Though in the United States all the arts are now publicly subsidized on a broad front, music has received a lion’s share of the official cultural dollar. This support has come to music, it would seem, for two reasons: music is at once more “pure” than other art forms and at the same time has a history of commercial viability. Music’s purity consists in the fact that, unlike painting and sculpture, it provides little of material value to the collector; it is thus spared the costly and contentious apparatus of dealers and museums. And unlike repertory theater and dance, music managed for at least one century—from roughly the middle of the 19th century to at least the end of World War II—to pay much of its own way in this country, helped along by the devotion of individual music lovers and assorted social and ethnic groups. So music, of all the arts, must have seemed both a deserving and not too demanding candidate for the helping hand of government.

To speak of music’s commercial viability is of course not to forget that this possibility of financial success for musicians—soloists, supporting players, and teachers alike—could only arise when orchestras, opera companies, and schools existed to provide the necessary institutional structure. But these institutions have always had the kind of aspirations to distinction, comprehensiveness, and permanence that have made them sure money losers; as a result, their deficit had to be made up outside the normal play of market forces.

Historically, this task was performed by America’s rich, and the institutional history of musical America from the turn of this century until quite recently is a story of their attentions. Our two most famous music schools were named for their patrons: the Juilliard School was founded after a bequest in 1919 by cotton merchant Augustus Juilliard, and the Curtis Institute was begun and endowed in 1924 by Mary Louise Curtis Bok of the Curtis publishing fortune. Among orchestras, the Boston Symphony was founded in 1881 by Henry Lee Higginson, who remained the major financial support of the orchestra until almost the day of his death in 1919. In New York, the name of Otto Kahn was long associated both with the financing and management of the Metropolitan Opera, and the same can be said of the relationship of Clarence Mackay and Mrs. Lytle Hull to the New York Philharmonic. Though the names elsewhere were often hardly so famous, this story of private contributions to music was repeated across the country, and constitutes a noble chapter in the history of capitalist philanthropy.

But as increasingly the mere accumulation of money no longer served to legitimize its possession—and as income and inheritance taxes began to take a bite out of great fortunes—foundations established by the rich came to share in the exercise of patronage. In music, for example, the Guggenheim Foundation as early as the 1920’s awarded fellowships to many American composers, including Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Roger Sessions. More recently, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music has specialized in grants to individual musicians for specific projects. Nor has foundation help been limited to composers and soloists; countless grants have over the years been made in every field of American musical life.

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Important as these activities of individuals and foundations have been, they all pale in significance when compared with the scope and influence of the enormous Ford Foundation grants to music which began in 1966. This giant among American philanthropies found itself in the early 1960’s swelled by an enormous rise in the value of its holdings of Ford stock, and under an activist administration decided to support the arts in a big way. Within that general area it searched, in the words of the head of its arts program, W. McNeil Lowry, for a field in which its funds would have the “greatest . . . national impact.” That field was the orchestra, and the Ford intervention by its sheer size alone changed the economic situation of American music.

On strictly musical grounds it is difficult to understand the compelling need for this massive subsidy. There was no large number of new or ignored masterpieces awaiting first and repeated performances by major orchestras; there were no unserved audiences clamoring loudly for concerts; there were no vastly original styles of interpretation requiring the founding of new groups to do them justice. Nor had the level of orchestra performance declined; indeed, the pinnacle of American orchestral playing—in the quality of our major orchestras and the interest of their repertory—had already been reached by the early 1960’s.

There were, however, other than purely musical reasons involved. Rather than arising out of considerations of artistic need, the grants first came out of a desire for economic and social equity. The then current condition of the orchestral musician was seen as depressed. Not only did he on the average earn less than a mere schoolteacher, but his work in the orchestra was, except for players in the few largest groups, most often less than full-time; few American orchestras were then engaged on a 52-week basis. A financial situation that was tolerable for members of great orchestras (with their longer seasons and the opportunities for teaching and outside performance which went with employment in them) seemed intolerable in the case of lesser organizations in the smaller cities and towns. Here musicians were forced to support themselves outside music as best they could, working frequently as schoolteachers but often in fields totally unrelated to the arts.

