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CONSEQUENCES OF CANON
The Institutionalization of Enmity between
Contemporary and Classical Music

William Weber

When concerts of classical musiconly recently so namedarose in the nineteenth century, they brought with them a culture of intense enmity between new
and old music. Ask any composer in the avant-garde today what symphony
orchestras have done for him or her, and you will unleash a barrage of resentment against such institutions. Then ask a subscriber to orchestra concerts how
much new music should be performed, and you will get the contrary reaction: an
accusation that composers do not care about the public, that they write only for
each other. We take these expressions of enmity for granted now; they seem natural, inherent to the musical landscape. The dense polemical meanings of the
term modern music dene an area of high art where proponents and opponents
have little common ground and where conict has become institutionalized.
When agreement periodically occurs there is a popular taste for various works
by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Henryk Gorecki, and John Adams the
agreement is quickly disclaimed by an avant-garde anxious to recategorize modern pieces in concert repertory as merely popular. Myself, I love much music
by avant-garde composers but despair of their polemics; I therefore wish to help
make possible a language, built on historical foundations, by which to understand
the stalemate between the contemporary and the classical.
To comprehend how the stalemate happened, we must investigate the
Common Knowledge 9:1
Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press

78

process through which classics replaced contemporary music, rst in concert programs and then in opera, and next investigate how that change spawned a separate world of new music largely isolated from public life. This cultural framework, in both its polemical and institutional aspects, was in place by around 1910.
By that time, classical-music repertories dominated the great majority of the most
important concert series, from those of symphony orchestras and chamber-music
groups to those of solo recitals. The public had become instinctively skeptical of
anything new, and living composers had begun to build their own concert world.
Composers anger at their limited access to key concert repertories led them to
dene new music as a moral cause for high art; the composers developed concerts dedicated to the performance of serious contemporary music concerts
run by themselves, by musicians, by their patrons and friends, and usually attended
by few others.
Musical modernism, in other words, did not create the problem. It was not
that composers alienated the public by writing music beyond what most people
would like or could understand. Rather, by 1910 concert life had shifted its focus
so much from contemporary to classical repertory that new works now took up
a problematic, often marginal place within musical life.
Still, in the long term, the very rhetoric that divided classical from contemporary music has served as a means of negotiation between the two. While
the two sides have deprecated one another intensely from the beginning of the
twentieth century, they in the process have worked out practices by which new
music has maintained at least a limited standing in the life of the average concertgoer. However much the stalemate between new and old music has become
institutionalized, new musical and social pressures have brought both sides to
adapt to change and devise new ways, if usually small ones, by which contemporary music can relate to the larger musical world. The language of deprecation
has proved politically malleable, despite its harshness. Thus did the British
Broadcasting Company fund extensive performances of avant-garde works beginning in the late 1920s, and four decades later the National Endowment for the
Arts in the United States began requiring ensembles given grants to offer some
new music on their programs. Whether those moves helped or hurt public appreciation of contemporary music is of course an open question.1
The epitomes of twentieth-century musical enmity are books published
in the 1950s by the British critic Henry Pleasants and the Russo-American encyclopedist Nicolas Slonimsky. In their books, we can see how two generations of
attack on and defense of contemporary music culminated in the establishment of
dogmatic creeds for each side. Pleasants opened The Agony of Modern Music
1. Jennifer R. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music,
192236: Shaping a Nations Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).

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(1955) by declaring that serious music is a dead art. The vein which for three
hundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run
out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators
picking through the slagpile (3). Pleasants invoked the public as the source of
authority for his judgment: In former times contemporary music survived
despite opposition from critics and professional musicians because the public
liked it. Today it languishes despite critical and professional support because the
public will have none of it. That it survives at all, or at least continues to be
played, is due simply to the fact that the public no longer has anything to say
about it (8).
Slonimskys Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since
Beethovens Time predated Pleasantss book by two years, and Slonimskys Music
since 1900, published in 1937, indeed pregured it. Essential to Slonimskys dogmatic construct is the erection of a modernist countercanon, founded upon the
principle that great works will eventually be recognized. The opening chapter,
Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar, uses vocabulary just as blunt as Pleasantss
slagpile, and it blames the antimodernists fossilized senses for their failure
to appreciate new music: To listeners steeped in traditional music, modern
works are meaningless, as alien languages are to a poor linguist. No wonder that
music critics often borrow linguistic similes to express their recoiling horror of
the modernists (4). Slonimsky adapts the principle of canon to favor new works:
A fairly accurate time-table could be drawn for the assimilation of unfamiliar
music by the public and the critics. It takes approximately twenty years to make
an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity; and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece (19). Slonimskys credo has since become dogma for
defenders of new music, as can be seen in Richard Kostelanetzs adoring compendium of excerpts, published in 1994.2
Pleasantss work, ve decades on, seems more carefully argued, perhaps
more open to negotiation, than Slonimskys simplistic listing of antimodernist
horrors. Pleasants was not entirely typical of the critics of new music in that he
made a strong commitment to jazz and areas of popular music, arguing that public taste for the new had taken a creative path in a novel direction. Slominsky did,
however, accurately predict, indeed signicantly inuence, the rise of a modernist
countercanon.

