PART II
ECONOMICS

2
Professions and Patronage I: Teaching and Composing

In the absence of settings of the kind that the church, the court, and the state have traditionally provided in Europe, music in the United States has depended chiefly on the success musicians have had in finding customers and serving their needs. As Roger Sessions wrote in 1948, any serious consideration of American musical life must begin with the recognition that music in this country has been and is a "business."^[1]

In one sense, Sessions's statement is a truism. Of course music, insofar as it depends upon the marshaling of specialists prepared for difficult tasks, is an expensive pastime, and the money has to come from somewhere. The more we study the past, the harder it is to overlook arrangements that provide for the training of artists and the commissioning, performance, circulation, and preservation of their works. Whether American or European, musicians are no different from other human beings in their need to make a living.

Yet, because Sessions has fashioned his statement to jar musical readers into recognizing an unwelcome fact of life, it's best to view it with that purpose in mind.^[2] Two related premises loom behind it. One is that the European scene is different; the other is that Sessions's own kind of music operates at a disadvantage in a business climate. On the first point, Sessions's claim suggests the absence in America of prestigious institutional venues within which the creation and performance of musical works, conceived as art and not business, is encouraged. Readers are reminded that the realm of musical "art," which the American public is encouraged to think of as a wholly idealistic endeavor, is, for those engaged in it, an occupational calling in which musicians exchange their time and skill for money. On the second point, by re-

stricting his discussion to music in the cultivated tradition, Sessions reveals an anomaly: The American music about which he cares the most must make its way in an environment indifferent or even hostile to it.

While Sessions's subject is music for the concert hall and opera house, his article is conceived broadly enough to take in all of American music. Rather than denouncing business, Sessions describes it. The nature of business, he reminds his readers, is to seek the highest possible return on one's investment. To that end, a business tries "to produce its goods as cheaply as possible." It also tries to encourage in customers a demand for products that are "cheapest and most convenient to produce."^[3] Thus, cheap production, wide demand, and maximum profit are its prevailing values. Around these values there has been built in the United States a central marketplace—an arena centering on fierce competition for a paying audience. To compete successfully in that marketplace, musicians must follow the practices of an enterprise ruled by business. They must, in other words, produce musical commodities: goods or products suited to marketplace exchange.^[4]

It is as obvious today as it was four decades ago that pure business values are foreign to the milieu in which Sessions and his compatriots understand themselves to be working. For there, works of art are privileged in and of themselves, often without reference to their exchange value. As makers of these works, composers stand at the top of a hierarchy: composer, performer, listener. Rather than catering to public taste, they seek to lead it, in the name of ideals they see as traditional and artistic—including "the prestige of sheer quality."^[5] In essence, they practice art for art's sake. And they do so by making musical statements that, drawing from the full range of techniques available, seek to reflect the modern world as masterpieces of the past reflected the spirit of theirs. For Sessions, such music offers "new experience"; its makers must not shrink from placing stem demands "upon performers and listeners alike." In "an economy of scarcity," however, such "problematic" contemporary music cannot be expected to flourish.^[6]

Sessions's claim that music in America is first and foremost a business makes an excellent jumping-off point for a broader inquiry. It's a strong statement from a respected source. Its application to the whole of American music—some branches of which embrace business values as unreservedly as Sessions and his compatriots reject them—can be an illuminating exercise. For example, cheap production, wide demand, and

maximum profit may promote conformity, but the pursuit of such commercial goals has not cramped the diversity of American musical life. The careers of Sessions and his fellow composers testify to the flexibility possible within the larger economy of American music. The cultivated American composer's direct economic power may be modest. Yet Sessions, his compatriots, and his successors have found a way to live as musicians—to receive training, to find musical employment that involves composing, to work professionally at their calling, and to have their works performed and disseminated (i.e., published, recorded), though perhaps on a scale smaller than they wish. They have found in the larger American music business an arena for their talents and beliefs, even though those have aroused little interest in the central marketplace. They have found an economy within an economy: a realm that has also enabled them to hold to their ideals and to keep alive, in a democracy where commercial values overshadow other values, the spirit of music as an esoteric art.

It's remarkable that American composers have accomplished what they have. Their accomplishment is part of a larger story—one that considers music in the United States as an art that has grown up alongside a highly varied economic system. That system is carried forward by agents who serve the many functions necessary to the practice of music in the modern Western world.^[7] All pieces of music must be created in the first place, and musical creation is the province of the composer . Before a composer's music can be experienced, someone must sing or play it, and that's the province of the performer . Composing and performing music take special skills, of course, and formal instruction in those skills is up to the teacher . If music is to find its way from composers to performers and, eventually, to listeners, it must be publicly performed, reproduced and distributed (i.e., published, recorded); those tasks fall to the distributor . As an art of sound, music relies not only on the human voice but upon musical instruments (and, in the electronic age, on mechanical playback equipment), and the manufacturer of such instruments is another agent of the music business. Finally, as an art form concerned with the human condition, music is an object of reflection and contemplation, and interpreting its messages in words is the province of the musical writer .

Each of these agents—composer, performer, teacher, distributor, manufacturer, writer—has played a role in the development of music

in the Western world. Together, their efforts have created the economic structure of music-making. Yet the agents differ among themselves in background, training, and priorities, as a profession differs from a trade, a craft, or a business.^[8] Sessions writes with the confidence of a true professional—a practitioner whose occupation is defined not by economic reward but by intellectual autonomy and authority.^[9] According to Virgil Thomson, who wrote penetratingly on "the civil status of musicians," what separates a profession from other kinds of occupational calling are three special marks of "professional integrity": (1) "members of the profession are the final judges on any question involving technique"; (2) "professional groups operate their own educational machinery and are the only persons legally competent to attest its results"; and (3) "their professional solidarity is unique and indissoluble." Performers and music business functionaries may be brilliant or powerful or both, but they wield no authority on composers' own turf. "No executant musician," Thomson proclaims, "has the right to perform publicly an altered or reorchestrated version of a piece of music without the composer's consent." He uses an analogy from medicine to dramatize a composer's hegemony in the musical world. If a surgeon, he writes, "prefers to cut out appendices with a sterilized can-opener, no power in western society can prevent him from doing so, excepting the individual patient's refusal to be operated on at all." As for competence to judge the outcome of professional education, Thomson admits that "a certain number of prize competitions [are] still judged by orchestra conductors and concert managers." But still he insists: "Nobody but composers can attest a student's mastery of the classical techniques of musical composition or admit [another composer] to membership in any performing rights society." Finally, Thomson notes that only rarely do professionals "allow controversy to diminish their authority or their receipts." "Every profession administers a body of knowledge that is indispensable to society," he believes, "and it administers that knowledge as a monopoly."^[10]

Thomson's view of musicians' occupations is functional and hierarchical. For what, precisely, do different musical agents get paid, he asks? The answers determine their places in a hierarchy that privileges intellectual autonomy and control, with composers at the top.^[11] Composers make the designs upon which other agents depend. While they

may work on commission—that is, collect a fee to compose a certain piece—their professional income reflects most of all their success in leasing to others the rights to perform, record, or otherwise "exploit" their music.^[12] Performers "execute" the patterns made by composers and, as Thomson says, are "paid by the hour." Their work also demands a high degree of skill, which identifies them occupationally as craft practitioners. (One might add, as Thomson does not, that in vernacular music, having gained the composer's implicit or explicit assent, performers reinterpret and recompose pieces and hence assume some of the composer's function.) Teachers' occupational status is a matter of some dispute. Their calling fits the standard definition of "profession" more closely than the composer's does, for teaching is often a full-time, income-producing occupation, it requires extended practical and theoretical training as well as certification, and it espouses an ethic of service. Yet teaching—more a means to an end than an end in itself— lacks the intellectual autonomy enjoyed by other professions. For now, perhaps it will be enough to classify teaching (and writing about music, too) as part profession and part not, returning for a closer look later in the chapter.^[13] As for the other agents of music, distributing music is clearly not a profession, a craft, or a trade but a business, while manufacturing musical instruments and goods involves both craft and business skills.^[14]

Music-making in the United States has been shaped by professionals, trade and craft practitioners, and business people who, working alone or together, have followed the occupational callings open to them. What is crucial to note is how differently music has been financed in the United States and western Europe. In Europe, whether or not individual musicians were able to take advantage of it, financial support for artistic activity, in the form of patronage, emanated from the top of a hierarchical society whose ordering was hereditary. In America, where any social hierarchy has been unofficial, temporary, and nonhereditary, musicians have had to find their own support. In the Old World, structures dispensing artistic patronage already existed; music-making was stimulated by and flowed into them. In the New World, such structures, where there were any, were by-products, results and not causes, of musical activity. Music-making in America was able to create such structures of financial support only at points where enough money was

earned or donated to perpetuate some institution with continuity—for example, a publishing firm, a conservatory, a theatrical circuit, or a symphony orchestra.

The story of American musical "economies" is complex. Each profession, craft, trade, or business has its own history, accessible chiefly through biographical study. But while the scholarly literature is rich in biographies of musicians as artists, we know much less about the field's trade practitioners and business leaders. Who were the people who had the most to do with shaping each of the American musical callings, and how do we know? What can we learn about their practice of that calling, especially from an economic point of view? What occupations did musicians pursue in the course of their lives, and how did they pursue them? By studying many individuals, will we find patterns that will lead to a better understanding of their occupations? Once occupational roles are more carefully separated and considered, what can we learn by examining their relatedness, both in the lives of individual musicians and, more generally, in the musical activity of institutions, locales, and the nation as a whole?^[15]

An inquiry like the present one can do little more than to raise such questions. Nor would even detailed answers to all of them tell the full story of American musical "economies." Not all support for American music has come from earned income. At certain points in the story, patronage has appeared—patronage in the European sense, where a patron gives money to an artist for the production and/or performance of works of art. Not until well into the nineteenth century did patronage begin to contribute to American structures of musical support—structures that in Europe were traditional. And not until our own century has the state involved itself in musical support in any important way.

This chapter and the next sketch some of the ways in which musical professions and occupations have functioned in American musical life. As the normal agencies for American music-making, musical occupations offer a vantage point that, like the historiographical one of chapter 1, complements the customary view of the history of music, which is centered upon musical compositions, styles, and genres. The professions and occupations have also established the context in which patronage has appeared. As departures from the norm, examples of American musical patronage are best considered unusual events, called into play by extraordinary circumstances.

There's little ambiguity in the openly commercial grounding of many American musical transactions. But as we recoguize "business" as the very turf upon which American musical life has been constituted, we see more clearly that musicians' need to make a living has been the driving force behind two centuries of American music-making. That recognition undermines confidence in a fixed border between "commercial" and "noncommercial" arenas. Moreover, as we come to appreciate the artistry of certain commercially driven American musicians—Irving Berlin is a good recent example—we are reminded that commercial motives do not necessarily overwhelm all others. The artistic legacy of unabashed commercialism may be as mixed as that of other motives that American musicians have espoused. But the reach of commercial values, however ample, has left open spaces in the American musical landscape for other values to appear. Musicians in callings remote from money and the power that it brings have shown great resourcefulness in attaching themselves to American beliefs and values that extend beyond the commercial arena and even beyond music itself. Thus, like Sessions and his compatriots, they have discovered how, within the American music business, to carry on musical activities that cannot pay for themselves.

Let's begin our survey with a statement from 1753 about the post of organist at St. Philip's Anglican Church in Charleston, South Carolina. According to the Vestry, St. Philip's organist could expect to make about £200 per year. Earnings would come from three sources:

1. pay for playing the organ, about £50 yearly, or one-fourth of the total earnings;

2. fees for "teaching the Harpsichord or Spinnet" privately, projected at "at least . . . 100 if not 150 Guineas" per year, which amounts to half, and perhaps as much as three-fourths of the total;

3. fees for performing in public concerts, which might amount to as much as "30 or 40 Guineas per Annum more" per year.

In other words, the holder of what was surely a prestigious musical post in eighteenth-century Charleston could expect to make less than half

his living by fulfilling that post's official duties. Most of his income was to come from giving private lessons—from teaching music rather than playing it. As for concerts, he could expect relatively little from them, and then only if he showed "obliging Behaviour to the Gentlemen and Ladies of the place."^[16]

The priorities of this document from the Colonial south reverberate through the later history of American music. Indeed, from the eighteenth century to the present, what Americans have wanted more than anything else from musicians is to be taught to sing and to play. Teaching has been the skill most widely demanded of musicians, the calling most readily available, the American musician's bread and butter, the service musicians have most often exchanged for a chance to pursue the musical passions closest to their hearts. Teaching is thus the logical starting point for our consideration of musical occupations in the United States.

In eighteenth-century America, singing masters who organized singing schools in which beginners were taught to sing sacred music outnumbered private teachers by far. Private teachers (like the Charleston organist) plied their trade chiefly in cities, where affluence and leisure time helped to form a public willing to pay for performance instruction. Singing masters worked both the city and the countryside, offering congregations and choirs in hamlets and villages the chance to improve their sung praise to the Almighty. Private lessons were one-on-one encounters; singing-school classes could reach dozens of scholars at once and cost the scholars only a modest fee.^[17] A private teacher was most likely an immigrant and a professional musician, a performer on several instruments who offered other musical services for sale as well.^[18] In contrast, singing masters needed to know only the standard psalm tunes and "the gamut"—the system of solmization. They were American-born, musically educated in singing schools themselves, and unlikely to make a whole career of the singing master's trade.^[19] The private teacher and the singing master fit the types described in chapter x as cosmopolitan and provincial.

Teaching, as the Charleston document shows, could be important to a cosmopolitan performer's career. In provincial psalmody, as the only real occupational calling, it was the cornerstone of the whole enterprise. The Calvinist branch of the Protestant Reformation had assigned music to congregations—to worshipers themselves and not

experts in the art (such as organists). By the 1720s in New England, singing schools were being founded to improve unaccompanied congregational singing. The first music published in the English-speaking colonies appeared in tunebooks compiled to serve congregations and singing schools.^[20] And the first American composers, virtually all of them active as singing masters, began in the 1760s to publish their compositions in American tunebooks;^[21] only in singing schools and their offshoots—meeting-house choirs and musical societies—could these composers find performers skilled enough to sing their music.^[22]

Thus, in New England psalmody of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the teaching trade absorbed functions that elsewhere existed as separate occupations: the performer, the composer, and even the distributor, to the extent that singing masters were involved with the publishing and selling of tunebooks. Psalmody was a public music, of course. But because its performance, closely linked with worship, lay almost entirely with the worshipers themselves, there was no chance for performing to develop as an independent calling. While a dollar or two might change hands for the right to print this hymn tune or that one, it was an age in which authors' royalties were unknown. There is every reason to believe that profit from printed tunebooks, if there was any, went not to compilers or composers—or even to the engravers, printers, and bookbinders who produced the book—but to the publishers who assumed financial risk.^[23] The chief source of income for a musician in psalmody, then, and the sole economic niche created by the widespread singing of American Calvinist congregations over nearly a century's time, was singing-school teaching.^[24]

To see the life of a New England singing master like Andrew Law (1749-1821) as the exercise of a career in music is to encounter a condition of stark scarcity.^[25] Law's activities and those of most of his fellow psalmodists dramatize a truth often overlooked: In most places on this continent, and for most people before the recent past, music-making has relied relatively little on cash. As an economy, early American psalmody was a subsistence enterprise. Religious zeal combined with social aspiration and musical responsiveness to attract scholars, the customers whose tuition fees funded the singing school. Drawing upon the energy and dedication of its participants, the singing school required only enough money to secure a steady supply of teachers. There is no evi-

dence that it produced additional capital.^[26] Masters who aspired to more profitable careers moved on to other trades. Andrew Law himself was an unusually energetic and strong-minded man—a born reformer with enough stamina to survive half a century of singing-mastering. Yet Law, like his contemporaries, was constrained by the acute scarcity of the economy in which he worked.