All this the Ford Foundation was determined to correct. It did so in a complicated but decisive manner, contributing money in the form of both endowment funds (which required matching by local sources) and yearly subsidies for current expenses. Its goals were clearly stated: to raise the level of performance by enabling musicians to concentrate on orchestral playing, to make it possible for orchestras to expand their audiences, and to make the musical profession more attractive by increasing the income of its members.

Through the Ford grants 61 orchestras in the major and metropolitan categories received a total of $80 million ($165 million including matching funds). The response to this largesse was quick and predictable. Whereas in 1957 the average annual budget of the most important American orchestras had been no more than $600,000, by 1971 (the year when most Ford grants were being wound up) the average budget, after correction for inflation, had reached $2,800,000. Expenses had risen to meet income. Triggered by an often preexisting union militancy, most of this rise had taken place in musicians’ salaries, thus fulfilling the purposes of the Ford grants. Not only were fees per rehearsal and performance increased, but managements found it necessary to increase the number of concerts given so that it might be possible to compensate musicians for more services as well.

But regardless of the very real gains made by musicians in the Ford grant period—and it must be stressed that for their higher salaries they were now working harder than ever before—the enduring result of the Ford program was heightened expectations on the part of the musicians. Past gains were seen as meaningful only when they could be continued and extended. Musicians were quite understandably unwilling to be left behind by the increased affluence of other skilled professionals. Postponement and denial of the musicians’ demands resulted in strikes, generally lowered morale, and a pervasive climate of friction between players and management. The Ford Foundation was unable permanently to satisfy the demands its money had made possible; indeed, it had explicitly warned the orchestras that it bore no further obligation after the expiration of the grants.

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But here as elsewhere in American life, where foundations have led, government has carried on. The necessary ideological and statistical basis of such an assumption by government of a hitherto private responsibility had been prepared by the publication in the 1960’s of two lengthy foundation-supported studies of the financial prospects for the arts. The first of these, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Panel Report (1965), attempted to survey the state of the performing arts and their actual and potential sources of support. Today, after more than a decade of the growing socialization of culture and communication, the Rockefeller report, in its painstaking attempt to preserve the private aspect of patronage, makes nostalgic reading. The real weight of this report, however, may be gathered from the fact that of its eleven chapters only one, that dealing with the state of orchestras, choral groups, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, is longer than the section demonstrating the desirability of government aid—and it is longer by only one page.

It was left to the 1966 econometric study, Performing Arts—The Economic Dilemma, by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, paid for by the Twentieth Century Fund, to provide an argument particularly attractive to friends of official planning and subsidy. These two Princeton professors explained that government support was not only necessary to make the arts better; it was necessary in order to keep them alive at all. The reason was simple. In other areas of our automating society, technological progress, by saving labor costs, allows prices to decline relative to purchasing power. In the labor-intensive arts, on the other hand, both the inability to automate and the rising wages demanded across the society as a whole will soon price the arts out of the consumer market. Not only was government seen as the patron of last resort for the arts; once it had been agreed that the arts confer general benefits on the community, such patronage was for Baumol and Bowen a necessary response to the needs of the society.

It can hardly be overlooked that the critical years for both large-scale foundation activity and the beginnings of government involvement coincided with the palmy period of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, before the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The transvaluation of private expenditures by government determinations was the regnant political principle of the day, so it is not surprising that board members and trustees, in whose hands the making of business and financial decisions in the arts had lain for so many years, were as quick as were artists to give up fears of political intervention and control.