Musical Enmity: Quarrels in the 1750s and 1840s

To understand the recent framework of musical enmity, we have to look back to
earlier forms of conict over new and old music, prior to the establishment of a
2. Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Nicolas Slonimsky: The First
Hundred Years (New York: Schirmer, 1994).

canon in musical culture. A massive change (yet one little remarked on) took
place in this regard between around 1750 and 1910. We all take the existence of
a canon of music for granted; it is easy to forget that in 1800, except in Britain,
relatively few works remained in performance longer than a generation, and this
situation is of course the opposite of that which prevails in our own day in opera
and classical-music concerts. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, it
was unusual, though by no means unknown, for a work more than a generation
old to be performed publicly. Students and admirers of master composers kept
their music alive for several decades, sometimes a bit longer; and names like
Josquin Desprez, Giovanni Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, and William Byrd remained
in memory even though few people had heard or read any of their music. Musical taste was by denition a matter for the present, with links to the various styles
of the past changing on a cyclical basis. Most works were composed to celebrate
current events, and an old work seemed entirely inappropriate to such occasions.
Some works did remain in performance over long spans of time, chiey in the
church, but did so quietly, without being dened as components of a canon. The
idea of ancient music arose in England and France in the early eighteenth century, but it was not until around 1850 that canonical repertories began to emerge
in Europe as a whole.3

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The attitude toward old and new music was in the eighteenth century not
so different from the now current attitude toward rock music. Some readers will
protest any such parallel, and indeed the nature of public enthusiasm for leading musicians differs fundamentally between, say, the progressive-rock scene of
our own time and the concert world of 1780. The contemporary example has a
commercial purpose of large-scale prot quite unlike that of the earlier period.
Still, early audiences went with the presumption that most of the programs they
attended would be of new music, and indeed they were lured into the concert hall
by such promises. An interesting parallel exists also in the roles of public and private musical experience. Listeners in the late eighteenth century were acquainted
with older styles from their private lessons they were taught to play the concertos of Arcangelo Corelli. Likewise, today, rock concertgoers know the music
of the sixties from which the latest groups have grown, because those audiences
also listen to records and CDs at home.4 Rock has yet to establish its own insti-

3. William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in EighteenthCentury England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Weber, The
History of Musical Canons, in Rethinking Music, ed.
Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33655; Weber, From Miscellany to
Homogeneity in Concert Programming, Poetics 29 (2001):
125 34; and Weber, La Musique Ancienne in the Waning

of the Ancien Regime, Journal of Modern History 56

(1984): 58 88. The original piece on this subject was:
Joseph Kerman, A Few Canonic Variations, Critical
Inquiry 10 (1983): 107 26.
4. See Antoine Hennion, Sophie Maisonneuve, and Emilie Gomart, Figures de lamateur: Formes, objets, pratiques de
lamour de la musique aujourdhui (Paris: Documentation
Franaise, 2000).

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tutions of pedagogy based upon canonical examples, and for that reason most
such musicians still learn within the classical-music tradition.
Disputes between defenders of new and old music have occurred regularly
at points when style has changed rapidly and fundamentally. These episodes are
best seen as quarrels: that is, as brief disputes whose manners have followed patterns of literary custom that allow strong disagreements to occur without disturbing the social equilibrium. These usually have involved a congeries of interrelated musical, personal, political, and social issues; they have usually been linked
to politics, in some fashion, but ultimately have served to entertain the reading
and gossiping public. One nds such disputes prominently between supporters
of new and old styles around 1350, 1520, 1600, 1750, and 1830.
The dispute in the 1750s was the Querelle des Bouffons in Paris between
supporters of Jean-Baptiste Lully, the composer to Louis XIV whose works
remained unusually long on stage, and the new Italian opera buffa that had been
changing musical style from top to bottom across Europe for thirty years.5 The
episode did not concern the preferability of new music to old so much as it concerned aesthetic and political questions about what kind of musical experience
should dene the state theater. Though the Bourbon regime had prevented Italian companies from playing in its midst, the constitutional crisis of absolutism in
the 1750s forced the admission of a troupe in 1752, setting off an epochal querelle
in which authors of the Encylopdie found it in their interests to support the new
Italian against the old French opera. Friedrich Grimm, a member of the Encyclopedist camp, came down rmly on the side of Italian opera in Le petit prophte
de Boehmischbroda: echoing what foreign diplomats were saying about the amazingly out-of-date music they heard at the Opra, Grimm wrote: In your obduracy you have made yourself into an opera house which has bored me for twentyfour years, and which is the laughing-stock of Europe to this day.6 Thus did
enmity in musical culture serve the needs of political conict the most serious political crisis, indeed, that the regime had experienced since the Opra was
established in 1661.
We get a concise picture of what Parisians heard at that time in the concert
hall basically new music, with a smattering of what they called la musique
ancienne by looking at a program performed at the Concert Spirituel on September 8, 1752. The concerts were held on holy days when the theaters were closed,
and this privilege was justied by offering a few sacred works. Only two works
out of seven on this program were by dead composers (Madin and Delalande):

5. Weber, La Musique Ancienne, 5861, and Denise Launay, ed., La querelle des bouffons: Texte des pamphlets, 3 vols.
(Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973).

6. Launay, La querelle des bouffons,1:168. See also Louisette

Eugnie Reichenburg, Contribution lhistoire de la querelle
des bouffons: Guerre de brochures suscites par le Petit
prophte de Grimm et par la Lettre sur la musique franaise
de Rousseau (New York: AMS, 1988).

Angelo Vio of Venice, Symphony with Horns

Henri Madin (1698 1748), Diligam te, motet
Concerto for unnamed instrument, no composer cited
Aria in Italian style, no composer cited
Felippe Palma, Concerto for Flute
Pierre Gavinis, Solo for Violin
Abb Mongeot, Cantata for the convalescence of the dauphin
Michel Delalande (1657 1726), Te Deum.7
A program performed at the same series in 1782 shows a pattern closer to
the norm in Europe as a whole all works by living composers:
F. J. Haydn (1732 1807), Symphony, premiere
Giuseppe Sarti (1729 1802), Aria in the Italian style
Prosper Deshayes (c. 1750 1815), Concerto for unnamed instrument
Franois-Joseph Gossec (1734 1829), O Salutaris, motet
Concerto for Oboe, premiere, composer not cited
Chartain (1740 93), Ode sacre, words by J.-J. Rousseau
Chartain, Concerto for Violin, premiere
Nicolo Piccini (1728 1800), Aria in the Italian style
Johann Sterkel (1750 1817), Symphony.8
A paradox faced music lovers during this period (call it the Enlightenment,
if you will): being on the side of innovation meant bringing old works back into
the repertory, whereas being on the side of tradition meant scheduling only or
mostly new music at public concerts. Strange bedfellows were consequent on this
paradox. The Encyclopedists, for example, who were almost always seen on the
side of innovation, took the side of tradition in bringing contemporary music
back as the standard of taste. The performance of Jean-Baptiste Lullys out-ofdate operas was a dramatic novelty in music history, and the philosophes served
as a conservative force in helping to stop it. The traditional public got its way
in the end: Paris had to wait until the cult of Beethoven emerged in the 1820s for
canonical repertories in public concerts. Still, in the 1780s musical commentators began to speak of Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and the frenchied Christoph
Willibald Gluck as a national heritage, thereby attributing to past styles a high
authority that was to become central to musical culture. By the same token and

7. Pierre Constant, Histoire du concert spirituel: 17251790

(Paris: Societ franaise de musicologie, 1975), 210. At the
end of the concert, several motets were also sung, some of
which might have been from the earlier period.

