It takes many brains and many hands to carry music to the masses. Music must
be composed, or adapted; someone has to choose the works which are to be
performed, recorded on disc and tape or synchronized with films. Somebody
has to engage the performers, for the big symphony orchestras and opera-houses,
from the famous stars down to the cabaret and night-club singers. Somebody
has to build transmitters and turntables, pay fees and salaries, print and
sell tickets, put advertisements in papers and paste posters on hoardings.
Somebody even has to print music, collect royalties, performing and mechanical
fees and account for them-there is no end to what has to be done if music
is to be available like drinking-water in a large city, and its material
usefulness ensured.
The laws plot only the boundaries of the territory upon which the great spectacle
of present-day musical life is to unfold. It is for the interested parties
themselves to establish the necessary organization. In this thoroughly organized
world two groups are almost automatically forming which set the industry
in motion and keep it going: the creators or producers on the one hand and
the group of users or consumers on the other. The public, standing between
them, plays no part in the organization: but it buys or rejects the goods
offered, and in its hands the ultimate success or failure of the other two
lies.
It cannot be said that the two groups of 'producers' and 'consumers' are
living together in harmony. They probably never do in any field, but when
the 'product' is an art their differences can be sharp and distasteful. Although
music has become the subject of regular trade certain factors of general
commercial practice are still inapplicable to it. First and foremost, it
has no accepted price, as have other goods in daily demand. Differences in
quality are quite conspicuous, but differences in price are difficult to
assess. In the practical world of commerce a cheaper, inferior product has
a legitimate place-margarine instead of butter, the bicycle instead of the
motor car. True, this applies also to performers and places of performance.
But who would buy or perform a piece of music which is worse than another
simply because it is cheaper? Every work, rightly or wrongly, has to aim
at being thought excellent of its kind-whether it is serious or popular or
simply background music. This unavoidable state of affairs invalidates the
normal usages of commerce. The services rendered to music, the fees payable
for the performance, have no accepted material level. The users demand as
much as they dare and the public resists as much as it can, and this creates
the shifting ground upon which our musical life rests.
The composers, from whom all the power and influence should derive, are only
loosely organized. In almost every country there are composers' guilds or
associations but they recruit their members mainly from the ranks of the
disappointed. More ruthlessly than any other vocation, art separates the
qualified from the unqualified. If the captain of industry has some difficulty
in sympathizing with the troubles of the one-man firm, genius has nothing
in common with mediocrity. Neither Igor Stravinsky nor Richard Rodgers can
fit into a professional organization, for their ambitions are fulfilled and
the complaints of the smaller fry are not their complaints. Thus the absence
of all the most prominent figures robs composers' associations of any real
influence.
However, authors and composers-and publishers-do have organizations for the
protection of their material interests, and these have achieved a high degree
of efficiency. Starting modestly enough as a Societe Dramatique or an Agence
Centrale they have become great powers. There is now a society of this kind
in every civilized country, its presence and purpose almost unknown to the
millions of music consumers. These societies are not merely social or debating
clubs dealing with the art of music: they are the organizations which had
to be created if the rights conferred upon composers and their paroliers
or song-writers were to be operated and enforced-the right to authorize public
performances, broadcasts and mechanical reproductions and, more important
still, to establish scales of payments for all such authorizations, to collect
them and to distribute them.
This is no small undertaking-too big, at any rate, for the individual composer.
Capable organizers were needed to distil the 'esprit des affaires' from the
'amour des lettres'. Forced by the boom in all things musical like plants
in a hothouse, these societies have united into a world-wide organization
which disciplines the whole of musical life. The PRS (Performing Right Society)
in Britain, the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers)
in the USA, the SACEM (Societe des auteurs, compositeurs et editeurs de musique)
in France, and so on, are the bodies which control public performances. Other,
similar organizations control mechanical reproduction, and every country
has its societies and every society its acrostic. Whoever performs or reproduces
music-broadcasting organizations, orchestras, dance-bands, the solitary pianist
in a bar-has to submit his programme to his national society, obtain a licence
and pay for it. A vast network of 'supervisors', or snoopers, sees to it
that only the smallest fish escape. The national societies are united in
an international confederation, and treaties of affiliation provide a world-wide
exchange of programmes, controls and money, so that, for example, the British
composer receives his performing and mechanical rights from the Argentine,
the American composer his from Italy.
