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More serious-minded amateurs have organized themselves into the Amateur Chamber Music Players, an outfit founded by an Indianapolis incinerator salesman; the group lists the names, addresses and self-appraised musical ability of its 3,500 members all over the U.S. and in some foreign countries. Chamber music enthusiasts tend to sell their favorite music with a kind of missionary zeal. "There's a grapevine in chamber music you wouldn't believe," says Concert Manager Henry Colbert. "Let a group play a wonderful concert in Tulsa, and we get a telephone call the next morning from Buffalo asking for that group." Last summer an alfalfa seed dealer in Assaria, Kans. (pop. 200) spent his vacation money to bring a trio from the University of Wichita School of Music to town for a recital. Some 400 spectators sat on 100-lb. sacks of alfalfa seed to hear the delicately flavored music of Brahms, Schumann and Mozart.
Pros & Amateurs. One of the striking facts about the U.S. musical scene is that the dividing line between professional and amateur is becoming increasingly blurred. No longer is the amateur necessarily a man who plays privately with his family and friends; now he may take his music before the public. An amateur jazz group like Long Island's Farmingdale High School Band turns up with the Ellingtons, Armstrongs and Gillespies on such sacrosanct gigs as the Newport Jazz Festival. Amateurs sing from the opera stage, play in the concert hall.
Many critics think this is invigorating for American music. But the situation is not all rosy. While some amateurs work their way toward the pro ranks, a lot of pro musicians are unwillingly drifting toward amateur status. One of the depression pockets in an otherwise zooming boom: the U.S. keeps turning out more skilled instrumentalists than it can employ in their own lines. At best, only about a third of the band and orchestra men in the country make the bulk of their living playing. The remaining 175,000 are professional D.P.s who play in off hours or not'at all.
Paradoxically, the biggest factor causing musical unemployment in the midst of an unprecedented musical boom is also the factor that triggered the boom—music automation.
The Hi-Fi Age. The LP record and hi-fi are to U.S. music what the assembly-line system was to U.S. industry. No musicmaker, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band, is unaffected by vinyl, woofer and tweeter. Live music competes with hi-fi even harder than it used to compete with radio and old-style disks. The habit of splicing tape and gluing it together into the "perfect" performance gives listeners unreal models with which to compare concert-hall performances. And yet live music also benefits from the tremendous growth of musical enthusiasms that hi-fi brought about.