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Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste,
1770-1870Author(s): Wiliam WeberSource: International Review of the
Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jun.- Dec.,
1994), pp. 175-190Published by: Croatian Musicological
SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/836942Accessed:
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
MASS CULTURE AND THE RESHAPING OF EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE,
1770-1870*
WILIAM WEBER
California State University, Long Beach, U.S.A.
UDC: 78.073"17/18"
Original Scientific Paper Izvorni znanstveni clanak First
published in: / Prvi put objavljeno u: International Review of the
Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1977
Abstract - Resume
The rise of the master composers - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,
later Handel and J. S. Bach, and finally Schubert, Weber, Schumann,
and oth- ers - to musical sainthood took place during the 1850's
and 1860's. It can be regarded as an early, but clever and
profit-seeking form of mass cul- ture, whose evolution can be
traced in Europe from about 1770 to 1870. In this the growth of the
publishing industry is discussed, as the main
impetus behind the commercial development of the musical world
in London, Paris, Vienna, and Leipzig. The main large-scale
concerts which appeared during the middle of the 19th century
brought a new impersonal social struc- ture to life, and the
classical repertoire of these concerts reshaped European musical
taste since then by polarizing values for entertainment
(>popularclassical
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176 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
But upon closer inspection we can see that these tablets were
made not of ancient stone but of modem plaster. The rise of the
masters to musical sainthood took place during the 1850's and
1860's. It was only then that their works came to dominate the
concert repertoire and their names were put up on hight for all to
behold. Their elevation marked a fundamental change in the
orientation of European musical taste, for never before had the
music of dead composers been played so often or ascribed so lofty a
status in musical life. As late as 1840 most Viennese and Parisian
concertgoers scoffed at the idea that the greatest music might be
the music of the past. In 1846, a Parisian journalist mocked the
classical concerts at the Conservatoire - ?If music is dead /Well,
then let us inter it!/ On the air of tra deri deri /On the air of
tra deri deri!classical
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
graphically will be broad but will be limited primarily to the
three major Euro- pean capitals - London, Paris, and Vienna - and
to Leipzig, the German city most prominent in nineteenth-century
musical life. I will also not delve into the differences among
them.
In the musical field the term >mass culture< can be
defined in a relatively concrete manner. It should be conceived as
performance or dissemination of music which does not rest upon
personal relationships between musicians and the pu- blic and for
which obtaining - indeed, manipulating - a wide public is a primary
goal. This is not just a matter of brute numbers of people buying
music or going to concerts. What has characterized musical mass
culture primarily has been rather the impersonality of
relationships between listeners and performers and the active
exploitation of a broad public by the music business. To be sure,
neither the size of audiences nor the circulation of sheet music
during the nineteenth century compares at all closely to
contemporary levels, and early marketing tech- niques may seem
crude by comparison with those used for Elton John or Leonard
Bernstein. But the impersonality of concert events and the
manipulative devices of the publishing industry had much the same
basic qualities then as now. Be- cause of these dynamics, the
appearance of 1,000 instead of 300 people at some concerts and the
publication of tens of thousands instead of several hundred new
pieces of music per year changed the social structure of musical
life fun- damentally.3
Now, in the old society, in the world we have lost, music-making
revolved around one-to-one personal relationships. Music was what
one person did for another. There were no formal institutions where
people went for the objective, impersonal purpose of simply hearing
music. People danced and courted to music, passed the time making
music, and celebrated with music. Most of the ceremonial occasions
accompanied by music were directly associated with spe- cific
events in individuals' lives - marriages, funerals, namedays,
saints days. Moreover, the relationship often counted for far more
than the music itself. Even in the households of the upper classes
of society musicians were not a discrete profession but rather
simply those people who, for one reason or another, sang or played
for those around them. In a shrewd study of English musicians of
the late sixteenth century, Walter Woodfill has shown that few
performers were formal, resident retainers but rather were people
from a wide range of occupa- tions who made music for others and
obtained an unspecific reward, some kind of personal gratuity, and
often performed other services for the same house- holds.4
Performers in the large-scale ensembles of the eighteenth century
almost
3 The term has not been applied at all intensively to the
history of European classical music thus far. The most useful works
on the history of concerts which at least bear upon the subject are
the following: Percy M. YOUNG, The Concert Tradition, London 1965;
Arthur LOESSER, Men, Women and Pianos, New York 1954; and Hans
ENGEL, Musik und Gesellschaft, Berlin 1960.
