Popular Music and the New Man of Skill

Rockland County, the most rural area within close reach of New York City, has attracted a large number of creative and technical workers in the arts who want to live in the unsuburbanized country while enjoying the advantages of being close to the city. As is the case with the metropolitan middle class, the actors, musicians, writers and painters who reside here often get to know one another through their children and their children’s schools.

One of these is the Rockland Foundation, which conducts classes in handicrafts, music and dance for children and adults and periodically sponsors one-man shows of local artists. This year the Foundation has been presenting a series of symposiums on the arts, drawing its audience from the broad new middle class of technician-commuters and their culturally ambitious wives.

Not long ago the effects of popular music on musical standards were debated by Donald Waxman, an uncompromising young composer, and Mitchell Miller, the distinguished oboe virtuso. Miller’s remarks and the attitude toward popular culture they reveal deserve a wider audience than the roomful of neighbors he addressed. Mr. Miller has not been content to be a “working classical musician,” his own modest description of a career that has won him international recognition. He is also “A & R Man” (Artists & Repertoire) for Columbia Records, which means that as director of that company’s popular music recording division he has been responsible for a considerable amount of the music we hear over the radio and on juke boxes.

To Mr. Waxman’s complaints that everything is now geared to the juke box, that artificiality has replaced spontaneity, and that current musical sentimentality is a hybrid of Salvation Army brass and youngsters screaming for more, Mr. Miller had a variety of both simple and sophisticated retorts.

There was, for one thing, the incontrovertible assurance that the record companies are giving the public what it wants. That this may evoke memories of similar pronouncements by publishers of sado-masochist “mystery” and comic books should not consequently render it nugatory. For, more than that: thanks to LP, the record companies are now giving the public everything it wants, from wailing balladeers to Beethoven’s chamber music. The manufacturers, men of taste though they are, simply grapple with reality when they proceed from the incontestible truth that the public prefers Johnny Ray to the Budapest Quartet. They are consoled in this unhappy situation by a keen awareness that the sales of pop recordings are a thinly disguised blessing insofar as they make it possible to produce recordings of classical or modern music which will be unprofitable… or comparatively so.

Music, Mr. Miller observed, is the most transitory of all the arts; it whizzes past the ear and is gone. Those who play classical records, as well as tho...