6

The Orchestra, Concert Folkways, and Social Life

The Function of the Orchestra in Community and Nation

THE SYMPHONY concert is not exclusively, nor in one sense primarily, a musical event. For, so complex and inseparable are human interests, that every social occurrence is a blended experience of varied and simultaneous motives. A concert is comparable, perhaps, to a dinner party, where the interest in food may be subordinated to business contacts, social prestige, ceremonial display, or mere convivial association. No hostess would be flattered to be assured merely that the food was nutritious, nor even that it was tastily served; for such an affair has well-accepted ramifications into many other avenues of social intercourse. A symphony concert is similarly a pluralistic event, which may supply an outlet for fashion, prestige, civic pride, heightened national consciousness, as well as musical delight. It is therefore no disparagement, but a psychological and sociological truth, that music is often secondary to nonmusical considerations.

Since music, too, is laden with these derivative functions, which vary considerably in character and proportion from person to person, the quality and meaning of “enjoyment” of a concert displays a wide range of variation in different epochs. When, for example, we reflect on the strenuous content of our recent and contemporary symphony programs, the awe in which the masterpieces are held, the reluctance with which the audience pits its taste and judgment against that of the critic and conductor, and the frankly tentative and reserved judgments of the critics themselves, it is difficult for the modern patron to realize that in the classic period, often called the “golden age,” music was generally considered a matter of sheer pleasure, a forthright delectation of the senses, without any pretense 286 of satisfactions of a more edifying nature. It is quite evident from Mozart’s letters that he contemplated very little beyond the pleasure of the moment and harbored no conceit about the sacredness of his scores. In 1787 he writes of his having attended a ball where

I saw with the greatest pleasure all these people flying about with such delight to the music of my Figaro transformed into quadrilles and waltzes; for here nothing is talked about but Figaro, nothing played but Figaro, nothing whistled or sung but Figaro, no opera as crowded as Figaro—v try flattering to me certainly.

His solicitous father shared this desire for instantaneous success, counseling him

to imitate the natural and popular style which everyone easily understands.

As if in reply to this recipe for success, the devoted son reassures his father at the time of the rehearsals of Idomeneo in Munich:

As for what is called popular taste, do not be uneasy, for in my opera there is music for every class, except the long-eared.

In speaking of his concertos, he almost apologizes for the esoteric passages:

These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and what is too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, natural without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction, but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.¹

Charles Burney, a scholar and friend of artists, statesmen, and musicians (including Handel and Haydn), writing his monumental history of music during the same period, voices the same straightforward and mundane conception, characteristic of the period of The Enlightenment:

Music is an innocent luxury unnecessary, indeed, to our existence, but a great improvement and gratification of the sense of hearing.²

Although much of Mozart’s music is still played and enjoyed today, his guileless conception of its function has suffered eclipse, for the typical aesthetician of the romantic nineteenth century (descended, however, from eighteenth century antecedents) held in scorn the theory that music is made merely for pleasure. In fact, it need not even be beautiful. In reviewing Sibelius’ Second Symphony, the late Richard Aldrich, then of the New York Times, expressed that notion as follows:

There is absolutely nothing in this symphony that is written to please the ear as many wish to be pleased. There is much that sounds chaotic and disordered; but it is evident to the listener who can take a larger measure of it, that it is all very definitely related, the coherent expression of a consistent idea. It is not too much to say that this Second Symphony of Sibelius is one of the strongest compositions in the symphonic form that have been heard in a considerable period.³

Such a sanction for what was then cerebral cacophony would have been inconceivable to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. Mozart, Handel, and Bach had great difficulty in producing music in sufficient volume and at a rate to satisfy the honest appetite for novelty on the part of their audiences, while today a novelty is something the modern audience is expected to endure for the sake of possible habituation and future delight. To explain this complete reversal in the conception of the psychological function of the repertoire, in the criterion of aesthetic judgment, and in the relation between the artist and his public, one must examine the intervening period: the nineteenth century and its Romantic revolt.