4 Walter WOODFILL, Musicians in English Society, Princeton 1953,
pp. 59-62.
177
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178 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
always had other functions in the household; a list of the
members of one German Hofkapelle in 1783 cited, among others, two
porters, one cupbearer, two man- servants and the chaplain.5
Relationships between performers and their patrons were
therefore the cen- tral source of social order in musical life. The
key to success for musicians was not expanding the number of such
ties but rather maintaining them with careful diplomacy in the
smallgroup social context of the time. The frequency of vaga-
bondage among low- (and in some cases not so low-) ranking
musicians made this concern important to all concerned; reputations
depended as much upon simple trustfulness as upon musical
ability.6
The rise of public concerts during the 18th century changed the
nature of these relationships surprisingly little. The most
prominent early concerts were performances by dedicated amateurs -
Kenner und Liebhaber, as they were called in German - assisted by
musicians of usually greater ability from a lower social standing
who lived in part by teaching and performing in bourgeois and aris-
tocratic homes. The people who went to these events where
accordingly the friends and relatives of the performers, and
members of the local community. Such concerts thus rested upon a
structure of personal relationships and the complementary needs of
the different kinds of participants. Their highly per- sonalized
character limited their growth into large-scale or professional
institu- tions. When that did happen, as in the orchestra of the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde of Vienna after the Revolution of
1848, it came only through force- ful and controversial actions by
professionals.7
Even commercially-oriented concerts sponsored by individual
musicians had such a fabric of relationships. To be sure, such
concertgivers now acted in a enterpreneurial capacity, since they
put on events for more than one household and charged a fee for
admission. An element of commercial objectivity thereby entered
into the relationships with their patrons. But these concerts did
not have an impersonal public, for they remained dependent upon
domestic music-making until after the middle of the nineteenth
century. The growth of amateur musical training during the
eighteenth century had made teaching in bourgeois and aristocratic
homes a broad, highly lucrative market and provided a stable source
of income from which musicians could launch careers as public
performers. These events, usually called >Academies< of
>Benefit ConcertsHerkunft und Sozialstatus des h6fischen
Orchestermusikers im 18. und friihen 19. Jahrhundert in
DeutschlandZur sozialen Stellung des Stadtmusikanten
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
primarily of the families for which the sponsor had taught or
performed, since hiring a musician for such purposes carried with
it an obligation to buy tickets to his or her annual concert. The
web of relationships extended to the performers themselves, since
these concerts had long, elaborate programs played largely by the
colleagues of the sponsor, many of whom were often amateurs.
Touring per- formers drew upon the same network of ties, for
musicians provided each other with help in obtaining supporting
performers and attracting audiences.8
The benefit concert, like the amateur ensemble, could not become
a large- scale event because personal relationships were so central
to it. No musician could develop enough contacts to draw more than
at most five hundred people to a concert, and many had to give
tickets away to get big houses. It is doubtful whether many
concerts showed much profit; their purpose was rather to main- tain
contacts and develop reputations. In any case, the whole idea of
trying to attract audiences on an impersonal basis was far from the
imagination of eight- eenth-century musicians.
