Ours is the age of the electronic transmission and reproduction of music. Where once the musical experience of the listener was formed by face-to-face contact between musicians and audience, today one artist can perform for the whole world, and one solitary listener can have an almost unlimited choice of program material, some in live performance, most in the form of private or commercial recordings.
It all began with Edison’s infant phonograph of a century ago. Its first years were creaky, squawky, and exclusively vulgar. But by the early 1900’s—most brilliantly through the early efforts of Enrico Caruso—the acoustic reproducer became a worthy kind of musical instrument. It could be “played” by anyone able to wind the motor and place the pickup on the record.
Yet no matter how many acoustic records were sold, no matter how many young people found their first experience of musical art through these pieces of shellac compound, in fact the phonograph collapsed in mass consciousness when the radio became commercially viable after World War I. Even the inefficient radios of the mid-1920’s sounded better than the old phonograph records. Moreover, listening to the radio was at first even more satisfactory than hearing the then newly introduced electrical discs. And radio programming was always changing, always up-to-date; best of all, after a single original investment, radio programs were free.
Since it had usually been thought that popular culture was a mass phenomenon and high culture a matter of elite taste, it was only to be expected that the airwaves would be filled with dance and show music appealing to the widest audience. Surprisingly, however, serious music was also present at the creation of broadcasting. Not only was the best in music quickly perceived as a means of earning respectability for radio and its entrepreneurs, but performing organizations across the country also eagerly embraced radio for the twin purposes of music education and of bringing the organizations themselves to public notice.
No musical institution was more perceptive in this regard than the New York Philharmonic. As early as 1922, some concerts of the Philharmonic, at first originating from the Great Hall of the City College of New York, had been broadcast on station WEAF. Soon these concerts found sponsors, among them the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and later the Radio Corporation of America. As time passed, more concerts were broadcast each year; finally, in 1930, the Philharmonic inaugurated a series of regular weekly broadcasts of full-length concerts, transmitted from Carnegie Hall under the auspices of the Columbia Broadcasting System.1
Other established orchestras, including those in Philadelphia and Boston, had been eager to follow the Philharmonic’s lead. In addition, individual radio stations employed staff musicians to present programs of classical music featuring soloists, chamber ensembles, and even full orchestras. What single stations could do, the quickly expanding networks could do better. Network orchestras played for an increasing number of variety shows containing the classics. In 1937, with the founding of the NBC Symphony Orchestra for Arturo Toscanini, commercial support of serious music on radio reached its climax. For seventeen years this orchestra, bearing in every way the stamp of Toscanini’s dominating musical personality, remained in the forefront of American musical life, bringing art to millions and glory to NBC.
Thus, throughout most of the age of radio, orchestral music, performed by the leading artists of the day, was available nationally on two weekly broadcasts and locally on frequent though scattered presentations of equally important concerts. Opera was to be nearly as fortunate. Back in the technological dark age of 1910, the Metropolitan Opera had been the scene of an experiment by radio pioneer Lee De Forest in which a performance of Cavalleria rusticana (then only twenty years old) starring Caruso was broadcast to a small audience comprised of radio amateurs, ships in the harbor, and a few invited engineers and journalists. Real broadcasting did not begin until Christmas day of 1931, when Hansel and Gretel (in the original German) was transmitted, underwritten by NBC. The first sponsored broadcast of the Met was presented at the end of 1933, and in 1940 Texaco began its historic assumption of responsibility for the Met Saturday matinees, a responsibility it has borne without interruption to the present time.
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In general this reasonably satisfactory state of affairs was to continue without change until the war-delayed coming of television in the late 1940’s. At first gradually, and then with frightening speed, both the excitement and the audience left radio. Before many years had passed, radio became merely an outlet for brief news summaries and endless circulation and recirculation of records, mostly pop and mostly ephemeral. Staff musicians were let go, first at the local level and then finally by the networks.
The final sign that the great days of music on radio were over came in 1954, when corporate management decided not to retain the NBC Symphony after Toscanini’s withdrawal that year on account of the debilities of age. Something of NBC’s attitude toward its artistic responsibilities may be gathered from the story told in Agitato, Jerome Toobin’s entertaining memoir (1975) of his years in music administration. As he describes what happened, a committee of the orchestra, in order to get NBC to change its decision, met with Samuel Chotzinoff, an NBC executive (and former pianist and music critic) who had responsibility for music programs. The committee members poured out their hearts to Chotzinoff, explaining the importance of the orchestra to music, to NBC’s parent RCA, and as a living tribute to their revered Maestro Toscanini. Toobin goes on:
Chotzinoff listened and, when they were through, said, “Do you really want to honor Toscanini? Then die.” A pause. “Your orchestra, I mean,” he concluded, lamely.
