The Tastemaker

Since the war, a favorite target of English music critics has been the popular Promenade Concerts at London's Albert Hall. In haphazard programs that sometimes seemed as much a period piece as the hall itself, they rarely offered any modern music more controversial than, say, Vaughan Williams in one of his more idyllic moods. But now the critics are cheering the "Proms" -and so is a new set of fans. This summer Albert Hall is echoing to 50 works entirely new to Prom audiences -some of them classical, some contemporary, but all demonstrating what Guardian Critic Neville Cardus calls "the wild, bold and enterprising throw of Mr. Clock's net." As Cardus and his fellow critics are happily aware, Net Thrower Clock -of the British Broadcasting Corp. -is, at 54, the most influential man dispensing music in Britain.

Head of the BBC's music department, Pianist Clock wields an administrative baton over BBC's 13 orchestras (including four symphonies), employs a quarter of all the permanently employed musicians in Britain, spends more than $3,000,000 a year on music. In his small, square office at the BBC's music headquarters in London, Clock tirelessly studies scores and magnetic tapes as he tries to keep track of the 12,000 compositions played annually on the BBC's 3,000 serious music programs. Clock's own tastes lean to the modern, but a typical Clock program is a mixture of classic and modern. ("If you segregate old and new," he says, "music is just a museum.") The "Proms would not be Proms," Clock is convinced, unless they included most of the symphonies of Beethoven, the four Brahms symphonies, the last three of Tchaikovsky. But along with those staples, Clock demands the music of such well-known modernists as Oliver Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Hans Werner Henze, and has commissioned works by men that many of the Prom audiences have never heard of (this summer's commission composers: Alan Rawsthorne, Thea Musgrave, Nicholas Maugh, Peter Maxwell-Davies).

Middle-Aged Spread. In just three years on the job, Clock has transformed the BBC into one of Europe's most imposing boosters of avant-garde composers, influencing orchestras, ensembles and musical societies all over the country. "The BBC breaks the ice," says London Observer Critic Peter Heyworth. "Once it performs a work, the floodgates are open." Clock's appointment to the BBC, Heyworth decided, was "the most exciting musical event in Britain in years."

Anxious to rid itself of "middleaged spread," the BBC hired Clock in the spring of 1959. His credentials were varied. London-born, Clock studied piano with Artur Schnabel in Berlin in the early '303, returned to London to write music criticism, and founded a summer school (which he still runs) for composers and performers at Dartington, in Devon. Working on the theory that he could include two new works in a four-work program without losing his audience, Clock started his new job by sprucing up not only the Prom concerts but also the repertories of the three BBC regional orchestras. He also began handing out commissions to promising young composers ("They can't live off us, but we can encourage them").

One Step Ahead. The results seem to support Clock's conviction that audiences are far less hidebound than most concert managers think. In his first two seasons of handling the Promenade Concerts, total attendance fell off -but now it is impressively high. Says Tastemaker Clock: "We give them what they'll like tomorrow. We are one step ahead. If you are always trying to please them you are one step behind."

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