The publication and dissemination of music rested upon a similar
matrix of relationships. Because the cost of printed music was so
high, such scores re- mained the exception, and few cities had
retail outlets for their sale. The German music historian Klaus
Hortschansky has shown that the vast majority of music written in
most European countries was sold copy-by-copy through a complex web
of ties among composers, musicians, and interested amateurs. Each
com- poser would ask colleagues in different cities to solicit
subscriptions to a new composition (whether printed or not) for a
small remuneration, usually adver- tising these agents in
periodicals. The principal buyers were the local ensembles we have
just discussed, therefore a quite limited market. Many musicians
spent a considerable part of their time selling music in this
manner. Once again we find that trusting relationships were the key
to success: Hortschansky cites in- stances where certain composers
incurred the wrath of their colleagues of refus- ing to return
expected favors of this kind. Here, too, we can see that this
system was self-limiting, since only rarely could a work receive
more than four or five hundred subscribers.9
The personalized commerce and concert life of the eighteenth
century never disappeared completely from European musical life.
Amateur orchestras today still have an internal structure not very
different from those back then; recitals have remained in many
cases presentations by local performers to their students and
colleagues. But around them have developed broadly based,
impersonal so- cial systems which have come to control these
concerts in powerful ways. Indeed,
8 YOUNG, op. cit., pp. 2845; LOESSER, op. cit., pp. 88-96;
William WEBER, Music and the Middle Class, London 1975, Chap. III.
9 Klaus HORTSCHANSKY, >Der Musiker als Musikalienhandler in der
zweiten Halfte des 18.
JahrhundertsPranumerations- und Subskriptionslisten in
Notendrucken deutscher Musiker des 18. Jahrhunderts
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180 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
one of the most fascinating aspects of modem mass culture is how
it has inter- locked with personalized institutions in this
manner.
Musical mass culture first appeared in the publishing industry.
The key to these changes was the opening up of a vast new market of
music played by amateurs at home. Between 1780 and 1850
technological breakthroughs and a forthright new brand of
entrepreneurship made both publishing and retailing of music a
burgeoning consumer business. The most striking thing about the
technological advances was that they were exploited so soon for
specific needs of musical merchandising. Publishers seized upon
lithography immediately after its invention at the turn of the
century to print sheet music for home use with flashy, colorful
illustrations which proved easily saleable. New methods of movable
type served a different market, the mass choral movement, because
they were able to produce cheap, easy-to-read vocal parts for
singers still struggling to scan their lines. Lastly, improvements,
in engraving techniques provided the sharp detail needed for the
complicated virtuosic and orchestral scores at large-scale
concerts.10
The problems of rising productivity rates and falling prices in
publishing industry are too complex and have been studied too
little to be worth discussing at any length here. More to our
purposes is to see how the simple availability of music increased
so enormously after the turn of the century. During the 1770's and
80's most publishers' catalogues listed between 100 and 1500 items.
By 1824 the London firm of Boosey cited 10,000 foreign publications
alone; by 1827 the general catalogue of Whistler and Hofmeister in
Leipzig had accumulated a total of about 44,000 items; and in 1838
Parisian firm of d'Almaine claimed to have access to over 200,000
the plates.ll
The spread of retail outlets had much to do with the increase in
publications. Hortschansky reports that during the 1780's some of
the people who dealt in subscriptions began buying in quantity and
selling after publication at a mark- up; he suspects that
publishers then started dealing with them directly to get better
terms.12 The subscription systems could not handle large quantities
of mu- sic and displaced by full-time music-sellers, many of them
the musicians who formerly had sold music on the side and now began
to specialize in that field. The person-to-person distribution
system thus gave way to a professionalized international trade
network. In London directories listed twelve shops selling music in
1750, 30 in 1794, and 150 in 1824; in Germany one such source cited
333 shops in 1843, but that was probably only half the
number.13
10 See A. Hyatt KING, 400 Years of Music Printing, London 1964;
F CHRYSANDER, >A Sketch of the History of Music Printing
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
Crafty merchandising also had a lot to do with the speedy
expansion of the publishing industry. Arthur Loesser has given a
marvellously vivid description of the exploitative techniques which
publishers employed.14 They obtained mu- sic aimed directly at the
tastes and performing levels of the average amateur, and symphonies