The orchestra, of course, died. Though the players tried to keep the orchestra going under a new name, Symphony of the Air, the glorious ensemble soon petered out. Although it would be nice to report that CBS behaved better with the radio broadcasts of the Philharmonic, the unfortunate truth is that nine years later, in 1963, the corporate axe fell on these concerts as well; the broadcasts stopped altogether by 1967.
What was now unavailable on radio was hardly to be found on television. At first glance this might seem something of a puzzle: why should serious music have been unable to make the transition from radio to television in the same way as soap operas, variety shows, sports, and live news coverage? There are in fact two fundamental reasons, the first relating to the nature of music, and the second relating to the inherent attributes of television as a medium of communication. These reasons are well worth examination, for they remain as valid today as they were in the time of radio’s decline and television’s growth.
The musical reason for the failed transition to television is really quite obvious and indeed almost a truism. Music, after all, is sound; it is meant to be heard, and when it is clearly heard, it is, in principle, fully experienced. The visual aspect, welcome and even vital as it is to many, is felt by the most experienced and trained listeners to be often a distraction and sometimes even an adulteration. It is basically this fact which accounts for the spectacular long-term success of phonograph records and audio tape, and which accounted originally for the wide following of art music broadcasts on the radio. Such was the case when the radio (and the phonograph) had not reached the present state of high-fidelity reproduction, and it is even more the case today, when the sound available on radio far surpasses anything that can be heard from any currently mass-marketed home television set.
From television’s side, music seemed for many years both irrelevant and unrewarding. Because the number of channels in any one locality was originally limited to little more than half of the 12 places on the dial,2 and also because in television, equipment and production are inherently more expensive than in radio, the audience served by each channel must be many times larger than that served by any radio station in a given area. Thus, television, much more so than radio, had to aim from the first at the broadest possible audience at every moment.
So television found little room in its schedules for great music. Still, attempts were made: some programs which had found large audiences on radio by presenting tuneful classics in star performances—most notably the Bell Telephone Hour—did have several years of television life. Opening nights at the Met were televised in 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1954. How unseriously these presentations were regarded may be seen from the unhappy fact that no copies of them exist today. NBC made a valiant effort in the early 1950’s to establish a continuing opera theater, and one of the fruits of that effort was the commissioning and presentation of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Christmas staple, Amahl and the Night Visitors, in 1951. CBS, too, tried. Building on the success of Leonard Bernstein in handling musical subjects for the Omnibus series in the mid-1950’s, the network began in the 1957-58 season to present the conductor with the New York Philharmonic, at first in children’s concerts and then in regular programs. The regular programs were eventually discontinued, but the children’s concerts, hugely successful, continue on CBS, on a limited basis, today.
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But despite these isolated flashes, the generalization holds: there has been no room in the normal operation of television for serious musical art. However, television has not had to remain restricted to normal operation. The 1950’s saw the rise of educational broadcasting, and as has happened before in American history, the idea of education came to justify elite taste and its satisfaction. Music was to be one of the major beneficiaries of this new development, for here was a way to do something for culture and at the same time have the bill paid by the government, either directly through legislative appropriations or indirectly through tax deductions for charitable contributions.
National Educational Television, a forerunner of the present Public Broadcasting Service, began with a series presenting the Boston Symphony Orchestra; by the 1962-63 season NET was sporadically televising the concerts of many orchestras, mostly American, but also occasionally foreign. In addition to these national transmissions, local educational stations showed admirable initiative in producing programs of soloists and ensembles at minimal cost (and with minimal remuneration to the artists). These often touchingly simple productions were frequently exchanged with other local public stations for widespread but haphazard broadcast.
Lacking, however, was the kind of money needed for luxurious presentations. And lacking too was central organization and sponsorship to guarantee integrated efforts in production, publicity, and fund-raising. These two desiderata were provided by the political and social developments of the past two decades.
After the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, the putative association of the late President and his wife with high culture—or at least with the celebrities of high culture—made arts centers and support for the arts themselves seem a fitting memorial. The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, though hardly so aesthetically presumptuous as Camelot, did just as much to create a climate favorable to public spending on art and music; aid to artists and performers came to be seen as a most desirable kind of unemployment relief.