Any composer or song-writer with a number of published works to his credit
is admitted to the membership of his national society; he assigns his performing
and mechanical rights to it and the society then exercises them as his
representative. Enormous card indexes have been set up, listing hundreds
of thousands of titles and thousands of names, and these are exchanged between
all the societies. This requires a large personnel, extensive premises, directors
and managers and a great deal of money, which is readily available. Regular
mass consumers, such as the broadcasting and television organizations, pay
yearly sums, running into millions. Record-manufacturers have to pay a percentage
of the selling-price of every disc as a royalty; concert-promoters pay for
every protected work according to the size of the hall. Those who do not
pay are automatically delivered into the hands of justice. In this way these
societies have become the heavily armed and highly mobile international police
of musical life. An enormous stream of money flows through their tills, and
even though administration costs are high a sizeable sum remains for composers
and publishers.
In all this the art itself is but a secondary issue. For the societies music
exists only as a record of names, titles and duration of performance. It
is true that most performing-right-as opposed to 'mechanical' societies make
certain concessions to serious music* by granting a higher reimbursement
to the playing-time of, say, a symphony than to the playing-time of a popular
song, and some societies have even recognized a secondary category of serious
music, namely 'distinguished entertainment' music, which is cheaper than
serious music proper but more expensive than popular music, a distinction
which introduces an element of 'expensive' and 'cheap'. However, this is
of no concern to the promoters, being a matter of internal accounting between
the societies and their members. As the adaptor or arranger of unprotected
music, whose contribution is protected, has a claim to performing and mechanical
fees for his protected version smaller than those of a genuine composer the
societies have set up committees of musicians whose task it is to assign
the works declared by members to their respective categories. (Many years
ago I had an ill-tempered argument with one such committee which refused
to accord the status of 'original compositions? to the folk-song arrangements
of Bela Bartók.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
* It will be noticed here and thoughout this book that I do not adopt the
deplorable habit of calling all serious music "classical" as distinct from
"popular".
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
However, duration of performance remains the yardstick, and here the system
does not do justice to the composer's labours. A symphonic work for large
orchestra has the same 'point value' as a solo sonata for flute of similar
duration, whereas, though the original conception of those two works may
take the same time, the physical writing of a full score of, say, a hundred
pages is a much more slow and laborious task. But the administration of a
world repertoire is too complicated to allow for further itemization. Eschewing
preference for the good and aversion to the bad, the societies register success
but not its reasons. Despite this aloofness they present themselves as guardians
of the art. Composers must live if they are to compose, and no other institution
in our musical life supplies them with the means as bountifully and regularly
as the societies.
Perhaps the greatest blessing of the whole system is that all patronage is
banned. The composers receive no more than is due to them, but payment of
what is due-and it is a good deal-can be enforced without their incurring
the displeasure of a patron, as happened to Beethoven. However, nothing remains
for the beginner. Some societies have a pension fund for their old members
but the encouragement of the young, of the new and unproven, has no place
in their statutes. It is left to the care of others-the music-publishers.
I am always trying to find the beating heart of the living music beneath
the hard armour of organizational endeavours and legal and financial operations.
There is something more than a shrewd business sense in this protection of
the performance and mechanical reproduction of a musical work. A breath of
the 'amour des lettres', however faint, clings to all these carefully guarded
material interests. Music will be actively re-created. It cannot become
completely detached from its creator, like a poem or a picture; his shadow
follows it as the ghost of Hamlet's father dogs the wavering son. Even without
the interference of the law the purchaser of sheet music acquires only the
shell of a hypothetical content. He normally overlooks the threats and warnings
in small print: Performing rights reserved or even, all rights reserved.
These are no product of commercial acumen but a somewhat bizarre expression
of the greater mystery that unites the creator with his work.
Among the consumers broadcasting and television take first place. Even those
who may never have thought about it must have some vague idea of the size
of an organization which every day, from early morning till late at night,
educates, informs and-especially with music entertains hundreds of millions
of listeners and viewers. This is, in fact, a heavy industry of the immaterial,
having no other purpose but the hope of a better, happier, more educated
society. In many countries broadcasting is nationalized, because the improvement
of men's minds is an obligation upon governments rather than upon individuals.
The farther west one travels, the more the grip of the state loosens, both
on broadcasting and on the individual. In France the Organisation de
Radiodiffusion et Television Francaise (ORTF) is still a department of the
Ministry of Communications, but the moment we cross the Channel we find
broadcasting and television independent and the state exercising only a
peripheral control. Farther west again, in the Western Hemisphere, broadcasting
is left to private enterprise. In North, Central and South America there
are hundreds of private broadcasting organizations, and anybody who understands
the business can start and operate a transmitter or a network. Some clever
people have even discovered that the freedom of the high seas has preserved
some of the romance of the old days of piracy and have established commercial
stations on old ships and forts outside territorial waters and official control.
