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WESTERN COMMENT
Music and Industry
REVIEW OFFICE, REPUBLIC BUILDING, CHICAGO, I I I . , MAK. 24,
1928
T H E other clay a judicious gentleman wrote a letter to one of the
New York papers about the part taken by the Columbia Phono-
graph Co. in backing a world-wide celebration of
Art
the Schubert centennial. And he made a very
and
clever and very just analysis of the business point
Business
of view with regard to matters of cultural inter-
est. Of course, as this acute critic saw, there is always the pos-
sibility of business hurting the best interests of art, by forcing
artists to adapt their own views to a philosophy alien to them.
That leads to what is called, briefly and cuttingly, the commer-
cialization of art. Now, business men very seldom look clearly at
questions of art, and very often dismiss with scant attention and
scanter justice a whole great region of the human spirit. He who
would understand men and women, and rightly steer his way
among them, must understand something at least of those vast
departments of effort which are subsumed under the general title
of the fine arts. These are phenomena of immense importance,
involving organizations and mechanisms of great magnitude and
calling for the exercise of mental powers probably superior of their
kind to almost any others. In fact, great scientific discoverers, great
captains of industry of the Morgan type, and great exponents of
the fine arts, have much, very much, mentally in common. Busi-
ness men of the less imaginative kind commonly forget these facts
and look upon the fine arts as peculiarly remote from business.
From thinking thus to treating the arts and their practitioners
with contempt is a short step. The use of words like "unpractical"
is easy. Hardly less easy is it to persuade oneself, in this mood,
that artists are necessarily neither quite manly nor quite morally
desirable. Yet no greater nonsense could be imagined than all this.
Precisely the difference between a great house like Columbia and
any one of the small, spineless and timid houses, which are often
found in the music industries, lies in their respective attitudes
towards the fine arts. And at the present pass of the music in
dustries it is more than ordinarily worth while to look for a mo-
ment at this question, for it is a question not merely of some but
of essential, of utterly vital importance, involving no less than
life or death.
institution, said Emerson, is but the lengthened shadow of
a great man. Every business institution, it might be added, is the
creation of a great imagination. Adventure, the
Business
pioneer spirit, the same creative imagination
and
which on the field of battle was embodied in a
Romance
Napoleon or a Lee, on the field of science in an
Isaac Newton, on the field of commerce in a \\ anamakcr, remains
to-day, as ever, the sine qua non of any successful endeavor. An
individual business which lacks this spirit will never be great; an
industry which lacks or has lost it is already ruined. The great
business men have always been adventurers, men of imagination,
artists in their field, and it is a very remarkable fact that these
men have nearly always been great patrons of the arts. The
Medici of fifteenth and sixteenth century Florence, who began as
druggists, went on to become merchants and bankers, and culmi-
nated as politicians and ruling princes, were artists in business;
and they were- also the most magnificent patrons of artists and
the fine art>. The Fuggers, pioneer international bankers, invent-
ing methods which remain in use this dav, and running as a side
issue the first international news service, showed four centuries
ago what adventure and imagination will do for business. They,
too, were patrons of the arts. The great line of Italian and 1 hitch
painters would have died out through sheer starvation but for
KVKRY
the high-minded and farseeing support given by the merchant
princes, even more than by the great rulers, of their day. What
brought about the invention of the piano itself but the patronage
extended by a Medici prince to the artisan Cristofori ? Where
would Haydn, the founder of modern orchestral music, have been
without Prince Esterhazy? Where again would Beethoven have
been without those business men the publishers, Artaria and Sim-
rock, the piano manufacturers, Streicher and Broadwood ? The
fine arts owe more than most modern practitioners of them will
admit to those "babbitts" whom they sometimes make the object
of unworthy sneers. Big business has always been the patron of
the arts because the big business man and the big artist have so
much, fundamentally, in common. F>ach in fact is an artist, play-
ing the game more because he loves it than for any lesser rea-
son. Flvery big business man has been, and is, an artist first; and
a profit-seeker only after that.
is a moral to all this and a point to it acute enough to sat-
isfy the noisiest proponent of the practical. The music industries
in general, and the piano industry in particular,
Point
j ^ j ( li r e c tly with one of the greatest of the fine
„
.
arts. Music is in fact the modern contemporary
fine art par excellence. Why then is it that so
many, the piano industry in particular, and to some considerable
extent music industry in general, has always had the reputation
of unimaginativeness, pettiness, contempt for the art it serves and
for the artists whom, at the same time, it employs to lend their
names and reputations to the sale of its goods? The action of the
Columbia Phonograph Co. last year in promoting the Beethoven
centennial celebration was almost entirely ignored by the piano
trade, which made no serious effort to follow the lead, despite the
vast exploitative possibilities involved. In precisely the same way
the great opportunity of 1926 to celebrate the two hundredth an-
niversary of the piano was almost completely overlooked, although
persistent efforts were made to bring the matter to the attention
of all concerned. Now, again, the phonograph trade shows the way,
and this time with a more elaborate and costly program than ever.
Why does a great phonograph company do all this? Will the
sales of Schubert records be as numerous as they would be if the
composer had written jazz ? Why does a great commercial house
thus support the arts when its own direct commercial return there-
from must necessarily be indirect and possibly small r
THERE
T H I S is a question which touches directly upon the whole matter of
the attitude of the piano industry towards the art of. music. Co-
lumbia supports music and musicians because
T e
"
the men who control Columbia know that the
life-blood of their business is popular response
to music; not to the changing ephemeral taste
in the stuff which is here to-day and gone to-morrow, but in the
slow upbuilding of a national taste for what is good. The men
are building up, as the writer of the letter to the New York-
paper so well put it. a long-term investment that, if nothing else,
shows their remarkable wisdom and foresight. The phonograph
men perceive that future prosperity rests upon their developing
a "phonograph-conscious" American public; and on that target
they are concentrating. The piano industry likewise depends for
its future prosperity upon the development of a "piano-conscious"
American public. Let no piano man say that it is unpractical or
unbusinesslike then to patronize the art of music. Much more,
not less, of such patronage is what we need.
OCCIDF.NS.
12