The result of all this has been the rise of public culture, as expressed institutionally by the phenomenal growth of both the Public Broadcasting Service and the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA has by now become the major factor in determining the level of support and the direction of musical life in America.3 PBS has in effect become a competitive fourth network, spending large sums of money on both production and the publicity it feels necessary to insure that its programs are watched by a large and ever-growing audience. While NEA and PBS policy decisions are no doubt made independently, their actions are deeply related. The NEA supports many PBS programs, and PBS presents the work of the major recipients of NEA patronage. The result of this common effort in music is the offering on PBS this season of the most ambitious, well-thought-out, and well-financed opera and orchestral programs in American television history.
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The evidence of the first half of the current season is stunning. During this period PBS has shown six operas in live performance, including Verdi’s Otello and Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny from the Metropolitan Opera; from the New York City Opera came another Weill opera, Street Scene; Gounod’s Faust was performed by the Chicago Lyric Opera, Ponchielli’s La Gioconda by the San Francisco Opera, and Bizet’s Carmen by the Vienna Opera. Also from Vienna came a concert of operatic excerpts entitled “A Night at the Vienna Opera,” a Bernstein performance of the Mahler Ninth Symphony, and a performance under Herbert von Karajan of the Bruckner Ninth. The Dresden State Symphony was shown in a concert at the United Nations in New York. Among American orchestras, the New York Philharmonic appeared three times featuring such famous soloists as Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Emil Gilels, and Luciano Pavarotti. The Philadelphia Orchestra appeared in a tribute to its retiring music director, called “Ormandy at 80,” and the Boston Symphony presented weekly concerts previously taped and edited to one-hour length. Two additional operas were shown, though not in live productions; they were Poulenc’s La Voix humaine and Menotti’s Amahl.
Many of these events were intended to be shown more than once. They were usually rerun almost immediately on the stations where they were first shown, and were then circulated to non-commercial outlets on the UHF band where they will continue to appear for some time to come. Due to the proliferation in recent years of home video recording equipment, innumerable copies, some of quite remarkable fidelity, exist now in the hands of music lovers everywhere; their existence has been legitimated by a federal court decision. Equally legitimate, and vastly superior in sound quality, are audio tapes made on home cassette machines from the FM simulcast broadcasts which often accompany major PBS television music transmissions.
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Given opera’s use of visual as well as aural elements, it is plain that of all musical forms it stands to gain the most from television. Indeed, the same selling point might be made for opera on TV as is made for sports: one sees it better at home than from even a good seat in the stadium.
So, at least, it seemed in the Metropolitan Opera Otello, a telecast of the current season’s opening night in September. The star of the performance, aside from the brilliant singing of Placido Domingo in the title role, was the picture. Seen in the opera house, the Met production is impressive in its opulence; when it is translated to the screen, the viewer becomes conscious of the richness of color and the clarity of the action. Rarely can members of a chorus have seemed so convincing under the clinical eye of the television camera as they did in the opening crowd scenes. The camera work itself was smooth and varied, a tribute to the experience the Met has now gained in its increasingly frequent television presentations. Best of all was the ability of the production to sustain, throughout the opera, the illusion that the television picture was a representation of physical reality rather than of more or less adequate sets.
The San Francisco Gioconda, broadcast some days earlier, did not quite come up to the Met’s standards. One was always conscious of watching a staged performance; despite the provision of a real fire on board ship at the end of Act II, the sets seemed all too often the product of the carpenters’ and painters’ craft rather than solid wood and stone. While the cast did employ the services of the internationally renowned Pavarotti and Renata Scotto, their efforts seemed inadequately supported by both the orchestra and the conductor. Still, despite the flaws, the performance came across as both worthy and enjoyable.
By contrast, the Vienna Carmen was extraordinary in several ways. From the first notes of the Prelude, one’s attention was seized by the powerful conducting of Carlos Kleiber and the brilliant playing of the Vienna Philharmonic. Domingo was Don José, and he sang just as beautifully as he had in the Otello. Dramatically and musically the only major flaw was the Slavic sound and mood of Elena Obraztsova; her Carmen seemed no more related to the atmosphere of the opera than her Amneris at the Met several years ago had seemed to fit into Verdi’s Aida. But dwarfing all other considerations was the physical quality of the video image itself. Razor-sharp and delicately colored, the image seemed to reflect a higher level of technical achievement than can regularly be seen in this country.
