The opera, ballet, popular concerts, light music, virtuosic recitals, and
sentimental songs embraced by the European bourgeoisie in the mid 19th century
did not please everyone. Clubs of amateur and student performers found this
music trivial and unfulfilling. Aristocratic organizers of house concerts and
other events resented the incursion of go-getting townsmen. Long-standing
homogeneous concert societies resisted the popular preferences of the more
diverse comparatively ignorant middle classes and maintained their traditional
repertoires and practices. Professional musicians and composers, once employees
of court, town, and church or objects of noble patronage, were often ambivalent
about the necessity of catering to the recent economic classes for their
support. Ancient music (that is, music over twenty years old) enthusiasts
continued to examine, favor, and champion previous styles. Journalists and
intellectuals disparaged and mocked the new mass culture.
At luncheons, board meetings, happy hours, at various social gatherings, in
cafes, taverns, hotels, and clubs, over coffee, chocolate, beer, or wine, during
woodland walks and mountain climbs, at concert intermissions, in newspapers and
magazines, discussions ensued where views, feelings, dissatisfactions, and
theories were aired, argued, analyzed, and assimilated, and more profound
questions of far-reaching import were broached and bandied. What was the purpose
of music? What was good and great in music? By what criteria was music to be
judged? What was the nature of great music?
From these discussions, from study groups of kindred spirits, from sensitive
connoisseurs of the arts, from learned authors and carping critics, there
emerged a new aesthetic ideal. Its philosophic underpinnings lay in German
religious liberalism and romanticism and the actual history of its formation,
development, and acceptance is somewhat complex. As applied to music its
principles might be summarized as follows:
Great music, like the accomplishments of great heroes, transcends time, place,
and style.
Like great heroes, the composers of great music are divinely-inspired prophets.
Great music reveals something of God and the deeper meaning of human life as
intended by God.
As such it is a force for spiritual and moral uplift, for the cultivation of the
human being as intended by God.
Thus the purpose of great music is human culture.
Nevertheless, great music, like great art, is self-contained, is “its own excuse
for being”, dependent neither on audience nor noble or popular patronage.
Hence the origin of great music is in the composer’s inspiration, not in its
commercial function.
In these constructs we can discern the emergence of a cultural hierarchy based
not on class, function, or popularity, but on certain subjective aesthetic
considerations. Great music (what would come to be known as classical music) was
high art, inspired by God, serious, permanent, profound, pure, abstract,
absolute, complete, spiritual and refined. As culture its perfection appealed to
the intellect and uplifted the soul, cultivating moral virtue and compassion in
the listener. Popular music, on the other hand, was artifice, inspired by human
desire, light, temporal (transitory), pleasing, adulterated, material, limited,
conditional, worldly, and common. As entertainment its mediocrity appealed to
the senses and inflamed the passions, promoting in the listener moral depravity
and selfishness. While such a dichotomy, as a whole, undoubtedly overstates the
case, each of its elements may be found in the work of cultural critics,
philosophical essayists, taste-making journalists, and popular lecturers.
A pantheon of composers whose music best expressed this ideal was soon
established to parallel that of the ancient Greek and Roman literary masters.
Beethoven and Handel became the first “classical” composers, quickly followed by
Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and Schubert. To them were added Mendelssohn and Schumann
(both of whom actively promoted the new aesthetic), and later, after much
discussion, Brahms and Bruckner. All were, of course, Germans. Most favored
lengthier ‘abstract’ instrumental music – symphonies, concerti, chamber music –
and oratorios rather than popular, occasional, programmatic, or stage works
(Handel’s operas were ignored). All, it was said, wrote from ‘inspiration’
primarily for ‘posterity’ rather than for success. As this aesthetic spread
through Europe composers of other nationalities – Palestrina, Corelli, Cherubini,
Chopin, Liszt, Couperin, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky, Dvorak, etc. – were,
through usage, enthusiasm, ‘discovery’, recommendation, and examination,
installed in this august company.
