Modern Maecenas

The man across the table from Igor Stravinsky in Chicago's Union Station restaurant was an unlikely luncheon partner for a great composer to seek out on a stopover. He was a prosperous local wine importer, and his somber, heavy-set air evoked stocks and bonds rather than sharps and semiquavers. But when the man started to order coffee, Stravinsky insisted on champagne instead. "Contemporary music has many friends," Stravinsky toasted him, "but only a few lovers."

The man was Paul Fromm, and in the 14 years since that meeting he has continued to express his love of contemporary music in the most practical way. Each year he has set aside up to $100,000 and, through his Fromm Music Foundation, parceled it out in commissions to an international Who's Who of composers: Milton Babbitt, Alberto Ginastera, Alan Hovhaness, Ernst Krenek, Roger Sessions, Stefan Wolpe --some 90 names in all. Composer Gunther Schuller describes Fromm as "the single most important benefactor in the field of contemporary music."

Boos. "Composers," says Fromm, "are the sources of musical culture; yet their status in the musical world is uncertain. They are professionals without a profession." Fromm's efforts to offset this situation begin rather than end with his individual commissions ($1,000 for a piece by a young unknown, up to $5,000 for one by an established master). He befriends his composers--most often while they are still obscure --keeps in touch with them, sells wine to them. He makes sure that their works get performed and even subsidizes recordings. "There can be no living musical atmosphere," he insists, "without sympathetic interaction between composers, performers and listeners."

Nowhere is this interaction better exemplified than at the Fromm-supported Festival of Contemporary Music each summer at Tanglewood. Last week the festival marked the 20th anniversary of Fromm's foundation with a week of special concerts, forums and workshops, which, for Fromm, were fraught with both the perils and joys of being a modern Maecenas. When members of the Boston Symphony rehearsed for the premiere of Fromm's latest commission, an electronically amplified violin concerto by Charles Wuorinen, they disliked the piece so much that they booed. When the Tanglewood listeners heard it, some of them booed too.

Much more successful were reprises of two of the most important works ever commissioned by Fromm: Luciano Berio's Circles (1960) and Elliott Carter's Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961). These performances flanked a rare public appearance by Fromm in which he pleaded eloquently for better integration of contemporary and traditional music rather than a mere "busing of indiscriminately chosen new music to the halls of Brahms and Beethoven."

The son of a cultured Bavarian wine merchant, Fromm learned enough piano as a child to join with his brother Herbert in four-handed transcriptions of Mahler symphonies. His first hearing of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, he says, "made a 20th century man of me." But unlike Herbert, who became a composer, Fromm settled into the family vocation, and after immigrating to Chicago in 1938, used it to support music as a passionate avocation. Fromm and his wife live in an unpretentious apartment near the University of Chicago, where she teaches psychology (a field in which Fromm's cousin Erich has become prominent as the author of The Art of Loving). When a visiting Ford Foundation official asked to see Fromm's foundation offices and library, Fromm led him to a battered file cabinet in the corner of his wine firm's office and pulled open two drawers.

This year Fromm has shifted the administrative base of his foundation to Harvard University and passed the responsibility for making commissions to an expert committee of Schuller, Music Scholar A. Tillman Merritt and himself. At 65, he intends both steps as provisions against the future, hoping that the foundation will be able to continue and even extend his work after he is gone. Where new music is concerned, he likes to quote Mae West: "Too much of a good thing is wonderful."

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