or concerti of the older school were transcribed so as to be easier
and more flashy; everything was advertised as >>brilliant but
not difficult
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182 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
the market for sheet music. These outrageous showmen - Spohr and
Hummel in the 1810's and 20's and Thalberg and Liszt in the 30's
and 40's - began the tradition of plying public musical taste which
shifted quickly and easily from sheet music to the recording and
proceeded to give us Paul McCartney and Elton John. An even more
explicit action in the commercial direction by nine- teenth century
composers was their campaign for a universal copyright. This
movement was, clear and simple, an effort to obtain a legal mass
market. It is sobering to one's classical fancies to remember that
one of the key exponents of the reform was the master of the
masters, Ludwig van Beethoven.16
Let us turn to the second area in which the early dynamics of
mass culture emerged: public concerts. Tradition and change mingled
in a curious way in one area of concerts, for those by virtuosi
developed the least into large-scale events. Individual performers
stayed within the conventional form of the benefit concert and the
network of personal relationships which was its base. Few of these
events had audiences larger than 500 people.17 Since the virtuosi
were operating on a hectic international schedule, they were not
able to build permanent institutions with large publics. We should
note, however, that the primacy of sheet music in their fame
nonetheless made their concerts more than just the localized gath-
erings of the eighteenth century. When one went to a concert by
Liszt or Thalberg, or even to one by a minor performer playing
works by the giants, one went because of the fads which surrounded
that music. The functioning of the rela- tionships within the
concert's life was now controlled by the larger musical mar- ket.
During the last quarter of the century the new profession of
concert managers then turned recitals into internationally managed,
large-scale events.
Orchestras provided the fullest and most permanent basis for
mass concerts. The earliest form, found during the 1830's in many
European cities, was informal events held in dance halls during the
winter and parks during the summer. ?Promenades
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
Paris - they drew people from the whole of the middle class and
also young, unmarried apprentices from the more prosperous
artisanry. The crowds were for the most part from the lower-middle
class. Genteel music lessons had nothing to do with why such people
went to these shows.18
After 1850 formal orchestral concerts with classical programs
replaced the promenades in the French and English capitals, though
not in Vienna. There had been attempts at this kind of concert in
Paris before mid-century by Hector Berlioz and other entrepreneurs,
but the first permanent series was begun by Jules Pasdeloup in
1854. Charles Lamoureux and Edouard Colonne set up similar concerts
in the next two decades. In London Auguste Mann began the same kind
of low-priced series at the Crystal Palace in 1855, and the new St.
James's Hall initiated several series of both chamber-music and
orchestral concerts dur- ing the next ten years.19
Concerts of this order spelled the death of the public amateur
orchestral tradition in the three major capitals. During the 1830's
and 40's in London and Paris several orchestras derived from the
model of the eighteenth century tried to obtain a larger public by
hiring professionals as soloists and first-chair players, but the
incumbent costs were far too great for them to bear, and the
ensembles either disappeared or became strictly private gatherings
by 1850. Entrepreneurial musicians set up pay-as-you-go amateur
sight-reading ensembles as something of a replacement. In Vienna
the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde tried valiantly
to stay with strictly amateur membership, but after the Revolution
of 1848 the Society's new leaders professionalized the ensemble and
instituted sepa- rate private sessions for amateurs.20 Indicative
of what had happened to the per- sonalized tradition of dilettante
performance was a letter to a London music magazine in which an
amateur violinist complained that because the city was so big and
impersonal he had no way to locate other players and needed the
periodical's help to do that.21 Thus did the media take on new
functions in urban society.
Even elite symphony orchestras manifested tendencies toward
impersonal- ity in their social fabric. Most series attended by the
aristocracy and the upper- middle class during the early nineteenth
century not only had exclusive ticket policies, but also forbade
the use of tickets by anyone other than the purchaser and granted
single tickets only in exceptional circumstances. In most places
these rules were eliminated during the 1830's and 40's because of
demands by sub- scribers.22 Then in the second half of the century
all of the orchestras moved to
18 Ibid., pp. 108-113. 19 YOUNG, op. cit., pp. 234-238. 20
WEBER, op. cit., Chapter V, part 2. 21 Dramatic and Musical Review,
September 27, 1845, p. 493.