8. Constant, Histoire du concert spirituel, 232.

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with the same irony, aristocrats and political conservatives were particularly
prominent in the innovative the progressive movement on behalf of classical music during the 1830s and 1840s.9
By the 1840s (a second period of dispute), concert programming had
changed signicantly. A substantial classical repertory had developed, though it
did not yet wholly dominate musical taste. The following German program is
typical of the period:
William Sterndale Bennett (1816 75), Overture to
The Wood Nymphs (1838)
Mozart, Al desio di chi tadora from Le nozze di Figaro,
K. 492 (1789 substitute aria)
Ferdinand David (1810 73), Violin Concerto, played by composer
Giacomo Meyerbeer (17911864), Cavatina from Robert le Diable (1831)
Henri Vieuxtemps (1820 81), Lieder ohne Worte for Violin (1845)
Intermission
Beethoven, Symphony no. 3, Eroica (1804).10
Here, in a program of the Leipzig Gewandhaus (November 12, 1846), we can see
a xity beginning to develop in the choice of repertory a tendency, that is, to
stay with certain works rather than to refresh the program with new ones. The
placing of the Eroica as the only work after intermission reinforced the attribution of authority to the music of a dead composer. This practice departs drastically from the eighteenth-century convention of four or ve pieces in each half.
The rst such departure at the Gewandhaus occurred when the Eroica was rst
played there in 1807 (though with a well-known recent opera scene at the very
end), and the practice was continued as a way in which to honor works by composers who were now being recognized as canonical. By the 1840s, one might
occasionally hear a program including a work each by Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethovenin effect, a canon (which also included, at that time, Carl Maria von
Weber, Luigi Cherubini, Giovanni Viotti, Domenico Cimarosa, and Giovanni
Paesiello, among others).
Still, we need to underscore that the rst half of this Gewandhaus program
featured new music: an aria by Meyerbeer, the biggest name in musical life at the
time; a new overture by William Sterndale Bennett, who visited Leipzig regu-

9. Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From

the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Jann Pasler, Countess Greffulhe,
the Queen of Music, and Concerts as a Form of Diplomacy (paper presented at the conference The Musician

As Entrepreneur and Opportunist, William Andrews

Clark Library, University of California, Los Angeles, June
2, 2001).
10. Collection of Gewandhaus Programs, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig.

larly; and a concerto by the twenty-six-year-old Henri Vieuxtemps, soon to be

recognized as a star virtuoso. Thus were contemporary and classical repertory
closely linked, indeed balanced; one senses no canonical hierarchy of the sort to
which we are accustomed. Vieuxtemps certainly revered the Mozart aria sung just
before his piece, but he could take center stage after its performance with complete condence. The integration of old and new works did, however, prove to
be a transitional stage in musical tastea stage that was to end within about fty
years.
We can identify a formal negotiation between composers and orchestral
concerts under way even at this early date. It became the practice to hold trials
at which an orchestras directing board would invite several composers to bring
performing parts of a new work they wished to have considered for inclusion in
the orchestras program. Trials are known to have been scheduled by the Philharmonic Society of London as early as the 1820s, then by the Society of Concerts in Paris and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Vienna. It would seem that the
composer, his friends or students, and members of the musical intelligentsia were
invited to these sessions.11 By this practice did the rising orchestras claim a hege-

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monic role with regard to new music and to composers careers.

In this context, an instructive and highly ideological dispute surrounded
the Gewandhaus concert (1846) in which the Eroica was performed after intermission. The dispute began as a quarrel between two music magazines, the Neue
Zeitschrift fr Musik (NZM), edited by Robert Schumann, and the aging Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ), which the NZM arose to challenge. The AMZ,
founded in 1798, had been the foremost music periodical in Germany, reaching
both more and less learned readers, but by the 1830s it had lost touch with a
younger generation of idealistic musicians and intellectuals. Schumann attacked
the AMZ for a philistine taste governed by the growing commercialism of opera,
virtuosic music, and the publishing business; he came close, in fact, to using the
term commodication. The episode resembled the eighteenth-century quarrel
in many respects, since Leipzig was the Paris of Central Europe the leading
city of the German music world. Just as the querelle des bouffons broke out
during a major political crisis, so this later dispute drew much of its vitality and
its ideological themes from political unrest: from a situation referred to as the
Vormrz.12
11. The trials are cited in the Minutes of Directors
Meetings, Papers of the Royal Philharmonic Society, on
permanent loan to the British Library (see, for example,
January 20, 1815; December 28, 1817; January 19, 1819;
January 20, 1837; January 2, 1840); Procs-verbaux du
comit, Socit des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris,
Fonds Conservatoire, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris; and
Minutes of Directing Committee, Papers of the Vienna
Philharmonic, Archive of the Philharmonic, Vienna.

12. Much of Schumanns style of writing was seemingly

inuenced by the main early journal critical of the Leipzig
and Saxon regimes, Unser Planet: Blaetter fr Unterhaltung,
Zeitgeschichte, Literatur, Kunst und Theater. Unterhaltungsblatt (Leipzig, 1833 34).