When Waldo Selden Pratt wrote, early in the twentieth century, that the authors of earlier American tunebooks "had no ambition except to serve an actual musical situation as they knew it,"^[27] he must not have been thinking of Law or Andrew Adgate, two psalmodists who, in the early Federal period, harbored visions of their field as an agent of religious and musical change.^[28] Pratt was right, however, about the outcome of these men's efforts. Both Law and Adgate come down through history as men who struggled bravely and vainly: Law to reform American musical taste and Adgate to fund singing schools through concert proceeds. Perhaps they failed for different reasons. But both lacked cohorts who might have aided their cause, as well as economic capital which might also have provided the means for success.^[29]

While it may seem strange to equate discipleship with money, in an economy like that of early American psalmody the two had much in common. They were the only resources that might have enabled the chief agent—the musician with a vision of change, a desire not just to serve an existing situation but to alter it—to extend his influence. Discipleship, by increasing the number of spokespersons, helps to communicate the chief agent's message; money enables the chief agent to hire others to do routine tasks, leaving him free to devote more attention to extending the reach of his enterprise. So powerful is the hold of music over those who love it that many American musical enterprises have, in effect, been subsidized by the devotion of the musically inclined—by those willing to trade their energy and skill not for money but for the worthiness and pleasure of serving the cause. As it happened, Law's goal of musical reform was achieved in New England in the years 1805-10, not through his own efforts but because a coalition of religiously motivated disciples appeared in those years, steering psalmody toward a more Europeanized style.^[30] This was not an economically driven reform. Rather, it resulted from the effective coordination of par-

ticipants' energies. But money did play a key role two decades later in a development that profoundly reshaped the teaching trade. Because one music teacher found, first in psalmody and then in teaching itself, an economic potential far beyond anything his predecessors imagined, the course of American musical economics, and hence of American musical life, changed dramatically during the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.

Lowell Mason (1792-1872) has long been recognized as an important figure in American music, and for good reason. Indeed, once we understand the economic context of psalmody that Mason inherited, his use—indeed transformation—of that economy reveals him as a musician uncannily in tune with the aspirations of his public. A Massachusetts native, Mason attended singing school as a youngster, and he also learned to play several instruments.^[31] In 1812 he left his home town of Medfield for Savannah, Georgia, where he was employed first in a dry goods store and then as a bank clerk. He maintained his involvement with music by leading church choirs and studying harmony and composition with Frederick L. Abel, an immigrant musician. It was also in Savannah, while still in his late twenties, that he compiled his first tunebook.

Mason's compilation was noteworthy for its content but even more for the circumstances of its publication. Much of the music he had chosen came from William Gardiner's Sacred Melodies, from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (London, 1812-15), whose appeal lay in its adaptation of melodies from great European masters like Handel, Haydn, Mozart, even Beethoven, to English hymn texts.^[32] Bearing his manuscript, whose stylistic consistency and purity were unusual, Mason visited Boston in the autumn of 1821. There he approached the Handel and Haydn Society, founded in 1815 to improve musical taste through performances of sacred works by European masters.^[33] The society agreed to sponsor his collection for an equal share of the profits.^[34] Appearing first in 1822, The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music was a resounding success. It went through nearly two dozen editions, and proceeds from its sales helped to support the society's activities for years to come.^[35] It also earned a considerable sum for Mason—according to Pratt, $12,000 by the time the last edition appeared (1839).^[36] In 1827, Lowell Mason, now thirty-five years old and thanks to his tunebook at

least $2,000 richer,^[37] left Savannah for Boston, where he assumed leadership of several Congregational church choirs and was elected president and conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society.^[38]

So far, Mason had worked chiefly as a musical amateur: During his fifteen years in Savannah he was always employed outside music as well as in it. Nevertheless, his success there as a teacher (i.e., choirmaster) and distributor (i.e., compiler and copublisher) of music enabled him to enter the ranks of American psalmodists at a high level of income when he moved north. Not long after Mason's arrival in Boston, he detected fresh opportunities. As Pratt notes, the public school "was first establishing itself as an institution" at precisely this time.^[39] Mason, who together with most psalmodists of his day felt duty-bound to "correct" the prevailing musical taste, grasped the advantages of teaching music to young children before their taste was formed. Earlier singing schools had welcomed teenagers and adults, but no one had ever concentrated on children. By doing precisely that—by forming a children's singing school, where receptive youngsters could learn to appreciate "good" music as they developed their skills—Mason saw a chance to strike a blow for musical improvement. Not incidentally, by extending his work beyond churchly institutions, he could also enlist new customers for his teaching and publications.

Mason refocused his energies without giving up his place in psalmody.^[40] He kept one church post (organist and choirmaster at Lyman Beecher's Bowdoin Street Church, 1831-44, then at the Central Congregational Church, 1844-51) and remained active as a sacred compiler,^[41] though he did resign the Handel and Haydn Society presidency.^[42] Forming a singing school especially for children, he taught it free of charge and watched it grow in a few years from a class of "six or eight" to one of "five or six hundred."^[43] A key to the school's success was Mason's donation of his services, made possible, at least in part, by the economic independence he had won working outside the field of music and from profits on his first tunebook. Mason's procedure was ingenious and effective. Spotting the need for a teaching service for which no niche existed, he volunteered to provide it without pay. Once he had demonstrated its worth, aided by a public performance,^[44] he helped sponsors set up structures to support the new service on a paying basis. He also brought out new tunebooks aimed at his new customers.^[45]

By 1832, a decade after his first sacred tunebook had appeared, Mason had embarked fully on the second phase of his musical career in Boston. A year later, in collaboration with George James Webb, Mason founded the Boston Academy of Music, centered chiefly on the teaching of music, both sacred and secular.^[46] The next year, Mason began to offer teachers' classes through the academy,^[47] and his Manual of the Boston Academy of Music (Boston, 1834; eleven more printings by 1861) was published to serve those classes.^[48] In 1837, following a precedent that had served him well in the past, Mason took what has been widely considered the most historically significant step of his life: He offered free music classes in one of Boston's public schools.^[49] The success of that volunteer experiment helped to establish music as a regular school subject, and it won Mason the post of superintendent of music in the Boston school system, a job he held from 1838 to 1845, when the Massachusetts State Board of Education named him to the staff of its teachers' institutes. Mason continued to teach music in the Boston schools until 1851, when he was fifty-nine years old, and he participated in the teachers' institutes until 1855.^[50]

The facts of Mason's career trace a path from sacred to secular and from scarcity to abundance. Entering the subsistence economy of psalmody as the compiler of a sacred tunebook, Mason struck an agreement that brought him capital from its publication. Having earned a profit from psalmody, he could expand his range beyond it without having to depend upon new endeavors for his livelihood. Mason's first master stroke was to enlist a prestigious organization to back his debut as a tunebook compiler. Then he anticipated that vast economic gain was possible through secular education. But the crowning achievement of his later years was to target music teachers rather than music students as his chief customers. Mason's career shows a knack for assessing a rapidly changing situation while also participating in it. Hence, he was able to locate his own occupational activity in ever-widening contexts, each new stage increasing his clientele and influence. In the 1830s, without discarding the framework of psalmody, he broadened it gen-erationally, courting hordes of future customers. Then, having made himself the first American expert on how young children learned music, he enlisted and trained as disciples the teachers of those children, supplying them not only with ideas and techniques but with publications to meet their needs in the classroom. By the 1850s, rather than "serv[ing]

an actual musical situation as [he] knew it," as Pratt put it, Mason had helped to create a new one, supported by a growing trade network that he himself had invented.

Mason's erstwhile colleague George Frederick Root (1820-95) told a story about Mason that shows the latter's economic savvy at work. According to Root,^[51] William Woodbridge convinced Mason that he should try to apply Pestalozzian principles to teaching vocal music. "If you will call together a class," Woodbridge promised, "I will translate and write out each lesson for you . . . as you want it, and you can try the method; it will take about twenty-four evenings." Mason agreed, and the class was assembled in "the large lecture room of Park Street Church, Boston." Root does not give the year, but it must have been early in the 1830s.^[52] "Speaking to Dr. Mason once about this remarkable class," Root relates, "I asked him what those ladies and gentlem[e]n paid for that course of twenty-four lessons. 'Oh, they arranged that among themselves,' he replied. 'They decided that five dollars apiece would be about right.' 'And how many were there in the class?' He smiled as he answered: 'About five hundred.' "^[53] The class, Root says, "was composed largely of prominent people of the city who were interested in musical education." If Mason could turn another man's suggestion into a more than comfortable yearly income for just twenty-four evenings of work,^[54] it's clear that his earlier coup with the Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music was more than beginner's luck. Mason's was the first career that revealed American music, potentially at least, as a profit-making enterprise.^[55]

The economic perspective offers a good vantage point for understanding the impact of Mason's career. In the musical environment he inherited, the pervasive issue was how music could best serve religious devotion. Giving much energy to that cause throughout his life, the devout Mason left behind a deep legacy in sacred music. But Mason's transforming insight was to recognize psalmody as part of a larger world of music, one of many worthwhile kinds of American music-making. Once he grasped that fact—once he perceived music as a realm that contained psalmody rather than one contained by religion—Mason extended his professional reach. Music-making, his insight taught him, was not only an indispensable way to enter a state of grace in worship. It was also a pleasurable human activity: a wholesome, enjoyable way to spend leisure time, and a gratifying social pastime. And a society growing

more urban and middle class was beginning to find the accessibility of musical experience a more urgent matter than the devotional concerns of an earlier age. Teaching, Mason perceived, could be the key to accessibility. If Americans were steered toward music as youngsters—if they were shown how to sing and to read notes, and provided with simple, attractive, affordable pieces to perform—the pleasures of making music would be open to them for the rest of their lives. A musician who understood how to teach children, who could convey that understanding to other teachers, and who could supply music that beginners would enjoy singing could benefit society while at the same time finding more customers than earlier American music teachers ever dreamed of.

Mason's career points the way to certain formative patterns in American musical life. It dramatizes the significance of teaching as the American musical occupation. It shows how one occupational calling can provide a framework in which others can develop. And it reveals that American music, at first strictly a subsistence enterprise, was transformed into a capitalistic one by discovering a musical service or artifact for which demand is large, pricing it within many customers' reach, and keeping control over the surplus income that results.^[56] The implications of the latter point have shaped the American music business in many of its manifestations since Mason's time, especially in its tireless cultivation of arenas of demand. Surely it's worth noting that, while Mason himself got rich through a shrewd use of opportunities within the teaching trade, other musical callings can be much more profitable. But if teaching offers even its successful practitioners lesser rewards than some other callings, the pervasive and continuing demand for it has given teaching considerable economic power, which has helped it to foster an immense range of American musical activity.

Changes in the teaching trade during and after Mason's time reflect new demands. Private teaching broadened its sphere considerably. On the cosmopolitan end, it grew more specialized and, as conservatories and college music departments sprang up after the Civil War, began to provide high-level training.^[57] Moreover, the activities of both private teachers and singing masters grew more diversified.

The role of the private teacher, restricted in the eighteenth century mainly to the secular cosmopolitan tradition, found a new focus during the nineteenth, chiefly in response to the boom in middle-class home music-making. Chapter 5 will take up this issue in more detail. But for

now, it's worth noting that with the creation of a vast repertory of songs and instrumental pieces—composed or arranged with the skills of American musical amateurs in mind, published and sold in sheet-music form, supported by the successful design and marketing of affordable pianos— the middle-class American home was turned into a center of musical performance and a prime market for the music business. The aspirations of this new set of performers were served by a new corps of private teachers.^[58]

As for the singing class and the provincial singing master, both survived in their earlier forms in certain regions; the farther from the influence of urban centers, the more likely they were to continue.^[59] (Washington Irving invented Ichabod Crane, a singing master, in 1819.) Mason's efforts helped to separate the singing class from its sacred origin and install it in the public school, where it has maintained a place to the present day. A roughly parallel process took place somewhat later in instrumental music. Early in this century, the instrumental ensemble, and especially the wind band, perceived as a wholesome, constructive, group enterprise for youngsters, was also embraced by the public school, creating a need for bandmasters and instrumental teachers as well as vocal ones.^[60]

The sharp increase in the number of Americans seeking musical instruction widened the range of occupational skills and expectations of the musicians who taught them. At one end of the spectrum stood the Edward MacDowells and Horatio Parkers, hired in the 1890s by prestigious universities as professors chiefly because of their work as composers. At the other stood the school master or marm whose professional credentials consisted of attendance at a "normal institute," a summer residency program that trained music teachers in a few weeks' time.^[61] Somewhere in between stood men like W. S. B. Mathews, the historian of American music we met in chapter 1, whose activities reveal the American music teacher in a role familiar today: the inveterate scrambler whose livelihood depends on energy, versatility, and tight scheduling. Writing in 1859, Mathews described in Dwight's Journal of Music his own activities—typical, he said, for a music teacher "out west."^[62] In a single week, Mathews gave twenty-eight private lessons on the piano or melodeon at 50 cents each, taught three singing schools in three different towns at $1 per scholar for twelve sessions, led three choir rehearsals and two public-school music classes, and presided on

Sunday at four worship services. Mathews, it should be noted, was twenty-two years old when he fired off this dispatch. Whether or not he eventually suffered what a later age has come to call "burnout," by the time he was thirty he had settled in Chicago as a church organist, editor of a music periodical, music critic, and prolific writer on musical subjects. Teaching for Mathews, and for many other American music teachers as well, was a stepping stone, a way to maintain musical skills and to survive as a musician while remaining alert for new opportunities.

The more specialized the musical skills taught, the more expert command a teacher needs, and the more likely it is that teaching will occupy a secondary rather than a primary place in the teacher's musical aspirations. In this century, the teaching trade has broadened to encompass other specialties. Financial support, both public and private, has grown for conservatories and university music departments staffed by musicians who, while instructing student performers, conductors, composers, scholars, and teachers, are expected also to carry on their own specialties at a high level of competence. The presence of such specialist-teachers has allowed these institutions to build professional composing, performing, and writing about music into their educational programs.^[63]

The link between higher education and the professions of music deserves more comment. In some academic environments, musicians who teach for a living maintain another musical profession outside the academy. Colleges and universities have also helped to bridge the gap between the professions and patronage by supporting things—compositions, performances, scholarly research and writing—that cannot survive in the marketplace.^[64] Such activities are accepted not so much because society values them but because they are carried on in the name of education. They reflect public approval of the more conspicuous results of teaching, from opera performances and orchestral concerts to glee clubs and marching bands. Or, more precisely, they reflect public trust that good teaching lies behind these public successes. Many skillful musicians have found in teaching a way to buy time for their own work. Lowell Mason's career is simply one of many illustrations that, more than any other musical occupation, teaching has stretched the framework within which American musicians find employment. Since the eighteenth century, teaching has touched upon, overlapped with, infused, and in some cases subsumed other occupations for which demand has been less direct.

