Starvation Amidst Plenty

Serious composers are traditionally hard up. They pick out their masterworks on battered garret pianos with chilblained fingers, present them to a frigid world that applauds them only when it is too late. Or so the legend goes. In 1945, Paul S. Carpenter, director of the University of Oklahoma School of Music, decided to make a study of their situation in the U.S.

Carpenter died last year, but not before he had got his findings down on paper. This week they were published in an irreverent, readable book entitled Music: An Art and a Business (University of Oklahoma Press; $3.75). Carpenter found enough truth in the garret-and-chilblain tradition to raise his dander a notch or two. His conclusion: serious U.S. composers are seldom listened to, almost never earn a living from writing music.

The Villain List. Although Carpenter's report was shy of names, facts & figures, there were plenty of examples around to back him up. Last summer, up & coming U.S. composer Samuel Barber got a piddling $500 for a year's work on his top-notch piano sonata (TIME, Feb. 6). The bill was paid by Music Millionaires Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin, who could make 50 times as much by picking out one singable 32-bar tune. The usual royalty for a major performance of a contemporary symphony is around $50.

Carpenter places the blame for this state of affairs on those who refuse to give serious U.S. musicians a hearing. High on his villain list: public school teachers whose Pharisaical travelogues in "music appreciation" often bypass modern U.S. music completely; civic music associations which spend their money on package celebrity series; symphony societies whose percentage of performance of U.S. music sometimes is less than 4% of their total programs.

No Golden Shower. The music flesh pots of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood also come in for a Carpenter hammering. Film sound-track musicians make good money, but to do it they often work under intolerable conditions, grinding out 60 minutes of music, the equivalent of two symphonies, in as little as three weeks. *Carpenter concludes that music publishing and recordings offer few possibilities for the serious American composer, that A.S.C.A.P.'s "golden shower," which falls abundantly on popular publishers and songwriters, leaves the serious composer parched. Of radio's millions for music, very little goes to American composers "starving amidst plenty."

For Carpenter, the solution is to give modern U.S. composers a hearing. Sporadic grants and prizes are not enough: "Composers need incentive, not security--a hearing, not a handout, performers to play their music and audiences to listen."

*High-speed composition does not necessarily mean poor music. Mozart wrote his three greatest symphonies in one six-week stretch; in all, he wrote nearly 600 symphonies, concertos, sonatas et al., in 30 years, an average of one composition every three weeks, died in abject poverty at 35.

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