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While this dispute did not originate in a conict between taste for classical
and contemporary music, it ended up deepening the enmity between them
signicantly. The music business was at that time expanding rapidly, due to the
invention of cheaper and more colorful ways to print sheet music for amateurs.
Publishers were turning out medleys of the most popular opera tunes for amateurs to perform, and these opened up a vast new market. In effect, what we call
popular music began at this time, at least to the extent that observers such as
Robert Schumann began drawing a fundamental distinction between music written for commercial and noncommercial ends. Schumann accosted virtuoso performers and opera composers for designing their music for prot rather than
craft, and for thereby contributing to what we now call the commodication of
music. His pithy aphorisms, later published in a book titled On Music and Musicians, attacked such musicians on moral grounds: Rossini, Bellini, and Auber, he
wrote, each wanted simply to be fashionable, to be recognized as a genius la
mode.13 Schumann ridiculed the variation the main genre by which virtuosi
adapted opera tunes to the piano in especially harsh language: No musical
form, he wrote, has produced more insipid results than these. . . . one has little conception how much shameless vulgarity. . . . We consider ourselves and our
readers far too good to be burdened with such trash.14 Schumann accordingly
dened great classical works as a higher authority by which to deprecate the aesthetic and moral standing of the music he found inferior. As he put it: The quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven! Who does not know them and who dare cast
a stone at them? . . . after the lapse of half a century they still delight all hearts.
. . . in so long a period of time nothing comparable has been created.15
I have argued elsewhere that a sort of musical idealism emerged from
Schumanns writing: a moral code, in other words, for taste in music.16 In Britain,
Henry Chorley, critic for the Athanaeum, offered similar ideas as also, in
France, did Franois Ftis, editor of the Revue et Gazette Musicale. The quarrel
between the two Leipzig magazines (NZM and AMZ) ended at the opening of
the Revolution of 1848, indeed with the collapse of the AMZ in that year; but a
movement grew out of the episode that gave a new direction to the composing
profession. While Schumann promoted a musical idealism in defense, ultimately,
of new music, the movement he spawned gave so central a place to canonical
compositions that it worked against the interest of living composers. Franz Brendel, Schumanns successor as editor of the NZM, made that journal an organ for

13. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul

Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 70 71.
14. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 66.
15. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 68.

16. Weber, Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,

in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C.
Large and William Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 91145.

supporters of Wagner who proclaimed a broader movement on behalf of progressive music. Brendel adapted the moral rhetoric of Schumann to help composers of the self-titled New German School to get their works performed. During the 1850s, orchestras such as the Gewandhaus performed more classics and
fewer new works, especially works by composers identied with Wagner and his
ideological colleague Franz Liszt. The enmity that Schumann had felt toward
commercial music was shaped by Brendel in the service of progressive composers. Brendel and Liszt turned their conict with the Gewandhaus into an
institutionthe Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, founded at Weimar in 1861
to help bring new works to performance. The organization held a national festival of new music annually, and many of its chapters did the same in local communities.17 By the 1890s, it had become a kind of composers guild and pressure
group. The enmity against musical commercialism in Germany had turned into
a political and professional ideology. In France, the Socit Nationale de la
Musique Franaise, though not Wagnerian, had a similar history and worked for
much the same purposes as the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein.18

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The Dissociation of Old and New in Concert Programs, 1900 1910

By 1910, the concert repertory had become fundamentally canonical, and within
it new composers had begun to negotiate a limited status for their work. The
contemporary and the classical were no longer balanced: canon had come to rule.
New works were still performed, a good deal more than we are used to today, but
the most important concerts in the leading musical cities offered far less new
music than had been the case in 1850. The main symphony orchestras around
1910 did not tend to play more than one work by a living composer on any program. The presence of that single work was, in effect, the product of negotiation
with the ensembles by composers as an interest group. One element in the shift
between the typical eighteenth-century and twentieth-century concert was the
reduction in the number and length of works performed. It became usual, by the
rst decade of the twentieth century, to offer four or ve works per concert, as
compared with eight in the eighteenth-century Gewandhaus, ten at the Philharmonic Society of London, and as many as thirty-ve at some concerts. Short
genres common in the 1840s, opera selections or virtuoso fantasies on opera
melodies, had migrated from those events to pops concerts of an informal nature.

17. James Deaville is doing important research on the history of the organization and its concerts. See Deaville,
Programming in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein: The Life (and Death) of a New-Music Performance Organization (paper presented at American

Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Lexington, KY,

November 1999).
18. Michael C. Strasser, Ars Gallica: The Socit Nationale
de Musique and Its Role in French Musical Life, 1871
1891 (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1998).

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Since fewer slots existed for an increasing number of composers, any work
played had to be a major composition, almost by implication a candidate for
canonization.
By 1900, all countries in Europe made a sharp distinction between classical and popular music, and all offered events of the sort called music halls in
Britain and varit in France concerts focused upon female singers but often
also including jugglers, comedians, animal acts, and orchestral performance of
works that used to be included in formal concerts. In the rst half of the nineteenth century, the great majority of composers wrote lighter music for performance at home or in promenade concerts; pieces by Carl Maria von Weber,
Felix Mendelssohn, and even Schumann himself remained in use as late as 1914
in concerts thought to be popular rather than serious. But from around that time
on, composers have had to choose between the two worlds in their careers or else
to keep the music they wrote for each entirely separate. The serious musical
world now frowned upon anyone writing ballads or band numbers. Those who
wanted recognition in the serious musical world took Brendels ideology very
much to heart; it offered them intellectual salvation.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a concert for both vocal
and instrumental music was often called a miscellaneous concert one with
a repertory various enough to satisfy the contrasting tastes of different publics or
of any one person. At such a concert, one might hear not only a symphony, but
also an opera number, a ashy virtuoso number, and a sentimental song from a
comic opera. Eliminating such numbers spurned a time-honored tradition of performing the serious and the comic together. The new principle of homogeneity
(uniformity of cultural level) conveyed a sense of purity and, some might say, cultural pretense.19 The program offered at the Gewandhaus on February 12, 1910,
is an extreme, but not unusual, example of the new practice. Only four works
were performed all pieces by dead composers of the rst canonical rank:
J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 in G (1713)
Brahms, Variations on a Theme by Haydn (1873)
Mozart, Serenade with Horns, K. 375 (1781 or 1782)
Intermission
Beethoven, Fifth Symphony (1808).20
One would never have encountered a program such as that one in the 1840s. Let
us remember, however, that names unfamiliar to us now, though famous then,
are often to be found in programs of the timefor example, in this Gewandhaus
program of 1911:

19. Weber, From Miscellany to Homogeneity, 125 34.

20. Collection of Gewandhaus Programs, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig.

Beethoven, Third Symphony (1806)

Handel, Arias from several oratorios (1730s 40s)
Intermission
Friedrich Gernsheim (1839 1916), Zu einem Drama, tone poem
Robert Franz (1815 92), Lieder.21
Franzs lieder were in 1911 regarded as classics; Gernsheim, little known today,
was then a prominent member of the faculty at the Berlin Hochschule fr Musik.
Similar practices were followed in England. The London Symphony
Orchestra, from its founding in 1904 and quick rise to eminence, offered in its
programs only one relatively new work by a living British composer; the new
work was scheduled for the middle of the concert, as is the usual practice today.
The program for February 14, 1910, offered one recent work, a piece for a capella
chorus by Edward Elgar:

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Mozart, Symphony in B at, K. 319 (1779)

Bach, Sing Ye to the Lord, motet for double chorus (1727)
Edward Elgar (1857 1934), Go Song of Mine, op. 57,
unaccompanied chorus (1909)
Intermission
Beethoven, Mass in D, op. 123 (1823).22
Numbers can help us to see how massive a change occurred in the course of a
hundred years. All told, the works performed by the Gewandhaus in the season
1786 87 included 11 percent works by dead composers; in 1845 46, the proportion had risen to 39 percent; and in 191112, there was a steep increase to 81
percent. Likewise, during the season 1910 11, the London Symphony Orchestra performed 18 percent by living and 82 percent by dead composers.
Meanwhile, there emerged what we now call the new music concert
an event devoted almost entirely to contemporary music that does not command
a broad public. Such concerts were fundamentally different from those given
around 1800, say, where almost all works were recent, and the general public
attended. Concerts of new music, from around 1870 on, have usually been oriented toward narrow audiences. One could indeed argue that the audience for
new music was by the end of the nineteenth century not so much a public as it
was an interest group, given how high a proportion were either members of the
fast-growing music profession (including students at conservatories recently
established) or else patrons of the composers. When Mozart wanted to connect

21. Collection of Gewandhaus Programs, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig.

22. Department of Portraits, Royal College of Music,

London.

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with his colleagues, he did so privately, at one of the frequent gatherings of musicians that he wrote of in letters from Mannheim and Vienna. In the late nineteenth century, composers met up at public concerts, but it is doubtful that many
outside their own world attended; indeed, it was well known at the time that
many, if not most, people at such events had free tickets. The music largely comprised songs and chamber ensembles, but the programs were quite different from
those at classical recitals and chamber-music concerts. Take, for instance, this
1910 program of the Socit des Compositeurs de Musique (forty-eighth season,
third concert), held in Paris at the Salle Pleyel, a leading recital hall since the
1830s:
Edouard Mignan (1884 1969), Sonata
Stanley Golestan (1875 1926), Chansons populaires roumanes
Thodore Dubois (1837 1924), Dixtuor, Double Quintet for
Strings and Winds
Gabrielle Dauly, Deux Mlodies
Florent Schmitt (1870 1958), Sonata.23
Not one work by a then-canonical composer was performed (and not one of the
composers listed has become canonical since).
Concerts put on by composers leagues (such as the German and French
societies already mentioned) were to become the most important venue for new
music in the twentieth century. Examples include the Viennese concert society
of Arnold Schoenberg, the International Society for Contemporary Music begun
in 1922, the League of Composers in New York, and the 1939 Evenings on the
Roof in Los Angeles.24 In some cases, wealthy patrons have nanced concerts
where new works have been premiered. Thomas Beecham was the leading such
patron around 1910, providing Frederick Delius with a remarkable number of
opportunities to have his music played by Beechams orchestra. Delius himself
was in 1896 among the rst to give a concert entirely of his own compositions,
and Beecham made possible a full concert of Deliuss orchestral music in 1911.
More commonly, however, programs that focused on recent works also included
well-known classical numbers. The Thomas Beecham Orchestral Concert at
Queens Hall, London, on April 19, 1909, is a good example it offered work by
Britains best-known woman composer, Ethel Smyth:
Bedrich Smetana (1824 88), Overture to The Bartered Bride
Ethel Smyth (1858 1944), Ballad and Romance Amour, amour!
from the opera The Wreckers

23. Program Collection, Bibliothque de lOpra, Paris.

24. See Weber, Wagner, Wagnerism and Musical Idealism, 91145.

Arnold Bax (1883 1953), Into the Twilight, tone poem

Mozart, Violin Concert no. 4 in D, K. 218
Brahms (1833 97), Lieder
Smyth, Prelude to Act II of The Wreckers
Intermission
Rimsky-Korsakov (1844 1908), Antar Symphony.25

Polemics on Modern Music after 1900

The controversy over new music between roughly 1900 and 1910 put contemporary works in a situation entirely distinct from that of new music in the earlier pair of quarrels we have discussed. The new quarrel grew out of massive
changes in European cities and elites, changes that had a profound impact upon
culture. Major cities had grown too large and diversied for quarrels of the sort
found in the eighteenth century to take place: earlier disputes had involved a
small, self-conscious group, often called the beau monde or, simply, world. The
proponents and detractors of modern music around 1910 spoke to a variety of
separate cultural worlds rather than to a community. Composers fought for their
cause as an interest group; critics antagonistic to them responded with the pretension of speaking for an estranged public. It is vital to recognize that, while new
works had often been attacked in their own time, now the idea of what a new
work constituted became entirely different from what it had been in 1800. Any
new work was, on the one hand, treated with reference to hallowed canonical
standards and, on the other hand, defended by the composing profession as a
moral good to which the public had to pay allegiance. Neither proposition had
existed before.
Listeners expectations had changed fundamentally. In the eighteenth and
much of the nineteenth century, the period when concert programs balanced and
blended new and old works, listeners did not assume that the new music they
heard was by denition great or even a candidate for greatness. For his reputation to spread, a composer had only to be considered a master musician by his
colleagues. But by the 1890s, music critics had become impatient to nd composers worthy of comparison with the then-ultimate gure of the canon, Beethoven. In Britain, H. Heathcote Statham argued that neither Mendelssohn nor
Schubert could be considered as of this status, and George Bernard Shaws musical canon consisted of just a few genres of works by a very few composers.26 Pos-

25. Included in the programs of concerts of Thomas

Beecham, 1909 45, British Library J.X. 0431/534.