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The entering wedge of federal arts policy—if one exempts the controversial WPA experiments of the 1930’s as belonging to the area of unemployment relief—was the Eisenhower administration’s use in the 1950’s of appearances abroad by American artists as an extension of foreign policy. After several attempts in the early 1960’s, Congress in 1965 passed a bill, signed by President Johnson, establishing a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, made up of three institutions: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities (a body coordinating the Endowments’ activities with other federal programs). This structure, in broad outline, remains unchanged today.

In the beginning, federal funding was small in absolute terms. In its first year (fiscal 1966) arts appropriations barely exceeded $2,500,000, and the next year they reached $8 million, a level they were approximately to maintain through fiscal 1970. But from this point on the rise was steady and large; in fiscal 1971 the appropriation doubled, as it did the following year. Increase followed increase, and total appropriations for the arts in fiscal 1978 are at a level of $115 million.¹ And in many states, the same story can be told. Not only are all the state arts councils funded by the federal government through the diversion of 20 per cent of Endowment funds through bloc grants, but some states—most notably New York—have themselves become powerful movers in financing the arts, working in general conformity with Washington’s leadership.

Music was, as might have been expected, one of the prime gainers from the increase in federal funding at the beginning of the 1970’s. In the orchestral area, for example, orchestras, which had received $3,761,000 in 1971 (the year, it will be remembered, of the ending of the Ford grants), were by 1974 receiving $7,172,000; the 1977 funding level had risen to $12,250,00, of which $6,335,000 was for normal support and $5,915,000 was in the form of challenge grants requiring high rates of matching from new private sources. Much the same has happened in opera. Opera companies, which in 1971 were the recipients of only $598,000 in federal funds, were given $5,840,000 in 1977, of which $2,750,000 was in challenge grants.

Though these large institutional grants take up by far the greatest part of the NEA music funds (amounting in all to $12,750,000 for normal support purposes in fiscal 1977), other and smaller projects were supported as well. In 1977, for example, $1,450,000 went to groups which offer help to artists in career development; $845,000 was given to the jazz/folk/ethnic category; $470,000 was allotted to composer/libretto fellowships; $220,000 was provided for contemporary music performance; $130,000 went to grants outside regular NEA programs; $45,000 was given to the smallest program of all, a pilot project in choral music; and, finally, closing out 1977 NEA activities, $230,000 was earmarked for central musical service organizations such as the American Symphony Orchestra League, and $300,000 was allocated for audience development.

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The evidence of how all this money has been spent is all around us. As with all government programs, at the center stands a large and powerful bureaucracy publicly proclaiming its vital role in the currently improving state of things. Though in theory artistic decisions are made by panels of outside notables drawn from the fields in which grants are to be made, it is plain that residual as well as day-to-day power lies with the large permanent staff, often picked on a revolving-door basis from the flourishing and comfortably paid arts-administration establishment. This power not only resides in the staff function of preparing agendas for the panel meetings and providing reports and recommendations for panel actions, but also in the large role of the staff in picking the panelists themselves.

Outside the Washington offices of the NEA on Columbia Plaza the telltale signs of public subsidies may be found in concert and opera programs across the country. It is a rare musical event presented by a non-profit organization which does not prominently feature on the printed program, just below the listing of works, composers, and performers, the approximate legend “This event is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts”—or an individual state council, or a combination of the two. Similarly, arts institutions make a practice of giving leading space in their publications to publicity releases of the NEA announcing new and continuing grants described in glowing terms by the current chairman of the Endowment.

Beyond the requirement all these mentions so prominently fulfill—of giving credit to government for distributing taxpayers’ money—the fruit of all this spending is evident in vastly increased musical activity. In itself this increase did not begin with government help, for as the 1965 Rockefeller report regretfully noted, the vast rise of the previous two decades had occurred in amateur participation, with symphonies and opera companies (except for the largest and best) frequently staffed by part-time professionals and even music lovers. But since the mid 1960’s the expansion has involved the professionalization of music, with ever smaller presenting groups engaging full-time performers and specialized administrators.

