Music: Singing Land

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Let me go where'er I will I hear a sky-born music still.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the calm and cloistered air of 19th century New England, the Sage of Concord tuned his inner ear to the faint, sweet sounds that issued from his Transcendental trees and rocks. If he could hear sky-born music wherever he went, his friends and neighbors were less fortunate; they had to depend on the uncertain efforts of a handful of local groups, supplemented by occasional trips to Boston. In null century Concord, New Englanders do not find themselves so hampered—and Emerson would scarcely be left in peace to do his ethereal listening. Today's American, let him go where'er he will, hears the sound of music still—hardly celestial, but often sky-born.

If the explosion of painting in Renaissance Italy marked an "awakening of the eye," the explosion of music in post-World War II America suggests a massive unstopping of the U.S. ear. "Americans have discovered music," says Music Merchant André Kostelanetz, "like a people who have discovered red and blue and green where all had been black and white before." In its musical black-and-white era, the U.S. already had great symphony orchestras, great opera, great foreign artists—and it conquered the world with its jazz. What is different today is the extraordinary breadth of the nation's music production and consumption: operas and orchestras by the hundreds, musicians by the thousands, instruments by the millions—and blowing over it all. almost defying measurement, rising above the noise even of America's engines, the wonderful, relentless whirlwind of recorded sound.

Who Is Listening? The music boom sometimes seems less a cultural awakening than a mammoth assault of indiscriminate sounds on a public that no longer has any place to hide. Amateur psychologists say that the U.S. is becoming afraid of silence. Music in wild profusion volleys forth from phonographs, radios, television sets, jukeboxes. Piped music ushers untold thousands of Americans into the world (hospital delivery rooms), through it (garages, restaurants and hotels), and out of it (mortuary slumber rooms). Millions open their eyes to it, wrap themselves in it as they drive to work, turn out goods and services to a brisk, production-boosting beat (overall stitchers in Colorado stitch 10% faster to Ain't We Got Fun).

In this holiday season, the musical voice of Christmas carries to vacationers paddling beneath the surface of Miami pools (via underwater loudspeakers), to women in slenderizing salons, to celebrators in non-slenderizing saloons. In Philadelphia, worshipers can drop by the Arch Street Methodist Church and adjust a selector to the hymn of their choice. From the highest building in Salt Lake City, Christmas carols boom across the Salt Lake Valley. "I don't want to sound like Scrooge," complained an irate woman, "but damn it, I don't want to go without sleep until December 26th, either!"