In some academic settings the position of teachers recalls that of musicians under European patronage: They are supported by private or public funds and given the freedom to pursue their own professional ends as long as their teaching gets done. This freedom has been won not by official decree but more gradually and indirectly: by the efforts of musicians working on two separate fronts over several generations. On the one hand, by teaching students how to sing and play and teach music themselves, colleges and universities have responded to society's direct musical needs. On the other hand, by using teaching as a way to subsidize performance, scholarship, and composition—as Roger Sessions and his compatriots have discovered—the academy has helped to create an appetite for more and more specialized instruction and a protected niche for music outside the marketplace.

I have claimed teaching as the foundation of the American music business and hence of much in American musical life; perhaps now we should look at the bedrock on which the foundation itself rests—the most fundamental musical calling of all. Composition, or musical authorship, is the act that sets Western music-making in motion. Other musical occupations depend upon it, for all music must be invented sometime by somebody. And yet, in the United States, composing can hardly be said even today to provide a real livelihood for many, as other occupations have.

From the very beginnings of musical commerce on this side of the Atlantic, there was little chance for composing to become a livelihood, not to mention a profession. In the eighteenth century, American performers, teachers, publishers, and instrument makers each had their own special concerns. But all could take it for granted that music was available in ample supply—music from the British Isles and the European continent. The needs of Old World people and institutions brought this music into being. Oral tradition and written notation circulated and preserved it. It was composed by musicians in Europe, some of whom were able to pursue composing as a substantial part of their own occupation. Americans, too, began to compose in the eighteenth century, but they did so almost entirely outside the music business.^[65] Why? Chiefly because the ready supply of European music made American compositions unnecessary to the functioning of the other occupations.

Composers in America have earned money by writing music only at points where the supply of music from the Old World has failed to meet American needs .

The problem of composing as a way to make a living lies in the nature of musical notation. As the means by which composers fix, communicate, and sell their music, musical notation is indispensable to composing as a profession.^[66] Yet, by preserving and circulating music in the absence of its composer, notation complicates the role of musical authorship. Once performers get hold of scores they can read, the composers of these scores become superfluous to them. While teachers, performers, publishers, and the rest find employment by acting in the present, the composer lives in a less time-bound arena; for notation brings into the present music that people wish to play or sing. Performances exist in the present, or at least they did before recordings. But the notation upon which performances depend can be supplied from other times and places. To make a living as a composer, one must therefore compete successfully not only with one's contemporaries and compatriots but also with one's predecessors from elsewhere in the world.

Since the eighteenth century, Americans have been amply supplied with music by European composers. This European legacy has been fundamental to American musicians. It has also helped to shape the working life of composers. To illustrate this point, let's look at a career that comes as close as any to marking the start of composing as a profession in the United States.

Alexander Reinagle, son of a professional trumpeter, was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1756 and established himself as a harpsichord teacher in Glasgow by 1778. Around 1784, he traveled to Hamburg, where he met C. P. E. Bach, with whom he later corresponded. The Royal Society of Musicians in London admitted him to membership the next year. In the spring of 1786 Reinagle sailed for New York and, after spending two months there, moved to Philadelphia, where he settled. Reinagle taught privately and gave concerts over the next several years. Then, early in the 1790s, he became comanager of the New Company, a Philadelphia-based theatrical troupe for which the city's famous Chestnut Street Theater was built in 1793. From his seat at the pianoforte, Reinagle presided over the music in the New Company's performances. Behind the scenes, he served as the company's chief composer until he moved to Baltimore in 1803. Reinagle died in 1809.^[67]

During his early years in America, Reinagle's own compositions served him in the public performances he gave. He organized benefit concerts for himself in New York and Philadelphia, participated in other musicians' concerts, and also presented subscription concert series in both cities. His programs, which contain listings like "Sonata for Pianoforte by Mr. Reinagle," testify that he often played his own keyboard works in public. He also conducted his own overtures, played his own violin compositions, and even sang songs that he had composed.^[68]

Reinagle's published music reveals his right to a special niche in the evolution of the professional composer's role in the United States. When he arrived in the New World in 1786, no such thing as an American music publisher existed. Printed music in the cosmopolitan tradition was imported from abroad; the typical domestic musical publication was the sacred tunebook, brought out by book publishers. However, by the time Reinagle assumed his theatrical duties, several American music publishing firms had entered the business. The American music publishing trade, in fact, was born in Philadelphia while Reinagle was working there as a freelance musician. Its founding and Reinagle's presence were no coincidence. For between 1787 and the beginning of 1793, sheet-music publication in this country took place only in the shop of John Aitken, a Philadelphia engraver and silversmith. Aitken issued sixteen works in those six years, chiefly songs and keyboard pieces. As Richard Wolfe has shown, all but four of the sixteen were either composed by, arranged by, or printed for Alexander Reinagle.^[69]

Reinagle's compositions are not the only evidence of his involvement in the American music publishing trade from its very beginning. In a newspaper announcement soon after his arrival in New York, he advertised for pupils "in Singing, on the Harpsichord, Piano Forte, and Violin," and he added that he proposed "to supply his Friends and Scholars with the best instruments and music printed in London."^[70] This suggests that he left England planning to act as a New World representative of London music merchants. Wolfe has also shown that the punches Aitken used in his shop were of English design, and he speculates that Aitken may well have acquired them through Reinagle in his role as London publishers' agent.^[71]

The opening of music publishing shops in America was a key event in the establishment of composing as a profession. As suggested above, not until music was notated and put into salable form for circulation

did it become a commodity that could be bought and sold. Only if the composer participated in the publication process, as Reinagle apparently did in his work with Aitken—sharing at least some part of the financial risk—or, as was more common later, struck a royalty agreement with a publisher, could he hope to profit from his labors.^[72] I have said that composing in America became a profession only at points or in genres where the supply of music from the Old World failed to meet American needs. As it turned out, the American music publishing trade relied heavily on Old World music during the first half-century of its existence.^[73] Yet, with an American composer actively involved from its very beginning, seemingly as a prime mover, the founding of a music publishing trade opened to musicians on this side of the Atlantic a way to participate in the music business as composers.

Reinagle's post with the New Company at the Chestnut Street Theater brought composing closer to the center of his professional life than it had been earlier. Between 1793 and his death, he supplied music for more than twenty new stage works; he also composed and arranged songs, and he wrote overtures, incidental music, and orchestral accompaniments for theatrical works by other composers. Almost all of Reinagle's theater music was later destroyed in a fire, so that side of his work is mostly inaccessible today. But the music that does survive provides a good idea of what was expected of its composers.

Music in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American theater served as a pleasant, entertaining embellishment to the story acted out on stage, much of which was carried on in speech. The ability to write graceful tunes with clear text declamation, to highlight the vocal strengths of the company's performers, to provide effective orchestral accompaniments, to know what to borrow from other composers and where to place it for strongest dramatic effect, to work quickly and efficiently under pressure, and to accept one's subordinate place in the whole enterprise—these were the traits valued in a composer in this position. All indications are that the musical tasks for which the New Company employed Reinagle were more or less routine for a composer of his skill.^[74]

With Reinagle's career in mind, let's look at two examples of his music. Figure 1 is the first page of a piano sonata he composed in Philadelphia, probably between 1786 and 1794;^[75] it shows his command of the keyboard idiom of eighteenth-century European masters.

Figure 1.
Folio IV, opening page of Sonata No. 1, from Reinagle's autograph
 manuscript, ca. 1800 (Library of Congress ML96.R28)

Example 1.
Reinagle, "America, Commerce, and Freedom," bars 28-42
 (The Sailor's Landlady [1794]; after H. Wiley Hitchcock, 
Music in the United States [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969], 29)

Example 1 is part of a song Reinagle wrote for the ballet pantomime The Sailor's Landlady (1794).^[76]

By almost any accepted standard of aesthetic judgment, Reinagle's sonata is a more impressive piece of music than his song. Yet the sonata never found its way into print until 1978, while there is every reason to believe that "America, Commerce, and Freedom" was published immediately after it was composed.^[77] Why should a good piano sonata lie neglected while a routine song by the same composer is printed and offered for sale to the public? Because in eighteenth-century America there was a healthy market for songs and almost no market for piano sonatas. Songs were short, melodious, inexpensive, and they had words—all appealing traits to the amateur performers of the time who bought sheet music. The theatrical context of songs added to their attractiveness: One could hear a song performed onstage, buy a copy,

and sing the song at home oneself. Sonatas, on the other hand, were reserved for more accomplished musicians. Mastering a sonata required skill, practice, and, most likely, lessons. Besides, players who were technically accomplished could buy music by European masters like Handel, the sons of Bach, and Haydn himself. Who needed a piano sonata by Alexander Reinagle? Reinagle's own answer remains elusive, for his four sonatas stayed in manuscript for nearly two centuries after he composed them.

In Reinagle's two compositions may be read the divided heritage of composing as a profession in the United States. Reinagle the composer with intellectual autonomy and authority appears in figure 1, Reinagle the composer with economic muscle in example 1. The gap between composing as a profession of the kind Virgil Thomson has described and composing as a livelihood is dramatized by the differences between the two pieces. In the sonata, Reinagle exercised technical command and seriousness of artistic purpose for their own sake, unconnected with economic potential. In the song, technique and constructive power yielded priority to making a tuneful surface to catch the public ear.

Having noted the professional implications of Reinagle's sonata and his song, we may consider something else about the way notation has functioned in American musical life. Here we must be careful not to speak about written music as if it were simply one thing. For there are actually two distinct kinds of written music, illustrated by Reinagle's two pieces.

The first kind, exemplified by the sonata, is what both Thomson and Jacques Attali describe as a normative musical composition. Here a composer invents a piece of music and writes down his or her instructions in enough detail that it can be played or sung precisely as the composer has conceived and imagined it. The performer, in turn, accepts the composer's score in an attitude of deference and strives to carry out the latter's instructions as closely as possible. In the second kind of written music, exemplified by Reinagle's song, things work differently. The composer's score is far less detailed. And its lack of detail is an invitation for performers to sing or play it any way they like. Some performers might want to simplify or decorate the written version. Some might prefer it in a different key. Some might accompany it with cello or guitar, or with the final keyboard section left out, or lengthened, or sing it with no accompaniment at all, or at a very fast clip or a slow

one. Departures from the score like these would be unacceptable in the sonata; they would change its very nature. But in the song, they would hardly be noticed. For the score of a song like "America, Commerce, and Freedom" is understood not as a finished statement but an outline to be filled in, to be "realized," by performers in any way they choose.

In an article published some years ago, I called the first kind of written music "composers' music" and the second "performers' music."^[78] I did this because I felt uneasy with the standard polarities— "classical" and "popular," or "cultivated" and "vernacular," or "serious" and "light" music—because they seemed more categorical and value-laden than a historical view of music would support.^[79] With the typology of "composers' music" and "performers' music" in mind, it's clear that professionalism's different elements pulled Reinagle in opposite directions as a composer. "Performers' music" like "America, Commerce, and Freedom" offered the chance of pecuniary success but no authority over its performances. "Composers' music" like the piano sonata offered intellectual autonomy at the price of economic potential. Reinagle's two pieces reflect the structure of a divided profession: To compose either composers' or performers' music was to forfeit one of the profession's traditional perquisites, whether it be technical control or economic reward. By writing both, Alexander Reinagle managed to exercise in his compositional mind, if not embody in his music, the full range of a professional composer's opportunities and obligations.

If composing became a livelihood in America only where the supply of music from the Old World failed to meet American needs, we can see that it has been in performers' music, not composers' music, that the Old World has fallen short. American composers of performers' music—from Reinagle's "America, Commerce, and Freedom," to Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home," to W. C. Handy's "The St. Louis Blues," to Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin' "—are the composers who have won a secure place in the American music business. By appealing to the tastes and adapting to the talents of many performers, the music of these men has established them as "professional" composers in an economic sense if not in the full sense of Thomson's intellectually based hierarchy.^[80]

Having noted the importance of performers' music, let's look again at composers' music—at Reinagle as a writer of piano sonatas and at Sessions and company as writers of music for the concert hall—and

examine its professional heritage. During the nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, American composers' music existed mostly outside the music business. This did not discourage Americans from composing it, any more than Reinagle was stopped from composing sonatas because sonatas were unmarketable. In fact, the widespread impulse to compose is a striking feature of nineteenth-century American musical life. Scratch an organist, a pianist, even a historian, and you find a composer with a drawerful of songs, sonatas, concertos, cantatas, symphonies.^[81] Little of this music was professionally motivated. But there it stands—or, rather, lies: testimony to the industriousness of its authors and of their urge to contribute their own mite to the tradition of the European masters.

The twentieth century has seen the gradual alienation of many composers of composers' music from other musical trades and occupations and from much of the concert-going audience as well. Yet alienation has not dampened the urge to compose. The writing of new composers' music goes on at what seems like a quickening pace, and all over the United States composers are hard at it, pouring their creative efforts into works that may never be heard, except in their own imaginations. This state of affairs suggests that complex, even contradictory impulses are at work. One step toward sorting them out is to distinguish between the profession of composer, the role of the composer, and the place of the composer, considering them as three different though complementary things.

Thomson described in 1939 how American composers make a living: "[the composer] plays in cafés and concerts. He conducts. He writes criticism. He sings in church choirs. He reads manuscripts for music publishers. He acts as musical librarian to institutions. He becomes a professor. He writes books. He lectures on the Appreciation of Music."^[82] Conspicuous by its absence from the list are the words "he writes music." Perhaps the range of duties has changed a bit in the half-century since Thomson wrote. But the principle remains the same. As has been true since the time of Alexander Reinagle, the profession of composer of composers' music is only indirectly linked to a livelihood, and almost all such composers earn their keep by doing something else.

What about the role of composer? The question answers itself, for what nation would admit that it has no composers? Certainly we have composers: hundreds, even thousands of them. And we are knee-deep

in composers' music.^[83] Perhaps, as in the nineteenth century, the supply would have been assured in any case. But something new has appeared in the twentieth century: an institutional commitment to supporting the role of composer. This commitment is reflected by the beachhead that composers have won in the academy, the preserve gained by teaching. It is also reflected by patronage—in earlier years devoted almost entirely to supporting performers in the concert hall and opera house—which in our century has begun to be available to composers.

During and after World War I, as the reverberations from radical movements in Europe began to reach American shores, a few modernist composers, rejected by the concert establishment, managed to find patrons, as in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's support of Edgard Varèse, or Harriette Miller's of Carl Ruggles, or Alma Wertheim's of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris.^[84] But more typical has been the institutional patronage that began in the 1920s. In 1925, for example, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge established at the Library of Congress an endowment for commissions, prizes, and concerts, with the funds open to European and American composers alike.^[85] Beginning the same year, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation offered the first of the year-long stipends it has since granted to North American composers.^[86] Then there is the Fromm Music Foundation, established in 1952 to commission, record, and sponsor repeated performances of new works.^[87] Other private agencies, such as the Ford^[88] and Rockefeller Foundations,^[89] have also supported and commissioned new works from living composers. As for the federal government, whose earlier support of music had been limited to the military (since the end of the eighteenth century)^[90] and the depression-inspired relief measures of the WPA (1935-41),^[91] it established its own program of composers' patronage in 1965 when the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities was founded.^[92] These programs, and others like them, distribute funds on a revolving basis, treating applicants' claims to patronage as more or less equal and rewarding them after they take their turn in line. The way the programs are administered testifies at once to their commitment to supporting and maintaining the role of composer and their democratic reluctance to favor any single composer.