Orchestral concerts dedicated to this aesthetic and featuring longer symphonic
works in their entirety were regular occurrences in Leipzig, Paris, Vienna,
London, and other musical centers by the 1850s when these and similar views
reached the United States in the pages of John Sullivan Dwight’s Journal of
Music, to be taken up by critic Henry Finck in The Nation and the New York
Evening Post, by culture-promoting periodical editors like George William Curtis
of Harper’s Magazine, and given credence and substance by crusading conductors
Theodore Thomas, Patrick Gilmore, Leopold and Walter Damrosch, assisted by the
theories of English writer Matthew Arnold and visiting German musicians such as
Hans Von Bulow. With the establishment of the major symphonic orchestras after
1880 its influence was felt in, and began to define, this country’s urban
concert life. Of the newly wealthy Americans underwriting these ensembles some
were genuine music lovers, some acted for the common good, out of civic pride,
in emulation of continental models, or to provide a privileged focal point for
others of their class. Staffed and led by musicians enticed from European
cities, opera houses, and conservatories by superior salaries and substantial
seasons, the new orchestras gradually won a significant public for ‘high-brow’
repertoire.
American audiences of course wanted their waltzes, polkas, and light opera
favorites too, and they got them, but increasingly segregated into special
features or Spring and Summer series designed to extend the orchestra season and
‘purify’ their regular concerts of such trivialities. This was the origin of the
Boston Pops (1885) and other intra-symphony popular programs. Attempts were made
to purify the orchestral musicians as well and focus their attention on the
lofty purpose of their calling by contractually limiting their ability to accept
dance jobs and theatre engagements during the performance season.
Now that concert halls were no longer places of entertainment and diversion but
temples of fine art it was felt that a corresponding decorum should be required
of their patrons. Eating, drinking, smoking, chatting with family and friends,
loudly greeting one’s acquaintances, calling out requests to the conductor, and
singing topical and comic songs while the orchestra was playing were to be
excluded, as were late arrivals, early departures, and over-enthusiastic
displays of appreciation or displeasure. The proper attitude of the concert-goer
was now to be receptive awe and quiet, respectful enjoyment. Serious-minded
listeners, influential journalists, social leaders, and orchestra boards soon
agreed, so managers were obliged to encourage and enforce these new standards of
behavior. Despite initial resistance – from all levels of society – by 1910 the
classical music concert or recital had become synonymous with politeness and
gentility.
The simultaneous rise and spread of vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and rhythmic
styles (marches, ragtime, jazz, and syncopated dance music) only widened the gap
between the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular’. Snobbery and reverse snobbery ran
rampant. To the devotee of high culture popular music was cheap, vulgar, and
annoying, a menace to society and ultimately a threat to civilization. It is
fascinating to encounter books written between 1890 and 1940 purportedly about
‘American music’ that make no mention at all of popular music but concentrate
instead on a small group of European-educated native composers, most of them
somewhat obscure, working within received Germanic symphonic and chamber music
traditions. Able, cultured, and successful musicians such as Victor Herbert and
Fritz Kreisler who attempted to bridge the gap were often regarded with
suspicion and publicly excoriated because they, it was said, had set aside lofty
artistic ideals to ‘pander’ to popular tastes. An invitation to conduct a major
symphonic orchestra was withdrawn from a well-known musician who agreed to
direct a wartime benefit featuring a superstar crooner. On the other hand
average listeners had little patience with lengthy and difficult works they
could not sing or dance to written by composers who cared little about their
likes and dislikes and not at all about their opinions. To them ‘high-brow’
music was exclusive, effete, boring, and possibly un-American. World War I
became the pretext for a backlash against the concert works of German composers,
and many foreign-born musicians were deported. By the 1920s the extreme cultural
lines were clearly drawn.
Among Americans not committed to either extreme there arose at this time a
middle perspective, one that ignored the existing hierarchies and ideologies and
focused instead on the common admirable and desirable elements in all music:
illuminating, ennobling, and unifying elements that at the same time provided
the listener with pleasure and enjoyment. Concert music need not be abstract and
obscure but might be, and often was, appealing, dramatic, sensuous, and
affecting. Popular music was not seen as inherently base and degrading but could
be uplifting, serious, and profound. We associate this outlook with the optimism
of America’s rising professional middle class, but its historical sociology may
be more involved. Persons consciously or unconsciously favoring this perspective
claimed as their own the light classical repertoire, the better products of the
musical theatre, and a number of tuneful and articulate standard concert works.
Nurtured by radio, Hollywood, school and community music appreciation classes,
and recordings, this audience would increase significantly and come to dominate
the country’s musical taste in the twenty years following World War II,
enthusiastically taking up original motion picture scores, orchestral popular
arrangements, and, in part, modern jazz as well. The great age of ‘middle-brow’
music was at hand.