The Chicago Faust was disappointing. Inferior orchestral playing, and tacky sets attempting to convey a kind of delicate, allusive atmosphere ill-suited to the limitations of television, combined with fussy and often pointless stage direction to produce the total effect of a provincial performance, despite the presence of an international cast including Mirella Freni, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Alfredo Kraus.
The two Weill operas, Street Scene and Mahagonny, made strikingly different impressions. Though Street Scene has been a box-office success in New York, its presentation on television seemed much of a piece with the general run of City Opera efforts in recent years—earnest, ambitious, and withal still lacking. In the past the City Opera has made its mark by bringing something of the virtues of the American musical theater to opera; with Street Scene it has attempted to present as an opera a work which started life as a musical. Whatever the value of such an experiment in general, here, where Weill’s music and Elmer Rice’s story both seem so dated, the result was stiff and affected.
Much attention was naturally centered on the Metropolitan Mahagonny. Though the opera was written as long ago as 1930, its choice for production by the Met represents the culmination of much effort to find viable contemporary works. While Mahagonny is indeed more up-to-date than almost everything else the Met does, it is surely ironic that in its quest for contemporaneity the Met should have come up with a work so bitterly and mockingly hostile to the economic system and social ethos which built and supports the opera company itself.
These considerations aside, of all the operas seen on television this season, Mahagonny seemed by far the most appropriate to the screen. Bertolt Brecht’s libretto is gripping and incisive in its cynicism; mainly because Weill’s mostly thin music nowhere gets in the way, the English words, well and clearly enunciated by the singers, were almost always easily distinguishable. The acting, too, was excellent, and the characters came across forcefully and individually. Teresa Stratas scored a memorable success in the role of Jenny. Though she perhaps lacked the offhand decadence which Lotte Lenya might have brought to the role, Miss Stratas nevertheless sang magnificently, looked touchingly beautiful, and projected a waiflike and deeply moving personality. The production was simple but suggestive, and visually striking with its hints of between-the-wars poster style. Finally, because the production was in English, the television screen was not disfigured by the ubiquitous subtitles which marred the Italian and French operas discussed here
Little need be said about the presentations of Amahl and La Voix humaine. Whatever charm Menotti’s score may have possessed at its first appearance has long since faded, and in its latest production the work seemed sentimental and even mawkish. Poulenc’s quintessentially French work, dependent as it is on the exact sounds of the French words written by Jean Cocteau, seemed in English hysterical without being affecting. What was fatally lacking in this performance was style and manner; the work’s back-to-back billing in one evening with a rendition of the words without music acted by Liv Ullmann in Scandinavian-English only made too much of a poor thing.
Despite the criticisms which can be made of specific productions, it must be concluded that so far this season television has gone a long way toward justifying its employment for opera. The medium’s present limitations—principally the near-universality of small-screen sets producing wretched sound, but also the more basic lack of three-dimensional visual representation—seem less significant than the possibility television presently offers of bringing operas in high-level productions to those who have little or no other opportunity to experience them. For those who do, television must in the foreseeable future remain a distant second-best to live performance.
Because orchestra concerts are so much less dependent than operas on the visual element, they also seem decidedly less interesting on television. The instruments of one orchestra look, after all, very much like those of another, and they are all played in much the same way; oddly enough, one emoting, gesticulating, coiffured conductor also begins to look like all the others. Not only is the resultant effect one of boredom; paradoxically the repetitive screen images serve to concentrate attention not on the music but on the activity of music-making, and on the peculiar and funny-looking ways that some people behave. Even the merest hint of such a reaction on the part of a viewer can distract attention from the music and eventually come to discredit the entire musical enterprise.
The most absorbing of the recent televised concerts were those which offered something other than interchangeable performances of the music. Star singers, for example, are not interchangeable; their fame rests not only on vocal excellence but on the specific persona each one communicates visually and aurally to an audience. So it was to be expected that orchestra concerts starring singers would prove the most interesting.
The first of these star events produced domestically during the past season was the Joan Sutherland-Marilyn Home concert in October, with Miss Sutherland’s husband, Richard Bonynge, leading the New York Philharmonic in the accompaniments. The singing was self-assured and brilliant, and the combination of great vocalism with the backing of a major orchestra proved as irresistible on television as it had during a dress rehearsal in the hall.