2It is significant that the change came about in both London and
Leipzig - two radically different cities - during the 1830's. For
London, see Harmonicon, March 1833, p. 80; Programs of the Concerts
of Ancient Music, 1834, xxii; Minutes of the Directors' Meetings of
the Philharmonic Society
183
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184 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
larger halls, most of which seated more than 1000 people. Since
exclusiveness remained, one can not call these concerts true mass
events. But they did lose their earlier tight social bonds and now
operated within a larger context of mass publishing and mass
taste.
Choral concerts developed the widest social range among the new
large- scale concerts. Many of the choruses grew directly from
small singing clubs. The main one in London, the Sacred Harmonic
Society, was formed in 1832 from a collection of local groups based
primarily in Dissenting chapels and made up of people from the
artisanry as well as the lower-middle class. The Society es-
tablished a concert series in Exeter Hall, a church headquarters,
which by the middle of the 1840's had become one of the most
prominent musical locales in London. The extent to which the former
clubs had changed into a mass institution was indicated by the
invitation extended to the Society to perform at the opening the
Crystal Palace in 1851. A second source of large-scale choral
concerts was the singing school. Begun by highly entrepreneurial
singing teachers, the schools quickly changed from small-group
educational centers into choruses numbering in the hundreds which
put on festivals all over England. John Hullah, the most successful
teacher-manager, opened up a hall in London for classes and
concerts by his choruses.23
Similar choruses appeared in Paris with public rather than
private bases and had an even broader scale. In 1833 the singing
teacher Guillaume Wilhem began the >>Orpheon<
instructional program in elementary schools under mu- nicipal
sanction and shortly after extended it to adult classes. The
program drew a predominantly artisanal clientele derived in large
part from traditional tavern singing groups, and some of the
students themselves became professional choral directors. Wilhem's
successors expanded the >Orpheon< into a massive national
choral program which climaxed its first decade in 1859 with a
concert at the Palais de l'Industrie in which the press claimed,
undoubtedly with some exag- geration, that 6,000 singers from 204
societies from all over France performed before a crowd of 40,000
people.24
That certainly was mass culture. Throughout the concerts of the
1850's one can feel a lusting for identification with the mass of
the population, a desire to celebrate the emerging urban-industrial
civilization with a grand thronging to- gether in public places.
The minutes of the directing committee of the Sacred Harmonic
Society reveal complaints that singers balked at attending
rehearsals regularly and only wanted to appear at the big concerts.
That does not just show
of London, British Museum, May 22, 1831 and March 11, 1832
(refusals of permission for exchange of tickets), January 19, 1834
and August 10, 1842 (removal of the rule). For Leipzig, see
Programs of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Museum der Geschichte der
Stadt Leipzig, November 30, 1822 (warning to subscribers not to
exchange tickets) and February 13, 1837 (removal of the rule). The
Parisian Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire carefully avoided
the rule at its inception in 1828, as did the Vienna Philharmonic
Orchestra in 1842 and the London Musical Union in 1845.
23 WEBER, op. cit., pp. 100-108. 24 Albert LAVIGNAC, ed.,
>>l'Orphon-, Encyclopedie de la musique, Paris 1931, p.
3727.
