TODAY & TOMORROW: Tomorrow Will Be Better

By Martin Mayer

“JUST YESTERDAY,” said Norman J. Seaman, a small, disheveled, wiry enthusiast who presents more New York debut recitals than all the other concert promoters put together, “I ran into a real estate salesman who used to be a very good pianist. Some people say that if your kid’s a talented pianist you should cut off a couple of fingers. But I think that’s a cynical attitude.”

It is not an uncommon attitude. Musicians and managers who disagree about almost everything else will both say, with varying degrees of despair, that today’s new concert artists have less chance of making a living at their trade than any similar crop since Ward French joined the management firm of Harrison and Harshbarger in 1922 to promote the new idea of organized audiences.

This depression is probably not permanent, for reasons to be explored presently, but it is distressingly real right now. The reasons for it are various, but the most important is unquestionably the increase in the number who are trying to make a career as concert artists. “If we say that you’re in business if you have over twenty dates,” says David Rubin, who manages the supply of Steinway pianos to concert halls, “then there are many more Steinway artists in business today than there were ten years ago.” But the proportion who succeed is down—and seriously down from the point of view of a concert manager, who needs from an artist a gross of at least $25,000, substantially more than a young artist will earn from twenty-odd dates, if his own expenses are to be met.

There are success stories, too, of course. Though he made his New York debut only during the course of this season, an eighteen-year-old violinist named James Oliver Buswell IV was booked months ago at a very respectable fee for a very heavy schedule, which includes engagements with seven orchestras in big cities. “I told the conductors,” says Ronald Wilford, who manages both Buswell and a number of conductors, “that here was a young man who has not yet had the kind of career that would allow you to have heard of him. Give him an audition; listen to him; and they did, and they hired him.” Meanwhile, on the organized-audience circuit, Buswell was reaping the rewards of careful preparation by Columbia Artists. He was a Judson discovery, and played at the age of thirteen for a convention of Community Concerts managers. At sixteen, he played again for a similar gathering; and now, says Wilford, “he’s their boy.”

Others have been getting ahead through the sponsorship of a conductor, as André Watts has been pushed by Leonard Bernstein, Susan Starr by Eugene Ormandy, Jerome Lowenthal by William Steinberg. Erich Leinsdorf has even found a way to give a firm economic base to Claude Frank (who qualifies as a young artist because he did not enter the solo circuits until he was thirty). This year, Frank will make a number of appearances with the Boston Chamber Ensemble under a contract which permits substantial touring as a soloist and does not, according to Carl Dahlgren of Columbia Artists, Frank’s manager, “risk typing Frank as a chamber player.”

All conductors have at their disposal more patronage than they used to have: there are more orchestras with longer seasons playing more concertos. And now that the orchestras themselves go on tour, even the complete unknown has a chance for such dates, if he can catch the right person’s eye. Conductors who are reluctant to program a novice soloist for the subscription series, because it might cut the subscription sale, may be willing to try him out on a tour date, where the audience has bought its tickets for the rare chance to hear a big live orchestra. “The young person has a less critical platform,” says Donald Engle of the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, which has given grants to the Baltimore Symphony to hire young soloists for non-subscription events, “and the audience gets a concerto it wouldn’t otherwise hear.”

“How does a young artist usually get in with a conductor?” asks Jay K. Hoffman, whose list is composed almost entirely of artists under forty, and answers: “Repertoire.” A number of orchestras have bought the twenty-five-year-old Brazilian pianist João Carlos Martins from Hoffman, less on the strength of his superb notices and Hoffman’s ardent recommendation than on the value of the Ginastera Concerto at which Martins is a certified expert. Probably the most strikingly successful Ford Foundation program in music has been the one that gave artists money to commission concerted works from composers, and then paid the performing fees. In at least two cases these commissions have made a major difference in a career—the Barber Concerto lifted John Browning from the category of promising pianist to the rank of established artist, and the long-awaited Carter Concerto, now completed, will provide the base for a major effort on behalf of Jacob Lateiner. The Carter Double Concerto has brought a post with the New York Philharmonic, though not yet a full career, for Paul Jacobs.

