ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been much rejoicing over the phenomenal improvement in American taste for “serious” or “concert” music. Unlike most other arts—isolated from the public and practiced by esoteric groups—good music, at least, seems to have won a firm place for itself within the media of American mass culture. Technology has made products of this art more economical for the consumer and, thus, more easily accessible. The increased cost of preparing advanced music makes it difficult to include such music on programs of a major American orchestra whose annual budget runs as high as two or three million dollars. The extent to which long-playing records redeem new American composers is easily exaggerated. If American musical creativity is to avoid stagnation, we must examine this success more closely and ask, as Joseph Wood Krutch has, “Is the Good always the friend of the Best or is it sometimes and somehow its enemy?”