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
dislike for choral discipline; it illustrates also how far the
organizations had gone from the tradition of intimate, local
singing clubs.25
But the musical mass culture of the middle of the nineteenth
century was not simply people going to impersonal concerts in large
numbers. To understand how musical taste became mass culture in a
broader respect we must return to the matter raised at the
beginning of this lecture: the masters. By 1860 both the orchestral
and choral concerts we have been discussing and elite concert
societies had shifted their repertoire primarily to music by the
dead >great composersMusic in the Culture of the Renaissance
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186 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
This intermingling of tastes broke down at the turn of the
nineteenth century. With the simultaneous collapse of the patronal
tradition and rise of the printing industry, musical taste suddenly
went to extremes of levity and seriousness. At one pole stood the
virtuosi, those entrepreneurs who created a fire-storm of popular
demand for music they advertised as ?brilliant but not
difficultserious< repertoire. Most concertgoers not only did not
think you needed to know much about the music; they did not even
think it was nice if you did. To most people at concerts, said a
Parisian journalist in 1833, ?musical feeling, taste, the study of
the great masters, the science of composition are dissonances to
their ears that you would be ill advised to pronounce before
them
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
the bills would sometimes not appear or the whole concert prove
a hoax.30 The power of novelty had worn thin. That shrewdie Franz
Liszt certainly saw which way the wind was blowing; in 1849 he quit
giving concerts and moved to Goethe's Weimar, where he began
writing symphonies in his own serious way and ended up joining the
Augustinian order. By 1866 a reporter from Vienna - the town where
virtuosi had ruled more triumphantly than anywhere else - declared
with surprise that >individual concert-givers now scarcely dare
any longer present themselves to the public without Beethoven,
Chopin, or Schu- mannIt is not longsince we endeavored to show what
a change has taken place here during the last ten years
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188 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
in Europe, showed much the same change, but topped the
Philharmonic by de- voting only 11 percent of its repertoire to
living composers during the 1860's.35
Public taste swung to the masters in part because the conductors
of the symphony orchestras learned to use the new mass musical
market. The conduc- tors active during the 1840's - Felix
Mendelssohn in Leipzig, Otto Nicolai in Vi- enna, Francois Habeneck
in Paris, and John Ella in London - all made themselves into
charismatic figures at the podium and devised grand programs which
made the music of the masters seem awesome rather than esoteric.
They did not depart from the new aesthetics of serious taste; they
simply devised ways of making people think they had the necessary
knowledge. Ella, who conducted the cham- ber-music concerts of the
highly prestigious Musical Union, flattered his public, calling it
>the happy few< of >amateurs of cultivated and refined
taste? who knew the secrets of the masters as cruder dilettantes
did not.36
One should not, however, be overly cynical about that puff. The
growth of amateur performance had made a sizable proportion of the
upper levels of the capitals' population musically literate. In
fact, given the weaker competition from other leisure-time
activities during that era, musical literacy was certainly higher
than today and possibly higher even than at any point in the
twentieth century. Amateurs now wanted to brag about their skills
in a more concentrated, indeed more serious manner than before.
A key element in the public was particularly responsible for the
change. During the late eighteenth century there had emerged in
each of these cities a corps of highly trained, sometimes
semi-professional listeners who poured their energies into
advocating the music they regarded as the bastion of serious music
culture. They learned the entire classical repertoire, wrote about
it for magazines and newspapers, and went unfailingly to orchestral
and chamber-music concerts, often in leadership capacities. While
during the early decades of the century their activities had an
oldfashioned and rather esoteric air, at mid-century a new
generation of accomplished listeners arrived which knew how to
speak persua- sively to the larger public. Most important of all,
they respected true professional standards of performance as their
predecessors had not. After 1850 they became the dominant force
among musical amateurs and shaped concert life to their model.
These connoisseurs did not put up with any chatter in the concert
hall.
One also cannot discount certain commercial motives behind the
rise of the masters in musical life. The virtuosi had driven hard
bargains with publishers; they had been such hot properties that
music houses did not like to cross them and often granted them
surprisingly high fees.37 But the market was a chancy
35 Edouard DELDEVEZ, Histoire dc la Societe des Concerts du
Conservatoire, Paris 1887, passim. 36 Musical Record, June 24,
1845, pp. 53-54. These were the programs of the concerts.
3Joel SACHS, >Authentic English and French editions of Johann
Nepomuk Hummel
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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2
(1994) 175-190
one, there was a lot to be lost by poor investments, and reforms
in copyright laws had begun to limit publishers in some respects.