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For the increased pay which has made this professionalization possible, more musical events are being performed than ever before in American history. With the rise in amateur activity, this increase in the number of performances had already begun to take place in the 1960’s. The total of orchestra concerts given yearly went from 2,903 in the 1961-62 season to 6,758 in 1969-70, and the total of orchestras giving them went from 271 to 620 in the same period. But, significantly, the increase in orchestras did not occur evenly during these years; the great jump—stimulated even if not directly supported at first by new funds—occurred in the season immediately following the development of the Ford plan and the passage of the first federal arts support legislation in 1965. And a set of statistics on the period from 1965-66 to 1973-74 presents a similar picture; during this time, the number of performances increased by 80 per cent.

Perhaps least affected by these changes, save in their increased access to publicly funded electronic media, has been the elite category of orchestras like the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. Such orchestras have for years been so busy as to make expansion of their seasons and enlarging of their regular concert audiences difficult. But on the level of the less prestigious institutions the change has been enormous. Seasons have become year-’round, and musicians have been able—and in many cases have found it necessary—to devote themselves more or less entirely to their orchestral duties.

Another example of the rise in musical activity made possible in some part by public funds is the present ubiquity of summer festivals, formerly few and, save for such exceptions as the summer season of the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, small and short. Now the summer, always in the past a dead time for music, has become perhaps more active than the winter. So great is this activity that experienced orchestral players are in short supply for those festivals unaffiliated with all-year orchestras because of the contractual demands made upon the musicians by their full-time employers.

In opera, traditionally the most expensive of musical formats, the story is largely the same. The number of performances has increased significantly, new companies have been established, and untold new operas have been commissioned. Perhaps most important, live opera has become a staple on public television, allowing the presentation of frequent productions not only from the Metropolitan Opera but also from the New York City Opera and such summer festivals as Wolf Trap.

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As might have been expected, more has come from government than simply the money to pay for what musically qualified people want to do. The money itself has often been transferred with the requirement that it be matched by private contributions. Frequently the matching rate has exceeded a dollar-for-dollar formula, and has gone as high as three private for each governmental dollar. While this requirement has often had only a purely formal significance, in that the private funds used for matching purposes were in many cases those which would have been contributed anyway, the general effect of matching has been to spur arts institutions to seek out new sources of non-governmental support. Though the result of the recent increase in private contributions has been to quash the fear that government support would drive out individual and corporate philanthropy, the very prestige of government participation has made official commitment to a particular organization or program the necessary imprimatur for attracting help from an increasingly skittish, fearful, and guilt-ridden private sector in search of moral justification and public acceptance. Furthermore, the effect of this stamp of approval has not only been the facilitation of nongovernmental support; the weight thus put on official policy has enabled government programs and officials to exert an influence on arts activities out of all proportion to the still small percentage contribution of public funds to overall budgets.

Nor have the arts avoided the need to practice grantsmanship. Getting the grants is the name of the game, and the principle applies from the most prestigious down to the newest and smallest applicant. Thinking up projects which will make successful grant applications has become an art itself worthy of public support. At a recent meeting of a young arts group and the regional coordinator of the NEA, advice was tendered that the first grant the institution requested should be for funds to bring a specialist to recommend what grants to apply for. Further advice was also forthcoming: the specialist asked for should be an individual (who was named) renowned for his success in obtaining federal subsidies—over twenty grants in one year, or so the story went. To one listener’s quizzical comment that such success must take a lot of time and effort, the dry rejoinder was that the specialist had two people at work in this area full time.

Reassuringly, fears of political censorship have proven unfounded, though plainly music does not provide as much occasion for direct control as the theater or realistic painting. And music itself has recently seemed to be in retreat from the kind of social engagement which was popular a decade ago. A cynic might remark that in any case so little of revolutionary importance is going on in music today that even the blindest obscurantist would be hard put to find anything provocative enough to occasion suppression.