If the role of the composer of composers' music is firm, their place in our musical life is small, and the shadow they cast over the American musical landscape is hard to detect. Place means presence, and in music

presence means performance. In New York and a few other large cities, and on some university campuses, the composer's place is established by the chance to hear his or her music. But outside these circles, with their groups of specialist players, who, incidentally, make their way chiefly by other professional activity, that music is hardly heard at all, and composers exist chiefly as representatives of an honored role, their work reviewed and cataloged but not much relished.

In the field of American composers' music today, the imbalance between composers' honored role, their neglected place, and their almost nonexistent profession is striking. These different dimensions reveal our society's respect, in principle, for what composers are and what they do: talented, dedicated musicians who, as the heirs of Beethoven, maintain the legacy of past glories while also exploring new worlds of sound on society's behalf. At the same time, they reveal an indifference, perhaps even a hostility that amounts to a rejection of the experience that modern composers' music offers.

How does modern society treat something it respects but does not savor? The way we have treated most twentieth-century American composers' music: by finding a safe place for it. Composers' music by Americans—supported by various kinds of professional arrangements (including performing-rights income),^[93] complemented by a modest but steady flow of patronage in the form of commissions, prizes, and fellowships—exists today in an environment like that of a laboratory. I borrow the analogy in part from Milton Babbitt, who once likened the "specialist" academic composer to the theoretical mathematician or physicist.^[94] I'm also under the impression that labs, even when funded by laypeople, are run by experts, who evaluate how the lab's work is going. That's a way of pointing toward a noteworthy development among American composers of composers' music since World War II: the winning of autonomy—the right to compose essentially outside the strictures of audience esteem, or critics' approval, or the tastes and preferences of performers.

Autonomy has expressed itself in a feeling that, as Thomson suggested half a century ago, composers are perhaps the best judges of each others' works, even to the point of dispensing patronage, for the benefactions that reach composers are dispensed, at least in part, with the advice of a review of peers. Composers' music is thus composers' music both in its premise that the score controls the performance and

in the narrowness of the world it inhabits—a world of composers and a small number of specialist-theorists who know their work. This is not to say that composers would spurn the chance to be heard and appreciated by a much larger audience. It is merely to recognize their lot. Through hard labor and the acceptance of a lofty, lonely vision of their calling, they have carved out for themselves an autonomous niche within the broader world of musical professions, occupations, and patronage. Most American composers of composers' music seek a home within that niche. Finding such a home depends chiefly on how good the composer is at addressing fellow composers. In other words, composers of composers' music today write the kind of music that they are commissioned, supported, and expected to write.

Historians concentrate on what is lasting, and in music history the score lasts long after the sounds of performance have died away and the memories of personalities and public careers have faded. That's one reason that music historians have concentrated on musical scores. We earn our methodological spurs by grouping scores for study and interpreting them as distillations of musical life—as, in effect, what matters most about a given musical culture.

Musical scores, however, can distill not only music itself but the context within which music is made—not only the musical style, the artistry, and the aesthetic achievement of composers but the impact of a musician's livelihood upon his or her music-making. As Virgil Thomson argued half a century ago, in essays called "How Composers Eat" and "Why Composers Write How: Or the Economic Determinism of Musical Style," in the United States, where music reflects the pressures of the marketplace, money and musical style are closely intermingled.^[95] The scores of a forgotten composer like Alexander Reinagle may seem remote from present-day concerns. But if we can understand them as reflections and distillations of a professional environment that has shaped the particular, idiosyncratic patterns of American composition, then we can begin to recognize the continuity of our country's musical history and to see Reinagle, and Roger Sessions, and today's composers of composers' music as musicians linked in a tradition that began on this side of the Atlantic at least two centuries ago.

3
Professions and Patronage II: Performing

Performing has been the most conspicuous American musical profession and one of the most profitable. The musicians best known to the public have been performers. But behind the limelight of public regard, it must be remembered, musical performance is a distillation: the public result of many different agents' endeavors.

In the professional realm, the public concert^[1] is the emblematic event, for it is there that musical effort comes to fruition. A composer's invention, a teacher's regimen, an instrument-maker's labor, an entrepreneur's search for a forum, a critic's judgment—all, in a professional sense, revolve around the moment when performers sing or play music for the public to hear. For it's up to the performer to seize the occasion and, through artistry, technique, intellect, and personality, connect with an audience. In that connection lies the ultimate power of Western music-making. Performers risk much. But their intensely competitive profession offers rich rewards in money and fame.

Famous performers have been among the most fascinating American public figures, and few musical subjects are more ineffable than the relationship between them and their audiences. What makes a star performer? How can the "magic" of an excellent performance be described? Much has been written about performers—especially their lives and personalities—with questions like these in mind. Yet answers have remained elusive. Perhaps the reason is obvious. Because musical performance seeks connection, it is often judged less by what performers do than by how they are received. Therefore, writings that concentrate on performers without considering the audience and what it expects from them leave these questions unanswered.

To think of audiences and their reception of performers is to recognize that music is a particular kind of human interaction as well as an art. But how, in America, did audiences for music come to exist in the first place? In a country lacking the institutions that in Europe sponsored musical performance, other means of support had to be found.^[2] Without opportunities to sing and play for pay, there can be no career for a performer. The creation of such opportunities is itself an occupation—the arm of musical distribution that brings performers together with audiences. Entrepreneurship is intertwined with performing so completely that neither can exist without the other. In fact, impresario, performer, and audience are bound together in a round of negotiation driven by the impresario's pursuit of economic gain. French pianist Henri Herz, who toured the United States in the 1840s, attributed to his American manager Bernard Ullman a definition of music that was obviously intended to sound cynical. In Ullman's mind, Herz wrote, music was "the art of attracting to a given auditorium, by secondary devices which often become the principal ones, the greatest possible number of curious people, so that when expenses are tallied against receipts, the latter exceed the former by the widest possible margin."^[3] This definition shows little respect for either manager or audience. The latter, drawn by curiosity, cannot tell "primary" from "secondary" allurements and hence hardly deserves an artist's attention, except as a source of income. The former, knowing the audience's gullibility, seeks to exploit it for his own and the performer's advantage. The performer's artistic skill is the commodity the manager seeks to peddle. But the performer's dedication to art, Herz implies, is threatened by professional circumstances, which oblige the performer to do whatever it takes to occupy a curiosity-seeking audience, lured into a concert hall by the blandishments of a money-driven promoter. Thus, Herz's mock definition of music offers an unadorned glimpse of the performing musician's profession in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

The first performers to appear regularly before paying audiences in America were the English men and women who sang on Colonial stages from the mid-eighteenth century on, brought to the New World by theatrical managers like Lewis Hallam, Jr.,^[4] and Thomas Wignell.^[5] The former arrived in the 1750s and toured North America's major cities, as well as some minor ones, presenting plays and ballad operas. By the

1790s, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston all had theatrical companies in residence. Their presence established in each of these places a corps of experienced, European-trained musicians—singing actors, actresses, and orchestra players—some of whom supplemented their incomes by giving concerts (and lessons). It also made familiar the idea of public events centered on music, or at least involving it, and relying on an audience to pay for them. That audience had to be recruited, and advertising was the chief means. Newspapers carried notices of upcoming plays and concerts. Such ads proclaimed the merits of the event or, if the performers were new in town, touted their credentials. "At Mr. Hull's Assembly Room, will be performed a great Concert extraordinary," announced the New York Mercury on 16 May 1774 in a typical public invitation,^[6] while in 1796 an advertisement for a concert in Charleston by "Signor Trisobio" identified him as "an Italian professor of vocal music, who had the honor to be employed three years in the Royal Chapel by the queen of Portugal and who last winter sung in London before all the royal family."^[7] Advertisements ranged from the informative —these musicians performing this music at this time and place—to the promotional, often hinting that something extraordinary, unprecedented, or elevating awaited the customer. The public was being sold a chance to see and hear professionals practicing their craft, whether to dramatize real life on stage, to mock human pretensions through comedy, or to edify, divert, or amaze audiences with musical skill: beauty of tone, agility of technique, or an affecting delivery of melody and text. Many eighteenth-century concerts were followed by social dancing, which enlivened them for audience participants.^[8]

Oscar G. Sonneck has documented how theatrical and concert life dovetailed in eighteenth-century America, with many of the same people—Alexander Reinagle, for example—involved in both. His studies also show that, from a professional standpoint, the "American" musical theater of the eighteenth century, like that of Bristol or Edinburgh, or even the West Indies, was an extension of the London stage. When Wignell and company sought new works or talent, they sailed to England to find them.^[9] Carried on throughout the English-speaking world, this tradition remained Colonial, and not until well into the next century did American-born singers and players begin to find places in the American theater. Concert life, though more flexibly structured than the

world of theatrical companies, followed suit. Sustained by its links with the theater, it was also similar in format and repertory. Some foreign performers toured the New World, then returned to the Old. Others settled here. But more important than questions of immigration and residency was the fact that both theater and concert stage perpetuated Old World traditions. In fact, all indications are that through the first four decades of the nineteenth century, a vast majority of professional performers in America—people who made their living chiefly by singing or playing—were foreign-born.^[10]

A new situation arose in the 1840s. By that time, as egalitarian ideals and technological progress moved into synchrony, economic development in the United States was shifting into higher gear.^[11] Musical activity increased too, with more and more performances taking place over an ever-widening territory.^[12] With a growing appetite for public performance came new theatrical forms and the rise of new varieties of entrepreneurship. In the theater, the blackface minstrel show was born. Outside it, promoters of musical attractions (like Bernard Ullman) helped to spark the increase, as did artists and troupes who by the late 1830s had begun to tour the country in search of audiences, sometimes under a manager's direction and sometimes making their own schedules and arrangements.^[13] Moreover, if not new to the 1840s, local musical societies also fostered performing careers, providing occasions where amateur and professional musicians could collaborate.^[14] These developments maintain some links with the past, especially in the continuing importance of the English theater and Americans' responsiveness to foreign performers and music. But the vast increase in music's potential audience and in opportunities for American-born performers, performing American music, to make a living by singing and playing signaled the start of a new era.

Theatrical managers, as holdovers from an earlier age of entrepreneurship, continued in the 1840s to house resident companies playing English opera and other dramatic entertainments. They also hosted traveling companies.^[15] By all odds, however, the most significant force to hit the American performing world in the first half of the nineteenth century was Italian opera, which, from the time of its New World debut in 1825, inspired struggles of entrepreneurship on its behalf. The story of the United States' embrace of Italian opera centers on New York City, whose elite society proved neither rich enough nor sufficiently

interested to support opera on its own. Lorenzo DaPonte, who emigrated to America in 1805 and found a post as a teacher of Italian, was involved from the start. First, DaPonte encouraged Irish-born merchant Dominick Lynch to bring Manuel Garcia's troupe to New York for a season of Italian opera at the Park Theater (1825-26).^[16] Several years later, he also helped to find sponsorship for a season staged by Bolognese impresario Giovanni Montresor's company (1832-33); then he and Lynch backed the building of a new Italian opera house, which opened in 1833. These efforts, like the launching of a new company by restaurateur Ferdinand Palmo in 1844 and the collaboration of 150 wealthy New Yorkers to give the new Astor Place Opera House its own company in 1847,^[17] all failed to win a permanent presence for opera in the city. Not until the 1850s was success achieved. At the Academy of Music, Bohemian-born impresario and conductor Max Maretzek devised a plan in which the works of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi, as well as other European masters, performed in a large hall (4,600 seats) at varied prices ($1.50 top, ranging down to 25 cents), attracted an ample base of public support.^[18]

If Italian opera proved so hard to establish in New York City, and if after 1850 New York and New Orleans were the only American cities with permanent resident companies,^[19] by what token does opera deserve to be called "the most significant force to hit the American performing world in the first half of the nineteenth century"? Such a statement may imply exaggerated respect for the prestige of an Old World genre. But in fact, there is much evidence to support it.

Italian opera relies upon the drama inherent in the notion of stage characters who express themselves in song. And the operatic stage proved a potent vehicle for such expressions: larger-than-life characters, dressed in finery and with strong, sometimes beautiful voices, pouring out their emotions—love, rage, grief, exultation—on a grand scale, to music suited for such displays. Opera singers earned adulation and moved audiences by making public spectacles of themselves. Their skill at capturing, distilling, protracting, and communicating the human passions with utter conviction was surely the ingredient that enabled opera to cut across social and class lines, attracting a wide range of nineteenth-century American listeners in performance.^[20]

But opera also reached far beyond the operatic stage. To speak of opera's "ingredients" is to recognize that, while being a form that unites

many varied devices in one convincing whole, it is also a bundle of elements that can be pulled apart, changed, and recombined in new settings. The programs given at New York's Olympic Theater provide a vivid example of opera's adaptability. Managed from 1839 by comedian William Mitchell, and with composer-conductor George Loder as music director—both were Englishmen—the Olympic offered light entertainment and specialized in opera burlesques for an admission of 12½ cents. Mitchell's The Roof Scrambler , a travesty of Bellini's La Sonnambula , was a particular hit there, as were later Mrs. Normer (1841; Bellini's Norma ), Sam Parr, with the Red Coarse Hair (1841; Hérold's Zampa, or The Red Corsair ) and Fried Shots (1843; Weber's Der Freischütz ).^[21] In works like these, operatic characters and plots were employed to the burlesquers' own ends, with music adapted and arranged freely from the original scores. Clearly, the titles, subjects, leading characters, and plot elements of famous operas were common cultural property. Clearly, too, famous operas supplied hit musical numbers for the sheet-music trade—numbers whose performance in stage parodies struck familiar chords with the audience.^[22] With opera as a source, moreover, performers could ring changes on its themes and twist its archetypal characters—the sleepwalker of La Sonnambula , the madwoman of Lucia , the magician of Der Freischütz —for comic effect or social comment.^[23] As a theatrical form, then, opera struggled for a toehold on American shores. But as a frame of reference and a cornucopia of song, it provided the American vernacular theater, and the musical scene in general, with a vitalizing force of great richness.