One cannot repress a slight shudder when one reads the statistics of sound
and television broadcasting. Reliable figures are available only for
Europe-excluding Russia and a few other communist countries. The number of
listeners and viewers in North and South America cannot be ascertained, as
no licence-fees are payable. We must therefore confine ourselves to the figures
as published by the European Broadcasting Union, for all Europe with the
exceptions mentioned above. The number of licences for sound broadcasting
rose from 31,000,000 in 1950 to 60,000,000 in 1955, to 71,000,000 in 1960
and to 84,000,000 in 1965, while television licences increased during the
same period from 285,000 to 4,500,000, to 18,500,000 and finally to 44,000,000.
Experts deny that saturation point has been reached; in a world of insatiable
need for noise that may never happen. But the figures give a good idea of
the gigantic scope of the new means of communication. European broadcasting
and television organizations employ some 100,000 people, from directors general
down to doorkeepers. They engage thousands of performers of every type and
standard every year; and music is the commonest of all the forms of entertainment
they project into the ether, to be caught by those millions of receivers.
In Europe all this began rather pompously, with lofty cultural ambitions.
Until quite recently an inherent respect prevented the desecration of art
and culture at the profane hands of commerce. Sound and television broadcasting,
it was felt, should be financed out of licence-fees collected by the agencies
of the state, and these fees are not a selling-price but a tax. A comparatively
small amount pays for an enormous volume of information and entertainment.
But in the United States broadcasting was designed for profit from the very
beginning. Education, information and pleasure are free, and this is a laudable
ideal. Yet the broadcasting organizations, deriving their revenue from
advertisements, are commercial, which hardly seems compatible with such idealism.
The revenue is quite fabulous; so is the value of the advertisements, which
can recommend all types of goods much more persuasively than printed notices
in newspapers.
This American example, like others, was bound in the end to undermine stubborn
European morale. For many years commercialism prowled round European broadcasting
and television like a hungry wolf round the sheepfold. Only a few small
countries, such as Luxembourg or Andorra, let it in, leaving the responsibility
for art and culture to their more affluent neighbours. Eventually the temptation
became too great for the big countries and for their state-owned or
state-controlled organizations, and the wolf was ceremoniously received at
the front door.
It may be some time yet before Europeans rid themselves altogether of a nagging
feeling of impropriety. The method of 'sponsored programmes', so well established
in the Americas, is not admitted in Europe: in the United States General
Motors or Camel cigarettes can engage the New York Philharmonic, book time
on sound radio or television and enliven a one-hour concert of sterling music
under a sterling conductor of their own choice with their own advertisements.
In Europe the advertiser is firmly excluded from any interference with the
programme, and art and commerce are carefully separated. This, quite bluntly,
is sheer hypocrisy. The advertiser pays a very high price for his spot, and
will do so only if he can be assured that the programmes preceding and following
it are so popular that millions of listeners will endure his advertisement.
Hypocrisy has always been an excellent sedative for a troubled conscience.
So in Europe, too, commercial broadcasting and commercial television established
themselves-causing, incidentally, a bloody massacre in the world of illustrated
journals and magazines. As was to be expected, commercialism avoids art as
best it can. In T the undignified disguise of the 'jingle', music becomes
the salesman | of a multitude of goods, and clever composers who could perhaps
produce something better but certainly nothing more remunerative - are making
considerable fortunes by providing the right noise t for the right article.
Cosmopolitanism was not, at first, one of the visible preoccupations of
broadcasting, but since the Second World War it has become its proudest
achievement. Performances from the Salzburg Festival can be heard throughout
the world, either by direct transmission or on tape-recordings; programmes
are being ex- changed; the communications satellite has even overcome the
curvature of our planet. This has so increased organizational and legal problems
that not only do broadcasters run their own legal departments but the European
(with some non-European) organizations have formed the European Broadcasting
Union to take care of such common technical problems as how they should avoid
each other in the ether, and to steer them through the treacherous waters
of international copyright.