The shift is largely attributable to the complete sociological metamorphosis of the audience and of the social status of the musician. During the previous century, the pre-Napoleonic era, the musician had been an employee, who performed a skilled service according to contractual obligations—analogous to the twentieth-century staff musicians in a radio or motion picture studio, allowing, of course, for the divergent requirements of the period and the much greater sense of social stratification than now prevails. His secular audience consisted primarily of the nobility, many of whom were themselves adequate performers, and who sometimes arrogated to themselves the privilege of joining the orchestra. Some even utilized their leisure moments for composing. In fact, as late as 1905 Breitkopf and Haertel published a catalogue of compositions by German royalty, including Kaiser Wilhelm—which serves to recall the piquant warning attributed to Brahms that “one should never criticize the compositions of royalty, for you never know who may have written them.”

Composers were craftsmen who composed to order and who, like the architect, the portrait painter and the cook, expected their work to be appreciated forthwith. It would not have occurred to Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and’the other Kapellmeister of the day to ignore the interest of the current generation by writing Z ukunftsmusik, nor could they have had the temerity to expect their socially superior patrons to sit through repeated hearings of a suite or symphony on the chance that they or their descendents might possibly enjoy it at some future time. The liveried Haydn admitted that he experimented, but such experimentation was mild and inoffensive, and therefore tolerated and even enjoyed by the prince whom he was paid to serve.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, a social and political transformation had occurred with rather dramatic suddenness, as historical events go. In the history of music this consisted in the catastrophic bankruptcy, and consequent decline in power, of the musician’s two richest employers: the church and the court. To gratify those who feel that they must pinpoint evolving historical events, one may suggest that it was the bombardment of Vienna in 1809, sheltering at once the aged Haydn, the middle-aged Beethoven, and the twelve-year-old Schubert, which actually and symbolically gave the coup de grace to the feudal era and marked the transition from the old order to the new. The musician lost his job and became a free-lance composer and an itinerant performer, with all the risks appertaining thereto.

His audience was no longer the closed group of cultivated nobles and their leisurely satellites, before whom the composer was honored to display his accomplishments. Instead, the nineteenth century performer now served the emerging middle-class audience, the third estate, in a commercialized concert to which anyone had access who was able and willing to pay the price of admission. In this new pecuniary social order, the bourgeois audience was not sophisticated, nor well-schooled; but it was ready to be impressed by the virtuosity and the eccentricities of a Paganini, a Liszt, and a host of other virtuosi who mushroomed from that soil. Instead, therefore, of an attitude of reverence and awe on the part of the musician toward his noble audience, it was now the audience which sat in bewilderment before the musician. The artist, in fact, held his audience—his new patrons—in disdain for its crude and. undeveloped aesthetic tastes. In art the customer was never right. The mass of anonymous urbanites, newly hatched under the wings of the industrial revolution, issued from office and shop, from banks and colleges, from the professions and public services. Occupied, as they were, full time in gaining a livelihood from the new competitive world, they were by no means a leisure class, they felt keenly their inadequacies in the arts, and acquired a veritable inferiority complex in their presence. They suffer from this debilitating affliction to this very day. They eagerly emulated the standards of the decaying, but still glamorous, aristocracy by cultivating and supporting the arts, and stood ready to be instructed.

Now, if the audience generated by the bourgeois social revolution thus drew away from the artist, the artist on his part also drew away from the audience. Being no longer in the immediate employ of a master whom he was being paid to serve, he developed a sense of autonomy and self-expression in standards of composition as well as in interpretation and execution. The artist even erected an ivory tower where he could commune with his aesthetic conscience and protect himself from any insinuation of being responsible to the audience.

The evolutionary development of the musical arts abetted the artist in his new independence. Orchestral instruments were being” improved, orchestras were being enlarged, and composition was becoming more difficult and esoteric. Beethoven’s orchestral scores looked “so black” that they literally sounded the death-knell of the amateur player-cooks who had infested the mixed ensembles during the courtly era. Music was now becoming a learned profession which a lifetime was too short to master. Art was really long, and time fleeting. Liszt and Mendelssohn contributed enormously to the enhancement of the prestige of the once lowly profession. As a consequence of these social and technical revolutions, the artistic gap between audience and musician, which had been negligible a generation or two before, was now widening; and the evident explanation was to be sought not only in musical terms, but still more significantly in terms of the social, economic, political, and technological changes unfolding during that period. It is only against such a social background that the problems of the contemporary “heavy” repertoire can be comprehended.