The second vocal concert was less distinguished musically and also rather more controversial. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti is the most reliable, accurate, sweetly strong-voiced Italian tenor before the public today; his personality is compellingly charming and altogether winning. The concert, again with the Philharmonic, was conducted by Zubin Mehta, whose long suit is also vibrant public charm. Whereas Pavarotti’s singing on this occasion impressed some observers as less fresh than it had been in the past, Mehta’s conducting seemed, at least to me, some of his best work in New York to date. It was vivid and colorful (a careful performance of the Beethoven Egmont Overture excepted), and nicely calculated to draw forth the last ingratiating drops of tuneful passion from the famous works Pavarotti had chosen.
Perhaps the mood of the entire concert was best caught in one of the closing selections, the beginning of Act III of Tosca from the short orchestral introduction through Cavaradossi’s familiar aria E lucevan le stelle. Mehta and Pavarotti were joined by a boy soprano (as an unseen shepherd’s voice) and the violinist Itzhak Perlman to sing the few lines of the Jailer. It was Perlman’s vocal debut and possibly, as a New York critic hinted, his farewell too. He really did not do badly, but one could only wonder on what musical grounds he had been chosen. The effect on the total performance was predictably again one of charm—Perlman’s own personal aura combining with the palpable air of friendship among the participants on the stage. The suitability of all this charm to the tragedy of Tosca remains debatable.
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Still another concert of the Philharmonic, along with Mehta, featured Soviet pianist Emil Gilels. Here the fare was undeniably substantial. The program began with the Third Leonore Overture of Beethoven, continued with the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, and ended with the widely known Tchaikowsky Piano Concerto. After a dutiful and sometimes rough rendition of the Beethoven and a persuasive account of the Bartok, the Tchaikowsky closed the concert with a resounding thud. The once perfect technical mastery of Gilels is now in lamentable condition, a fact ignored only by those who hear what is in their memories rather than what is being played now. Close camera work made only too obvious the pianist’s present plight. Here television was—perhaps inadvertently—revealing, and none of Mehta’s motions on the podium or the hyperbolic comment with which these programs are liberally supplied could conceal the pathos.
Two programs presented something rather different from the reproduction of a concert. The Eugene Ormandy commemoration by the Philadelphia Orchestra included the familiar Second Symphony of Rachmaninoff, a work much performed by the conductor. Viewers were also given a sizable portion of Ormandy’s recollections of Rachmaninoff, as well as his own thoughts on what he had accomplished during his Philadelphia tenure. Even more solid as verbal material were the musical comments and rehearsal excerpts of Leonard Bernstein accompanying his performance of the Mahler Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. On this occasion, as always, Bernstein proved himself our cherished master of the haute vulgarisation of music; in addition, the performance itself was movingly conducted, and most beautifully played by the orchestra.
Indeed, it is sad to report that throughout all the events I have seen recently, performance honors were captured by European rather than American orchestras. The broadcast of the Dresden State Symphony under Herbert Blomstedt from the imperfect acoustical ambience of the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, for example, was a revelation of orchestral ensemble and musical penetration by the players themselves; the performance of the Meistersinger Prelude alone seemed on a level rarely approached in this country.
As if to prove how little television has to offer the straight performance of music, the most satisfying television orchestra concert this season, the performance of the Bruckner Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic, had little need of visual manifestation at all. The hour-long program was almost completely filled by the symphony; there was thus time for little more than a minute of the spoken word. The customary shots of orchestra and conductor were tasteful and restrained; Karajan’s ample movements and grimaces were seemingly meant for the orchestra rather than for the viewing audience. Incredibly refined orchestral playing of the most affecting warmth, led by a conductor whose analytical skill is no less acute than his ear for timbre and medody, produced a mood of total absorption in the music.
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It would be kinder not to spend too much time on the one major adult presentation of serious music on commercial television so far this season. This was the highly touted NBC production, “Live From Studio 8H.” Once again, the stars (with the addition of soprano Leontyne Price) were familiar from PBS: Mehta, Perlman, and the New York Philharmonic. The program was tied to the mythic name of Toscanini. Not only was the concert broadcast from the studio whose name was a byword for the poor sound of so many Toscanini records, but the music played on this occasion included works by composers “identified,” in the words of the NBC press release, “with performances by Toscanini and the NBC.” The point was further driven home by an intermission feature, hosted by Mehta, showing kinescopes of Toscanini conducting (in 1948 and 1949) breathtaking actual performances of the orchestra.
