Music as an Advertising Medium

A Discussion of What Has Happened Since Polyamine Turned Public Relations Counsel

DEEMS TAYLOR

NOT counting poetry, which is still regarded as a harmless avocation rather than a career, music is the most impractical of all the arts, in the popular imagination. "Impractical" is, in fact, a highly charitable description of what the layman thinks of music as a profession. Of course this same layman knows that all musical comedy composers are millionaires, that violinists, pianists, and opera stars all have villas on the Riviera, and that Paul Whiteman drinks nothing hut pearls dissolved in wine. But if you saw Lolly last year at the Greenwich Village Theatre, or if you saw Zangwill's The Melting Pot years ago, you know that the musician, to the man in the street, is still one who suffers from a complication of arrested development, hysteria, homicidal mania, megalomania, dementia praecox, and dark spots before the eyes.

It is arresting, therefore, to realize that this dreamer has gone to work; not for himself, of course, hut as an invaluable employee of that most modern of all professors, the publicity man. In this country today, one of the surest ways of getting yourself into that already congested organ, the public eye, is to become associated with some form of musical activity.

Consider the case of Kansas City. Two years ago Kansas City was little more than a name. We knew that the state in which it was situated was famous for its mules, and that its inhabitants, most of them Baptists, had a passion for being shown. Beyond this, the Kansas City department of our minds was untenanted. Among the gatherings of the cognoscenti, whole evenings would pass without a single mention of Kansas City. And then a young girl named Marion Talley, the daughter of a Kansas City telegraph operator, was found to possess A Voice. A group of Kansas City business men sent her to Europe to have her gift developed. And mentioned the fact. She returned from Europe to a triumphant début at the Metropolitan, and was greeted by an army-corps of fellow-townsmen who had journeyed to New York for the express purpose of revealing the fact that Marion Talley comes from Kansas City.

THE result, of course, is history. Musicians now say "Kansas City" as they used to say "Leipzig"; the textbooks now refer to Periclean Athens as "The Kansas City of Greece"; thousands of people now know where Kansas City is. It is safe to say that one young coloratura soprano has attracted more attention to Kansas City than all her parks, shipping facilities, boulevards, and manufactures rolled into one (Kansas City's, I mean).

There are at least two other famous cities in America that would be a good deal less so if it were not for their music. Boston is, of course, the place where the Boston Tea Party took place, and where the shop-keepers for years blocked the building of a subway because it would keep people off the streets; but it is also, and unforgettably, the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Philadelphia is not only the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Bad Taste Exposition of 1876; it is the place where Leopold Stokowski conducts the orchestra from which the city derives its name. One of the latest symphony orchestras to be founded in this country is in Omaha, Nebraska. And it is backed, not by a group of wealthy musical amateurs or social arbiters, but by the Omaha Chamber of Commerce, which decided that a symphony orchestra would be valuable advertising for the city.

There are four kinds of advertising. There is direct selling advertising, wherein you extol the virtues of your wares and exhort people to buy them; there is reminder advertising, in which you keep your name, or the name of your product, in the public consciousness: there is good-will advertising, in which you simply endeavor to give your name pleasant associations in the public mind. Lastly, there is what, in my ignorance of the technical term, I shall call get-'em-inside advertising, whereby you strive to lure the public into your place of business by giving them something free, so that they will buy something else.

IT is the advertisers of the two latter classes who have found music so particularly useful. No one knows exactly how much goodwill advertising is obtained through various forms of music, hut the quantity must be staggering. Marshall Field & Company and Swift & Company, for instance, both maintain large choral societies recruited from among their employees. These not only keep the employees happy, but such is their excellence that their fame is country-wide, and must reflect much glory upon the names of both corporations. Radio entertainments, of course, are almost entirely good-will advertising in musical guise. The various Dill Pickle Hours, and Misery Boys, and Brown October Ah' Eskimos that we pick out of the air are contributed by manufacturers who purpose to make us think kindly of them by associating their names with pleasing musical performances. The Atwater Kent corporation finds it worth its while to engage Walter Damrosch and the entire New York Symphony Orchestra to give a season of radio concerts. One public service corporation traced the sale of a new stock issue to its radio "hour".

In the field of get-'em-inside advertising, Wanamaker's, in New York, is the oldest, and the shrewdest exploiter of music that I know. Where other department stores have been content with bargain sales and window demonstrations to collect crowds of potential customers, Wanamaker's gives concerts. As far back as 1904, Wanamaker's thought of engaging Richard Strauss to conduct a symphony orchestra in its New York auditorium, thereby inextricably linking the name of the world's most famous living composer with its own. Even Ernest Newman, in his monograph on Strauss, is impelled to point out that the composer raised a terrible rumpus among the highbrows (I paraphrase) by conducting concerts "in a New York department store." The result must have been incalculably profitable to Wanamaker's; for anybody reading that passage must inevitably wonder, "what department store? ' And, as Plato remarks, "To know what to ask is half of knowledge. In late years, and at present, Wanamaker's gives daily concerts in the auditoriums of its New York and Philadelphia stores, maintains a special staff for hiring the performers at these free concerts, has built two magnificent pipe organs, and has imported some of the world's most famous organists —among them Marcel Dupre, Joseph Bonnet, and Charles Courboin—to play them for the shopping public.

In direct-sales and reminder advertising music is not useful; largely, I think, because it is a vague and cssentialh dignified art (1 said art), and resists too specific associations by rendering them ridiculous. Street-cries are probably the only successful form of musical direct-sales advertising; but even they are never too specific. The melodious "Pepp'ry Po-hot!" that you hear chanted in Philadelphia, or the ravishing "Mouron politics p'tits oiseaux!" of Paris omit, vou will notice, any mention of the proprietor of either the peppery pot or the duckweed. There would be very little advertising value in such a specific version of Bullard's Stein Song as this, for instance:

For it's always fair weather

When good fellows get together,

With a Listerine on the table,

And a good song ringing dear.

The public still likes its music pure, and the wise advertiser is the one who is content to use music to bring him gratitude rather than orders.

JUST what cosmic forces are back of this sudden mercantile interest in one of the most intangible of the arts I cannot, naturally, say. ft might be the war or prohibition. Whatever the reason, whereas a town used to brag of its waterworks, or its sewage system, or the fact that it was the site of the State Insane Asylum whenever it wished to attract favorable public attention, nowadays it achieves the same end by founding an orchestra, endowing a hand, or developing a soprano. Time was, when an American municipality would have shuddered at the thought of being considered a seat of culture; now it fights to be thought one, and is disgraced if it is not.

Of course, all this free music is being dispensed from motives that would horrify an aesthetic fundamentalist. But the motives do not spoil the music. The point is that Americans are allowed to hear an enormous quantity of good music, in the name of publicity, that they would otherwise be deprived of hearing. I used to have to save up to go to Carnegie Hall to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Now I can hear it for nothing, over the radio, because somebody hopes that I'll buy his ginger ale. What difference does it make? The music is just the same; and it's not my fault if T don't like ginger ale.