Synchronized with these social changes, philosophers, as is their wont and function, were drafting a system of thought designed to rationalize and buttress these overt historical trends, which were rendering music incomprehensible even to an intelligent audience. By an evolution too complex to rehearse at this point, music was elevated to the most exalted position among the arts; and in its unfettered creativeness, it approximated “pure spirit,” universal and absolute Truth. Because of its mystical and supernatural characteristic, it possessed the power to exert a spiritual and ethical influence upon its auditors superior to that of any other medium. Such neo-Platonic doctrines of Hegel and Schopenhauer inevitably placed the great musician in a position of ethical leadership, conferred a certain sacrosanct validity on his “inspiration,” and elevated him into the realms of near-infallibility. Music, the most exalted art, was not only a reflection of ultimate ideas and sentiments, but was actually a form of thinking in tones—an abstract, subtle, and direct communication superior to crude verbal symbols, independent of the physical actualities of the world, and therefore a “universal” language. The inspiration of the artist was thus of higher validity than the uninstructed taste of otherwise intelligent people. This was the ideology propagated by such philosophers as Schopenhauer, whose concepts dominated his disciple, Richard Wagner.

This dogma of artistic supremacy was imported to the United States from Germany in the baggage of musicians and conductors, and has set the standards for the musical repertoire to this very day. Indeed, in this country, where vertical mobility was much more rapid than in Europe, where class relations were elastic, where wealth was easier to come by, and the middle class musically unsophisticated, the musical gap was probably still wider than in the old country. Precisely because of this, the conductors assumed, and were given, greater latitude and freedom in America than in Europe. The programs in Boston and Chicago were much more radical—or “progressive”—than they ever were in London, Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, both in relation to the maturity of the audience and in absolute terms, as far as the latter can be measured.

The musical interpreters, Bergmann, Theodore Thomas, Gustav Mahler, Gericke, and the rest pressed the last ounce of vindication out of the mystical ideologies which upheld the didactic mission of music, and translated this conviction into an unrelenting policy, in the face of an indifferent, and even antagonistic, public. It is quite irrelevant whether it was Bergmann, Theodore Thomas, or Wagner himself—the essential remark has been attributed to all three—who replied to the protest, that they “do not like Wagner,” with the determined resolve: “Then we will play him until they do.”⁴ The significant thing is that, consonant with the Romantic philosophy with which they were imbued, such a retort was symptomatic of a policy which nearly all symphony conductors relentlessly pursued. If Theodore Thomas seemed to be the most fervent missionary of them all, it was partly because, in those days, there was more proselytizing to be done. To him, a symphony program was a stern, humorless “sermon in tones.” The function of a concert was not relaxation, but

what our overworked business and professional men most need in America is an elevating mental reaction which is not amusement.

He was convinced that music was a “powerful character building force” which, “by its uplifting influence” would transport one to a “higher plane.”⁵ The music journals of the day regularly carried long articles on the beneficent effect of music on personal character and national welfare. This identity between Beauty and Virtue was an old axiom dating to the Greeks, who were alleged to have brought this union to perfection. It was, of course, an abiding faith rather than an empirically derived discovery. But precisely because it was a mystic faith, it was more tenaciously and uncritically adhered to than if the generalization had been obtained from prolonged and painstaking empirical studies of human behavior.

The musical leaders were warmly supported in their ethical and didactic mode of thought and practice by critics, painters, authors, poets, and even psychologists. Henry T. Finck,critic and early-Wagner biographer, knew of

no other art that so vividly arouses the unselfish feeling, the desire for sympathetic communion ... one of the most important moral functions of music, that of weaning people from low and demoralizing pleasures ... the best way to eradicate savage impulses. . ..

... If such performances of both sacred and secular music were more frequent, we should have less drunkenness, less wife-beating, less spending of winter gains, less winter pauperism.⁶

There seemed to be no area of human conduct which might not be susceptible to aesthetic influences. Western civilization itself was big with possibilities if the aesthetic front could be maintained unbroken. A biographer of Theodore Thomas wrote in 1927:

When before have we been aware of any such force at work on such a scale among us? Suppose it [the symphony orchestra program] to keep on for another generation, gathering head. It might produce in this country the greatest change ever known. . . . Two generations of it might change the whole American character; it might in the end scourge us of materialism. Is this fantastic? Not if what we believe about the power and the ethics of art has any foundation.⁷

Somewhat more vague, but in exactly the same vein, spoke John S. Dwight, the influential Boston critic, musical editor, and New England transcendentalism who opined that “good music must have some intimate connection with the social destiny of man.”⁸

