliard String Quartet. This year there are about 1,200 cities and towns in the organized-audience, and they have collected in advance close to $6,000,000.
One of the newest additions to the tour list is Rangely (pop. 800), which lies in such an inaccessible corner of Colorado that artists must drive in from Utah. Rangely music lovers wired Community Concerts Association last spring that they had collected $2,000 and wanted a concert series. When Community turned them down on the ground that it was essential to have a piano in town, the citizens of Rangely took up another collection, bought a new Baldwin grand, and got their series, including a male quartet and a two-piano team (which trucked in the second piano).
Play It Yourself. Critics used to fear that so much professionally packaged music, plus the flood of LP records, would put an end to amateur music. The reverse has happened. Twice as many Americans (some 28 million) now play musical instruments as did 20 years ago; roughly 8,000,000 children are playing musical instruments in schools. "It's accepted by the kids now," says one music educator. "In my day it was considered sissy." The industry reckons that it will gross $470 million from musical instruments and sheet music in 1957. Sales of electronic organs alone have increased an estimated 600% in the past five years (says Hammond President Stanley Sorensen: "If you can get it in the house, you can sell it").
The family musicale has gone the way of family Bible-reading, but in its place are thousands of groups that give the weekend instrumentalist a chance to play anything from bop to Bartok. Madison Avenue admen get together to play igao's jazz, Menninger Foundation psychiatrists play Bach. In Chicago a group of Northwestern professors formed a combo called "The Academic Cats," and San Francisco Christmas shoppers are currently being assaulted by the excruciating street-corner sounds made by nine businessmen in "vaguely Franco-Prussian uniforms" who bill themselves as the "Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band" ("We take out our animosities this way; it's cheaper and more fun than psychiatry").