Notebook: The Peoples' Symphony: A Tribute

...Or the two elderly ladies, one explaining to the other that the two women seated nearby in choice seats by Mr...

...For the better part of twenty years my wife and I have attended, often with our friends, occasionally with our children, a chamber music series in Manhattan's Washington Irving High School, off Union Square...

...The series, incorporated in 1900 by the Peoples' Symphony Concerts under the inspiration of Franz X. Arens "To Bring the Best Music to Students and Workers at Minimum Prices," has given me great personal pleasure...

...And even though upon occasion a Simon Barere may enter a cab at Columbus Circle, confused, and wind up in Washington Heights, at the other end of Manhattan, while fifteen hundred music lovers anxiously await him downtown in Washington Irving, by and large the concerts are identified in the mind of the musical public as the Washington Irving concerts...

...In 1914 the latter took on young Joseph Mann as assistant manager, and in 1925 Mann (who had been a U.S...

...Arens's vision coincided with the great swell of European migration, much of it composed of Jews, Slays, and Italians, people who were, as he insisted, "literally music hungry...

...It took a long time, but when Noah Greenberg finally did bring his Pro Musica group to the Peoples' Symphony series, he quickly established them as favorites with an audience which is resistant to innovations (even of old music) , and simply will not turn out to hear song recitals...

...Franz Arens was twenty-seven years old before he heard his first symphony —Beethoven's Fifth, in Munich—with bafflement and bewilderment...

...He is still at it in 1966, working out of a pokey one-room office high in a Union Square loft building...

...I promise you, next year we'll make it up to you...

...It opened its doors to its first class of excited Lower Manhattan kids on a Monday morning in the fall of 1914, but on the previous Saturday evening its elegant auditorium (the chandeliers and imported parquet flooring have long since disappeared) was christened by a Peoples' Symphony Concert...

...During all those years, Peoples' Symphony Concerts has changed format and locale as little as possible...

...It has also given me ample opportunity to ponder, during all those intermissions gazing at all those vaguely familiar faces, the ingredients that create a sense of continuity, in short a cultural tradition, to make more tolerable the jagged, abrasive quality of contemporary urban life...

...With such an audience musical bonds are taken for granted...

...Mann says, "they 'graduate' and go uptown to the recitals...

...Or that an aunt's more recent class photo used to hang on the second floor outside the balcony...

...It was to such an audience that Alexander Schneider could say jovially, after one of the Budapest's scores had been stolen (unlike other quartets, each member of the Budapest looks out for his own music), "I'm sorry, folks, but we can't finish without the music...

...It is not merely that interest in music among Washington Irving students, now composed of Jews, Chinese, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, among others, has grown, influenced by the Saturday evening recitals, to the point where the high school orchestra is large, firstrate, and so flourishing that it also includes smaller chamber groups...

...Culture means concrete...

...Isn't there a lesson in this for those whose devotion to the diffusion of culture today manifests itself across the country in complex plans for the erection of palaces which may in the end serve—like the grandiose edifices of dead tyrants—as tombs rather than towers of culture...

...Of all the audiences in New York for which music is regularly performed, the one I would choose to perform for is this one," Irving Kolodin wrote in the Saturday Review of February 23, 1963, "It is alert attentive, responsive to the most refined values in execution and not deluded either by reputation or the lack of it...

...About thirty years ago—many subscribers have been coming for longer than that, incidentally—one woman brought her fifteen-year-old son along to his first Washington Irving recital...

...This kind of continuity, it is important to understand, has far more than sentimental significance...

...As an audience they are conservative and do not respond to modern music...

...Thezeafter voluntary subscriptions carried on the work...

...There is no accident in this...

...It was apparently not too difficult for this visionary to interest philanthropic families in his conception, when they saw music lovers storming the ten-cent section, and police reserves called out to keep the customers in line in front of Cooper Union...

...Mann himself in apparent violation of the first-comefirstserved rule were the wife and mother of the performing artist, a distinguished pianist of my acquaintance: "Some mother," sighed the second lady, loud enough for the pianist's relatives to hear, "to have a son like that...

...In the early days, Franz Arens used to open the hall at 6 P.M...

...Even the eccentrics can be endearing—the grim lady who will not move one chair to the left to accommodate your group because she arrived an hour early to claim this particular seat, the stooped old man who pulls his Beethoven score from a brown paper bag and follows it with a pen flashlight...

...But after the buildings have gone up, when in that sense it is already too late, and audiences have discovered that they cannot hear as well as they used to in the older buildings, or do not care for what they see in the newer ones, people may turn to an examination of somewhat more modest undertakings with an eye to isolating their particular contribution to the cultural fabric...

