Aesthetic Populism or Snobbish Conspiracy?
Another way of approaching the problem of the patrons' mixed motives (at once democratic and artistic) is found in Michael Broyles's "Music of the Highest Class": Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (1992). Broyles's view is that American musical life has been shaped and reshaped over the centuries by two tensions: "one between a populist and an elitist attitude toward music, and another between a conceptualization of music as entertainment and music as a moral force [that uplifts and ennobles its listeners]." Both tensions, he stresses, need to be taken into consideration, especially since they are "not always in synchrony," a clear example being Lowell Mason's attempt to make sacred music more "correct" and "scientific" yet also easily accessible to the least-tutored parishioner.[22] Broyles's conclusion emerged from his work on Mason and such proponents of symphonic music and oratorio as Samuel Eliot and John Sullivan Dwight, but it is paralleled by scholarly work in other areas. The cultural historian Neil Harris, for example, observes of the gradual purification and legitimation of America's museums: "Ironically, . . . [the] transfer of interest [from sculpture casts and sham biblical artifacts] to original artworks and authenticated historical relics . . . [made] the museum a truly popular institution."[23]
Joseph Horowitz has shown in detail how sacralization, despite its elitist origins, "metastasized in the twentieth century into an insidiously popular movement: the groundlings who once had thrown tomatoes became well-behaved acolytes in the temple of culture."[24] And they became good consumers: RCA Victor's marketing division successfully cultivated Arturo Toscanini's image throughout America as the definitive conductor of Beethoven, a sort of "high priest" on vinyl.[25] Levine dismisses Toscanini's NBC Symphony broadcasts as "conscious exceptions to what normally prevailed." In fact, though, in the early decades of radio, such station-supported orchestras and "live" broadcasts were anything but exceptional. And they also allowed much new American music to be heard: one might mention the nationwide broadcasts of Howard Hanson's Festivals of American Music or network-radio competitions and commissions such as those won by Aaron Copland (Dance Symphony, Music for Radio, Letter from Home ).[26]
Of course, one can argue that populist efforts—such as pre-concert lectures, low-priced concerts for special segments of the community, even mass-produced recordings bearing awe-inspiring photos of the Maestro and incense-laden jacket
prose—were little more than tools in the mystification process: propaganda that made the average listener feel uncomfortable approaching music on his or her own, especially without prior coaching from someone of superior knowledge and taste. Levine does not quite venture this line of argument; rather, he leaves efforts at education and dissemination largely unmentioned or dismisses them as marginal (he speaks of museums and orchestras in the mid twentieth century engaging in "mere outreach programs").[27] But just such a jaundiced conclusion is a logical result of his exaggerated emphasis on the exclusionary impulses of the cultured elites: "[A]fter the turn of the century there was one price that had to be paid: these cultural products had to be accepted on the terms proffered by those who controlled the cultural institutions. In that sense, while there was never a total monopoly of access, there was a tight control over the terms of access."[28] Although it has the rhetorical thrust of an accusation, this statement is actually a tautology. People of privilege were making the decisions, so of course one can say that everyone else was, in a sense, forced to accept the system set up by people of privilege. That is true of any system: someone must bear the risks and make the big decisions. Levine's statement can only become a valid accusation if one can ascertain that the decisions in question were primarily self-serving and exclusionist in intent or effect. And the very mention of "effect" should remind us that concertgoers were not captive pawns in management's concert game; they were free to "vote with their feet"—and regularly did so.