William James, the philosopher-psychologist, warned that musical indulgence, however, could be overdone, by lapsing into an “inert sentimental condition” and thereby defeat the very ethical purpose of the arts. He therefore advised

never to suffer one’s self to have an emotion at a concert without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world—speaking genially to one’s aunt, or giving up one’s seat in the horsecar if nothing more heroic offers—but let it not fail to take place.⁹

Hanslick, too, deprecated the overzealous educational policies of the conductors. When, in 1880, Biilow closed a Beethoven cycle with a double performance of the Ninth, the famous critic deplored the “vigorous faith with which he propagated the Beethoven gospel by baptizing the converts, as it were, with a fire hose.”¹⁰

In the nineteenth century, this general exaltation of the arts drew much of its strength from the deficiencies of the industrial era. Social critics like John Ruskin, William Morris, Walter Pater in England,, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in America—each in his own way—were revolted by the misery and ugliness attendant on the growing pains of the new industrialism, and had a supercilious scorn for material science, which for them was the root of these evils. Said Emerson in his Conduct of Life:

Geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make us wise, but they leave us where they found us. . . . All our science lacks the human side. . . . Science hates the name of love and moral purpose. . . . Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All high Beauty has a moral element in it.

It is not at all obvious, nor even probable, that the industrial philanthropists, who liquidated the deficits incurred by Theodore Thomas, Gericke, Mahler, and Stokowski, necessarily shared these mystical convictions with the crusading conductors whom they sponsored. Some were indeed musical and philosophical dilettantes, while many of them were downright metaphysical illiterates and calculating businessmen to whom the ethical import of the Beethoven Third probably did not make much sense. However, in the meantime, the orchestra, with its conductor and esoteric programs, had achieved a certain prestige and glamour. Like fine churches, public buildings, and parks, it soon became an element in the complete apparatus of civic life which focused not unwelcome attention upon the community, and consequently deserved support. Such “tycoon” pride was characteristically expressed by the orator of the occasion at the dedication of Orchestra Hall, December 14, 1904:

Chicago has been the most public spirited city in the world. We are proud of our rapid growth in wealth and population, but we are not satisfied with the merely industrial growth of our city—we demand something more and something better. We look through the dust and smoke of Chicago as she is, to see the fair and noble form of our city as she will be, a center of influence, intellectual and artistic as well as industrial, a school for the nation, as Pericles declared Athens was the school for Greece.¹¹

Intercity rivalry was a constant factor that stimulated audience, management, and conductors. Even the idealistic Thomas used this motif on his rebellious constituents in defense of his uncompromising stand on program construction:

The announcement of a symphony on the program was enough to keep many people from the concert. ... When fault was found with the severity of the programs I would say: Do you wish our program to be inferior in standard to those of the Boston Orchestra? “No” was the answer . . ,¹²

That an orchestra had merit as an investment that would redound to the economic benefit of a city was a frequent theme. It was agreed, however, that a city’s musical life serves as an enticement to visitors and settlers, and the tours of the orchestra are considered favorable publicity. In one instance, the orchestra was declared to be a force in “helping to sell shoes” for the greatest shoe center in the country.¹³

There are many who are neither sensitive to the supposed ethical overtones of a symphony, nor concerned with the commercial potentialities of a fine civic orchestra, but whose private social ambitions are gratified by indulgence in such an honorific enterprise. These impulses manifest themselves in diverse ways: maintenance of boxes or other preferred locations in the auditorium; program listing as patron; socially exclusive erudition on matters artistic; all the subtle satisfactions accruing from the wide range of contact and intimacy with a fashionable concern, from the occasional ticket purchaser to the confidential relation with conductor and steering members of the board, with all its invidious prestige. The concerthall box has now all but disappeared in the relentless democratization of audience and patrons. But it once reflected the highly prized perquisite of the social elite. The private corridor and the anteroom, which conferred a sense of aloof distinction, translated the symphony and opera into a social ritual more highly regarded than the aesthetic relaxation derived from the actual music, which, in fact, was often sacrificed.

Musical politics may run very deep, and orchestras have at times been a “football of society.” With motives something less than sublime, various groups have often rallied around rival conductors, thus literally splitting the resources of the community to the detriment of higher values. On occasion, however, such competition has had its salutary moments. Witness the case of the prolonged feud between the followers of Damrosch and Thomas in New York, during which two orchestras challenged each other for supremacy. But in other less inspiring circumstances, two orchestras have been supported when nourishment was insufficient for one. That pioneer period has, in general, passed. Though factions will always exist, funds are not nowadays so plentiful as to permit the luxury of such wasteful competition.