It was into an environment prepared by opera that blackface minstrelsy was received. The landmark event occurred on 6 February 1843, when Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, Dick Pelham, and Billy Whitlock, billed as "the novel, grotesque, original, and surpassingly melodious Ethiopian Band, entitled the Virginia Minstrels," staged an evening's entertainment in blackface at New York's Bowery Amphitheater. The resulting mania for similar companies, and for the new sound they brought into the theater—fiddle, banjo, bones, tambourines, and, as one advertisement put it, "other instruments of music used on the Southern Plantations"^[24] —is well known. Historians have explored both the minstrel show's indigenous roots and its racial stereotyping. What has been less often noticed, however, is how minstrelsy helped to transform the world of American musical performance.^[25]

Blackface minstrelsy was the first musical genre to reverse the east-to-west transatlantic flow of professional performers that had existed throughout this country's organized musical life. Until Americans discovered ways to present performing styles they themselves had invented, European dominance went unchallenged. An early example occurred in the 1830s, when black trumpeter Frank Johnson of Philadelphia featured his own band in a successful series of promenade concerts.^[26] But the impact of minstrelsy, a fresh theatrical form whose sudden popularity sparked a demand for American performers, went much further. Minstrelsy called for a different kind of musician: a man who could step into the character and dialect of an "Ethiopian" stage darky and entertain an audience with comic turns and the singing and playing of popular music. A minstrel's apprenticeship involved no particular pedigree or formal training. Indeed, for some its key element was personal contact with black Americans. Philadelphia-born E. P. Christy (1815-62) spent time as a young man in New Orleans, where he later claimed to have studied the Negroes' "queer words and simple but expressive melodies."^[27] Christy perfected his imitation as a traveling blackface musician and comic singer in the 1830s before founding his own troupe in Buffalo in the 1840s. T. D. Rice (1808-60), who invented "Jim Crow," the "first important American stage character rooted in black contemporary culture,"^[28] based his creation on the walk, dance, dress, and song of an aging black man he encountered in Louisville in the late 1820s.^[29] On the other hand, Ohioan Dan Emmett, the driving force behind the Virginia Minstrels, claimed no formative experiences with black culture. The background upon which he drew in his show-business career included a stint as a military musician at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and travels with a Cincinnati-based circus.^[30]

Inside the theater, nineteenth-century Americans seldom formed the silent, largely passive audiences that are now expected at "cultivated" events. In fact, statements like that of a Boston citizen in 1846 could be read today as evidence of that era's uncivilized behavior. "We (the sovereigns) determine to have the worth of our money when we go to the theatre," this correspondent wrote. "We made Blangy dance her best dances twice; we made Mrs. Sequin [sic ] repeat 'Marble Halls' . . . and tonight we are going to encore Mrs. Kean's 'I Don't Believe It' in The Gamester... . Perhaps we'll flatter Mr. Kean by making him take poison twice."^[31] But the audience's decorum is less the point here than

its expectations, which were those of people determined to react to the spectacle, responding in public interchange with stage players. The work being performed was far less important to these theater-goers than the quality of their own experience. If they liked what they saw and heard, they clamored for more; if not, they demanded an end to it. Lawrence Levine has compared the atmosphere in mid-nineteenth-century American theaters to that of a modern sports event, where audience members "are participants who can enter into the action on the field, who feel a sense of immediacy and at times even of control, who articulate their opinions and feelings vocally and unmistakably."^[32] The audience, in other words, consisted not of modern "spectators" but participating "witnesses" with a firm sense of themselves as an active force in the show.^[33]

By all accounts, minstrel audiences were among the most boisterous, the most insistent that performers meet the expectations that had brought them to the theater in the first place.^[34] That fact should be kept in mind in weighing the achievement of E. P. Christy, who managed Christy's Minstrels and also performed as the group's interlocutor (master of ceremonies), hallad singer, and banjo player. Assembled as a six-man troupe in Buffalo in 1843, Christy's Minstrels toured upstate New York and elsewhere for several years before opening in New York City in April 1846. A critic complimented their first performances for "chaste, refined, and harmonious" singing and "very fine" instrumental music. His praise of "exquisite . . . soft touches" on the bones suggests the skill of Christy and his men at playing the crowd. For, as well as meeting audience taste for the high-spirited, storeping numbers that were minstrelsy's stock-in-trade, the Christy troupe also featured pieces that, if "exquisite" touches on the bones could be heard, must have hushed the house into rapt silence. Offering family entertainment at cheap prices (25 cents for adults, half that for children), Christy's Minstrels took up residence at New York's Mechanics' Hall for a run of more than seven years (February 1847-July 1854) and 2,792 performances—ample evidence that Christy had discovered the kind of successful formula for which popular performers search.^[35]

Minstrelsy, however, was just one of many attractions for which new paying audiences emerged in the antebellum years. The rise of American vernacular forms did not diminish interest in European performers, who took their offerings deeper and deeper into the continent. Through

the 1840s, a troupe headed by English basso Arthur Seguin toured North America, performing operatic favorites in English translation.^[36] Beginning in the middle of that decade, a wave of European virtuoso performers traveled to the United States on concert tours, including singers Marietta Alboni, Giulia Grisi, Henriette Sontag, and Jenny Lind; violinists Alexandre Artôt, Camillo Sivori, Henry Vieuxtemps, and Ole Bull; and pianists Leopold DeMeyer, Henri Herz, and Sigismond Thalberg.^[37] The appearance of the Tyrolese Rainer Family at New York's Apollo Theater in November 1839 touched off a fad for "family" singing groups specializing in folk songs and part-songs.^[38] Of the many Americans who followed in their wake, the Hutchinson Family Singers from Milford, New Hampshire, made the greatest impact. Touring from 1842 until 1849, the Hutchinsons were drawn to political causes such as temperance, abolition, and universal suffrage and eventually brought songs supporting such causes into their concerts.^[39] Finally, English-born ballad singers William Dempster (from 1835) and Henry Russell (from 1836) found audiences for their performances on a more intimate scale, as if inviting the audience as guests into their own parlors for an evening's entertainment.

The survival of a detailed journal kept by members of the Hutchinson Family Singers provides glimpses of that group's entrepreneurial customs. During their first tour in 1842, the family's four singing members, Asa, John, Judson, and Abigail, seem to have improvised concert arrangements as they traveled. On Friday, 29 July, for example, the Hutchinsons performed in Sandy Hill, New York, and planned an appearance for the next evening in Glens Falls. Judson Hutchinson noted on Saturday that "John & A[sa] have gone to Saratoga Springs to make preparations for a concert." But a storm broke out that afternoon, delaying the brothers' return and forcing cancelation of the Glens Falls concert. John and Asa had struck a deal in Saratoga Springs to sing three concerts there for room and board, plus one-third "of what is taken." Arriving on Monday, I August, the Hutchinsons found the resort town "lively," with Frank Johnson and his band in residence at a local hall. Their concerts of that evening and the next, however, were sparsely attended—"Sung last night to a house full of seats," Judson wrote— and, after dispatching Asa ahead by train to explore the situation elsewhere, they left Saratoga Springs a day early, traveling to Ballston for a concert on Wednesday night, 3 August.^[40]

Things changed for the Hutchinsons toward the end of their second tour. Unexpectedly, in the spring of 1843, they found themselves no longer a struggling enterprise but a success. Their final concert in New York City (25 May) earned receipts of $130 from an audience of 600. And when they moved on to Boston, where "Jesse arranged the business," they sang to a thousand spectators at the Melodeon Theater on 2 June. "Our receipts for that Evening," Asa wrote, "were as great if not larger than any receipts before, between $180 & $200."^[41] The Hutchinsons' appeal was both artistic and political. A New York critic praised their "admirable" style of singing: "simple, sweet and full of mountain melody" and with voices "all rich and clear."^[42] And the next week in Boston, they appeared at an antislavery rally in Faneuil Hall with leading abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and ex-slave Frederick Douglass. "Speechifying, even of the better sort," responded one newspaper correspondent, "did less to interest, purify and subdue minds, than this irresistible Anti-Slavery music."^[43] The now-famous family returned to their farm in July 1843. By fall, they were back in the New York area, where they stayed for two months, giving more than twenty concerts, including two "farewell" events at Niblo's Theater. Dale Cockrell reports that each of these performances attracted an audience of 1,200 or more, which, at 50 cents per ticket, made for revenues of more than $600 each.^[44] When the Hutchinsons set out again in January 1844, they entrusted management of their concerts to brother Zephaniah Kittredge Hutchinson, who traveled with them, serving as advance agent for the next year and a half.^[45] It was in keeping with the tenor of the Hutchinsons' musical career—audiences and critics received them as unspoiled, talented, morally principled amateurs, and in fact they did return in the summer to New Hampshire to farm the land—that a family member would serve as their impresario.

Of all the musical performers active in antebellum America, however, none better illustrates the potential of imaginative promotion than the visit of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. Inspired by the notion that a concert tour of the United States could be lucrative for both him and Lind, P. T. Barnum enlisted the singer's participation, then set about creating a demand for her. Well before Lind's arrival, Barnum launched a publicity campaign based on claims about her virtuous character, the prestige of opera singing, and the susceptibility of the American audience. He struck just the right chord with the

public. Lind's ship from Europe was greeted by a crowd of 30,000 when it landed in New York Harbor on x September 1850.^[46] And when she announced that she would donate to charity her share of the receipts from her first concert, Lind's stock rose even higher.^[47] Newspapers throughout the country reported her every deed and character trait. But press coverage of Lind's tour did more than work Americans into a lather to attend her concerts. It provided a framework for understanding them. The rapture with which other audiences had greeted Lind's performances was a matter of record, so each new audience brought to its experience a sense of avid expectation, mixed with the usual curiosity. Lind's concerts began with playing and singing by other performers, which prepared listeners for the great diva.^[48] Her appearance, always plain and dignified, confirmed the image of unpretentious virtue that Barnum had built up around her. And her singing offered something for everyone, from fiery, virtuosic Italian arias to Swedish folk songs and even favorite songs in English like "Home, Sweet Home." Lind's simple songs gave audiences a chance to measure the sound of her singing voice and to test claims of its "purity" and "sheer beauty" against their own experience. As for operatic arias, even listeners for whom such music was unknown terrain were supplied, thanks to publicity and reviews, with a language— "sweetness and compass," "extraordinary powers," "brilliant clearness"—for discussing her artistry.^[49] In organizing Lind's tour, Barnum convinced Americans in large numbers that a powerful experience lay in store for them. Then, through Lind's artistry, he met their expectations. The remarkable success of Lind's tour may be judged by the unlikelihood of Barnum's achievement. By peddling recitals of a foreign opera singer, he created not only a cultural sensation but a commercial bonanza, involving everything from concert tickets, sheet music, and pianos to Jenny Lind gloves, stoves, and cigars.^[50]

The 1840s represent a watershed in the history of American musical performance. By the end of that decade most of the elements that were to endure for the next century and more were in place: a ready supply of professional performers, domestic and foreign, to carry on the concert and theatrical life that prosperity encouraged; growth in the ranks of impresarios, entrepreneurs, promoters, and institutions organizing an increasingly diverse menu of performances; and a steady increase in audiences willing to pay to be regaled, entertained, amazed,

tickled, or edified by the array of performances available to them. Many things changed during the nineteenth century's second half. Americans began to win places in the ranks of concert-hall performers,^[51] and after Emancipation the number of black professionals grew apace.^[52] Theatrical circuits consolidated entrepreneurial endeavor in new ways.^[53] But all of this activity was premised on one condition: Musical performance must pay for itself.^[54] Indeed, everything discussed so far about the performing professions in America occurred in the marketplace. No development in the second half of the nineteenth century was more important to the history of music in America than the creation of a new sphere for performance.^[55] And no vantage point offers a clearer perspective on that development than the career of Theodore Thomas (1835-1905), the nineteenth century's premier American conductor. For the symphony orchestra provided this development its chief national focus.

Born in Esens, East Friesland, Germany, the son of a professional musician, Thomas emigrated with his family to New York City at the age of ten.^[56] In 1854, he joined the first violin section of the New York Philharmonic Society, an organization built on the model of the local musical society. Founded in 1842 with an idealistic mission in mind,^[57] run by its members (who included both amateurs and professionals), and financed by membership fees and concert subscriptions,^[58] the society pursued its goals within the modest resources provided by concerts, typically four per year. Thomas was an accomplished violinist, and he kept playing in public well into his thirties. But even as a very young man, he showed talent for entrepreneurial leadership.^[59] In May 1862 Thomas conducted his first professional orchestral concert at New York's Irving Hall, an event for which he himself took the financial risk: booking the hall, choosing the players and the program, conducting the rehearsals, directing the advertising and ticket sales, and paying the players from the proceeds while he kept the rest.^[60] Soon Thomas also began conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society, formed in 1857 as a local parallel to New York's.^[61] Later, he served as regular conductor of the New York Philharmonic (1877-91) and founding conductor of the Chicago Orchestra (1891-1905), and led music festivals throughout the country. But it was as impresario and conductor of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra (1865-90) that he made his deepest mark on American musical life. For during that time,

Thomas—an idealist with a payroll to meet—controlled both the artistic and economic arms of his orchestral enterprise.

To identify art and economics as separate "arms" of Thomas's activity is to recognize a conflict between them. Indeed, for Americans who have written about this country's musical life, perhaps no idea has been more basic to their understanding of it than the assumption that economic interests run counter to aesthetic ones—that the marketplace is a foe of artistic values.^[62] Theodore Thomas's career tests that assumption, for without a musical marketplace, Thomas's orchestra could never have survived. The conductor's great achievement was to discover within that marketplace an audience for orchestral music and hence to maintain a career for himself and his men as performing musicians. In the course of his struggles, Thomas came to know his audiences' habits and tastes very well indeed. Yet, he was seldom content merely to serve them. Respecting audience taste while working persistently to change it, Thomas came to be the chief actor in a drama whose denouement was the establishment of the symphony orchestra in America.

Thomas himself grew up (in New York City) in a cultural environment dominated by German music and musicians, the German language, and German artistic values. In Thomas, that Old World legacy seems to have combined with character traits—ambition, determination, independence of mind, physical stamina, self-assurance—to create a burning sense of mission. As a conductor, he would strive to make his adopted country "musical" through the cultivation of instrumental music.^[63] What the United States lacked, he believed, "was a good orchestra and plenty of concerts within reach of the people."^[64] To fill that need, Thomas set about providing audiences with music-making of the best quality the marketplace would support. Three related factors shaped Thomas's pursuit of quality: how his orchestra played, what it played, and where it played.

Economic conditions affect the character of any orchestra's playing. Thomas was a taskmaster who strove for precise, polished performances; these required skilled players—mostly German immigrants—and time to rehearse them; and the best players, being most in demand, preferred situations offering the most work. Thus, to keep his orchestra together, Thomas pursued every possible opportunity for performance. His entrepreneurial sense taught him that, as one writer has put it, "there was not just one symphonic audience but a variety of them."^[65] The responses

of each audience, Thomas recognized, depended on the performers' ability to address it on its own terms. And that demanded in turn careful consideration of musical repertory.

