New Statesman: Joseph Horowitz: A culture of performance: The Back Half
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http://www.newstatesman.com/Arts/200505160026
5.5.16
A century ago, the United States confidently predicted the arrival of
its answer to Beethoven or Wagner. Now, abandoned to a brutal market
place, American classical music is in crisis. By Joseph Horowitz
With the re-election of George W Bush, many Americans found themselves
asking questions about the future of American democracy: about the
impact of money and of political machination, and about the power of
both to sway an electorate already addicted to fast-food news and talk
radio.
Considered as an experiment in the democratisation of high culture,
classical music in America restates these questions. Orchestras and
opera companies, composers and broadcasters have done without
government guidance and subsidy taken for granted elsewhere. Half a
century ago, and before, individuals of vision - conductors,
composers, entrepreneurs, even critics - heroically shaped the course
of America's musical high culture. In more recent times, the fate of
classical music in the US has been governed by the market place.
The indulged and uninquisitive American electorate is paralleled by
classical music audiences that ask for little and give little back. A
tangible acuity of knowing attention still found in Berlin or Budapest
is no longer much encountered in New York. Every US orchestra and
opera house of size has, or hopes to obtain, its own marketing guru
whose business it is to devise strategies - invariably impinging on
repertoire - to sell more tickets. They may succeed, but does music
benefit?
Certainly, American classical music has proved a distinct variant of
the European parent culture. It may be likened to a mutant transplant.
Deep roots were neither imported nor newly cultivated. By "roots" I
mean a vital canon of home-grown symphonies and/or operas. An
"American Beethoven" or an "American Wagner" were once predicted - but
none materialised. At the same time, the institutional trappings of
Europe's musical high culture were regrown with amazing alacrity: even
before 1900, America's best orchestras and opera companies challenged
comparison with any abroad.
In short, American classical music describes a simple trajec- tory of
rise and fall. Before the First World War, the American composer,
striving impressively towards prominence, was a central focus of
attention and expectation. After the First World War, American
classical music slipped into a "culture of performance", chiefly
celebrating great orchestras and conductors, singers and
instrumentalists.
The contributions of such early pioneers as Theodore Thomas can
scarcely be overemphasised. Thomas arrived in the New World from
Germany in 1845 at the age of ten. In his teens, he toured the South
by himself - on horseback, packing a pistol - as "Master T T", the
prodigy violinist; he acted as his own manager, publicist and
ticket-taker. He first led an orchestra of his own in 1862. Busy
though it was, the Thomas Orchestra could not offer its members steady
employment unless it travelled. Its core itinerary of 28 cities became
known as the Thomas Highway. Thomas byways included railroad stations
and churches. Visiting virtuosos were astonished by the discipline and
dedication of the players. Thomas's credo was that "a symphony
orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera". In European
cities, the opera house was central, and orchestras - like today's
Vienna Philharmonic - played opera first, concerts second. The
"symphony orchestra" (the term was coined in the US) became an
American specialty. Thomas him-self founded the Chicago Orchestra,
later the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1891.
What Thomas was to Chicago, Henry Lee Higginson was to Boston - and
more. As a young man in Vienna, Higginson dreamed of becoming a
musician. When this dream fizzled out, he amassed enough money as a
banker to realise what had become his crowning ambition: beginning in
1881, he created, owned and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Higginson was a democrat who insisted on reserving 25-cent seats for
non-subscribers. His world-class orchestra hired world-class
conductors such as Arthur Nikisch and Karl Muck. Another of
Higginson's conductors, Wilhelm Gericke, exclaimed upon examining
symphonic programmes from previous Boston seasons: "I am completely
dumbfounded. I do not see what is left for me to do here. You seem to
have heard everything already: more, much more, than we ever heard in
Vienna!"
Thomas and Higginson espoused Germanic music and Germanic uplift. An
anomaly within the same meliorist tradition was America's greatest
concert composer: Charles Ives. More than we tend to realise, Ives
also belongs to the heroic pioneer chap-ters of American classical
music. He is less a proto-modernist, anticipating the future, than a
New England transcendentalist, celebrating his Connecticut past.
After the First World War, the culture of performance produced heroes
of a glossier kind. Leopold Stokowski, who re-created the Philadelphia
Orchestra, was a Londoner who claimed to have been born in Poland. He
also invented exotic habits of speech. He blithely discarded all
conventional wisdom about how orchestras should look and sound. Rather
than having his violinists bow up and down in unison, he espoused
"free bowing"; by inviting his players to bow individually and
naturally, he reasoned, he could obtain a warmer, more intense, more
continuous sound. His own individuality was also expressed in various
seating arrangements unique to Philadelphia. He tried positioning the
strings at the rear of the stage, or massed to the left. "I shall keep
on experimenting," he pledged. "I have no system." He kept his word.
Like Stokowski himself, the Philadelphia sound, with its seamless line
and satin finish, was a singular American creation, remote from
European experience. Equally singular among conductors of his
generation was Stokowski's Hollywood glamour: he shook hands with
Mickey Mouse; he dated Greta Garbo. Stokowski's rivals - Serge
Koussevitzky in Boston and Arturo Toscanini in New York - were also
lustrous celebrities. Though Stokowski and Koussevitzky championed new
music, Toscanini's recanonisation of dead European masters proved more
influential. On the cultural commodity exchange, it proved especially
attractive to a new interwar audience: the "new middle classes".
These culture consumers were sold a bill of goods - that all great
music was old and European - by the "music appreciation" movement, a
commercial enterprise whose chief exponents included David Sarnoff of
the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). Notwithstanding the
efforts of America's composers, of whom the most voluble was Aaron
Copland, an avalanche of music appreciation bibles, recordings and
broadcasts sidelined the quest for an indigenous musical voice earlier
pursued by Ives, George Whitefield Chadwick (yet to be acknowledged as
America's first symphonic nationalist) and (even earlier) Louis Moreau
Gottschalk, with his saucy Caribbean delicacies.