More controversial has been the use of political appointees to fill the highest-level Endowment positions. President Carter’s choice of Joseph Duffy, a political supporter, to head the National Endowment for the Humanities was skeptically received in the scholarly community; his appointment of Livingston Biddle as chairman of the NEA was widely taken as an all too plain acknowledgment that the choice was a perquisite of Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell, the head of the Senate subcommittee dealing with Endowment matters—and Mr. Biddle’s previous employer.

Furthermore, both the NEA and the state councils are susceptible to the ideological winds of change blowing in Washington and the country at large. Only this past fall the NEA announced the creation of a new post, that of Arts Endowment Representative for Minority Concerns; more publicly significant has been the pressure in the media recently brought to bear on the New York State Council on the Arts to allocate a designated and high percentage of its large funds to black and Puerto Rican culture. In general, it is increasingly obvious that arts funding is seen by politically and socially activist groups as providing the means of increased visibility for their causes as well as prestige employment for their leaders and committed supporters.

One could only become more conscious of this connection between politics and support for the arts as the travels of Joan Mondale, America’s Artistic First Lady, unfolded last summer. On her trip to the Rocky Mountains, for instance, the Vice President’s wife—who seems to enjoy being called and calling herself “Joan of Art”—combined appearances at money-raising affairs for Democratic congressional candidates with a speech on government aid to the arts at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, where, joined by Livingston Biddle, she also participated in a seminar on funding the arts. Local newsbroadcasts made no attempt to separate the political and non-political aspects of her viceregal visit, lumping them together seriatim under the rubric “woman makes good.”

Clearly the arts have become good political business. The publicity is free, the cause beyond criticism, and the opportunity thus provided to bring together politicians and rich potential contributors who are used to giving is unparalleled. But beyond all these particular aspects of public arts policy, what have been the direct artistic consequences of the spending of so much money? The immediate, crude answer is that they have been nil. Music itself has changed remarkably little due to government subsidy. In order to understand why this should be so, one must remember that government support in this country began as the support of artists rather than art, and that this support has been channeled largely through traditional institutions able, at least in principle, to prove their worth in the marketplace.

The result is that artists have been paid to do what they have been trained to do and what their predecessors were doing before public help came on the scene. Orchestras have played much the same pieces, and opera companies have produced the same operas as they have for most of the years of this century. There has, it is true, been some circulation in the constituents of the standard repertory, most notably in opera, but one’s impression is that the pace of even this normal circulation is rather less than it has routinely been in the past. New works have been put on, but they have merely replaced yesterday’s new music in whatever program niche performers have always felt they must allow the current creative crop. And the same iteration of the past is seen in the help that has found its way into music education; almost all of the curricula of our best music schools would hardly have been out of place in the Austria, Germany, or Russia of seventy-five years ago.

What has changed is that the musician’s tasks are being performed for vastly more people than ever before. As far as opera is concerned, a high NEA official was recently heard to remark happily that now, after the last decade of expansion and government support, more people are attending opera in the United States than the games of the National Football League. The exact figure for 1977-78, according to an article in Opera News, the publication of the Metropolitan Opera Guild (which itself has a membership of 110,000), is 9,760,000, a one-year gain of 6 per cent; an estimated corresponding figure for 1963-64 was 1,700,000. The same story can be told about orchestral audiences. Material required to be submitted in support of 1976-77 NEA orchestra grant applications disclosed such prodigies of annual attendance as 1,564,049 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 887,400 for the New York Philharmonic, 690,420 for the Cincinnati Symphony, and even 85,800 for the small Winston-Salem Symphony.

These statistics are truly overwhelming, and to quote them is to comprehend that the arts are no more immune from our national fascination with body counts than was our military effort in Vietnam. The error is the same: the confusion of quantity with success. But whereas in Vietnam bodies were counted even when they were alive, in music today it is difficult to escape the feeling that the audience is counted even if many of its members are, for all artistic purposes, dead.

