The Sound of Music

People who think they are hearing things may be right after all. More Americans are tootling, scraping, twanging and banging than ever before. By the end of 1962, according to estimated figures released last week by the American Music Conference, there were 34 million amateur musicians in the U.S., compared with 19 million in 1950 (a 79% increase, compared with a 24% population growth). The number of musical instruments owned increased from 23 million to 39 million, and the 1962 retail dollar volume of instruments, sheet music and accessories sales was $630 million--more than 2 1/2 times what it was in 1950 and more than seven times what it was in 1940. According to the current growth rate, do-it-yourself music (as opposed to records, concert and opera going) will be a billion-dollar business by 1970.

The main factors responsible for all this noise, according to A.M.C., are more leisure, more money and more concern about music in the schools. The combination has spawned both serious and lighthearted groups of after-hours instrumentalists in almost every community.

Atlanta, for instance, has the "Sorta 40," a dozen prominent (and fiftyish) business and professional men who began meeting about seven years ago when one of them discovered his old banjo in his attic and found some kindred spirits who decided it would be fun "to get together and play some." The Sorta 40s play for dances, and turn their fees over to charity--as does another Atlanta outfit called The Seventeen, which includes three architects, a doctor, an investment counselor, the plant manager for a box factory, an engineer, a lumber company vice president and an adman.

In Boston there is the ten-year-old, 20-man Probus (PROFESSIONAL AND BUSINESS) Club, among dozens of other such groups. Cosmopolitan Washington has its Recorder Society, Foggy Bottom Chamber Music Group, and Potomac English Handbell Ringers. And Manhattan, naturally, has an ad-agency outfit called The Many Splendored Stompers, whose theme song is Man in a Gray Flannel Stomp.

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