Music in American Life

Tara Browner, Thomas Riis, Tara Browner, Thomas Riis

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051159
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis curate essays that offer an eclectic survey of current music scholarship. Ranging from Tin Pan Alley to Thelonious Monk to hip hop, the contributors go beyond repertory and biography to explore four critical yet overlooked areas: the impact of performance; patronage's role in creating music and finding a place to play it; personal identity; and the ways cultural and ethnographic circumstances determine the music that emerges from the creative process. Many of the articles also look at how a piece of music becomes initially popular and then exerts a lasting influence in the larger global culture. The result is an insightful state-of-the-field examination that doubles as an engaging short course on our complex, multifaceted musical heritage. Contributors: Karen Ahlquist, Amy C. Beal, Mark Clagu,. Esther R. Crookshank, Todd Decker, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, Joshua S. Duchan, Mark Katz, Jeffrey Magee, Sterling E. Murray, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., David Warren Steel, Jeffrey Taylor, and Mark Tucker

PART I

Performance

In The American Musical Landscape, Richard Crawford examines in a variety of contexts the unique economic and artistic matrix that informs most music-making in the United States, outlining the intertwined roles of composers, performers, teachers, distributors, manufacturers, and writers, as well as the roles of the managers and impresarios and the audiences and consumers who supported them.1 Performers represent a central point in this web of influences, for (in most instances) it is they who create the sound, whether or not it is mediated by other means. In fact, the role of performers in American music and its evolution from the practices of First Nations and the performances of the earliest colonists to the digital age of the twenty-first century remains an important thread through much of Crawford’s scholarship. Emphasis on performers is a primary way in which his scholarship is set apart from that of most earlier chroniclers of American music.

If performances of the early settlers filled a mainly private, utilitarian role, with religious texts sung during worship to melodies carried by oral tradition from Europe, the advent of music printing in the 1780s and the establishment of singing schools began to build a unique phenomenon that would have a far-reaching effect on music in the United States: the American audience. As Crawford and other historians have frequently pointed out, the lack of an established tradition of institutional support fostered a unique relationship between the performance and those who consumed it. As Crawford writes, “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.”2 Enter the American musical impresario, an entrepreneur with quite different goals and methods than his European counterpart. Especially after the 1830s and ’40s, with the creation of black-face minstrelsy, the rise in popularity of Italian opera, and the foundation of American orchestras, choral societies, and relevant institutions, performers, audiences, and entrepreneurs (or their later incarnations, theatrical managers, booking agents, talent scouts, and the like) remained inextricably linked. Sometimes integrated into this trio and sometimes orbiting about it was the composer, who could be the creator of an inviolable work of art, a completely unknown source (as in oral traditions), the inspiration for a casual musical interpretation, or (as in the case of some improvised traditions) one with the performer.

In some cases, entrepreneurs and audiences demanded from performers little more than light entertainment, sometimes providing (for minstrel shows, especially) music and routines that were already so well-known that audiences could sing along. In other cases, both managers and performers themselves sought to foster spiritual uplift and to educate their audience in what they considered the height of (Western) musical creativity. Whatever the case, the machinery of the music business worked tirelessly to expand performers’ audiences and, concurrently, their pocketbooks (as well as those of their supporters).

And machinery it was, indeed. For more than two hundred years technology and performance have remained close partners in American music, from the founding of a domestic sheet-music business in the eighteenth century to the latest digital means of musical delivery. In the nineteenth century, new developments in music printing, transportation, and the telegraph all affected performer’s musical lives and touring careers. But it was after 1900 that technology truly became embedded in the experience of performers and those who promoted them and experienced their art. With the advent of the phonograph, radio, film, television, and ultimately electronics, performers could create music that might reach their audiences at a considerable distance. No longer was a performer’s career based solely on a particular event at a particular time and location, with established promotional tools in place, as well as a specific audience and venue. As Crawford writes:

To survey such [technological] 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. These changes all involve technology’s impact upon communication—its power to capture performances and to circulate them more and more swiftly and widely.3

Therefore, after the turn of the twentieth century, a quite different set of scholarly tools need to be brought to bear on the role of performance in American life. The introduction of high-speed digital technology and the creation of whole new categories of laptopwielding performers in virtual orchestras around the world has created yet another branch of performance art in the twenty-first century, about which new critical perspectives have only begun to take shape.