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Public support, having begun as support for music through aid to musicians, now turns out to have been all along support of the audience as well. These two goals, so neatly interlocking, have become a vicious circle in which support of the one requires support of the other. Indeed, at the present time, it is possible to see that expansion has been the real goal of public support from the beginning. It is this goal which provides the justification for the proliferation of government funds, and the extent to which it has been accomplished is by now the chief criterion of the success of the entire program.

In the days of Richard Nixon, the NEA talked about “outreach” of the arts; now, under Jimmy Carter, Livingston Biddle talks about “access” to them. It would be a mistake to allow the differing rhetorical associations of these two words—outreach suggests doing good from above and access suggests entitlement from below—to obscure the fact that in our society only those public expenditures which serve the greatest number in a fairly equal fashion can receive moral validation and survive the scrutiny of opposition, press, and citizenry.

So as part of obtaining that portion of their daily bread which is necessary to getting the rest, musical institutions, no less than art museums, have been chasing after the audience—both in the usual places and in newer ones like inner cities and barren wastes, youth centers and homes for the aged, schools and prisons. And those whose bodies have not been available in person have been reached through public television, which has been used to bring both the most intimate chamber music and the grandest opera into the home itself.

An example of this search for an audience is the remarkable story of the services provided to the community by an orchestra as small as the Albuquerque Symphony. From 1970-71 to 1971-72, these services increased from 14 to 100; by 1974-75 they reached 199. It is not clear, however, that this boom reflected a golden age of the concert audience in New Mexico. For almost the entire increase is represented by the publicly-funded category called in the early 1970’s “ensembles in schools” but later (reflecting the inflated language of the bureaucracy) “Workshops, Lecture/Demonstrations, Educational or Community Programs.” In 1970-71, there were none of these events; in 1971-72, there were suddenly 84; and by 1974-75, there were 161. The growth in concerts was quite a bit less dramatic. From 14 in 1970-71 they rose to 16 the next year, and reached 38 in 1974-75—but the 1974-75 figures include 16 “Performances for Children/Youth.” In fact, the regular concerts in this period increased from 9 the first year to 10 the next, and three years later went to 22.

A large percentage of the audiences described above can be loosely called “contracted”—a euphemistic way of saying that the listeners do not themselves pay via the box office for what they are given. But “ticketed” audiences—those who do pay individually and presumably make personal decisions to attend—have not been ignored either. All the techniques of direct-mail advertising, so noxious when they are used to sell a commercial product, are being brought to bear on the consumer. Governments and foundations alike sponsor experts who travel around the country advising local groups how to move their artistic product.

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What kind of audience can be found through this undignified, vulgar, and half-crazed search? Is there any reason to agree with the prevailing assumption of the arts merchandisers that serious culture—the “best,” as Livingston Biddle likes to call it—is now or will in any foreseeable future be attractive and meaningful to millions without intellectual training, background, or even any clear idea of what they are being either forced or gulled into attending?

An answer to this question can hardly come easily to anyone who is either a reasonably convinced democrat or a professional active in the world of culture and ideas. Democratic societies—in the past and perhaps even today ours more than any other—are founded upon two assumptions: Vox populi, vox dei remains the ultimate political sanction, and our ultimate cultural article of faith is that the “common man” is capable, given an opportunity, of learning, mastering, and liking every achievement of civilization from the most recherché to the most complex. In America this faith has underlain our vast education industry, and it is plain that our current attempts to dragoon an audience for music are merely another facet of our cultural leveé en masse.

It is, however, not clear that democratic hopes in politics and education can so easily be extended to high culture. Perhaps the strongest evidence that such optimism in the field of music is unwarranted is precisely the subtle and not-so-subtle changes which are presently being made in musical programs designed to attract and please these new hordes of virgin concertgoers. Something of the spirit of this attempt to find a kind of repertory attractive enough to bring in an audience may be gathered from two items, the second immediately following the first, here quoted in their entirety from the October 1978 issue of Symphony News, the publication of the American Symphony Orchestra League:

“Mozart, I love You Madly”—a series of three pairs of weekend concerts conducted by Maurice Peress, highlighted the Kansas City Philharmonic‘s September activity at the Grace and Trinity Cathedral.