Faced with such competition, Mehta and his forces did not come close to a draw. Leontyne Price, in excerpts from Verdi’s Aida and La Forza del destino, was vocally variable, alternating beautifully produced notes with hollow chest tones and strident tops. The orchestral performances of the Overture to Forza and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries seemed both ragged and booming. While Perlman may well have been made uncomfortable by being restricted to the last movement alone of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, his facial expressions while playing betrayed nothing but amused satisfaction. Only the Ravel Daphnis and Chloe Suite no. 2 sounded on a high level, an achievement for which credit must be given not merely to Mehta but also to Pierre Boulez, whose immaculately prepared performance of the complete score was one of the glories of recent Philharmonic history.
A further comment must be made. The NBC program was interrupted and blemished by the intrusion of commercials, no less vulgar for all their pretentiousness. But the PBS programs were similarly blemished by commercials. On public television these are not, of course, called commercials, but in their effort to sell a product they are commercials in everything but name. The product they sell is, in theory, music and culture; in practice it is the performing institution and the careers of the stars the institution has engaged. Everyone appearing on these programs speaks in honeyed tones of the wonder of it all. Phrases like “the really great superstars” and “star-studded” abound; during the Joan Sutherland-Marilyn Horne program the announcer described what he saw as “marvelous reflections of joint admiration and satisfaction on the faces of [the artists].” Almost everywhere souvenir booklets are hawked, and sometimes free gifts and premiums are offered. It is all dismayingly like TV sports—but lacking the occasional objectivity and even skepticism of sports-casters.
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The reasons underlying this hucksterism are all too plain. For the artists the goal is what it always has been—fame and money. For the institutions, the goal is, simply put, survival. In a time of rising budgets, reduced participation by big contributors, and loss of contemporary intellectual relevance, the only hope lies in an expansion of the uneducated audience. A massive new audience can hardly be expected to enter concert halls and opera houses; its natural habitat can only be television land.
The participants in this quest are quite open about their intentions. The morning after the Met Otello (which indeed may have reached as many as ten million viewers), the New York Times quoted the company’s executive director as saying:
We average 25,000 letters from people who haven’t been on our lists with each new telecast. . . . The wider we reach, the more access we have to both federal funding and private contributions
And the Met’s president added:
We hope to get considerable revenue from electronics of all sorts—cable TV, video disks, cassettes and tapes. . . . We’ve got to play to the widest possible audience. And with satellite television, the world is there.
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Meanwhile, far from the klieg lights and PR agents of television, serious music on radio has taken a new lease on life. For now, more than thirty years into the age of video, the real music lover’s home is still radio. The once despised radio now offers an unequaled variety of great music, in concert performances from all over the world. So much, indeed, is available that one’s experience of it is limited only to the time one has for listening—and to the number of FM tuners and tape recorders one has available to record simultaneous programs.
In the New York metropolitan area, for example, in addition to the Metropolitan broadcasts of the entire season, there are available during the year the Salzburg Festival and the performances of the San Francisco Opera, along with weekly concerts by the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago Orchestras. Chamber music is broadcast from the Library of Congress, and solo recitals from Carnegie and Tully Halls as well as the 92nd Street “Y.” The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the series at the Frick Museum, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Budapest Festival, the Aspen Festival, even festivals of Women’s Music. . . . The list is endless, and the result is a cornucopia of today’s musical life.
From the standpoint of the performers whose work is now being widely circulated and the music lovers whose every taste is now being supplied, this plenty on the airwaves can only be welcomed. For these producers and consumers more must always seem better. Yet the very success of the electronic transmission of music poses several disturbing questions. Is all this activity, on radio and television alike, good for the continued existence of live concerts? What is the effect of all this easy access to acknowledged masterpieces on the writing and the writers of new music? Has all this easy listening thinned the ranks of those most vital members of the audience, the cultivated amateurs who experience music by playing it themselves?
Perhaps all these questions are no more than polite ways of getting at the most troublesome problem of all: is there a limit to the desirable size of the audience for high musical culture? Individual programs and performers will come and go but this problem will remain, and it will increasingly be the task of an independent music criticism to address it.
1 It is significant (and perhaps even startling to an observer of today's world of serious music) that the prime mover in the relationship between the Philharmonic and CBS—which continues in reduced circumstances to this day—was the legendary impresario Arthur Judson, at the same time manager of the orchestra and a founder and major stockholder of CBS.
2 And so it remains today, despite the opening-up of the UHF channels, more numerous but also more difficult to receive and tune.
3 For an account of the rise of the NEA and a consideration of the factors involved in government funding of the arts, see my article, “Funding the Piper,” in COMMENTARY, January 1979.