Similarly, Levine regularly insists that the sharp, value-laden distinction between "highbrow" culture and more "lowbrow" fare was "rooted in a quest for intellectual and cultural authority" on the part of the emerging groups of the wealthy, in conjunction with the older gentry.[29] DiMaggio, too, tends cynically to assert, without much evidence (or with patently selective evidence), that snobbery and other less than admirable motives were the primary driving forces for Higginson, Dwight, and other culture makers. In particular, he asserts that a remark of Dwight's about "people of taste and culture" buys into the "crucial syllogism" that equated "taste and social standing."[30] But Dwight was no social snob: coarse tastes for him could be found in the rich as well as the poor. Education and cultural exposure could help, of course (as the Brook Farm experiment had confirmed); that these were at the time far more available to people of means was for Dwight an injustice that called for prompt remedy. He hailed the massed performances of Rossini, Gounod, and Wagner at the National Peace Jubilee and Great Music Festival of 1869 for reaching "tens of thousands of all classes (save, unfortunately, the poorest)" and concluded: "Public opinion, henceforth, will count [knowledge and love of Music] among the essentials of that 'liberal education,' which is the birthright of a free American, and no longer as a superfluous refinement of an over-delicate and fashionable few."[31]
True, the remark about "people of taste and culture" to which DiMaggio alludes does refer specifically to the wealthy, but not because of some "implicit" (as DiMaggio puts it) class agenda. Dwight made the remark in the context of his (ret-
rospective) description of the Harvard Musical Association's practical strategy (which is to say, his own strategy, since he was one of the association's prime movers) of establishing the "nucleus of a fit audience" for its orchestral concerts. This "nucleus"—the key word here—consisted of people who at once valued the music and who could "make the concerts financially safe" by "subscribing before-hand" and "increas[ing] the number by the attraction of their own example."[32] Dwight always assumed that additional "fit" listeners, thousands of them, from various social strata, would seize the chance to gather around any such nucleus, which is exactly what happened, in Boston as elsewhere. Indeed, when the Boston Symphony was finally founded, in 1881, Dwight welcomed it in his widely respected magazine (Dwight's Journal of Music ), stating in no uncertain terms that "it places the best of music within frequent and easy reach of all who love it and cannot afford to pay the prices usual heretofore" (at his own Harvard Musical Association); now Boston, he declared, would have "music of the highest kind, accessible to all the people, and a plenty of it."[33] For Dwight, as for so many other builders of America's cultural institutions, taste was not linked, in any kind of "crucial syllogism," to social or economic standing. Rather, he recognized that wealthy supporters could provide economic security for cultural institutions that, without such underpinnings, would barely be viable. Ever an idealist about art music, Dwight could also be a hard-headed realist about what it took to get it performed (and performed well).[34]
In the field of American literary history, Joan Shelley Rubin has recently warned of a widespread "tendency to depict canonizers monolithically" and even as "almost conspiratorial" figures.[35] The writings that I have been citing lean far in that direction. Levine claims, for example, that the elite groups had "a vested interest . . . in welcoming and maintaining the widening cultural gaps that increasingly characterized the United States" and that their efforts to "proselytize and convert . . . often had the opposite effect" by making culture seem distant and effete.[36] The "often" is the one welcome word in this highly charged statement, since it leaves open the possibility—although Levine hardly explores it—that no less often efforts at developing a taste for art music, and at enabling people to perform it at home, enriched people's lives across the country, just as efforts at literacy did by enabling them to read political essayists (of varying stripes), the Bible (and attacks on religion), the novels of Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens, or the poetry of Walt Whitman or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Joseph Horowitz finds more than a whiff of "polemic" in what he calls Levine's recurrent "emphasis on the villainy of . . . upper-class snobs." "This perspective," he notes, may be a little too "reassuring" to present-day ideological preferences, in that "it lets the People off the hook."[37] I prefer to stress that the many statements by Levine and others about the stultifying or distorting effects of private patronage are valid in part and indeed are necessary correctives to certain long-standing, exaggeratedly rosy attitudes toward the generosity of patrons (such as one finds in various semiofficial histories of symphony orchestras). But I also hold that these
corrective statements become tendentious and unreliable when they are offered as the predominant or indeed nearly the entire story of how and why the institutions of art music emerged in America. And I become particularly skeptical when I see that such statements are made in a context that gives inadequate consideration to the second countervailing force mentioned above: the desire of musicians and music lovers for intense aesthetic experience.