DON'T RAISE YOUR BOY TO BE A FIDDLER
Kenin, Herman D.
Don't Raise Your Boy To Be A Fiddlen By HERMAN D. KENIN YOU WONT find reference to Bach or Beethoven, to Shostakovich or Aaron Copland in this article on the state of music today. More...
...There is more employment for the brasses and woodwinds, and more prestige and publicity...
...There were 1,500 violinists listed in the area...
...Pepsi-Cola has its painting contest...
...The union's survey for the 1947-48 season showed that the 32 "majors" employed 3,277 musicians for an average period of 23.4 weeks, offering summer jobs to an additionHERMAN D. KENIN, a member of the executive board of the American Federation of Musicians, recently served as IX S. delegate to the International Labor Office conference in Geneva...
...The employer delegates maintained that the performer does not "contribute either artistically, financially, technically, or administratively to the fixation of the performance in permanent form," and that therefore the recording was a product belonging only to the employer...
...not one was proficient enough...
...I was one of two American "workers' delegates" to a recent Geneva conference of the International Labor Organization that discussed performers' rights in the mechanical reproduction of sounds...
...Three states—Utah, Vermont, and Oklahoma—give lessons to the Federal Government, which spends nothing for music and art, by granting small amounts for their symphonies...
...The past generation has seen a vast increase in the volume of music heard, but little added employment has resulted...
...Often their proposals were accepted, sometimes exactly doubling the amount put up by the union...
...The overall value of the old-style American tycoon is debatable, but much of his cash did spill over into the support of music...
...The musician is being made to compete with himself...
...It often carried with it demands for an improper subservience to the whims of the benefactor, but the sum total was the maintenance of a cultural asset...
...The pipeline is leaking at every joint...
...it cannot produce music...
...The 1,200 non-network stations gave work to no live musicians—although 60% of their time was filled with recorded music...
...The Secretary recently called for a national commission "to examine the state of the arts in the United States...
...More significant now to our culture is the economic crisis facing music, for certainly the founts of serious music, the symphonies, are suffering blows that may be irreparable...
...The years from 1910 to 1940 saw the development of the phonograph, loudspeaker, radio, movie soundtrack, and juke box...
...For, the machine can only reproduce...
...the latter must work elsewhere in music at tasks sufficiently demanding to maintain their skills at a high pitch, or drop from the sympnonies...
...Still, in the mechanics of the grants lies the seed of a genuine solution to the serious music problem...
...In the '30s, performers, headed by Fred Waring and Paul Whiteman, and supported by the manufacturers, took legal action to force payment of royalties by commercial purchasers of their records...
...Another lead to a financial solution of the problems of serious music is suggested by a musicians union survey disclosing that in 1948 local government bodies appropriated nearly $1,500,000 for public performance of music...
...In New York the union's biggest local, numbering 30,000 members, reported at the end of 1949 that 35% of its roster was unemployed...
...Today the patron of music is following to oblivion the patron of other arts, a victim of death and high taxes...
...If it is done quickly, we may even save the 32 major symphonies...
...The main bone of contention in the Geneva discussions was the workers' demand for the right of authorization, that the artist be able to grant or withhold permission for the dissemination by mechanical means of his performance...
...once it's placed on the market you can't forbid its use in corned beef hash...
...Even musicians must eat, and they save their serious music for home musicales while they earn a living in other fields...
...If all this money had been applied to our major symphonies, it would still have accounted for only about 13% of the operating costs...
...They almost all fail...
...Ill This is progress of sorts, this merger of the artists through their union and government through the municipalities...
...Their members share an intensity of interest and height of purpose that entitle them to the name of artist...
...This sum is never met by ticket sales or the subsidy revenues from recording royalties or broadcasting rights, and just about every philharmonic or civic orchestra association winds up its year in the red...
...The United States is almost alone in not making at least a start on legislation in behalf of performers' rights...
...Although record labels carried a legend, "for non-commercial use only in homes" (which many of them still carry), the courts ruled that the right to specify subsequent use of a record was lost when the artist communicated his production to the public...
...Stymied in the courts, at a loss for a sound method of controlling the Frankenstein monster they had created, the musicians called a halt to all musical recording in 1942...
...Average weekly pay for the winter was $72.50, for the summer a dollar less...
...II In days of yore, the battle was often won by a doughty champion munitioned with a sheaf of blank checks...
...The American Federation of Musicians has a handy way of classifying symphony orchestras...
...It is a pipeline that must be kept filled...
...It is my guess that it takes 10,000 boys and girls studying a stringed instrument in countless communities to turn up one high-grade craftsman in a great orchestra's string section...
...The American Federation of Musicians had available for 1948 $1,500,000 of its own, drawn from its fund created by royalties on records and transcriptions...
...Music is an expanding art...
...Longhaired critics may group them by the big three in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (or four, if you include the NBC), followed by others of assorted degrees of excellence...
...The musicians spent $1,500,000 a year in 1947-8-9, and the trustee of the new fund for the recording and transcription industry is spending at the rate of $1,000,000 a year...
...Once upon a time, after the yacht was paid for, the chateau imported from Touraine, and the Italian count welcomed to the family, our wealthy magnates shelled out for culture...
...Television, on the verge of tremendous profits, may recognize its duty...
...The principle established here has been accepted by the industry...
...In some ways corporations have tried to fill the void...
...To begin with, the slow stunting of talent that afflicts the symphonies reflects the music business as a whole...
...Unlike his fellow-victims of technology in ice plants and carriage factories, when he goes, there will be nothing left but the outworn sound and faded fury—and that too will soon subside...
...These are slender funds to cure what ails music, but new sources are in the offing...