Other opportunities have been offered by the record companies and by the proliferation of prize contests—though winning a prize does not seem to guarantee much, unless there is Communist competition. Recording contracts have certainly been valuable to Charles Rosen, Ivan Davis, and Raymond Lewenthal—not to mention the flocks of Europeans whose first appearance here is heralded by the public-relations departments of the record companies. Mildred Shagall anticipates that it will be at least a little easier to book dates for Augustin Anievas, winner of the Mitropoulos Prize, after his Angel recordings are issued in America. “People are always willing to help artists whose talents they know,” says Susan Popkin, a dark-haired young lady whose Young Concert Artists, Inc. supplies free New York recitals and management services to about twenty highly promising near-beginners, “and that means either they know the artist or they know the name.”

For the artist whose name nobody knows, chances at the moment are dim, probably dimmer than they were, almost certainly dimmer than they will be. A dozen years ago, there were about 1900 “organized audiences” on the Community or Civic circuit, and all of them needed a few low-priced artists to fill in their lists. Today, with the decline of Civic, there are only about 1200 such audiences, and they can afford higher-priced talent. In all series, the recitalist has been pushed into the background by the astonishing growth of “group attractions,” many of them orchestras or serious chamber groups, many of them essentially show-business.

Colleges and universities have picked up much of the slack left by the decline of Civic, but they are distressingly susceptible to the appeal of the recorded big name, and the folk, the semi-popular, the jazz group. “When I first came into the music business,” says Mildred Shagall, “the universities were a very small outlet, but the artists they wanted and could afford were the young, serious artists who didn’t cost much. Now the universities are our largest single source of straight sales—but they don’t want the young, serious artist anymore.”

Even if the manager for a college series has an appropriation and need not sell all his tickets, he looks for the celebrity. “You can’t blame him,” says Susan Popkin, blaming him. “If he doesn’t fill the hall he loses his appropriation.” Every year a few universities grow out of this philistine attitude—the combination of a new concert manager and a new president, for example, moved Hunter College in New York from a straight celebrity series to a widely varied pattern of attractions—but every year sees some backsliding, too, by managers who have gambled and lost.

The squeeze on recital dates has been most severe for pianists and violinists. The market for guitarists is a creation of the last decade. Young singers are better off than they were: they never had much chance to make lieder appearances, anyway, and losses in this area have been more than made up by the substantial growth of opera in America and the opening of a large German market for American opera singers. (The European opportunity, however, is more for experience than for sustenance: many of the lesser German opera houses pay so badly that the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund has made grants for living expenses to young American singers who are fully employed in Germany.) And orchestral musicians have been steadily moving ahead to a guaranteed year-round salary, with the free-lance recording date in New York adequately replacing the post in a movie-studio orchestra as the elite occupation. The new $85 million Ford grant—more than twice the total income of the nation’s orchestras last year—will unquestionably reduce the pressure on many orchestral musicians to take odd jobs to stay alive.

If the touring group attractions have reduced the opportunities of recitalists, they have in themselves given a great deal of work to talented musicians who would otherwise be scrambling for jobs in the pit at musical comedies. It isn’t a living (50 nights at $50 or at the outside $100 a night doesn’t pay many bills), but for someone who wants to spend his life making music it’s a lot better than selling shirts. And the universities have offered increasing numbers of teaching jobs as well as concert series. “Until a few years ago,” Gary Graffman said the other day, “most of my colleagues felt that the university was the end of all hope; now for a lot of people teaching seems to complement a concert career.” Such established artists as Leon Fleisher, Berl Senofsky, and Janos Starker are on faculties (Heifetz himself has tried it), and many others have taken the mixed teaching and concertizing position of artist-in-residence. An interesting venture pioneered by the Ann Summers management has combined a concert date with a kind of artist-in-transience program—an “extended engagement,” which includes a seminar, perhaps a little chamber music with the students, and a lecture as well as a recital appearance.

Still, for the highly talented potential soloist, who has been beating himself up since the age of seven in the confident expectation of audiences to dominate, all such arrangements are more or less unsatisfactory.