In retrospect, a watershed moment was the defeat of proposals to set
aside one-quarter of all radio frequencies for non-profit use. This
1930s threat of an "American BBC" was one factor in the creation of
Toscanini's NBC Symphony and other instructional and cultural radio
offerings. Sarnoff and CBS's William Paley were practical idealists
for whom the new broadcast medium was both a cultural and a commercial
opportunity. But without federal intervention of the kind they helped
to defeat, there was nothing to prevent their successors from
abandoning the many music-education strategies undertaken during
radio's early heyday.
Where are the Thomases and Higginsons, Stokowskis and Sarnoffs of
today? In his 2002 biography of Bill Clinton, the political analyst
Joe Klein wrote:
Marketing has been the most insidious force in the shrinking of public
life. The ubiquitous pollsters and advertising consultants who
dominated late 20th-century politics were thuddingly pragmatic. They
asked people what they wanted. The answers were always predictable . .
. And so, the politicians themselves became thuddingly pragmatic. They
became followers, not leaders.
The same crisis in leadership afflicts American classical music.
For all that, the present moment is not unpropitious. Leonard
Bernstein, in his 1973 Norton Lectures, asked "whither music?" - and
could not find an answer. At the turn of the 21st century, the answer
is all around us. It is global. Non-western music and contemporary
culture are what have refreshed the musical traditions Bernstein held
dear - and nowhere more than in the US, where those traditions were
less deeply instilled. Today's iconic American composers - John Adams,
Philip Glass, Steve Reich - cannot be called "classical musicians".
They enjoy a robust and diverse following. They embody a
"postclassical music" which, if we are lucky, will absorb and redirect
a musical high culture that has mainly run its course.
Joseph Horowitz is the author of Classical Music in America: a history
of its rise and fall, published by Norton in June
Matthew B. Tepper
letters to be typed in news:Pine.NEB.4.63.0505190911100.15273
@panix1.panix.com:
> Joseph Horowitz:
Uh-oh! You just KNOW there are going to be gratuitous shots at Toscanini,
whom Joey here regards as the Darth Vader of music.
> Stokowski's rivals - Serge Koussevitzky in Boston and Arturo Toscanini in
> New York - were also lustrous celebrities. Though Stokowski and
> Koussevitzky championed new music, Toscanini's recanonisation of dead
> European masters proved more influential. On the cultural commodity
> exchange, it proved especially attractive to a new interwar audience: the
> "new middle classes". These culture consumers were sold a bill of goods
> - that all great music was old and European - by the "music appreciation"
> movement, a commercial enterprise whose chief exponents included David
> Sarnoff of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). Notwithstanding
> the efforts of America's composers, of whom the most voluble was Aaron
> Copland, an avalanche of music appreciation bibles, recordings and
> broadcasts sidelined the quest for an indigenous musical voice earlier
> pursued by Ives, George Whitefield Chadwick (yet to be acknowledged as
> America's first symphonic nationalist) and (even earlier) Louis Moreau
> Gottschalk, with his saucy Caribbean delicacies.
We get it, Joey. Toscanini was history's greatest villain because he never
played the music of the Godlike Chadwick. Now will you please just go
somewhere and fuck yourself?
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Take THAT, Daniel Lin, Mark Sadek, James Lin & Christopher Chung!
euse...@aol.com
> Premise Checker <che...@panix.com> appears to have caused the
following
> letters to be typed in news:Pine.NEB.4.63.0505190911100.15273
> @panix1.panix.com:
>
> > Joseph Horowitz:
>
>
never
> played the music of the Godlike Chadwick. Now will you please just
go
> somewhere and fuck yourself?
>
Although Toscanini was not history's greatest villain, he was a villain
nonetheless, not because he didn't play Chadwick (although one might
ask, Why not?), but because he was, in the words of Wilhelm
Furwängler, a "damned timekeeper."
Regarding Horowitz's article, I wish he had spent a bit more time on
Chadwick, and his fellow Bostonians such as John Knowles Paine and
Arthur Foote. I'd like to know more about these guys. But the major
omission from the article is the school of African-American composers
that was founded originally in New York, when Antonín Dvorak tutored
Harry Burleigh. Burleigh and Hall Johnson produced arrangements of
Spirituals that are among the most profound contributions of the U.S.
to the world of music.
Matthew B. Tepper
in news:1116600665.8...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
> Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
>> Premise Checker <che...@panix.com> appears to have caused the
>> following letters to be typed in news:Pine.NEB.4.63.0505190911100.15273
>> @panix1.panix.com:
>>
>> > Joseph Horowitz:
>>
>> We get it, Joey. Toscanini was history's greatest villain because he
>> never played the music of the Godlike Chadwick. Now will you please
>> just go somewhere and fuck yourself?
>
> Although Toscanini was not history's greatest villain, he was a villain
> nonetheless, not because he didn't play Chadwick (although one might
> ask, Why not?), but because he was, in the words of Wilhelm
> Furwängler, a "damned timekeeper."
Your opinion, perhaps; and in my opinion, that's bullshit.
> Regarding Horowitz's article, I wish he had spent a bit more time on
> Chadwick, and his fellow Bostonians such as John Knowles Paine and
> Arthur Foote. I'd like to know more about these guys. But the major
> omission from the article is the school of African-American composers
> that was founded originally in New York, when Antonín Dvorak tutored
> Harry Burleigh. Burleigh and Hall Johnson produced arrangements of
> Spirituals that are among the most profound contributions of the U.S.
> to the world of music.
--