Review

Reviewed Work(s): Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in
London, Paris and Vienna by William Weber
Review by: Raymond Grew
Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 114-116
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786332
Accessed: 17-10-2024 15:43 UTC

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114
journal of social history

FOOTNOTES

1. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), esp.
8; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between C
Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).

2. Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cam

1971).

3. E.P. Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebian Culture," Journal of Social Histor

no. 4 (Summer 1974), 382-405.

Music and the Middle Class. The Social Structure of Concert

in London, Paris and Vienna. By William Weber (New Y
Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975. ii + 172 pp.)

"They talked of 'poetry' and 'art for art's sake.' But through it all there
'art for money's sake.' " Romain Rolland had no doubt that somewh
the course of the nineteenth century the arts, and especially music, had
commercial. Throughout his great novel, the rustic purity of Jean-Christ
genius is contrasted with the artificiality and cynicism of a Parisian soc
that used music like fashion to create reputations and fortune rather th
Such disgust was common among nineteenth-century intellectuals, an im
tant part of their critique of liberal society; and historians, who would
be so accepting of a political memoir, have tended to accept these compl
more as accurate descriptions of a philistine world than as a familiar sig
some painful social change was taking place. Even the point unive
acknowledged - that social and technological change greatly affected the
music was written, performed, and heard - has had little impact
historical perception of the nineteenth century. To guess what those ef
really were, one would have to turn to a few works of Kuturgeschi
few studies of single musical forms, instruments or ensembles. Nor has
concert as social rite yet found its anthropologist. Elias Canetti (in
and Power) suggestively discusses the symphony conductor as the very
of power, but a case can also be made for an orchestra as the very m
liberal society: a carefully selected elite employing their individual (but
graded) talents in harmony, inspired by genius but skillfully led, perfo
for the benefit of others, able to appreciate if not perform, who are ca
arranged in distance from the orchestra according to their means - and
this evolved and sustained through the forces of the market.
These approaches would extend to music the kinds of analysis already
developed in cultural and social history. William Weber, however, dashe
turn the question around: the concert as a social form is, he belie
sensitive social indicator; and he studies concerts to find out about
His central method is to count the number of concerts of various k

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REVIEW 115

analyze the price of tickets (an appendix of 22 tables accompanies the text),
and to estimate what sort of audience attended. One would expect such an
approach to produce a lean and limited study culminating in a few clear
points neatly nailed home. Instead, Professor Weber's ideas swirl in turgid
sentences that obscure the central argument, and sometimes the evidence, but
glimmer with provocative thoughtfulness.
In Vienna, Paris, and London, musical concerts, he finds, become more
frequent, more public, and more professional between 1830 and 1848. "High
status" concerts he declares to be of two types: classical (featuring the music
of Beethoven and earlier) and popular (marked by the works of Liszt and
operatic overtures). "Low status" concerts, less divided in this way, came to
be dominated by high status, popular concerts and with them led in making
music a commercial entertainment, musicianship a profession, and the distinc-
tion between classical and popular obsolete. Business families are more promi-
nent in high status concerts of popular music, families from professional occu-
pations are drawn rather to high status, classical concerts (and with char-
acteristic insight Weber suggests that such families have thus extended to
music their respect for formal learning). From this and more, he finds the
aristocracy more isolated in Vienna and more influential in London, the
bourgeoisie more dominant in Paris. Everywhere the direction of change from
salon to concert hall and from amateur to professional is one of moderniza-
tion.
The gift for generalization, however, strains the thin traces of logic and
proof. Businessmen "approached musical activities with broad social interests
in mind" (lawyers and bureaucrats with "more narrowly focused concerns"),
but popular music also provided "an escape from contemporary anxieties"
(58, 34). The "academicism" of Beethoven's epigone ("his work indicated few
fruitful directions in which the next generation could move") gave classical
music a conservative caste reinforced by male domination that cost it popu-
larity (55-55); on the other hand, the Viennese "nobility was running scared
and, logically enough, shifted to the operatic and virtuosic styles which were
lighter and less sensitive to comtemporary issues." (76) These statements need
not be contradictory, but they are too densely packed for the reader to be
sure. That reserve seats at separate prices reflect a middle-class need to demon-
strate status is a bright idea (25-26), but it is offered with no more real
evidence than the explanations as to why children were more central to high
status than to low status concerts (87). That "the whole conception of private
playing changed from a simple pastime to a means of self-advancement" (32)
simply seems too strong. So, after all, do the claims that the role of women
singing and at the piano is a sign of "deep social restlessness" (36), that the
role of government in affecting the life-style of the lower-middle class is
shown in military bands (93), that choruses "understandably" are more politi-
cally involved than instrumental players (101), or that concerts were used "to
redirect the lower orders away from protest." (120) There is something to
each of these points, and the imagination that saw them deserves praise. But
they tumble after each other unmitigated and undeveloped conveying, like the
numerous typographical errors carried with them, a disturbing sense of breath-

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116 journal of social history

less haste.
Weber's ideas, impressive as many of them are, and even his more formal
conclusions seem to me to spread far beyond the narrow tripod of his
research. He makes a good case for using three commerical, capital cities; but
his own introduction suggests a periodization that should at least begin in
1815 rather than 1830, and the full case requires some attention to periods
before that and after 1848. Much of his complicated argument depends upon
an analysis of musical taste, but this is not buttressed by attention to contem-
porary taste in literature or painting or to ideas of any sort, nor even to
nationalism in music. Much of the argument rests on an analysis of musical
institutions, but no attention is paid either to parallel developments in other
arts or to the essentially new social role of the musical critic or of religious
music to the development of musical form. Almost exclusively, the evidence
comes from public concerts, primarily 314 of them in 1826-27 and 927 in
1845-6. Although no case is made for the selection of those years, one can
understand that equally intensive analysis of data from other years might have
added very little for the effort. But when those cases are broken into three
cities, with several categories of concerts in each, the number of cases be-
comes too small to make the percentages analyzed so compelling as their
verbal formulation.
Nor does the scaffolding of argument seem to me consistently well built.
The comparison of three cities is clear enough; so is the concept of the
professionalization of music-making, but it is not carefully developed. The
"Social structure of musical taste," however, is less clear; and these "taste
publics" are quickly reified rather than preserved as categories of analysis. So
are subtle and uncertain distinctions among lower-middle, middle, upper-
middle, noble and aristocratic classes. And these in turn are sometimes broken
into occupations, family, male and female roles, and the "fabric of casual
socializing." If the intent is admirably subtle, the effect is simultaneously
unclear and mechanical. When audiences seem to come primarily from one
class, it shows the dominance of class structure even over music; when not
from one class it "shows again how concerts were able to bring together kinds
of people who did not often mingle socially" (76) or that "pride in belonging
to music's high culture was such a powerful force that its adherents would
attack members of their own class..." (54) One closes this interesting and
recalcitrant book impressed with much of the author's knowledge and insight
but suspecting that he could have discovered only what he know when he
began. Distrustful of middle class philistinism, hypocrisy, and social control,
he has nevertheless usefully focused attention on one of the great achieve-
ments of middle class culture.

University of Michigan Raymond Grew

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