I am listening to South Dakota Public Broadcasting interview Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall. Judging from the author’s tone, the book decidedly focuses on the decline aspect of the story.
“What we take for granted today,” Horowitz tells his radio interviewer David Gier, “that the market dictates celebrity programming, or getting a celebrity pianist, or getting a well known piece, was really unknown before the First World War. It is just not how it was done.”
“The box office was not a consideration,” Horowitz declares, speaking of those times.
What I find striking is how different Horowitz’s observations are from those of at least one other historian of classical music. I quote from Lawrence Levine’s book Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America:
” . . . three of the most popular European visitors to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century—Viennese ballerina Fanny Elssler, the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, and the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind—with many less well-known foreign stars, symbolized the best of European culture without an aura of exclusivity. Bull would gladly play ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ‘The Arkansas Traveller,’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in the midst of his dazzling solos; Lind regularly mixed Swedish folk songs and such popular American songs as ‘Home Sweet Home’ with her operatic arias; Ellsler combined classical ballet with English hornpipes and Spanish folk dances [Levine, 108].”
I see an eye for the market in this paragraph, not to mention for celebrity performers. Why this divergence in how historians have viewed the classical music past? I suspect that a lot of it depends on when you think that classical music in America begins. Judging from the interview, Horowitz’s timeline seems to start after the American Civil War. Levine goes back to the 1820s and 1830s.
Still, I would not be surprised if, during the years prior to the Great War, Horowitz found classical orchestras, newly funded by Gilded Age magnates, thumbing their noses at popular tastes and going in their own highbrow directions (see long symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler, for starters). And it would also make sense that during the lean Great Depression years ticket sales suddenly mattered again. What I suspect, however, is that Horowitz’s Golden Age was always an anomalous period in the history of what we call classical music. The challenge today is to acknowledge public tastes in the concert hall and the classical radio playlist, without allowing them to ossify the program down to two dozen warhorses.
Here’s the interview link for downloading. Enjoy.
