Swing (Jan-Dec 1953)

22 concert hall. The following year, the Philharmonic went back on the air live and it still is live. It's doubtful that any one will monkey with it any more. Last December when the Philharmonic performed its 5,000th concert, it had at' tained such eminence that "Life" hailed it as the "greatest single institution in musical history," noting particularly that it had pioneered in the broadcasting of symphony music. Curiously enough, it took some doing to get on the air in the first place. The symphony broadcasts were the brain child of William S. Paley, who had just acquired control of CBS. In 1930 when he dreamed it all up, CBS was very much the junior network to the older, larger and infinitely more powerful NBC. It was Paley's thought that the broadcasting of a symphony concert on a regular basis would give his network a little prestige with which to combat NBC's high position. His co-directors thought he was out of his mind, pointing out that there was no audience for good music. Paley retorted that he would create one. The Philharmonic has done just that. The first broadcast. October 1930, a performance of Weber's overture to "Der Freischutz", was heard over sixteen stations by an audience which by today's standards is infinitesimal. Today it's broadcast over 194 stations to an audience that runs into the millions. Its national rating is 4.2. (In Kansas City, its November-December "Pulse" rating averaged 3.?.— Ed.) It's impossible to estimate how large a contribution the Philharmonic has made toward creating the present huge market for symphony records or for concerts throughout the country. The Philharmonic has even done a lot toward building an audience for rival symphonies which followed it on the air. The impact of good music on American culture can't be measured in ordinary terms but it may be assumed that it has had a deep and permanent effect. In fact, radio's contributions in the field of good music only calls attention to its glaring omission in other fields. Radio, it seems to me, might have created an audience for great books, great plays and great minds just as it did for great music. But it didn't. The Philharmonic broadcasts have successfully disproved the old notion that symphony music appeals only to the upper crust. Fan mail, station reports, telephone calls and surveys reveal that symphony appeals to people in all classes of society and in rural as well as urban communities. Some of the Philharmonic's most devoted fans are soldiers situated in God-forsaken spots in the world. This December, the orchestra got a $5 contribution from an army private in Korea who wrote that the broadcasts which are heard in Korea were his only link with America. The symphony is also heard by troops in Hawaii and Alaska. Today more people listen to the Philharmonic on a single Sunday afternoon than have attended the concerts at Carnegie Hall in the orchestra's 110-year existence. James Fassett now does the ten or fifteen minute intermission talks and interviews and these bring in quite a lot of mail. These range from talks with musicians to tape recordings of musical events done on the spot around the country and sometimes in Europe. Fassett has made these tape recordings in Waukesha, Wis.; on Boston's Beacon Hill (where the Beacon Hill Bell ringers played carols on bells), and at Grandma Moses' home in Eagle Bridge, N. Y. On this one, Grandma Moses told about the first Christmas she remembered when she was four years old, eighty-eight years ago. A UP IN Albany, N. Y., Sen. Thomas C. Desmond is engaged in a private crusade to purify the air, specifically of liquor and beer commercials. (If hard liquor has ever been advertised on the air it's escaped my attention. It's been banned by the networks for decades.) Desmond objects even to the sponsorship of baseball games by beer companies which are far and away the biggest baseball sponsors in the nation. Children, says Desmond, now sing "Piel's is the beer for me" instead of Mother Goose rhymes. Shucks, Senator, you should have heard the jingles I sang as a child. They weren't Mother Goose rhymes and they weren't half as mild as "Piel's is the beer for me" which isn't a bad jingle at all. At the age of five or thereabouts, one