“This business,” says Herbert Barrett, “is fundamentally rooted in the recital. The answer has to be a revival of the recital circuit.”

Fortunately, Barrett’s answer has begun to look possible: there will be a revival of the recital circuit, and a better living for a greater number of serious musicians. “People say the problem is an overproduction of artists,” says William Schuman, who ran Juilliard before becoming president of Lincoln Center. “Really, it’s been an underproduction of audiences.” An analysis done at Carnegie Hall the year before Philharmonic Hall opened indicated that the entire audience for serious music at Carnegie amounted to only 30,000 people in a city of eight million. Americans spend at stores twice as much for clothing made in Hong Kong as they spend at box offices for all the serious music, including opera and dance, made in America. But these figures merely reflect the audience and the box office in being; potentially, all the numbers are much higher. When the New York Philharmonic played in Central Park, 70,000 people showed up to hear them; and the money volume of the classical records business is roughly equal to that of the concert and opera business together (about $75 million a year). Federal money is virtually guaranteed, and though the bulk of it will leak off to institutional bureaucracies a significant quantum will be left for artists, particularly in the orchestras and opera houses. Faced with the stern injunction of the Rockefeller Panel Report (“the effective exposure of young people to the arts is as much a civic responsibility as programs in health and welfare”) local governments should be about to loosen the purse strings just a notch. One-quarter of one per cent of the money now spent on education would double the box office for music.

“ON THE ONE hand,” says Julius Bloom, gesturing, “there’s a mounting supply of artistic talent. On the other hand, there’s a mounting demand for music. Somebody’s going to find a way to bring them together.” Bloom himself has been finding such ways with remarkable imagination and success. As executive director of Carnegie Hall, he has sponsored everything from Beethoven cycles with the Philadelphia Orchestra through sets of bargain solo recitals to series of contemporary chamber music. As manager of the concert programs of Rutgers University, he handles perhaps the most adventurous collection of concerts on the academic circuit, including two series that present “non-names.” Under his leadership, and with help from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Hall has become the sponsor of an effort to transplant the Jeunesses Musicales movement to the United States. Bloom sees a better future for the young American artist in a combination of Jeunesses Musicales and a more sophisticated university market.

The basic purpose of a Jeunesses Musicales chapter is to produce music-making by local students. “But in developed Jeunesses Musicales countries,” Bloom says, “there are chapters which set up concert series—almost two hundred of them in France. The chapters take their own artists and exchange them for Jeunesses Musicales artists from other countries. And wonder of wonders, the artists wind up with money in their pockets. They get all travel expenses, a per diem, and a little fee—but they don’t have to split the fee with anyone. If he makes the grade—the artist has a press, and he’ll get a big recital plus an international reputation.”

In America, the universities would be an ideal base for such an organization, and Bloom has been pushing it through the Association of College and University Concert Managers, of which he is past president. Other natural bases are the young people’s programs of the museums, the YMCAs, and the civic clubs. These nonprofit organizations are already the lifesavers for those artists for whom, as a lady in a foundation put it, “a hundred and fifty dollars is the big time.” Like the chamber music societies of doctors and lawyers and businessmen which have made a touring circuit possible for string quartets, the concert presentations of the Ys and museums are managed by amateurs, who are particularly susceptible to idealistic arguments in favor of young soloists, even if they have the budget for more. One of them, Pittsburgh lawyer Herman Recht, has become a kind of folk hero for courage and taste in hiring young performers.