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26. Henry Heathcote Statham, My Thoughts on Music and

Musicians (London: Chapman and Hill, 1892); Jeffrey Hay,
Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Shaw (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1994).

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itivism was a strong inuence upon writers like Statham and Shaw, perhaps via
Auguste Comtes Calendar of Great Men, which included a scant thirteen musicians and was widely translated. (Comtes Calendar appeared in its nal form, prepared by Frederick Harrison, in 1892.) 27 From this point forward, critics commenced to up the ante on what they expected from composers before considering
them great.
Beyond this impatience with less-than-supreme greatness, a general suspicion of new music emerged after 1900 that had not appeared in concert reviews
or public discussion even thirty years before. From the start of formal concert
criticism at the end of the eighteenth century, reviewers were often harsh about
new works, as Slonimsky shows in detail, but they did not exhibit a distrust of
new music per se. By 1910, a recurrent theme of concert reviews and reports on
public taste was that the new was to be regarded as a burden to the critic or listener. It did not matter whether the new music in question was stylistically traditional or avant-garde; its being simply unfamiliar Slonimskys apt adjective set people against it. Proponents of contemporary music fought this
tendency by dening its role in moral terms. In 1820, scheduling new works was
taken for granted, though some classics were long-term and beginning to seem
permanent in the repertory. By 1900, performing new pieces became, to an
important subculture, a musical virtue, a step beyond the normal etiquetteand
virtuous behavior of this kind brought (as it still brings) the blessings of those
who approved. The narrowness of the emergent canon was, for such musicians
and critics, unethical. What is going to happen to young composers? became
the key moral question of the new-music subculture. Here, for example, is an
extract from the leading article in a 1910 issue of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt,
the descendant of Schumanns magazine:
Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, R. Strauss. Anything else is
regarded as a nuisance. It is so difcult to get anything new and good in
front of the public. After all, look how many singers do nothing but
trudge through Schuberts songs piece by piece. And so what is going to
happen to young composers? Singers say theyve done all they need to
do in that department by offering pieces by Wolf and Strauss.28

27. Frederick Harrison, The New Calendar of Great Men:

Biographies of the 558 Worthies of All Ages and Nations in the
Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte (London: Macmillan,
1892). Comte included thirteen musicians, including
Antonio Sacchini (1734 86), excerpts from whose operas
reappeared periodically through the 1840s, but not Johann
Sebastian Bach.

28. Musikalische Chronik: Leipzig, Musikalisches Wochenblatt (September 29, 1910): 1.

If the polemical terms used by proponents of new music were ethical, those
used by its opponents were apocalyptic. The former held that performing new
music was virtuous; the latter, that doing so was suicidal. For a closer look at the
enmity between classical and contemporary music, it is best to begin with Britain
because its composers at the turn of the century Charles Villiers Stanford and
Hubert Parry, most prominently cannot be regarded as modernist, and thus
we can rule out a reaction against musical radicalism as a cause of the dislike in
Britain of new music. Of course, by long tradition composers had limited prestige in Britain; a great deal of British music, however, was heard in both homes
and public concerts just not in the most prestigious genres (opera, symphony,
concerto). In other contexts, there was a rich world of British music.29 Stanford
and Parry aimed their sights at the higher genres, and the British public did not
respond warmly to the change. The movement that Stanford and Parry stimulated, which was being called a renaissance by around 1890, became a major
force in British musical life at that time, but the challenge to public expectations
resulted in a nervous relationship between composers and concertgoers. A relatively small but highly articulate public developed that favored the new composers, but the general public remained alienated.
New works were performed regularly, beginning in the early eighteenth
century, at the annual music festivals held throughout Britain. Concertgoers
treated these three- or four-day events in the cathedral towns as holidays and
enjoyed the several important premieres that occurred alongside the offerings of
standard works. By around 1910, however, the number of new works performed
was declining, and critics began to observe that the public regarded even these as
a burden. Fewer people attended the festivals, causing directors to look for more
consistently popular repertory. Concerning the Three Choirs Festival (Gloucester, 1910), one reviewer wrote: The fatal mistake made by the committee was in
the choice of new works for performance. . . . All the festivals that I have named
are on the down grade: they do not attract the public in sufciently large numbers. It is noticeable, however, that The Messiah, The Hymn of Praise, and Elijah
are still great draws, proving that the public likes that with which it is familiar.30
The word fatal in this review is typical of the new diction of disparagement. The disparaging rhetoric became typical, indeed, of both sides. A reviewer
named Herbert Antcliffe assessed the concert public of 1910 in these condescending terms: Ask ten people who go to a festival, and nine will evade it (the

29. See, for example, the concert-tour programs, 1853

1888, of trumpeter Thomas Harper in the Department of
Portraits in the Royal College of Music, London.

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30. Gerald Cumberland, Musical Problems: IV Musical

Festivals, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 398
(November 1, 1910): 90 91. See also Robert Demaine,
Individual and Institution in the Musical Life of Leeds,
1900 1914 (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 1999).