The other great power in our musical life is the record industry - as it
is honest enough to call itself. It has become a heavy industry. It is estimated
that sales, excluding Russia and Japan, amount to 500,000,000 records annually,
which is no mean achievement considering that more than one-third of the
world's population has not yet arrived at the stage of buying records. But
the record manufacturers are no music-promoters in the ordinary sense. Recording
sessions take place behind closed doors, and what is eventually sold to the
public is often the result of much trial and error. This accounts in no small
measure for its undoubted technical excellence. Also, manufacturers secure
the exclusive services of prominent performers and popular stars, and often
first-recording rights of important composers; all this, of course, against
payment of substantial fees and with an eye more on their competitors than
on the art itself Sound broadcasting and television have clear-if rarely
fulfilled-cultural obligations; record-manufacturers have none. Broadcasting
is quite frequently criticized on artistic grounds by the Press or by Parliament
because of its programme policy, and the public follows such activities with
suspicion. But record manufacturers, who are likewise mass distributors of
cultural goods, are immune to any criticism. One regularly reads about their
new issues and the technical quality of their products, but their artistic
policy is not a subject of public discussion. The words 'manufacturers' and
'industry' distinguish them from all other servants or patrons of the art.
The manufacture of records is 'business', pure and unashamed, and not a
particularly risky business at that. In a few countries, such as the United
States and Great Britain, this has even aroused the sympathies of the
legislators, and a legal and compulsory licence limits the sacred prerogatives
of composers by declaring that a work, once recorded, may further be recorded
by any other manufacturer without the composer's prior consent, though not
without payment of the usual or statutory royalties.
All this stirs up considerable resentment among composers, publishers and
performers, but the power of the manufacturer and the possibilities he offers
are so great that few would be brave enough to invite his wrath. One day,
perhaps, some independent spirit may measure the enormous influence of the
mass distribution of records on the whole existence of music and may discover
that, overwhelmed as it is by public taste, it tends to vitiate the efforts
of many serious promoters and distributors. The young composer, the unfulfilled
promise, can expect nothing from the gramophone industry. It is for others
to take risks and the industry to pick the plums; for others to encourage
budding talent and the industry to exploit success. But the gramophone record
has fantastically increased the commercial potential of music, and for this
achievement alone has secured a place of honour in the annals of the art.
Being international, and in almost constant conflict with the artists' and
performers' rights, the industry has established an international federation
for the world-wide protection of its interests.
This, then, is the formidable array of forces which has ringed Apollo's grove
with a series of fortified camps. Great battles are fought behind the scenes
between producers (the artists' societies) and consumers (broadcasters,
record-manufacturers and concert promoters), with ever-rising costs of living
on the one hand and ever-increasing demands on the other to ensure that there
should be no lasting peace.
Mention must also be made here of the army of performers, though more will
have to be said about them in their proper place. They include all those
who perform music professionally: star conductors, singers, instrumentalists,
down to the humblest musicians in the humblest dance-band.
Although the individual star performer has a fairly long and distinguished
pedigree, the respectable orchestra musician is a product of more recent
times. While music remained an aristocratic pastime the ordinary musician
was a proletarian, badly educated and badly paid. There was nothing exceptional
about the Salzburg Court Orchestra as described by Mozart in 1778: 'One of
the main reasons why I hate Salzburg is the rude, wretched and disorderly
behaviour of the court musicians. No honest, well-behaved man can live with
them. Instead of taking their part one has to be ashamed of them.' Twenty
years later Carl Maria von Weber confirmed Mozart's verdict: 'There is no
lack of personalities, but they all are disorderly drunkards.' Conditions
were to change profoundly before the rank and file of professional musicians
could rise to the commanding position they now hold in the musical hierarchy.
Growing professionalism and, in its train, growing perfection have given
them a sense of purpose and pride such as they never knew before. Without
them our whole musical life would come to a standstill.
In the face of technological progress there grew up in some quarters the
fear that the live musician might eventually become dispensable, but the
very opposite has happened: there are more professional musicians than ever
before, they are more urgently needed and they are more proficient. Their
strength had only to be co-ordinated to make itself felt. In most countries
performers are organized in trade unions, demanding fixed minimum wages and
maximum working-hours; they strike to enforce their demands and generally
like to emulate other workers in other industries. This attitude has a peculiar
flavour when applied to an art, which, apart from talent, requires enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm should be above timetables and collective bargaining. But this
is just one more case of the 'amour des lettres' and the 'esprit des affaires'
entering into an uneasy partnership. A performance is no longer aimed at
a comparatively small audience: its preservability and portability make it
available to millions, a development which, theoretically at least, deprives
the performer of many of his opportunities.
Confronted by the powerful consumer organizations, he would be crushed if
he did not have the strength to resist. The performer's new status, his powers
and rights, have played an important part in the development of musical life
over the last fifty years, and we shall meet him again when we come to consider
the fundamental change that has occurred in the art itself.
