Comes the Contemporary

Conductor Leopold Stokowski is driven by a double urge: to play contemporary music, and to get it heard by as many people as possible. After a quarter-century with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he resigned, formed his first-class All-American Youth Orchestra, and toured with it as far as South America. When that broke up because of the war, he spread himself around, guest-conducting in almost every city that had a good orchestra. Wherever he went he gathered new scores, played many of them, and catalogued all according to his own hieroglyphic filing system against the time when he might play them for a really wide audience.

This week Conductor Stokowski got his chance when he gave the downbeat on

Twentieth Century Concert Hall, over a CBS network, coast to coast. Every Sunday, for six weeks (1 p.m., E.S.T.). he will lead a string orchestra or a chamber symphony in programs consisting of the works of younger U.S. composers and the less familiar pieces of more renowned Europeans ("We don't believe in segregation of music"). The first program: the Siciliano from a Bach sonata (arranged by Stokowski), a Concerto for Orchestra by Manhattan's Alan Hovhaness, 42, and a memorial performance of an Adagio by the late Nicolai Berezowsky.

The Crude & the Creative. Stokowski, who admits to 66, is as enthusiastic as a teen-ager over his armfuls of new scores. "Music is becoming decentralized," he says. "It must. This country grew on individual initiative, first physically--with railroads--then culturally. It must continue, or we will never reach our flowering period."

As for the kind of music Americans need to hear: "We are looking for two kinds, the kind that reacts to the crude life around us, and the kind that creates a remote world that is far from everyday life." Stokowski has a strong feeling for the second kind, promises new fantasies by such composers as Modernist Wallingford Riegger and Tapesichordist Vladimir Ussachevsky (TIME, Nov. 10) for future CBS network programs.

The Time Was Ripe. CBS came to its new concert series slowly, and not too surely, mostly through the quiet determination of Music Producer Oliver Daniel, 41. Originally trained as a pianist, he joined the network ten years ago, produced such pioneering shows as Invitation to Music and School of the Air. As an enthusiast for contemporary scores, he also sandwiched them into briefer programs, along with salon music and show tunes. Nowadays, scarcely a program of CBS's informal Music Room, its recitals by Organist E. Power Biggs (both on Sunday mornings) or its Wednesday Top Hat show goes by without airing some new composition. Old friends Daniel and Stokowski met last winter and agreed that the time was ripe for a more ambitious program. The network played along.

Nothing could be more naturally appropriate for radio than concerts, argues Daniel. They can be heard in fireside comfort, and there is more opportunity to program them now that TV has siphoned off many of the big commercial shows. It is equally natural for radio to offer contemporary music, he insists. The radio audience is well accustomed to modern sounds: "It hears them [as background music] every time it tunes in on a mystery thriller, and never turns a hair at the modernist dissonances."

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