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question) because they mean amusement or recreation only. This distinction between amusement and serious listening had begun to arise in the writing
of Robert Schumann and (in England) the reviews of Henry Chorley of the
Athenaeum and J. W. Davison of the Times; now it became basic to musical culture as a whole. A few years before, Antcliffe observed, the concert committee at
Shefeld had expressed the view that they did not exist to . . . afford openings
for untried compositions by budding composers. On the other hand, Antcliffe
agreed with the festival organizers that few, if any, masterpieces have resulted
from such premieres: The majority of commissioned works pass into the oblivion that their respectability demands and do little good to the world in general
or either to their composers or their publishers.31 These views were widespread.
In a piece entitled Weird Opinions by a First and a Second Cathedral Organist, the reader is bluntly informed that serious modern composers and their
works never appeal to our people; and their music is always so difcult and costs
much more money.32
Terms like amusement and recreation had not before been applied to
(for example) the sentimental songs that were mixed with overtures by Mozart
and songs by Mendelssohn in music halls and ballad concerts. By the 1880s, it
was common to refer to such concerts as popular; but in 1910 the term popular music had come to mean entertainment, and classical music was the
term used to imply serious listening. At a popular concert in the provinces, a
journalist wrote in 1913:
The singers are often quite well known to the audience and can be relied
upon to sing something the audience knows; or at any rate, something
where the sentiment is so obvious and the music so tuny that the listeners know what is coming. . . . The concert is for recreation, not for
brain work. So the audience will not studiously listen to new works and
try to nd the beauties in them: hence the new things do not have a
chance of becoming well known, although they might easily be better
than those which have been hackneyed on street pianos for twenty years,
but which are still accepted at popular concerts.33

It was as if the clock of musical time had stopped. The repertory that was
seen to open with Johann Sebastian Bach was now seen to end with Wagner, and
a new one had begun with Edward Elgar and Antonin Dvorak. Listeners seemed

31. Herbert Antcliffe, Musical Festivals and Modern

Works, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 391
(April 1, 1910): 483.

32. Weird Opinions by a First and Second Cathedral

Organist, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 396
(September 1, 1910): 842.
33. Songs, Singers, and Audiences, Musical Opinion and
Music Trade Review, no. 392 (May 1, 1910): 551.

fundamentally uneasy about what the standards should be for accepting new
works as canonical. Worries grew that some works were accepted too quickly and
supercially. The well-known critic John Runciman asked, after hearing Elgars
Cockaigne Overture, Is Elgar still a classic, I wonder, or has he outlived the burst
of cheap immediate fame that followed [The Dream of ] Gerontius? He was hailed
as a classic before the last chord of that semi-failure had been struck for the rst
time; he was called a classic just as Gounod and Dvorak not to mention
Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccinihad been called classics. Runciman argued
that a classic had once meant a composer whose work had stood the test of time.
But around the period when Gounods operas arrived in England, musical writers got tired of such slow methods. They began to immortalize composers and
new works after a single hearing, with results that soon became amusing to the
idle looker on and embarrassing (if not, as in Dvoraks case, positively disastrous)
to the composer.34

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Clearly, famous new composers on the Continent garnered no more interest in Britain than did new British composers. Ignaz Paderewski, for example,
came out of a long tradition in which a performer in his case, a great pianist
played his own compositions along with those of contemporaries (and, more
recently, with those of canonical musicians). Paderewskis works were treated
with a polite lack of interest around 1910. After the premiere of a new Paderewski
symphony, a reviewer for the Star wrote that he thought it would be of interest to learn how many people came to hear the concerto and how many the symphony?a most unpleasant inquiry. The reviewer found the new work dull, too
close to the styles of Wagner and Strauss, and burdened with weird new instruments such as the sarrusophone and the thunder machine. Besides, he concluded, why any modern composer should write an instrumental work an hour
long is quite beyond the present writer.35 As for German composers, the country that had given birth to the greatest classics was thought to lack inspiring new
talent. One British critic suggested that Germany is living on its past: a great
and glorious past it is true, but one that from the very nature of things cannot
prolong itself far into the future. . . . Nor are the other great European schools
of music in much better case. A kind of dry rot in matters musical seems to be
spreading all over the continent; a lethargy succeeding the overexertion and the
strenuous energy of the past.36

34. John F. Runciman, National Composers at Queens

Hall, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 389
(February 1, 1910): 337. This article was originally published in the Saturday Review.

35. Walter Bernhard, Out and About: Symphony of

Paderewski, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no.
387 (December 1, 1909): 185.
36. C. Elvey Cope, The Future of Music, and the Final
Aim of Art, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no.
393 ( June 1, 1910): 621.

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The situation of new music was not all that different in German-speaking
countries. True, a nationalistic movement in German music had existed since the
turn of the nineteenth century, while the equivalent had only just started in
Britain after two centuries in which British music was largely neglected in the
prestigious concert programs. But while the Austrians and Germans were conceded to possess the ultimate national canon, that perception only meant that a
new German-speaking composer would be judged by tougher standards. The
Austro-German canon closed with the deaths of Wagner in 1883 and Brahms
in 1897, and even then the jury was still out on the reputation of Brahmss abstract
symphonic style. What could a German composer do to enter a canon with
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? New German composers did have a more sympathetic press than the British. As we have seen, the Wagnerian movement had
begun an intense ideological campaign for the cause of progressive composers in
the 1860s, a campaign that developed into a kind of trade lobby. More critics in
the major German-language periodicals favored performance of a large number of contemporary pieces than British critics did. Yet new music faced an
enmity in Germany from the public and that public faced the scorn of newmusic supporters just as much as in Britain. Few composers other than Strauss
and Johann Reger had become respected or even fashionable in the eyes of the
general public, and composers had begun wondering where on earth they stood
professionally.
The institutionalization of musical enmity was in fact more pronounced in
Germany than in Britain. Even so formidable a musical gure as Richard Strauss
had a hard time making room for new music when he conducted. In 1909, one
of the two main German music magazines applauded Strauss for performing
somewhat more new music as conductor of the Berlin Court Orchestra than had
his predecessor. Yet the magazine warned him to exercise caution: It is dangerous to break with tradition suddenly, since the public sticks to its ways.37 Following some advice or instinct of the kind, Strauss continued the practice of giving all nine of Beethovens symphonies every season, and even while including
Mahlers Fourth, he selected almost nothing by composers under age fty. The
reviewer mentioned that, among all of Berlins orchestras, only a single piece by
Claude Debussy had been performed in the winter of 1909.
The rise of musical classics established a fearsome hierarchy and a dreaded
new concept: the minor composer. In the late eighteenth century, a lesser musician was ignored but not derided. A choice example of the ridicule to which a
minor composer might be subject appeared in 1914 in a Leipziger Volkszeitung
review; its victim was a piece played by the Munich New String Quartet. The
37. August Spanuth, Symphoniekonzert-Programme,
Signale fr die Musikalische Welt 67 (April 28, 1909): 617.

