Books: Oboe Jungle

In his scholarly way, Arian, now associate professor of political science at Drexel University-he bowed out of the Orchestra anticlimactically shortly after the strike-underscores his contention that, unless the Orchestra makes a 1800 turn and courts the public instead of avoiding it, the Philadelphia Orchestra will become just one more dinosaur in the bog of strangling American cultural institutions.

Maybe because he had 20 years to research his subject from within, perhaps due to the strictures of backing up his claims in his doctoral dissertation for Bryn Mawr College, Arian has managed to compose a book that is far more incisive if considerably harder to read than Those Fabulous Philadelphians, Herbert Kupferberg’s still fast-selling yet prettified portrait of the Orchestra published two years ago.

To begin with, Arian coldly, clinically dissects such sacred cows as Stokowski and Ormandy, the two men who most influenced the Philadelphia sound. The difference, he says, was sharp: boiler room cacophony versus lullabies, childbirth compared with formaldehyde.

All through his book, Arian carries and builds this theme of opposites — box office and good public relations in counterpoint to revolutionary music and confrontation.

To Arian, at least, Stokowski comes off best, Ormandy and his press agents paying a heavy price in popular and professional support for the economic gains of pleasing their dwindling benefactors.

With the abruptness of Beethoven, Arian pounds for attention by immediately tackling the legend of how Philadelphia lost the flamboyant Stokowski and gained the agreeable Ormandy. At once, he clashes sharply with Kupferberg.

To replay Kupferberg’s recorded message from Stokowski:

"Everything in the universe is evolving all the time, and that includes music. These gentlemen [the board of directors] didn’t wish that. There was a wonderful man who was the president of the orchestra association. His name was Van Rensselaer … one day he came to me and said:

"’We had a board of directors meeting yesterday, and they have asked me to say that they instruct you not to play this modern music.’ I didn’t like that word ‘instruct.’ I had at that time a long contract. … I completed it, but when they asked me to renew it I was not willing, because I did not wish to be ‘instructed’ not to play the music of our time and our nation."

Only a few months ago, in an NET film biography, Stokowski slightly altered his story, saying he left "because I had been there 26 years, that was enough."
But even that is not so, according to Ariem’s research.

It was the Great Depression. The great benefactors were dying. Subscriptions were off 15%. The musicians had accepted a 10% pay cut, but Stoki still insisted on his high salary, personal staff, an income somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000 a year. With the disappearance of large individual donors, power passed to a new board concerned with the economic realities of the institution’s survival. Not only wouldn’t Stoki yield, he insisted on bold new ventures.

"Finally, in a move calculated to frighten the Board and bring them to heel, Stokowski tendered his resignation. To his surprise, it was accepted."
Again to listen to Kupferberg, Ormandy was hailed to the podium at the Academy by popular and critical demand.

Uh-uh, says Arian. He came really as a discount conductor, eager to please management, patient, familiar from years in radio and movie houses with the rewards of smooth public relations and frequent recording sessions.
It was, Arian maintains, the ideal marriage of convenience between a penny-pinching corporation and the perfect organization man. Ormandy was" the embodiment of the successful administrator whose outlook is primarily economic. utilitarian and pragmatic rather than esthetic or idealistic."