Sour Note for A.P.M.

The powerful. 260,000-member American Federation of Musicians, which has long laid down musicians' terms for the scoring of motion pictures in Hollywood, as well as most other commercial music, last week lost control of film scoring to an upstart splinter group headed by a studio trumpet player. In an election sponsored by the National Labor Relations Board. Hollywood's film musicians chose the rebel Musicians Guild of America as their bargaining agent, by a vote of 580 to 484.

The Guild, only four months old, is the creation of 49-year-old Trumpeter Cecil F. Read. In 1956 Read led a revolt of Hollywood's Local 47, A.F.M. He protested the handling of the Music Performance Trust Funds, which collect phonograph-record and TV movie music royalties to use for unemployment benefits for the entire A.F.M. membership. Read complained that although performances by the 15,000 Hollywood musicians provide the Trust Funds with more than 50% of their revenues, only 4% of the revenues ever gets back to Local 47. Expelled from the A.F.M.. Trumpeter Read recruited musicians for his Guild by dangling the bait of extra income, and by the unsubstantiated charge that James C. Petrillo (who resigned as A.F.M. president last month) was using Performance Trust Funds to keep his favorites in office.

Read's first post-victory job will be to sit down with studio representatives to work out a new contract for settling the five-month-old strike called against major motion picture companies by the A.F.M. over royalties on films released to TV. His second job: to call elections contesting the A.F.M.'s authority in the lucrative fields of live television and recordings. Petrillo's successor. Herman D. Kenin, predicted "catastrophe" for the Musicians Guild--brave talk to conceal the fact that Kenin's federation had suffered one of the rare setbacks in its 62-year history.

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