The New Patronage

In Haydn's day, every culture-loving nobleman supported a composer on the place. Prince Nicolas ("the Magnificent") Esterhazy fully supported Haydn and his orchestra for nearly 30 years. The composer had to wear a court uniform and dished up music on order, but he got his chance to become the era's most famed composer. A generation later, public concerts began to thrive and noble patronage to bow out. In 20th century Europe the state shoulders the load. In the U.S., until recently, there has been only a scattering of such dedicated individuals as the late Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and Alma Morgenthau to support the creation of new music. But today, U.S. composers are witnessing the most lavish patronage boom they have ever seen.

In the Red. At the top of the money pile is Louisville, a city that is better known for bourbon than Beethoven, and probably always will be. But the Louisville Orchestra has just rounded out its first year of a four-year plan that has made it the world's busiest performer of new music: under a $400,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (TIME, Jan. 18, 1954), it has commissioned and played a new work for almost every week in the year. Records and tapes are played on Louisville's closed circuit and radio programs are also sent to the Voice of America, the BBC and European stations. LPs of the new music are pressed (by Columbia) for commercial release at $65 per twelve-disk set. If enough people subscribe, the record sales will gradually make the program self-sustaining. Current headache: only 300 subscriptions out of the necessary 1,000 came in last year.

But if the Louisville plan is financially in the red, it is musically well in the black. Forty-six new works have been introduced and several have already been performed elsewhere. A few were standouts, e.g., Luigi Dallapiccola's haunting, emotional Variations for Orchestra, Henry Cowell's gentle Symphony No. 11, Carlos Surinach's vivid Sinfonietta Flamenca. The overall quality was higher than critics dared hope.

Money Flood. Other U.S. organizations that are following in the footsteps of Nicolas the Magnificent:

P: The League of Composers has coaxed such patrons as Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin to ante up for new music, arranged commissions of many diverse items, e.g., Copland's bright Music for the Theatre (1925) and Leon Kirchner's almost atonal Sinfonia in Two Parts (1950).

P: The Koussevitzky Music Foundations have commissioned the world's finest composers with resounding results, e.g., Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, Stravinsky's Ode for Symphony Orchestra, Blitzstein's Regina, for a total of some 60 major works.

P: Chicago's Fromm Music Foundation spends some $50,000 a year for commis sions, publishing, recording and performance of new music, including works by Orientalist Alan Hovhaness and Twelve-Tonist Ben Weber.

P: Columbia University's Alice M. Ditson Fund has commissioned and premiered Menotti's The Medium, Virgil Thomson's Mother of Us All, symphonies by Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Randall Thompson.

P: NBC has commissioned Menotti operas for radio and TV, now has two new operas by Lukas Foss and Stanley Hollingsworth for spring TV performance.

P: The Boston Symphony, in collaboration with Conductor Charles Munch and one of the Koussevitzky foundations, is awarding $2,000 apiece to 15 famed composers, e.g., Darius Milhaud, Heitor Villa-Lobos, William Schuman, for symphonic works to be played in 1955, its 75th anniversary year.

Men of the music world -- New York City Center's Lincoln Kirstein, Conductor Andre Kostelanetz, Clarinetist Benny Goodman -- also commission music for their own use. Among the increasing number of people who commission music for private purposes: a Philadelphia lady who commissioned a piece in memory of her dog. Standard fees: about $1,000 for a symphony, $2,500 for an opera.

Despite the flood of patronage dollars, there are still able composers who go hungry; no composer can write enough music to live on today's commissions alone. But the entry of big money into the field means a healthier musical state in the U.S. Every work may not be a masterpiece, but masterpieces only get written when there is lots of music in the air.

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