...The showoff sensation-mongering of Cage and his crowd is not to be found in the Wuorinen-Sollberger concerts, which are also run quite humbly, without fanfare, monstrous budgets, capital fund drives, or elaborate protestations of cultural utility...

...In both series the emphasis is on excellence rather than on flashiness...

...Greenberg knew, like other performers, that this was a special audience...

...Obviously, though, a lot of them stick...

...with a brief lecture, illustrated with musical examples at the piano, and followed with a pause for supper, before the musical evening...

...But what is publicly meaningful (even if not statistically demonstrable) is that the diffusion of culture is in its way as dependent on the maintenance of such traditions as it is on innovation, money, or the mixture thereof...

...Mann, a portly gentleman with a cigar and severely brushed black hair, is no musician, and he is dealing with a vastly more sophisticated audience, but he too is very much in evidence at every recital, soothing nervous musicians (some of whom arrive the morning of the recital and practice all day long) , placating disgruntled patrons, and prowling the aisles, reminding the faithful that there is no smoking and no saving of seats for friends or family (in the orchestra your season ticket does not entitle you to a specific seat) . After the early years in Carnegie Hall and Cooper Union—which used to feature symphonic concerts—the move was made to brand-new Washington Irving High School...

...This audience, composed about 65 per cent of teachers and students, is for inscrutable reasons mostly from Brooklyn...

...It is not a minor question...

...But the connection is made—between musicians, between performers and publics, between generations...

...Culture" and "beauty" have suddenly become political matters, and, in a perhaps typically American confusion, have become associated in the public mind with the spending of vast sums, usually on demolition and construction projects...

...To be sure it is moving for someone like myself to recall that my mother was a graduate of the old Washington Irving, and indeed I still have her class photo, a clutch of wide-eyed marvelously innocent girls in shirtwaists 67 and huge hair ribbons...

...Army drillmaster, of all things, during World War I) became manager...

...But the recitals have attracted outside listeners whose lives have been not only enriched but changed by exposure to the best chamber groups in the world,• ranging from the fabled Flonzaley and Kneisel Quartets (both introduced to this country by Franz Arens) down through the Budapest and the Quartetto Italiano to the Juilliard and Gullet Quartets, and such virtuosi as Arrau, Novaes, Serkin, Francescatti, Stern, and Szigeti...

...But 68 there are others, like the piano fan who, eagerly eavesdropping on your conversation about an Arrau performance at Philharmonic Hall, will join in with his opinion as unselfconsciously as if he had been with you in the first place...

...The boy was so moved that he swore to her that one day he would perform there himself...

...Just music, eighteen Saturday evenings a year, in three series of half a dozen concerts each...

...At his last concert there, only a few weeks before his sudden death, this good musician, good socialist, and decent human being led a performance that was both charming and energetic and had the members of still another generation, curious youngsters, clustering before the stage at intermission for a closer look at the hand-crafted rauschpfeifen, krummhorns, portative organ, and regal...

...When the young people that come to our concerts start to earn more money," Mr...

...It would seem perfectly clear that one reason for this is the modesty and simplicity of the entire operation: no building campaigns, no flacks or drumbeaters with mimeos, press releases, and luncheon meetings, no surveys or study commissions—not even any advertisements, unless someone contributes fifty or a hundred dollars for that specific purpose...

...I loved that man," says Mann, who has similar stories about the generous loyalty of artists like Szigeti and Gina Bachauer...

...66 Now, sixty-five years and over a thousand concerts later, the original capital funds (augmented by stock left to the organization) remain intact, and in consequence the recitals are assured of continuation into the indefinite future...

...The two have been synonymous ever since that World War I era when the Workmen's Circle and the Peoples' Institute (which founded the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts) used to send their members en bloc to hear the music...

...He returned to America, convinced, as he put it in his first circular, sent out in 1900, that "A great deal of bad, cheap and trashy music is offered to the people," and determined to prove that "If good music were provided at rates within their reach, they would eventually prefer the latter...

...Nevertheless the concertgoer will recognize among them, particularly among the young couples in sweaters and desert boots who sit holding hands, some of the same intent listeners who turn up at the McMillin Theater concerts of Columbia University's Group for Contemporary Music, which presents, under the leadership of Charles Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger, the most ambitious and brilliantly performed avant-garde music to be heard in the United States today...

...Franz Arens was succeeded as manager by his son Egmont...

...The first year's concerts, given at Cooper Union as the new century began, ranged in price from ten to fifty cents, and the expenses were defrayed by Arens from his own funds...

...Maybe this was why Greenberg more than once urged Joseph Mann not to worry if the organization couldn't afford the Pro Musica's full fee—he'd find someone or some foundation to make up the difference and so ensure their appearance before the Washington Irving audience...