Words on Music
[Thursday night 6/29.—ed.]
Recently read: a book called "The American Symphony Orchestra," by a fellow named John H. Mueller. [Since discovered: he was a sociology professor at the U of Indiana; died 1965.] I had found this in the Yale library system a couple of months ago, tried to check it out, learned that I could not do so under temporary employee status, and managed to find a used copy at The Strand bookstore in New York a little while later.
Mueller wrote this in 1951. In it he covers the history of the symphony orchestra as an institution in the USA, reviews the repertoire they performed, and attempts to describe how cultural tastes in orchestra music are shaped.
It’s an interesting read if you’re an orchestra geek. I was interested in finding a perspective on what the founding impetus was for orchestras, and what sort of society-wide support they were given early on. You get some of that, though the book is very observational, as opposed to analytical, so Mueller doesn’t discuss a lot in terms of social motivation. And he doesn’t dig into why philanthropists believed that their home cities — Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco — "should" have had symphonies as part of their civic development. (There might not be much of a question there; maybe it just goes without saying that there was a classical cultural priority at the time.)
You might instinctively think the 50s would be a signature time for American orchestras, but actually they came more into their own in the 60s: big grants, primarily from the Ford Foundation, funded more orchestras to employ their musicians year-round, as opposed to seasonally; and you had Leonard Bernstein on TV spreading the word popularly. So reading a book from the early 50s is even more out-of-date than it first appears.
(Joseph Horowitz’s recent book Classical Music in America gets into the nitty-gritty of orchestra-music consumption habits throughout the century a bit more, and I’m thinking I should re-read that now. Pete, I think I lent this to you sometime last year. Do you still have it?)
Repertoire-wise, not a lot seems to have really changed since the 50s, or for that matter for most of the time Mueller surveyed. Early orchestras were very Beethoven-centric, also concentrating a lot of energy, in some cases, on Brahms (as Beethoven’s cerebral successor) and Wagner (though obviously he was more of an opera guy). When you get down to it, a huge part of the original artistic impetus for founding these orchestras was getting people to hear, for the first time, the same standard repertoire we have today. The fact that we’ve had two full generations of people used to hearing music recorded and not live, with 500 recordings of every piece of standard rep on the shelf, must account for a huge chunk of today’s orchestral existential crisis.
Mueller’s writing style is fun, since it’s extremely readable but cast from a noticeably antiquated, erudite-by-intention kind of linguistic metal. For example, a description of an early Russian conductor of the New York Philharmonic:
In closing, I’ll just say that whoever originally owned this book put a sticker on the inside cover, featuring his name typed below a printed picture of an angry-looking imp, wearing a peaked cap, sitting legs folded on a stool while poring over an oversized book. Highly creepy.
Recently read: a book called "The American Symphony Orchestra," by a fellow named John H. Mueller. [Since discovered: he was a sociology professor at the U of Indiana; died 1965.] I had found this in the Yale library system a couple of months ago, tried to check it out, learned that I could not do so under temporary employee status, and managed to find a used copy at The Strand bookstore in New York a little while later.
Mueller wrote this in 1951. In it he covers the history of the symphony orchestra as an institution in the USA, reviews the repertoire they performed, and attempts to describe how cultural tastes in orchestra music are shaped.
It’s an interesting read if you’re an orchestra geek. I was interested in finding a perspective on what the founding impetus was for orchestras, and what sort of society-wide support they were given early on. You get some of that, though the book is very observational, as opposed to analytical, so Mueller doesn’t discuss a lot in terms of social motivation. And he doesn’t dig into why philanthropists believed that their home cities — Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco — "should" have had symphonies as part of their civic development. (There might not be much of a question there; maybe it just goes without saying that there was a classical cultural priority at the time.)
You might instinctively think the 50s would be a signature time for American orchestras, but actually they came more into their own in the 60s: big grants, primarily from the Ford Foundation, funded more orchestras to employ their musicians year-round, as opposed to seasonally; and you had Leonard Bernstein on TV spreading the word popularly. So reading a book from the early 50s is even more out-of-date than it first appears.
(Joseph Horowitz’s recent book Classical Music in America gets into the nitty-gritty of orchestra-music consumption habits throughout the century a bit more, and I’m thinking I should re-read that now. Pete, I think I lent this to you sometime last year. Do you still have it?)
Repertoire-wise, not a lot seems to have really changed since the 50s, or for that matter for most of the time Mueller surveyed. Early orchestras were very Beethoven-centric, also concentrating a lot of energy, in some cases, on Brahms (as Beethoven’s cerebral successor) and Wagner (though obviously he was more of an opera guy). When you get down to it, a huge part of the original artistic impetus for founding these orchestras was getting people to hear, for the first time, the same standard repertoire we have today. The fact that we’ve had two full generations of people used to hearing music recorded and not live, with 500 recordings of every piece of standard rep on the shelf, must account for a huge chunk of today’s orchestral existential crisis.
Mueller’s writing style is fun, since it’s extremely readable but cast from a noticeably antiquated, erudite-by-intention kind of linguistic metal. For example, a description of an early Russian conductor of the New York Philharmonic:
The daringly garish interpretation of his fellow-Russian composers by this musical Tartar turned out to be an impossible mannerism, aberrant and irresponsible, when applied to the general repertoire. Eschewing the baton, he employed a fistic style of direction, vehement and theatrical, which called for rude contrasts and extravagant rhythms and tempi.
In closing, I’ll just say that whoever originally owned this book put a sticker on the inside cover, featuring his name typed below a printed picture of an angry-looking imp, wearing a peaked cap, sitting legs folded on a stool while poring over an oversized book. Highly creepy.
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