By comparison, publication of works by dead composers had lower
cost, greater stability, and fewer attendant problems. Many of the
publishing houses had close ties with the major sym- phony
orchestras and probably exerted some influence in the shift in
program- ming.
By the 1870's there was indeed an active suspicion of new music
in concert life. In 1887 the conductor of the Socie'te des concerts
meditated upon the past and the future of his orchestra: >Can it
not today conserve its title of glory, follow the mission of the
last fifty years; can it not continue to devote itself to the cult
of great art, to the masters of the masters, without excluding the
modems, the contemporary members of the young
school?>Reflections on Mod-
ernism: Or Aimez-vous Brahms?<
189
-
190 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA
25/1,2 (1994) 175-190
Sa'etak
MASOVNA KULTURA I PREOBLIKOVANJE EUROPSKOG GLAZBENOG UKUSA U
RAZDOBLJU GD 1770. DO 1870. GODINE
Masovna kultura u europskom glazbenom zivotu nije se pojavila u
20., ve& u 19. stoljeeu. Ma- sovna je kultura bila temeljna
snaga koja je transformirala europski glazbeni ukus u njegovim fun-
damentalnim pretpostavkama. Tradicija klasicne i tradicija zabavne
glazbe proizvodi su suvremene glazbene masovne kulture.
Radna je definicija masovne kulture, koja se upotrebljava u
povijesne svrhe, u tome da je treba shvatiti kao izvedbu ili
girenje glazbe na na6in koji ne po6iva na osobnim odnosima izmedu
glazbenika i publike, i u okviru kojeg je zadobivanje, u stvari
manipuliranje giroke publike prvotni cilj. Premda se kvantitativna
Ijestvica glazbene masovne kulture 19. stoljeea ne moze usporediti
s onom iz 20. stoljeea, bezliknost koncertnlh dogadaja i
manipulativna sredstva izdava&ke industrije bila su u osnovi
istog karaktera tada kao i danas. Masovnu kulturu ne bi trebalo
shvatiti samo kao puki broj ijudi koji idu na koncerte ill kupuju
plo&e ihi muzikalije, vee kao osobitost glazbenog iskustva
specifiknog za modemo urbano drultvo.
Europska je izdava&ka industrija tako inicirala masovnu
kulturu u glazbenom livotu pri kraju 19. stoljeea putem tehnololkih
inovacija i vjegtim metodama prodaje. Glazba s plora bila je
k1ju&na za razvitak. Sirenje glazbe time se promijenilo od
neposredne osobne distribucije u razgranati medu- narodni sistem.
Instrumentalni su virtuozi imali glavnu ulogu u novom sistemu jer
su se pomrou njih razvile nove prodajne metode koje su najavile
suvremeni fenomen glazbenog bestselera.
Ovaj je razvitak temeljito preobrazio europski glazbeni ukus.
Prvobitna pretpostavka glazbenog ukusa u 17. i 18. stoljeeu bila je
otmjeno uvjerenje da su znanje i ozbiljan interes za glazbu bill
pozeljni no ne i nuini za razumijevanje glazbe. >>Nije
potrebno da znate mnogoo, govorili su, >no zgodno je ako je tome
takoo. Uspon glazbene masovne kulture slomio je taj polimorfni skup
vrijed- nosti. Otkad su se procesi proizvodnje glazbenih aktivnosti
giroko razvili i postali ekonomski snahni, lakoumnost i ozbiljnost
rastali su se u glazbenom 2ivotu i svaki od ta dva aspekta postao
je temeljem odvojenog glazbenog svijeta. Do tridesetih godina 19.
stoljeea razvile su se potpuno neovisne glazbene institucije za
>ozbiljnu? simfonijsku i komomu glazbu s jedne a virtuoznu i
opemu glazbu s druge strane. U prvoj se pretpostavljalo da se negto
mora znati, dok se u drugoj preferiralo ako se nije znalo.
Nove klasikne institucije nisu bile nigta manje proizvod masovne
kulture nego zabavne. I sfm pojam )>majstora