...Another city tried to raise a first-class orchestra of 100 for a special event...
...The union simply lists as "major" those 32 that engage their personnel at regular weekly salaries for a season of a specified number of weeks...
...We'll finance five park concerts (or a free symphony), if you will match our contribution...
...Even then the disc jockeys and juke operators were coining money on tiny initial investments in other men's talents...
...they joined with the musicians in a sincere search for a way to continue under the law...
...Our closest approach to this maturity was the Arts Project of WPA, of blessed memory to the artists, actors, and musicians it helped to sustain in their professions, but inextricably confounded in myth with the boondoggle and the shovel-leaner...
...A population that won't support the orchestras with ticket purchases won't do it with contributions...
...For the serious music lover these major symphonies form, with the virtuosos, the peak of music...
...that is, whether the interpretative artist has an equity in his work similar to that of the author or composer...
...NBC has a symphony, CBS finds industrial sponsors for the New York Philharmonic, on the Coast Standard Oil has for 24 years offered the Standard Hour (without commercials) to radio listeners...
...One by one the luxuries have fallen before the graduated income surtax...
...In coping with the disaster, musicians have taken two lines of approach...
...they are still encouraged by the socialist governments that concede the value to the national welfare of a thriving culture, whether or not it pays its way...
...The musicians' union estimates that only one in five professional instrumentalists has a steady job in music...
...Art contributions came out of the top bracket...
...The record industry used 10,584 musicians in 1947, but average earnings were under $300 for the year...
...From a pool of 4,000 professional musicians, only 85 adequate instrumentalists could be recruited, and most of them were members of an existing symphony...
...The moribund body of music will get up and walk, if it can get transfusions of subsidies for art's sake, greater royalty funds for employment's sake, and perhaps national direction as proposed by Secretary of Labor Tobin...
...On the contrary, the greater the quantity of recorded performance, the greater the competition it offers the live musician...
...San Francisco for years has had a special tax to support its symphony and opera-house in a great municipal center...
...But corporation philanthropies do not solve the problem of the 32 major symphonies...
...The American Federation of Musicians assumed the right of authorization in their behalf...
...Since the advent of the musicians' fund, Hudson County, N. J., and its towns have equaled the allotments made by the union...
...In America, we are still governed by the Copyright Act of 1909, passed when the gramophone lived in the parlor...
...In 1947 radio employed 2,675 staff musicians and 5,431 part-time...
...It is a blot on our culture that the symphonies cannot exist as organizations without unending financial crises, and that musicians of high attainment cannot exist on their earnings as serious artists...
...Now 20% of records sold never see the home but wind up as the stock in trade of the mighty disc jockey, juke box, and piped music industries...
...This modest wage for a half-year's work certainly fails to confirm the argument that exorbitant union demands produce the symphony deficits...
...From time to time attempts are made to replace the big donor with a host of little givers...
...More and better music is available today than ever before...
...The union's figure (admittedly incomplete) places the cost of operation of all 32 major orchestras at $11,460,516...
...But it doesn't necessarily follow that lots of music means lots of musicians playing...
...One line is the establishment of the performer's "right of authorization" to perpetuate his single performance...
...An additional 5,000, casually hired, earned less in total salaries than the handful of contract musicians...
...In the settlement of that ban, James C. Petrillo, president of the union, established an instrument to assure at least some relief...
...Commercial music, once a refuge for the fur-collared fiddler between engagements at Carnegie Hall, produces fewer and fewer jobs...
...The rest live by other trades, using music to keep themselves in tobacco...
...These items, properly augmented, can make practical the uniting of musicians, employers, and government in a unique way to solve the precarious state of music today...
...The fund paid out $4,500,000 in three years, before Taft-Hartley intervened, and its principle is still embodied in a current independently administered trust fund...
...We have seen that the orchestras cannot provide adequate employment for their members...
...The Tavits-Ives proposals for a National Theater and Opera introduced in Congress a year ago specifically divorce their proposed agency from any lingering kinship with unemployment relief...
...How do the musicians justify their accumulation of what is almost a tax on manufacturers' profits...
...In other words, a canned performance has the status of a sack of potatoes...
...The relevance of this to the symphony is two-pronged...
...In Europe many a national symphony or Staatsoper dates back to the court theaters and orchestras of the Kings of Prussia and the Dukes of Weimar...
...The manufacturers were required to pay a small royalty, on each record or transcription sold, into a fund administered by the union to advance the cause of music throughout the country...
...Movie houses employed 22,000 band members or piano professors before Jolson and Vitaphone revolutionized the industry...
...When Taft-Hartley outlawed the union's royalty collections, the manufacturers did not attack the theory of their responsibility...
...Besides, music is no different from other professions in that the supply of top practitioners needs to be constantly renewed from the bottom...
...In 1948 the film producers gave regular employment to only 339 musicians...
...Olin Downes of the New York Times has pointed out that the growing shortage of strings starts in the music schools and is correlated with a trend in modern and popular music to the other side of the podium...
...A city recently needed one new violinist of symphony caliber to fill a place in its major orchestra...
...The cause of it all is canned music in its many forms...
...In many of the union's local jurisdictions, its officers went before the holders of the public purse strings and made deals...
...Each of them either reduced the number of existing jobs, or failed to create new ones...
...The subsidy idea is catching on, in some places has caught on long since...
...al 869 for an average period of 8.2 weeks...
...How does it apply to the symphony problem...
...Some producers of TV film—the latest way of canning music—have already offered to contribute to a fund similar to that in the record industry...
...the other is the insistence that the owners of the machines must repair the social and cultural damage they have created...
Vol. 14 • June 1950 • No. 6