The chapters in this section cover over a century of American musical history. Not only does the context of each piece differ substantially, but so does the definition and role of the performer. The performer lies at the center of Karen Ahlquist’s new investigation (in chapter 1) of a long-standing debate about American music since the early 1800s: the so-called divide between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture. American performers—and their constant companions of promoters and audiences—have traditionally been judged not just by critics but also by larger issues of economics and social class, which may hinder a nuanced view of musical art (whether or not it has been described with that phrase) in the United States. Jeffrey Magee’s theory (in chapter 2) of a popular trope in musical theater depends on a unique relationship between composers, performers, and audiences, where the artists who create and present a production rely on the attentive listening of theater-goers who will recognize—consciously or not—the subtle evolution of a simple idea into a multilayered concept. For Warren Steel, in chapter 3, the performer and audience are one; singers gather in “convivial” settings such as the home or the lodge hall, with secular repertory suitable for performance outside the worship service. The repertory and accompanying instruction also serve as an educational tool. This is not music for public choral performances, events that would become so widely popular later in the century.

So, the word performer and the idea and realization of performance finally embraces a range of participants and perspectives, in public and private spaces. Performance, broadly defined, implies a deed done, an accomplishment, an enactment. It may even imply the fulfillment of an obligation to oneself or one’s community. Our common human experience with musical performance can be a powerful unifying force in a divided world.

Notes

1. Richard Crawford, The American Musical Landscape: The Business of Musicianship from Billings to Gershwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See especially 43–46 and 70–71.

2. Ibid., 71.

3. Ibid., 90–91.

1 Balance of Power

Music as Art and Social Class
in the Late Nineteenth Century

KAREN AHLQUIST

I first encountered Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America when it came out in 1988 as I was working on my dissertation.1 Borders Books in Ann Arbor rushed my order, and I have that hardbound copy still today. It is littered with marginalia and holds pages of notes marked “Levine 6/95” and, another, “5/05.” Over twenty-five years, I have been far from alone. Dozens of reviews and hundreds of citations show Levine’s wide-ranging and effective presentation of late-nineteenth-century “sacralized culture” resonating with scholars across a broad expanse of fields. Highbrow/Lowbrow argues that after the Civil War, elites took control of what had been shared public cultural expression to distinguish and separate themselves from the broader population. This idea brought both approbation and counterarguments. Nonetheless, it has had admirable staying power and still has an affinity with social-class debates prominent in American political life in the twenty-first century.

Levine focuses attention on the complex period between the Civil War and World War I. Economic boom-and-bust cycles that brought poverty and labor violence, westward expansion and the so-called Indian Wars, industrialization, urbanization, massive immigration, racial tension and violence, corporate consolidation, and the growth of a consumer society are among the contemporaneous changes that affected the life of every resident of the United States and many beyond its borders. The period also brought ambitious new institutions, including some of today’s most prominent arts organizations. Art museums, art schools and conservatories, performance venues, and orchestras allowed burgeoning cities to offer their publics opportunities for cultural growth and served as sources of civic pride. They are, however, also the organizations seen as instruments of a linked aesthetic and social hierarchy. This idea—that elite-created institutions aimed either to exclude a broader audience or invite it only on its own stuffy terms—grew to mainstream proportions over the course of the twentieth century. Furthermore, in a circular argument, scholars (Levine not among them) have sometimes designated European art music as inherently elite culture in order to use it as evidence of elite preoccupation with social distinction.2

It is important here to acknowledge that hierarchies exist, class exists, and power imbalances exist. Nor have questions of power...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Performance
• Part II: Patronage
• Part III: Identity
• Part IV: Ethnography
• Contributors
• Index