"Symphonic music is the highest flower of art," Thomas once wrote,^[66] testifying to his belief that the music he loved was imbued with ethical force. He looked upon Beethoven in particular "not only as a great musician but [as] an almost divine embodiment of moral virtue."^[67] Performers and listeners alike, he believed, were tested and measured by the best symphonic compositions. In his autobiography Thomas explained why he discouraged the telling of risqué stories in his presence and why he never read "trashy" books or attended "trashy plays": "When I come before the public to interpret masterworks, and my soul should be inspired with noble and impressive emotions, these evil thoughts run around my mind like squirrels and spoil it all. A musician must keep his heart pure and his mind clean if he wishes to elevate, instead of debasing, his art."^[68] In listening to music by Beethoven and other great composers, Thomas wrote, "faculties are called into action and appealed to other than those [the listener] ordinarily uses," absorbing attention and freeing listeners "from worldly cares." More than vocal music, whose meanings are explicit, instrumental music appeals to the listener's "imagination and intellect, and permits his own interpretation to the extent of his experience."^[69] Differences in listening experience were precisely what divided Thomas's audience into segments, each requiring a repertory aimed to please while also extending the reach of its taste, in line with Thomas's goal of elevation.^[70]

Thomas's pursuit of different audiences also involves the third issue of quality: the venues in which he and his men performed. Throughout its history, the Thomas Orchestra played in standard concert halls, where they existed. But beginning in 1865, it also began to make a specialty of outdoor concerts. A summer series in Central Park Garden proved especially popular with the public: 1,227 programs in an eight-year period, 1868-75, or more than 150 performances per summer on the average. At Central Park, and in the other outdoor series he conducted throughout his career, Thomas served customers a mixture of symphonic movements with overtures, dances, and lighter selections in settings where they felt relaxed and comfortable—snacking, drinking, and socializing. Such "concessions," he believed, chipped away at barriers that inexperience erected between audience and orchestra. At the

same time, thanks to all that performing, the Thomas Orchestra grew artistically, outstripping all other American ensembles, with their changing personnel (including conductors) and small numbers of concerts.^[71]

But however popular he may have been with New York audiences, Thomas stayed in business only by turning his orchestra into a touring ensemble.^[72] In 1869 the Thomas Orchestra made the first of its many journeys over the so-called Thomas Highway of the United States and Canada, which included Maine, Georgia, New Orleans, San Francisco, and many places in between.^[73] The orchestra also played up to a dozen concerts per season and more in cities like Boston and Chicago that lacked permanent orchestras of their own. Through the early 1870s, the ensemble toured widely, sometimes spending more than half the year on the road. The rigors of that life worked hardships on Thomas and his men.^[74] But the results justified them.^[75] Pianist Anton Rubinstein testified at the end of an 1873 tour with Thomas that in the whole world, only the orchestra of the National Conservatory of Paris was the Thomas Orchestra's equal in personnel—"but, alas, they have no Theodore Thomas to conduct them."^[76]

Thomas's achievement, while heroic, was no model for the symphony orchestra's establishment in this country. Dependent for support entirely on concert receipts, the Thomas Orchestra toured from necessity, not choice. Indeed, given its size and character, a symphony orchestra is far from ideal as a touring ensemble. In Europe most orchestras were local organizations. They were tied to a particular place, financed by local resources, and they addressed local audiences. Similarly, in the wake of Thomas's tours, the American symphony orchestra began to establish itself as a civic enterprise. Orchestras were formed where money could be found to free them from dependency on the marketplace—the dependency that had forced Thomas to tour and to perform music that he would rather have left to others. Such funding hinged on convincing patrons that symphonic music was worth their support. Among the factors that channeled money to symphony orchestras, one belief was fundamental: the orchestral works of great composers ranked among the supreme achievements of humankind.^[77] A community, however prosperous, whose citizens had no experience of this art could hardly aspire to cultural distinction. Hence, both civic duty and a wish to foster the expression of enlightened virtue moved wealthy Americans to join the ranks of orchestral patrons.^[78]

The orchestra's elevation of composers and their music broke with the customs of earlier professional concert life, which, under the control of entrepreneurs, had tended to privilege occasions . By the late nineteenth century, the American symphony orchestra was privileging works over occasions. Under the banner ars longa, vita brevis , symphonic performers approached their task with fealty to the score, sparing no effort to honor the cornposer's artistic intent. As for the audience, its members learned to behave like respectful guests, listening in rapt attentiveness and deep concentration, alert to the work's nuances and sure of the significance of the whole endeavor.^[79] Presented in that ambience, music could pack enormous power. Charles Edward Russell, an early biographer of Theodore Thomas, recalled that in 1877 the Thomas Orchestra paid a visit to the Mississippi River town where he grew up, playing works by Mendelssohn, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt. For the audience, this writer later remembered, "life was never the same afterward.... There had been shown to them things and potentialities they had never suspected. So then there really existed as a fact, and not as something heard of and unattainable, this world of beauty, wholly apart from everyday experiences."^[80] When approached with care, American audiences found the symphony orchestra's "world of beauty" so compelling that by the early twentieth century it had won a secure niche in the nation's cultural life.

This seems like the place to pause and reflect for a moment on the shape of American music-making described by general historians of the subject. Whatever their values, as noted in chapter I, these writers have found musical endeavor divided into two broad streams: "classical" and "popular," or "serious" and "light," or "art music" and "functional music." It has already been noted that "the cultivated tradition" and "the vernacular tradition," terms offered by Hitchcock to encompass both properties of music and attitudes toward it, seem more flexible and less hierarchical than the older categories, which may explain their growing use in recent years. On the other hand, these terms, introduced in a history that deals only with American "classical" and "popular" genres, lack comprehensiveness. They tend to come up short when faced with "folk" or "traditional" musical practices. For example, in the customs of Native American communities some music combines the sup-

posedly "vernacular" trait of acquisition—being "grown into as one grows into one's vernacular tongue"—with the supposedly "cultivated" one of function: being approached "for its edification—its moral [and] spiritual . . . values."^[81] This objection aside, Hitchcock's terms fit well into a historiographically based inquiry. By making ample room for agents other than composers, they invite an approach to history in which performance and reception are allowed to play a key role.

The attitude of deep respect toward music that Theodore Thomas fostered was a change from earlier custom—a change crucial to the founding and maintenance of the institutions that still enjoy high prestige in the "cultivated" branch of American musical life: symphony orchestras, opera companies, conservatories. The change took place chiefly in the realm of attitude. Beethoven's symphonies and Bellini's operas were performed and listened to in mid-nineteenth-century America, but seldom within the aura of respectful concentration that encouraged responses like Charles Edward Russell's to the Theodore Thomas Orchestra. It's not enough to say that Bellini's works themselves were "popular" in 1850 and "classical" in 1900, for that would overlook the huge gap in musical density between, say, Norma and "Oh! Susanna." The terms available to us simply don't fit the matter we're talking about unless—claiming that a "popular" attitude toward Bellini was gradually replaced by a "classical" one—we stretch these terms beyond their original intent. Created with properties of music in mind, they cannot encompass the attitudes toward music brought about by the change in performing ambience. Even Hitchcock's more flexible "vernacular" and "cultivated," while taking attitude more into account, won't quite fit the present case.

If we want to do justice to nineteenth-century American music, we need a pair of attitudinal terms to supplement our familiar repertoire-based ones. Accordingly, I propose that we call the two attitudes that have dominated the performing professions in America for the last century and a half "accessibility" and "authenticity."

Opera in mid-nineteenth-century America exemplifies accessibility. As we have seen, opera flourished in the American marketplace. It flourished as entertainment for an audience that cheered favorite performers on, abused others, and expected calls for encores to be obeyed. It flourished as music for home performers to sing and for pianists and wind bands to play. And it also flourished in the form of characters and

stories that caught the popular imagination. In all of these ways opera proved accessible to American audiences. Note, however, that most Americans encountered operas not as integral works of art, faithful to the composer's score, but in altered form: as adaptations, pastiches, arrangements, translations, truncations, excerpts, and single numbers. Alteration—the tailoring of the music to suit particular audiences and circumstances—was the key to opera's accessibility. In a composer-centered history of American music, opera in the nineteenth century earns little more than a footnote. But when performance and reception are brought into that history, opera looms as a significant genre in American music.^[82]

In standard schemes of classification, Bellini's Norma belongs with the cultivated tradition, with "Western art music," or "classical," or "serious" music. But to make it accessible to nineteenth-century American audiences, and hence to maintain their own careers, impresarios and performers changed Norma in ways that brought it closer to the vernacular tradition—that turned it into a kind of popular music. What I'm calling "accessibility" here is itself a statement of priorities. Accessibility seeks out the center of the marketplace. It privileges occasions over works. And it invests ultimate authority in the present-day audience . Performers driven by accessibility seek most of all to find and please audiences and to increase their size. From the eighteenth century to the twentieth, performers and entrepreneurs in America—sometimes working with composers, sometimes not—have been ingenious in their pursuit of accessibility, which has been an agent of new styles, institutions, and techniques of merchandising from New York's Olympic Theater, to vaudeville, to the London Symphony's Hooked on Classics album, to Madonna.

But to suggest that the American marketplace forces performers to embrace accessibility would be to tell only part of the story. The marketplace is more complex than that. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there took hold in this country a new attitude among some performers, the one I'm calling "authenticity," implying the genuine article—the real thing. Authenticity arose as an ideal countering the marketplace's devotion to accessibility. Authenticity privileges works over occasions. In fact, authenticity invests ultimate authority in works and the traditions within which they are composed . Performers who follow the ideal of authenticity believe that musical compositions, at the time

of their creation, are animated with a certain original spirit . A performer is duty-bound to seek that spirit, to be guided by it, to remain faithful to it. Authenticity is an oppositional stance. Its disciples seek truths behind appearances, follow ideals that may (though not necessarily) involve financial sacrifice, and often set themselves against general trends of fashion and public taste. Authenticity can be an expensive proposition. Its serious pursuit requires financing that, though still connected to the marketplace, does not depend completely upon it. The combination of idealism and sacrifice that underlies authenticity helps to explain its appeal to certain kinds of performers and patrons. In high-mindedness and rigor, authenticity is somewhat akin to religion.^[83]

The beliefs pulled together here under the label of "authenticity" provided the ideological cornerstone upon which the American symphony orchestra was founded. Indeed, without such an ideal—an ideal, by the way, whose intellectual appeal could be emotionally verified by the experience of listening—it is not clear how an alternative to "accessibility" could have emerged in nineteenth-century America.^[84] With the help of authenticity's powerful justification, however, sources of orchestral patronage began to open up. In 1881, banker Henry Lee Higginson founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra and ran it himself for nearly four decades, hiring and firing conductors and players (all under personal contract to him), and collecting the receipts, making up deficits out of his own pocket.^[85] A different strategy worked a decade later in Chicago, when, at the behest of Charles Norman Fay, a group of fifty businessmen and civic leaders each contributed $1,000 per year for three years to a fund guaranteeing the enterprise against losses, then hired Theodore Thomas himself as the orchestra's first conductor, placing artistic matters in his hands.^[86] Other cities found their own schemes.^[87] But no matter how the money was raised, all these endeavors were rooted in civic pride and a belief in authenticity. If the ideal of authenticity were to be served, these patrons understood, the pursuit of accessibility must be set aside.

Recently, the ambience that Theodore Thomas and his colleagues worked hard to establish has come in for criticism as historians have found fault with some of its results. What earlier writers had hailed as progress toward artistic "maturity" has begun to reveal another side: the "sacralization" of the concert hall into a place where secular rituals take place; the building of a cultural "hierarchy" in which those rituals

serve as barriers; and the fragmentation of the musical audience. All of the latter symptoms are said to reflect a snobbish elitism that has plagued the cultivated American musical scene ever since.^[88] Indeed, the link between social exclusiveness and the concert hall in America is an old one. In an interview published long after music publisher Gustave Schirmer's death, his daughter confided: "Father hated what he called 'social music,' glittering occasions and society patrons," which to her represented the world relished by other musical friends and family like conductor Walter Damrosch and her uncle Rudolph Schirmer.^[89] Dam-rosch's niece Marya Mannes's description of her Uncle Walter as "always center-stage: charming host and perfect showman" helps to explain his success with musical patrons.^[90] Feeling at ease with the social occasions attached to concert-giving, Damrosch gloried in both the artistic and social environments of his musical life, avidly and easily courting the favor of those who might be able to further his career. On the other hand, German-born composer Paul Hindemith, who taught at Yale University from 1940 to 1953 and became an American citizen during that time, experienced the impact of one of sacralization's more incongruous by-products after he left the United States for Europe in the 1950s. For two years, Hindemith waited vainly for invitations to conduct American orchestras. Then, early in 1956, he had his Zurich agent seek out an American management firm headed by the well-connected Arthur M. Judson for help in securing an engagement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, then conducted by Fritz Reiner. Judson wrote back:

I am afraid there will be no chance for Hindemith in Chicago since Reiner does not seem to be interested in him. However, Pittsburgh is interested in having him in the first part of January 1957 for a fee of $1,000. Would Mr. Hindemith be willing to come for that one date? Please let me know immediately so as not to hold up Pittsburgh in its plans.^[91]

Hindemith took Judson's letter as a snub and was deeply offended.^[92] But in the sphere of "sacralized" American concert life, a prominent concert manager, aligned in his own mind with certified artistic glory, found little reason to doubt that his prestige and power far exceeded those of an active, distinguished contemporary composer.^[93]

If the nineteenth-century attitudes that inspired the ideal of "authenticity" now seem narrow, exclusive, or even pernicious, we would do well to recognize that authenticity, broadly defined, has prompted most of the musical patronage that has existed in the United States. Moreover, as the course of professional musical performance in twentieth-century America will show, authenticity has proved a far more flexible ideal than its first champions could have imagined.

Over the past century, technological change has dramatically altered the face of American musical performance. This is not to say, however, that technological change is new to our age. Even without discussing musical instruments and their manufacture, the story of performers, entrepreneurs, audiences, and their interactions could be sketched over more than two hundred years from a technological standpoint. Chapters in that story include: the founding of a domestic sheet-music trade (1780s); the changing modes of printing music (punched plates, engraving, and lithography [1780s-1830s]); the improvement of transportation—especially railroads and transatlantic steamships—and the invention of the telegraph, all making musicians' travel easier and providing speedier distribution of printed music (1840s); the appearance of the phonograph (ca. 1900) and the many later developments in recording and distributing musical sound;^[94] the rise of the film industry and the changing role of music within it (1910s on); the introduction of the microphone and electronic amplifier and their effect on performing styles (1920s); the advent of radio, perhaps the most democratic form of disseminating music (late 1920s); the role of television, today's most powerful, pervasive, and expensive performance medium (1940s); and the rise of electronically synthesized sound, allowing one musician to take the place of many (1970s).

To survey such developments with performers, audiences, and entrepreneurs in mind is to glimpse the shifting ground of their interaction. It is also to recognize that changes in their roles are interrelated: for performers, the evolving function of the public appearance; for audiences, the division into more and more specialized segments; for entrepreneurs, the rise of collective and corporate sponsorship.^[95] These changes all involve technology's impact upon communication—its power

to capture performances and to circulate them more and more swiftly and widely.

Perhaps nothing reveals the effect of technology on the performer's profession better than the changing role of the personal appearance. Until around the turn of the century, when phonograph recordings began to circulate commercially, personal appearances were the only way for performers to reach their customers. By the 1920s, recordings were becoming big business. But they still were considered an adjunct to "live" performance: an effective means of marketing performers and increasing the fees they could claim for singing and playing in theaters and on concert stages. Technology pressed forward; recorded performances became more and more faithful facsimiles of live ones. As sound quality improved, long-playing records, magnetic tape, and compact discs offered lengthier stretches of unbroken sound. New means of access dissolved traditional links with space and time. Performances were no longer restricted to concert halls, theaters, nightclubs, and dance halls, nor did listeners have to schedule their opportunities to hear them. The social experience of being an audience member changed. Broadcast and televised performances brought music into American homes, while car radios, cassette tapes, and portable playback equipment took it wherever listeners wanted to go. If in the nineteenth century music was embedded in social experience—the experience of people gathered to make music and to listen—in our time, technology, in effect, has drawn a veil over the social circumstances of music's performance.^[96] In the late twentieth century, for most Americans most of the time, music is experienced as disembodied sound.