AT PRESENT, THOUGH admirable work has been done by the National Music League, no organization really services the small-scale promotions. A few artists keep busy under their own management—Norman Seaman, as part of his package price for a New York recital, supplies artists with a complete set of labels for mailing reviews and brochures to every institution in the country that sponsors concerts; and one piano-violin duo, assiduously following up Seaman’s list, put together a fifty-date tour for themselves. But most artists don’t have the time or the talent for this sort of thing. “They need somebody to file their twelve pictures,” says Susan Popkin, “and then send out the pictures and the clips. Somebody to talk them up, and negotiate. ‘I need three hundred and fifty dollars and there must be a Steinway—an artist shouldn’t have to say things like that, it’s demeaning.” ··

Engle· claims “a lot of work is going to have to be done below the professional concert management level.” The model for work on this level is Miss Popkin’s Young Concert Artists, which books minor-league dates for its people from Mexico City to Halifax, wherever Miss Popkin or the artist has a contact, and Engle has given Miss Popkin a grant to keep her ·going. Significantly, one of the first products of the grant has been a series in Baltimore, under the auspices of Baltimore Junior College, duplicating the YCA series in New York. Among William Schuman’s dreams for Lincoln Center is an artists’ bureau which would package series of attractions below the commercial level for arts centers all over the country.

Seaman has run some successful pilot projects on a more startling idea which would expand the concert business to organized groups who do not realize they are audiences. Seaman would offer concerts to trade unions, church groups, American Legion posts—anybody with a hall—on a basis that would oblige the organization only to send out Seaman’s publicity and sell the tickets. He would put the artists on salary in return for three appearances a week, print up literature for them in great quantities, and take the risks. For the sponsor, the result would be a new service for members which would cost nothing. Indeed, the organization would be ahead of the game, receiving a small cut of the proceeds for the use of the hall, plus a piano which Baldwin is prepared to supply without down payment, crediting toward its purchase the rental fees from the concert receipts. Seaman is convinced that his early experiments with the Transport Workers Union and the National Maritime Union in New York have proved the feasibility of the plan, but to date he lacks the funds to finance it. For the man who thought up a way to sell what nobody else could give away (Seaman’s “Concert Club” offers tickets to a hundred New York recitals by unknown artists, at $7.50 a season), this purely monetary obstacle ought not to be permanent.

EXPANSION OF opportunity for young artists, of course, will merely postpone the admission of defeat, unless the recital business as a whole can expand with it. Here the sign of hope is the amazing rash of new halls breaking out all over the country. It is easy enough to demonstrate that this burst of arts centers proves only an abiding American interest in real estate, not an emerging American interest in art; easy enough, too, to express one’s feelings about the businessmen and foundation officers who gleefully poured into the bricks and marble of Lincoln Center more money than two years’ total receipts for musical performances in America. But just as Andrew Carnegie’s library buildings forced American communities to buy books for their empty shelves, the new auditoriums will force the provision of concerts.

The trend can be seen most clearly at the universities, where the opening of a new auditorium is followed almost automatically by the expansion or creation of a concert series. Arizona State University, for example, off the beaten track in Tempe, had no professional musical life before Gammage Auditorium was completed; today the budget is over $20,000, and while the first attractions included Burgess Meredith and the American Jazz Ensemble, they also included Ruggiero Ricci, the Amadeus Quartet, and Merce Cunningham.

Wherever the new arts centers are completed, the concert series follow. Lincoln Center is sponsoring twenty recitals this season. At Indianapolis, a new theatre gave the Metropolitan Opera National Company a most unexpected home base, while it gave the city three glamorous (and sold out) weeks of opera. Seattle’s inheritance from its World’s Fair has already doubled the quantity of professional musical performance available to the city. Even the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, normally taken up with drama, became a major stimulus for music. Together with the arts center there comes the state or municipal arts council, whose purpose is to abhor the vacuum in the new hall. New stages will draw talent, some of it new talent, to fill the new seats.

Exactly how these wonders are to be wrought, nobody really knows. “What’s lacking in the field,” says Jay Hoffman a little irritably, “are the ideas.” Given the space and the money, though, the ideas will come; and the talent is already here. If the last decade has been dark for the young American artist, there is a dawn ahead. Performers’ problems, though worse recently than before, have been with us always (Mrs. Theodore Thomas, after all, founded the National Federation of Music Clubs back in the nineteenth century to provide bookings for young artists). The prospects are new.

Martin Mayer, a regular observer of the music scene, is classical music editor ofEsquire and the author of such best-selling books as Madison Avenue, U.S.A. and The Schools.