four gentlemen attended us with an entirely modern program, the critic took his
aim: So little can one follow this composer [Jan Ingehoven], so little can be
grasped about what is going on the piece, that its clear he fritters away what
musical talent he does possess by going too far in the contemporary direction.
He gives us an unattractive mirror image of our hideously nervous age, rather
than seeking out new artistic ideals that can be comprehended.38 A commentator in the Deutsche Sngerbundeszeitung put the same point in more sweeping
terms. Writing for a readership of amateur choral societies, he felt no compunctions about denouncing new music per se: So you want even more modern
music? Havent we had enough already? Isnt it clear that as soon as a conductor brings on a new piece, the hall empties out immediately, and that is the best
way to scare people off ?39
Felix Weingartner, the composer and conductor, transmitted a subtler and
less conscious version of this message in 1913. He related that, fteen years earlier, he had been introduced to a woman over ninety years old in Brussels, a
woman who was said to have known Beethoven and sung under him in the premiere of the Ninth Symphony. After the woman nished reminiscing about the
great icon, her daughter closed the conversation: Modern music does nothing
for her but when the Classics begin . . . she becomes young again.40 Weingartner did not question the daughters assertion. It might, though, have been in
his interest to observe, as a serious but unappreciated composer himself, that
Beethovens Ninth Symphony was not a classic at the time when his elderly interlocutor sang in its premiere. Weingarten and the womans daughter took it for
granted that an old person would dislike contemporary works a distaste that
would have been unusual in Beethovens lifetime and that new music had
always been unpopular in Germany.
It is important, at this juncture, to remind ourselves that neither Igor
Stravinsky nor Arnold Schoenberg had come to the fore of European musical life
by 1910. Martin Thrun, the historian of the German new-music movement, proposed Schoenbergs rst tour in 1911 as the moment at which an avant-garde
began to form.41 The controversies we are discussing were motivated by the kinds
of novelty heard in the operas of Strauss and the orchestral scores of Debussy,
music that we may nd tame in retrospect but that contemporaneous taste found
unassimilable to the existing repertory. The far harsher and more categorical

38. Musik, Leipziger Volkszeitung (February 3, 1914).

39. Richard Oehmichen, Mehr moderne Musik frs
moderne tgliche Leben, Deutsche Sngerbundeszeitung 53
( June 7, 1913): 374.

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rejection of Schoenberg grew out of a suspicion of new music already established

rmly by 1910.
And yet, a good deal more new music was performed in 1910 than is performed typically today: elements of tradition remained in early modernist music
by which composers such as Stravinsky could claim the publics attention. In
1910, a commentator returned from a Promenade Concert in London, noting:
Crowds listen with delight to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven
who would at best only pay formal respect to the works of Milton and
even Shakespeare or to the pictures of Titian and Rembrandt or to the
sculpture of Michelangelo. Further these crowds are interested in the
most modern music as they are not interested in the most modern literature and art. Composers like Strauss and Debussy are familiar to a
public that has scarcely heard the names of their chief contemporaries
among writers and painters.42

As this observation suggests, thanks to skillful institutional and ideological negotiation, enmity between new and old music did not keep audiences from hearing works by the two leading composers of the decade, composers then only in
their forties. But the statement proved only half true in the long run. As early
as the 1920s, abstract painting and sculpture went far beyond music in achieving
a place in museums and other public venues. By the 1950s, members of the bourgeoisie began to ood into exhibits of modern art, far more than went or now go
to new-music concertsand the public came to tolerate reprints of Jackson Pollack even in dentists ofces. Not only are museums of modern art places of general resort as few new-music concerts tend to be, but also art galleries as a whole
balance older and newer exhibits much more closely than orchestras or most
chamber groups. While disputes do break out over abstract sculpture in public
places, or sexual content in exhibitions, those disputes may do as much to rally
support to the cause of modern art as to harm it. Modern poetry, too, eventually acquired a broadly based public, stimulating a relatively modest amount of
criticism of experimental styles.
One could argue that people have enjoyed attacking modern music and that
the rhetoric of enmity has thus enlivened musical life. For myself, I must admit
that I yearn for conditions like those of the middle period of this history of the
epoch between the early and late decades of the nineteenth century, when new
and old music mingled in a balanced and creative way. The line between canonical and recent music was extremely ne audiences enjoyed Handel, Mozart,
Schumann, Gounod, Wagner, and Brahms on a virtually equal planeand every

40. Felix Weingartner, Eine Begegnung mit einer

Zeitgenossin Beethovens, Deutsche Musikdirektoren-Zeitung,

Amtliches Verbandsorgan des Deutschen Musikdirektoren-Verbandes, Sitz in Leipzig (March 26, 1913): 100 101.

commentator fought battles on both sides of the line. It may be that musical culture simply could not support such a framework of taste for very long. Canon had
come relatively late to music, awkwardly close to the time when massication
transformed all the arts to some degree. Musical culture ended up with a much
more severe alienation between the canonical and creative areas of high art than
was the case in painting or sculpture. The pictorial arts were not as radically
changed by massication as music was, and indeed visual art and architecture
have experienced a much more balanced, temperate interaction between canon
and creativity since the sixteenth century. History dealt music a tough set of cards
to play. Music has been implicated in the unusually dynamic and emotion-bending
movements we call classical and popular taste movements that could be
made to work together only by institutionalizing the enmity between them.

41. Martin Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis

1933 (Bonn: Orpheus-Verlag, 1995).

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42. Notes on News, Musical Opinion and Music Trade

Review, no. 398 (November 1, 1910): 100.