Expansion/Development

An expanded 1978-79 season opened October 3, for the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, with the addition of a new five-concert Friday night pops series. Titled TGIF (thank God it’s Friday), the new series will allow the orchestra to reach new audiences and increase the association’s earned income.

No one would want to be caught saying that there is too much Mozart being played, but one can hardly go wrong pointing out the questionable nature of forays outside the body of classical music as a means of drawing the masses into culture. Such pops concerts, employing serious musicians, proliferate, with a repertory drawn from the smash successes of Broadway, pop music, and the movies. Last season, for instance, found the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under its then music director Zubin Mehta playing a concert at the Hollywood Bowl for 17,500 screaming rock music fans featuring music from Star Wars. On a level less vulgar but vastly more quixotic, the NEA has just sponsored a meeting in New York City of figures from opera and Broadway to begin its program of grants to develop a new hybrid form of musical theater. The New York Times headlined its report of this meeting “Figaro Meets ‘Fiddler,’” and quoted soprano Beverly Sills as saying, in deploring opera’s insistence on voices large enough to do without microphones, “If amplification conveys more emotion to the public, what’s the big deal?”

It is here that the new policy of public involvement, and the atmosphere in which it is being carried out, will in the long run have artistic consequences. To speak of audiences dragging down his art is a humiliating admission for an artist to make, for it reflects on his art as well as his ideology. Every artist needs an audience before whom to do his work; the audience is the sounding board against which his productions can be tested, and its approval is the criterion of his success. Once these facts are admitted, it is but an easy jump from wanting some audience to wanting an ever and infinitely larger one.

Unfortunately, it is the artist’s search for support and verification which allows the inevitable lowering of quality attendant upon rapid expansion of the audience to affect his work. We have seen how tempting it is to do what an audience wants in order to get it to come in the first place. Equally tempting, though less easy to pinpoint, is the playing to the gallery felt to be necessary to get the audience to return. Two examples of this cheapening come immediately to mind. It is highly likely that such an overriding concern for audience approval has produced the current vogue in orchestral playing for forced orchestral tone in general and blaring brass in particular. It seems even more likely that the present ossification of American operatic production in the “grand” style of monumental surrealism reflects a fear on the part of opera administrators that the mass audience to which they are appealing will tolerate neither experiment nor refinement.

While we can hardly be surprised at the desire of all the parties to the bargain of public funding—artists, administrators, and government alike—to agree about the search for the largest possible audience, what finally makes our present official support of music and the other arts such a new departure is the separation it reflects of patronage and consumption. In continental Europe a long tradition of what might be called participant support marked the flowering of 18th- and 19th-century music; from the Esterhazys with Haydn and the Archduke Rudolph with Beethoven, through the aristocratic piano students of Chopin, and to Ludwig of Bavaria and Wagner, patrons of music savored what they supported. Vestiges of this tradition still remain, in the musical sophistication of the European educated classes. Even in England, the erstwhile Land ohne Musik, the former Prime Minister, Edward Heath, has devoted much of his life to amateur performance of great music.

But for the United States, having lacked for so many years an autochthonous musical culture, the situation remains different. Here our numerous governing cadres have neither historical nor present attachments to high culture. For reasons of political convenience our leaders are willing to arrange for the transfer of public monies for artistic purposes. That they have up to this point done so with a surprising amount of disinterest is perhaps no more than a sign of their basic uninterest. It is this uninterest which makes them so eclectic in their own practical decisions. Thus freed from any burden of their own tastes, they are able to preside smilingly over the gradual vulgarization of what was once a civilized glory.

¹ A similar sum goes to the humanities.