When audiences can accept disembodied sound as a "natural" form of music, on the one hand, and, on the other, buy it in packages like soap, cigarettes, or other consumer products, the implications for musical performance are considerable. The former suggests that music is nothing more than sound. If that is true, then one might just as well ignore music—as if it were part of the environment—as listen to it with total absorption. Disconnected from its makers, music becomes much more widely available. Even complex and culturally remote styles grow familiar with repetition.^[97] At the same time, sound alone can do no more than suggest the intensity and excitement of music-making's tactile and choreographic dimensions. As for the physical packaging of music,

its impact on performers has been strong. In some branches of the music business, sound recordings (including film, television, and video) have replaced "live" performance as the most desirable and lucrative means of reaching audiences. Personal appearances have become an adjunct to facsimiles of personal appearances: an effective way of plugging recorded music, capitalizing on the appeal of performers known for their recordings. Entrepreneurs have moved into closer contact with industry, for the technology's cost and the distribution networks' vastness have required the investment of the corporate world. Hence, a merging of interests has taken place that could hardly have been imagined a century ago: art (music) and science (technology) are joined in connubial union, under the benevolent eye of business (the entrepreneur).

The social realm's decline as the location of professional performances has further fragmented the audience, though that trend had begun long before. Cause and effect are hard to separate here, for performers, entrepreneurs, and audiences are caught up in a technologically induced spiral of means and ends. Because "music" (i.e., certain musical performances) exists in consumer-friendly packages, it can be sold in the same way; the values of the mass market ensure that such packages contain music that will sell under these conditions; therefore, some performers tailor their music-making to market specifications; and advertising encourages audiences (consumers) to buy musical packages that meet their expectations the way other good consumer products do. To the extent that audiences participate in this process, the performers who best meet their expectations within it can reap huge financial rewards. Nineteenth-century audiences, as we have seen, were given to expressing preferences noisily and in public, interacting directly with performers and with each other. Those of the later twentieth century have not lost that chance; but they exercise their preferences most tellingly, if more privately, in the mass marketplace as buyers of recorded music.

The process described here—the movement of technologically driven business innovation into American music-making—has affected agents of "accessibility" and "authenticity" in different ways. For the former, who primarily seek audience approval and the largest market for their music, technology has been a godsend. With technology's help, any style can be widely known and any function involving musical sound effi-

ciently fulfilled. One artist, one song, even one performance can be parlayed into huge economic gain. That possibility has turned some segments of the mass media into intensely competitive arenas where musicians clamor for the public's ear.^[98] Since accessibility itself means the wide dissemination of performances, modern technology has proved its natural handmaiden.

For authenticity, on the other hand, technological change has proved a mixed blessing. Whatever preserves and circulates performances that would otherwise be unavailable promotes authenticity's cause. But, as I have also noted, authenticity is an oppositional movement, duty-bound to protect the original spirit of the music it chooses and therefore exclusive in its choices. Committed to works for their intrinsic worth, and trusting that informed artistic efforts on behalf of such works will not be ignored, advocates of authenticity invest with deep seriousness in the authority of their performances.^[99] Those performances, however, must compete in a marketplace already flooded with more music than it can possibly absorb. The glut of available performances makes it difficult for any one performance to be heard. Therefore, performances recommended by their truth to an ideal outside the central marketplace win relatively few customers. Technological change has furthered the cause of authenticity more by preserving performances than by finding large markets for their circulation.

Recorded performances, interacting with ideas about music that stem from the notions of accessibility and authenticity, have influenced American music in ways that could scarcely have been imagined a century ago. To say that most twentieth-century American performers have ranked the pursuit of audiences (accessibility) above the search for the original spirit of works (authenticity) may at first seem just another way of talking about "popular" and "classical" music. The former, from Tin Pan Alley to rock 'n' roll, has unashamedly pursued the goal of widely accessible performances. The latter, centered on concert hall and opera house, has privileged composers and their works. Accessibility and authenticity, however, are terms about musical attitudes, not musical properties; I have introduced them as a way of exploring performance, not composition. With that in mind, jazz seems the perfect genre for testing the usefulness of these terms. Jazz is an American music whose entire history has taken place since the ideal of authenticity has been in force. Furthermore, jazz is hard to pigeonhole. It took

shape in the marketplace, but relatively few jazz musicians have found a mass audience.^[100] Moreover, jazz is first and foremost a performer's music whose origins lie not in composition but in particular ways of playing and singing.

Jazz, a syncopated dance music played with a particular kind of expressive freedom in pitch and sound, originated in cities where black musicians found the environment hospitable. In New Orleans, the proverbial "cradle of jazz," the new style emerged in the playing of instrumental ensembles at parades, social clubs, picnics, brothels, and wherever else people danced. Some early New Orleans jazz players made music their chief livelihood, but most were day workers who performed on the side.^[101] In New York the atmosphere was more professionalized, thanks to the many jobs available in a flourishing entertainment industry. There, by the start of World War I, a pianist like New Jerseyan James P. Johnson could make a good living playing in clubs, dance halls, and at private parties;^[102] or a bandleader like Southern-born James Reese Europe could make a mark by accompanying Vernon and Irene Castle, a husband-and-wife team famous for starting a national dance fad.^[103]

As an economic force, jazz burst upon the entertainment world in the century's second decade, with the landmark events taking place in New York recording studios. Early in 1917, during a successful engagement at Reisenweber's restaurant, the (white, New Orleans-bred) Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first commercial jazz recordings.^[104] And in 1920, black entrepreneur Perry Bradford recorded a group of black musicians—singer Mamie Smith and a jazz ensemble—on his song "Crazy Blues," in search of a market among his own "race."^[105] Both endeavors succeeded. Jazz by the ODJB and blues àla Mamie Smith proved powerful in the marketplace. Jazz ensembles proliferated, and through the 1920s more and more jazz musicians, first white, then black as well, made recordings. Tunes favored by jazz musicians were also published and sold as popular sheet music. Dance halls and nightclubs hired jazz ensembles and prospered on the excitement they kindled. Jazz performers were featured in theatrical shows, including some on Broadway.^[106] American composers for the concert hall wrote music inspired by jazz; European musicians and audiences noticed and responded too.^[107] A vibrant new American musical style had been born.

In the years following World War I, jazz—more than just a musical style—was taken as a symbol of the whole era. A new code of manners in urban America, consciously breaking with the past, brought to the fore new styles of dress, dance, speech, and behavior. Freedom from older inhibitions and norms became a watchword of the time—including freedom from the law, for the Volstead Act (1919), prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages, was widely ignored by trend setters, young and old. Jazz, whose aggressive beat invited unrestrained dancing, whose sounds often mocked conventional ways of playing, and whose spontaneous spirit took original songs and numbers as jumping-off points for fresh embellishment, seemed to embody that freedom. Thus, when F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed a set of his short stories Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), the label stuck. In naming his era after jazz, a vernacular musical style from the entertainment world, Fitzgerald made two connections that were to loom large through the twentieth century: a link between cultural style and consumer products and services (e.g., clothing, hair style, music in the form of phonograph recordings) and polite society's responsiveness to cultural forms that, rather than filtering down from the top of the social spectrum, percolated up from below.

From a distance, the matter looks clear-cut: in "the jazz age," jazz was the new expression of "accessibility," the popular music that reigned supreme. A look at phonograph record sales, however, undercuts that view. According to Joel Whitburn's tabulations, between 1918 and 1929 a total of 139 different recordings reached the top position in week-by-week national sales figures. Of that number, only three would be recognized today as jazz performances: the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Tiger Rag" (which topped sales for two weeks in 1918), Bessie Smith's "Down Hearted Blues" (four weeks, 1923), and Red Nichols's "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider" (three weeks, 1927). Historical consensus now identifies Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet, Joe "King" Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, James P. Johnson, Fletcher Henderson, and Bix Beiderbecke as the leading jazz musicians of the jazz age. Except for Smith's one success in 1923, however, none of these performers made a number-one hit recording, nor did their record sales come close to matching those of Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, or Ben Selvin's or Ted Lewis's, or the singing of Al Jolson.^[108]

The authority of Whitburn's findings could be challenged from several directions. It might be argued that, because his method of mea-

suring sales is never fully explained, his figures cannot be trusted; that record sales in the 1920s are a false index of popularity; that recordings by leading jazz musicians lacked the efficient distribution other recordings received; that a largely white corps of record buyers was slow to accept black artists. But even if all these objections are true, one fact remains undeniable: as record buyers, the jazz age public preferred "sweet" music to "hot."

The popular music that, according to Joel Whitburn's research, sold most of the records during the jazz age did in fact belong to the family of syncopated dance musics introduced in the years after World War I. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band represented its informal, unbridled side; Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, through clever arrangements and precise, well-tuned performances, sought to control that passion without extinguishing it. By 1920, Whiteman was leading a large dance ensemble that emphasized variety. Its saxophones or violins could play a melody in the smooth, legato manner of a singer. Or its brass could give the same tune a more clipped delivery. Muted or open, a cornet might "sing" the tune or a "hot" soloist improvise on it.^[109] Fundamental to Whiteman's approach, though, were a fanciful presentation of the original melody and a danceable beat. A disorienting introduction, a weird concluding tag, an unexpected chord change, a surprising transition leading to a new key, a wry decoration of the melody itself, an elaborate new response to a melodic phrase's "call," a constant procession of different tone colors—these were the earmarks of the Whiteman orchestra. They added up to an artful, elaborate, often gaudy setting of the tunes Whiteman played, almost as if to disguise their foursquareness. Through variety of sound and affect, Whiteman's performances expressed "freedom" from unvaried repetition. To the public that found them novel and stylish, they were the very essence of the new dance music called jazz.

As Whiteman was discovering the approach that captured the heart of the popular music market, other musicians—chiefly black, and working in a network of dance halls and clubs parallel to though seldom intersecting with Whiteman's—were exercising a different kind of freedom. Louis Armstrong was the leader, a musician rooted more in individual expression than in Whiteman's collective ideal. Armstrong brought to playing and singing an originality that few other musicians in history have matched. Through his cornet (later trumpet) and voice,

Armstrong "freed" himself from sounding like any other musician in the world. The warmth and strength of Armstrong's tone, his command of instrumental technique, the unique "grain" of his voice, the infectious surge of his rhythm, and the inventiveness of his melodic imagination combined to give his performances overwhelming artistic authority.^[110] It was Armstrong's special gift to balance disciplined artistry with the spirit of play upon which his music's accessibility, and his own livelihood, rested. Armstrong communicated an aura of freedom so powerful that even his mistakes could be heard as evidence of his reaching for the unattainable. To know and appreciate Armstrong's music was not necessarily to disdain Whiteman's. Clearly, however, the two men were doing different things. The problem was that, by the terminology of their own day, both were playing jazz.

Enter the writer on jazz. From the time it came to public notice during World War I, jazz evoked a flood of written responses, from disapproving polemics, to journalistic puffs, to the first attempts at critical appreciation.^[111] Writers found much to say about jazz, concentrating especially on personalities, the racial basis of performers' behavior, the reactions of audiences, and their own responses to what they perceived as eccentric novelty. But a few writers, recognizing jazz as something more than an entertainment fad, focused on the music—on precisely what the musicians were doing and how their music related to other music the writer knew. Jazz was widely perceived as a new kind of expression. But what kind? How was it to be understood? James Lincoln Collier credits Carl Van Vechten, Abbe Niles, and especially R. D. Darrell, all active before 1930, with writing "the best American jazz criticism of the day."^[112] A lesser-known figure, dancer Roger Pryor Dodge, caught the mood of his own early experience as a jazz listener deftly when he described his state of mind in the early 1920s: "I did not know what ! wanted to hear. But I was looking for it."^[113]

Writing on "Jazz in the Twenties," Dodge set down vivid memories of first encounters with the music and his own impatience with others' admiration for "jazz" elements that he found inauthentic. "I was taken off my feet," he recalled, by hearing Stravinsky's Piano Rag at a concert by Alfred Casella on 20 February 1923. "Here, for the first time, I heard what I wanted Whiteman to do." Stravinsky's rhythms convinced Dodge that "this was the new music." In 1924, Dodge heard his "first hot jazz record," Ted Lewis's "Aunt Hagar's Blues," which he found rhythmi-

cally "much simpler" than Stravinsky but "far more real." Stravinsky "inclined me to look for nothing but startling rhythm," Dodge wrote, but "Aunt Hagar's Blues" seemed "more like 18th century music; it could grasp your attention by melodic significance and did not have to rely solely upon astounding rhythmical stunts."^[114] Heating Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue at a Paul Whiteman Carnegie Hall concert in April 1924 and reading the reactions to it confirmed for Dodge that music critics had only a foggy comprehension of jazz's unique and vital traits.^[115]

In the winter of 1924-25, Dodge first heard the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom. He especially admired Coleman Hawkins's solo on Henderson's recording of "Strutter's Drag"—"so perfect and clearly laid out"—and Charlie Green's on "The Gouge of Armour Avenue," and he told Henderson so. Henderson's response was a shock. When Dodge asked when he had written "the hot choruses," Henderson answered, "I don't write them. . .. They're played ad lib." It had "never occurred" to Dodge from listening to records, he admitted, "that the whole vitality of jazz depended upon improvisation." Dodge also questioned Henderson about an arrangement the band had played of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and learned that Henderson considered the music "outstanding." "It was quite a jolt to find out that solos which seemed so inventive and comparable to the great written music of other periods, were not consciously plotted and composed, but were simply played adlib by players who thought that Gershwin was a great composer."^[116]

Now an avid collector of records, Dodge preferred "washboard bands" to fuller orchestras, found Ted Lewis "increasingly commercial" and even Henderson sometimes too "sweet and fullthroated in his arrangements," and heard in Bessie Smith's singing "an enlargement of esthetic pleasure rarely encountered."^[117] By 1927 he had begun to transcribe solos he admired and to play them "with one finger on the piano." As part of a revue produced in 1930 by Billy Rose, Dodge devised an act in which he danced to a trumpet player's performances of favorite solos Dodge had transcribed, including those on Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" and "Black and Tan Fantasy" and Armstrong's "Potato Head Blues."^[118] The success of this player's imitation of the originals, Dodge wrote, "proved to me that a sympathetic reading of

hot solos from notation, even on a different instrument from the original, lost nothing of the intrinsic beauty of the melodic line. Spontaneous 'hot improvisation' need not be the sole characteristic of jazz. A good solo is always a good solo." As things worked out, Dodge was able to perform his act for an extended period to the accompaniment of trumpeter Bubber Miley, the man who had first played many of Dodge's favorite solos. "Six months dancing in front of Bubber Miley," he wrote, "was an experience, extravagant or not, that I would not care to trade."^[119]

Summing up the 1920s' legacy, Dodge found the balance sheet mixed. "On the credit side," he wrote, "mark up the first appearance of actual jazz melodic fragments, the growing up of these fragments into full length solos, and the hot, though somewhat florid obligato [sic ] work."^[120] As Dodge saw it, the solo choruses that began to appear around 1923 were "very rhythmic," in keeping with the character of "early Negro jazz," which he considered "lusty and ribald and only accessible to the musicians themselves at uncontrolled frantic moments." For Dodge, jazz at its most authentic achieved a quality that he could describe only as "subconscious improvisation," a state of coordinated thought and action reached especially in some of Ellington's pieces "of the late twenties"—"loosely orchestrated" and representing "a sort of arranged background for improvisation."^[121]

Dodge's "debit side" for jazz of the 1920s included "the symphonic jazz orchestra, the bad taste of the first major jazz work (Rhapsody in Blue ) and the commercialization of the hot virtuosi into sweet, full toned, straight players." He coined the oxymoron "refined manhandling" to describe the impact of "increased technical facility"^[122] and what he saw as the stultifying effect of "conscious orchestrators." Their legacy, he wrote, was "prolonged uninventive fortissimos and 'sweet-jazz' "—the latter perfectly "suited to sentimental dancing and the dinner hour." Even jazz musicians, Dodge thought, tended to overestimate instrumental effects. "The jazz world," he wrote, "is always seriously admiring its dull orchestrations and casually dismissing its revolutionary melodic line." Dodge concluded his article with these words: "Until the significance of jazz melody becomes engrained in the mind of the arranger (later to be called composer, we hope) we shall have to continue to go through a period of self culture, before we can expand, not simply

expend, the precious material wrought out by those first ten years."^[123]

Dodge's article shows that, for some listeners, authenticity swiftly became a key issue in the understanding of jazz. By the 1930s, more and more writers were finding ways to describe what performers like Ellington and Armstrong were doing. In their view, these musicians, though working in a commercial environment, could be listened to as artists. Hence, they deserved to be ranked above musicians who, like Whiteman, chose a less demanding path and reaped greater financial reward.^[124] Ellington's and Armstrong's music manifested an artistic ideal reaching far beyond the requirements of the marketplace in which they and their cohorts worked. Yet, even while holding to that ideal, they kept their music accessible—full of catchy, high-spirited traits that en-livened the popular music scene.

