Music for the Family

The Boston Symphony Orchestra will present one of its monthly concerts in Sanders Theater this evening. Works by Bach, Stravinsky, and Brahms will be on the program. Yet to the overwhelming majority of music-lovers at the University, this information is both meaningless and frustrating. Tickets to the B.S.O. concerts at Sanders are sold only by season's subscription, and the subscribers list is a Who's Who of Faculty members, local alumni, and "friends of the University." The average student has about as much chance of hearing tonight's concert as he has of attending a meeting of the Corporation.

By all the logical rules of symphony managing, the concert series at Sanders should not exist at all. The theatre is too small, both in capacity and stage area, for an organization like the B.S.O. Like many other features of Boston and the University, however, the Sanders concerts are Tradition. "After all," one Symphony official has said, "the B.S.O. and Harvard are two of the oldest organizations around here." Over the years the Sanders subscription list has also become traditional-"a family affair of the Harvard people," as the official described it. Indeed, some local families have occupied the same seats in Sanders through two or three generations.

But many of these subscribers have long since dissolved their ties with the University. Their affiliation with the "Harvard family" is tenuous when compared to that of any student. To make the B.S.O. Sanders tradition meaningful, therefore, the Administration should prune from the subscribers list, people who are no longer attached to the University. It should then allot the extra seats, not to the most "eligible" persons applying for season's subscriptions, but on a "rush" basis to the first students who show up before each concert. In this way, Harvard music-lovers would have at least some chance of sharing in the fine tradition that they have inherited.