The terms "accessibility" and "authenticity" help to define where jazz fit in the economics of performance. Beginning in the limited marketplace of African-American communities, jazz soon caught the interest of whites, and some of its traits were widely borrowed—especially note-bending, syncopation, and certain sound effects. In the 1920s, jazz inspired the national music of accessibility. Since that time, however, its more "authentic" strain, tied to the risk-taking and improvisatory fire of players like Armstrong, Miley, and Hines, has come to be recognized as a tradition in its own right.^[125] That strain's leaders were masters of improvisation. Some were also composers—Morton and Ellington and, later, Monk—who caught in their compositions a spirit of possibility akin to Armstrong's, leaving room for improvising or sections in the style of improvisation. Jazz styles changed as new generations came on the scene. But traits that Armstrong and his generation introduced—especially a distinctive personal sound and an inclination to explore—have marked the jazz tradition's leaders ever since. If classical performers serve the intentions and inventions of composers, authenticity in the jazz tradition follows from the charge to make every performance unique. Like their classical counterparts, however, jazz musicians locate their aesthetic ideal outside the marketplace: not in works but in a process, not in scores but in a demanding way of performing. Jazz is the source from which some musicians—Whiteman and Glenn Miller come to mind—fashioned commercially successful formulas. Jazz is also a close relative of the blues tradition, from which rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll have come. The latter both express freedoms of

their own, especially from the mores of middle-class society that in certain periods have dominated American popular music. But jazz remains unmatched in the stringency of its "authentic" ideal.

It's hard to think of a quicker way to sketch the entrepreneurial structure of jazz than to quote The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz's list of venues where the music has been performed:

nightclubs (or clubs), cabarets, casinos and gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, cafés and coffee houses, pubs, taverns, saloons, and speakeasies; ballrooms and dance halls; cinemas, music halls, theaters, concert halls, entertainment centers, and lofts; hotels, inns, roadhouses, and brothels; cruise ships and riverboats; and parks, gardens, and lakesides.^[126]

There is something remarkable about a music that can flourish in all these settings. But more than that, the list dramatizes jazz's long history as an accessible music, an adjunct to Americans' pursuit of a good time. Thus, jazz musicians have been employed by theater managers, club owners, and dance-hall operators, to whom they've been responsible for attracting customers to these places.^[127] On another level, beginning in the 1920s, the best-known jazz performers, like classical and popular artists, have had personal managers.^[128] And on a third level, technology has vastly aided jazz's dissemination; and dissemination involves entrepreneurship. From the 1920s on, when recording challenged then outstripped publishing as its major source of revenue, the music business changed rapidly. Each change brought new agents to the fore: in the 1920s alone, for example, first publishers, then record makers, and then film companies.^[129] Entrepreneurs struggled to cope with these changes, for to maintain a position of influence through all of them took shrewdness and persistence.

One jazz age figure who succeeded was Irving Mills, described by Sanjek as "a flamboyant, fast-talking figure on the Manhattan music scene." Beginning as "a songwriter and a dance-hall singer," Mills joined his older brother Jack in founding the publishing firm of Mills Music in 1919. Within a few years, Mills, as an organizer of recording sessions, had become a key figure in the record business. Experienced, as Sanjek says, in "both race music and popular-song-and-dance bands," he was reported "to have made more recordings than all other studio

supervisors combined." His work in the record studio also gave him access to new songs and pieces for the Mills catalog.^[130] By 1927, Mills was manager of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, a promising black jazz ensemble for which he had earlier secured record dates.^[131] "Through connections with the bootlegging underworld," Sanjek reports, "Mills booked the Ellington band into one of Manhattan's most prestigious night spots, the Cotton Club." Here the band could take advantage of a radio broadcast hookup, which introduced Ellington's "instrumental music and popular songs, most of them with . . . lyrics by Mills . . . coast to coast."^[132] According to Mercer Ellington, Mills's brilliant show-business instincts were responsible for much of the aura of prestige that surrounded the Ellington orchestra in its early years.^[133] Mills continued as Ellington's manager until 1939. By that time, he had established two record labels of his own, Master and Variety. The publishing firm of Mills Music, in which Irving Mills held a 39 percent share, owned some 25,000 copyrights when it was sold in the 1960s for $7.75 million.^[134] In Irving Mills's career, singing, songwriting, recording, publishing, managing, and broadcasting came together in a single process that helped make Ellington—one of the truly authentic voices in jazz— widely accessible.^[135]

When Gilbert Chase wrote in 1955 that American musicians had expressed the nation's spirit best in "folk and popular music," he challenged earlier historians' assumption that this country's musical achievement could be measured without considering vernacular forms seriously. Later historians have agreed with Chase. Today, the music of the American people, not the music of American composers, is the subject of our music history. Recent histories, of course, do not ignore composers. But the important contributions of performers, together with modern recording technology, have encouraged historians to recognize that "American music" means performances as well as scores from which performances are made.

Chase's insight, as shown in chapter 1, has been influential, and the early history of jazz helps to explain why. Originating with accessibility as its goal, jazz in the hands of some performers met, then transcended, that goal. Once writers came on the scene to interpret jazz as a music

in the marketplace but not wholly of it, some of the audience for jazz showed an interest in reading about the music as well as listening. Histories, criticism, and journals began to appear, identifying the best performers and performances. Discography emerged, a new scholarly form listing phonograph recordings, the "documents" that preserve the music. By the early 1940s, a canon was being created for jazz: a corps of seminal performers and recordings.^[136] In short, an ideal of authenticity took shape around jazz—an ideal strongly resembling the one that, half a century earlier, had inspired new American attitudes toward European art music.

By World War II jazz writers were strongly asserting the music's artistic excellence. But their claim had little impact outside the circle in which it was made. For one thing, the claimants, rather than established critics or academics, were journalists and fans, many with little or no formal training in music. For another, the performers they praised shared little, in origins or public bearing, with other musicians whom Americans had accepted as artists. Moreover, jazz still belonged to the world of commercial entertainment; advocacy for the music carried no edifying justification.^[137] Finally, few Americans in positions of cultural authority were deeply enough absorbed in both classical music and jazz to understand them as complementary parts of American music.

In the 1960s, the position of jazz in American musical life changed dramatically. The reasons are many, and they extend beyond the realm of music, including the civil rights movement, the wave of populism that brought vernacular expressions to the fore, the role of public protest—much of it expressed through music—in the nation's political life, historians' new interest in the lives of common people, and a general distrust of "elitism" in all its forms. Within jazz, an avant-garde developed. Jazz performers, who in the 1920s and 1930s had generally accepted their role in the entertainment business, and some of whom in the 1940s had withdrawn more self-consciously into a realm of "hip" iconoclasm, now moved closer to the intellectual world, sometimes offering elaborate explanations of their music. As jazz's economic support shrank, its cultural capital grew. For jazz was coming to be seen as a music whose devotion to authenticity made it unable to compete in the marketplace. That devotion, together with the musical skill jazz demanded, opened the door to support of the kind that classical music

had been receiving for years: public and private patronage, university positions for jazz musicians, and academic programs to train jazz performers and certify them with diplomas and college degrees.^[138]

In identifying and privileging the original spirit of the best jazz performances, as well as works by great composers (whether European or American), authenticity has shown itself to be a flexible idea as well as a powerful one. That flexibility has allowed it to play a key role in determining what American music historians have written about. As received from Chase, the broadened view of authenticity grants the importance of many American musical vernaculars. At the same time, it holds that, because a commitment to accessibility tends to corrupt a musical genre's integrity, the most significant American music, cultivated or vernacular, has grown up on the marketplace's edge or outside it altogether. Thus, such practices as Southern shape-note singing, Negro spirituals, and Anglo-American balladry—all performing traditions originating in the vernacular tradition, in the everyday lives of particular communities—can be considered expressions of authentic artistic significance. In different ways, these and other community-based styles have intersected with the marketplace without being absorbed by it. All three have done so in published arrangements for literate singers; balladry, over the past half-century, has inspired performers carrying forward the so-called folk revival; spirituals, which preserve what Stanley Crouch has called "the molten nobility of Negro religious emotion,"^[139] are a direct ancestor of the economically potent gospel tradition. The religious roots of shape-note singing and spirituals give them an indisputably authentic grounding. As for balladry, it's understood as a branch of folklore, distilling basic human truths that modem civilization has obscured. In a musical world where technology and the marketplace can supply any conceivable performing forces and produce glossy, sumptuous sound on demand, to sing in a rough, raw voice with bare accompaniment can seem a statement of moral principle. Thus, messages of political protest have gained in authority when a Woody Guthrie, a Pete Seeger, or a Bob Dylan have delivered them as proverbial truth-telling "voices in the wilderness." As spirituals and balladry have found their own paths to marketplace accessibility, their authentic links with the past have come to be an issue for performers, writers, and entrepreneurs involved with them.^[140]

Recently, the ideal of authenticity has crossed another boundary. Moving beyond styles and repertories whose origins lie outside the marketplace, its advocates have taken an interest in "original" performing styles, whatever their provenance. Alec Wilder's American Popular Song: The Great Innovators , 1900-1950 proved a harbinger of this trend. Marking the demise of the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway song as a major creative force, Wilder's study is a musician's appreciation of the art of Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, and others, as song composers. Since Wilder's book appeared, some performers have taken up this music's cause, not so much to boost its accessibility—though it still holds a niche in the repertories of some popular and jazz performers—but to revive its original spirit. From performances that stick close to the songs' sheet-music versions (Joan Morris and William Bolcom), to arrangements harking back to days of marketplace power (Linda Ronstadt and Nelson Riddle), to revivals of whole musical shows—Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1976, Houston Opera) and Kern's Show Boat (1986, John McGlinn) "as their composers wrote them"—performers have applied to such erstwhile "accessible" works standards of authenticity like those first offered for classical music, jazz, and noncommercial vernaculars.^[141]

Thus, over the past century, authenticity has broadened its focus: from works by European composers, to jazz, to vernaculars originating outside the marketplace, to vernaculars originating inside it but no longer potent there. At the same time, however, it has consistently taken an oppositional stance against accessibility and the musical conventions that rule the present-day marketplace. As the technology of dissemination—especially recording—has been simplified and democratized, and as authenticity has embraced a widening variety of music, the marketplace has turned into an arena where supply does not have to be governed directly by demand. Patronage from foundations, academic institutions, individuals, and sometimes the business itself, for performances sanctioned by authenticity, has helped to create other sources of supply, further enriching a musical marketplace already abundant and remarkably varied. That enrichment has encouraged even more audience fragmentation. Today, if an audience exists for a certain kind of music-making, some arm of the marketplace stands ready to serve it.

Of all the recent appeals to authenticity, however, perhaps the most striking has been by advocates of rock-based music, who have succeeded

in planting inside the marketplace an ideal that separates so-called classic performances from the rest. One symptom is the "Golden Oldies" impulse, keeping certain performances available in record stores and on the airwaves. But the ideal goes further. For rock has inspired its own intellectual tradition, complete with critics, journals, discographies, biographies, histories, and serious interpretive assessments—a tradition whose implied "other" is not European music but nonrock musics, both cultivated and vernacular. Rock is rooted, after all, in African-American rhythm and blues. Hence, it began life as a music oppositional in sound, aesthetics, and its place in the music business.^[142] If early rock 'n' roll brought a playful spirit to its celebration of sex, a strongly moral tone appeared in the music from the mid-1960s on. Declaring itself against middle-class authority, morality, manners, materialism, and reliance on reason, rock took a stand for freedom, sincerity, love, youth, and an idealistic moral code rooted in these elements. Moreover, in its own way, rock sought to be edifying. It is vocal music whose meanings can be explicit, strongly political, and widely understandable. In the years when Americans fiercely debated the nation's involvement in the Vietnam War, rock helped to crystallize public sentiment, not only about the war but about changes taking place in society. For the popular music industry, a happier turn of events could hardly be imagined. As a major supplier of messages that helped to fuel a national crisis, the business grew enormously in those years, both in wealth and prestige.

Before rock advocates forged their own ideal of authenticity, accessibility and authenticity could be distinguished by the repertories upon which they focused. The wide commercial appeal of rock-based music still made it seem different in kind from music whose more limited attraction supported its claim to authenticity: symphonies, operas, jazz, blues, or folk music.^[143] But when advocates found a large public willing to apply authenticity's powerful justifications to music that was still commercially potent—when audience members began to choose both the accessible "other" and the authentic masterwork from within the current marketplace—then that audience's incentive to explore music outside the marketplace weakened, and its musical horizons narrowed.

In 1993, rock-based musical styles—that is, popular styles with black roots that have been embraced by large nonblack audiences—have a powerful hold upon the American people and others around the globe. In my own experience, if you mention "music" to a young American

person today who is not a musician, he or she is unlikely to think much beyond the family of rock-based musics of the past several decades. In other words, many Americans seeking authentic experience through music find little reason to search beyond the present-day marketplace. For there, aided by consumer culture's promotional muscle, rock musicians and advocates and present-day audiences have created a self-sufficient world, complete with its own version of authenticity, preserved and disseminated chiefly through phonograph recordings. Here we can see the marketplace's uncanny power to constitute and define even the grounds upon which its own premises are criticized.

From an economic point of view, there is no greater success story in American music than that of rock-based vernaculars. Lower-class and black in inspiration, they captured first the mass market and then much of the intelligentsia, with insistent, wide-ranging messages.^[144] Blending the trappings of anarchic freedom with a certain humanistic ideology, and supplied by an efficient consumer network, they have crystallized ideas and emotions in a way that many find truthful. Rock-based vernaculars have drawn a powerful portrait of the human condition as seen from the perspective of late twentieth-century American consumer culture. Their impact on the American musical landscape in the long run will depend, I think, on how much value Americans manage to find in music that treats the human condition from other points of view.

The historian's task is not to legislate but to try to understand and describe. The story of how rock has donned the mantle of authenticity formerly reserved for music outside the central marketplace needs to be written, and not as a pro- or anti-rock polemic.^[145] We already have enough of those, mostly ill-informed or confused about what the music they're criticizing is really trying to do. How has a part of American music come to be taken by so many Americans as its whole? Or, to paraphrase Carl Dahlhaus: To what questions is this notion—the notion of rock's authenticity—the answer? Now there's a worthy subject for musicological Americanists of the 1990s!