Since 1893, when Walter Damrosch first organized them, many of the responsibilities for carrying on orchestral affairs have fallen to the ladies, whose efforts have proven indispensable to the solvency of the harassed orchestral institution. Largely for the benefit of the fashionable world, the matinee concerts (usually Friday afternoon) are maintained. Originally instituted by the New York Philharmonic as a public rehearsal which would offer bargain rates to students, musicians, or others who might wish to hear repeated performances,¹⁴ these matinee programs have long since graduated into more or less exclusive afternoon affairs, constituting an integral part of the winter social season. In Boston and Philadelphia, where this “Friday Spell” exerts its full potency, this particular division of the audience into two segments has been profitable, for the house is sold out. However, in other cities, for various reasons, the Friday patronage, though involving a similar principle, has for some time been hardly sufficient in volume to persuade the management that the retention of the traditional weekday matinee was practicable. History may be repeating itself, for the economic aristocracy today, analogously to the feudal aristocracy of 150 years ago, is declining in power and is relaxing its control over our artistic institutions. Musically this may mean a popularization of the repertoire and a significant alteration in the role played by the orchestra in its community relations.

There remains another function of music in general, and the orchestra and opera in particular, which has never struck such deep roots in the United States as it has in Europe: its contribution to national solidarity. The urge to integrate the various aspects of national life—religion, politics, family, industry, and the arts—is not an exhibition of any virtue or perversity inherent in man or nation. It is, sociologically speaking, induced by conditions of stress, national emergency, and tension, and does not flourish in times of peace, plenty, and repose. If this totalitarian phenomenon prevailed during the^ nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, it is because Europe, unlike the United States, experienced an abundance of tension and relatively little repose. Nations are not “patriotic” when there is nothing to be patriotic about. Patriotism is rather a defense reaction, to protect the cherished values which are threatened, or thought to be threatened. If nationalism became the prevailing idea in the nineteenth century, it was not because of the vague, spontaneous, and unconditioned promptings of a “romantic impulse,” but it stemmed rather from a definite crisis in the affairs of nations. Prussia suffered a humiliating defeat by Napoleon, Poland was dismembered by three powerful neighbors, Bohemia felt itself oppressed by the Hapsburgs, Norway was uncomfortably yoked to Sweden, and Finland to Russia. Although some of these culture groups were not to realize their nationalistic yearnings until 1918, their internal cultural cohesion was maintained throughout the preceding decades. This overwhelming preoccupation with their cultural autonomy is manifested in their musical preferences in creation and performance, as well as their political policies.

The usual European conception of musical nationalism is that of the folksong, in the largest sense, which becomes the basis of the more sophisticated forms in song, symphony, and opera. This conception was, indeed, a critical symptom of the growing national consciousness, for folksongs—the musical expression of the indigenous folk—could be despised only so long as royalty and nobility set the standard of taste. With that power destroyed, the center of gravity of economic, political, and aesthetic interests veered to the middle class, and to the rural regions which had previously been held in serfdom.

In addition to the important folksongs and folktunes, nationalism manifested itself symptomatically in subject matter of song and opera (e.g. Glinka, Weber); in the use of national dances (Smetana); in the revival of forgotten music and musicians from their historical past (Rameau, Bach, Purcell); in the pressure to perform native and contemporary works (Russia, France, Germany); the purging of foreign music and musicians (Germany, United States in World War I); and in the fabrication of an ideology which defines music as an emanation of the national spirit, or an economic class (Germany, Soviet Union).

If the United States has never been infected with the chauvinistic virus as severely as has Europe, it has at least not escaped exposure. For the United States is a mosaic of polyglot expatriates who have no common and glorious past that could be revived to flatter provincial pride. As a nation almost without a “history” in the venerable sense of the word, a nation that has never experienced a serious external crisis, there simply do not exist the first essentials for a good nationalistic debauch.

Two minor symptoms of nationalism did subsequently put in their appearance in the United States: the purging of German music during World War I, which has been a matter of apology ever since; and the inauguration of a kind of “protective tariff” for American works. But the wave of sentiment to “buy American” has never reached a high crest among the populace, and it remains today, as yesterday, the expression of small and interested pressure groups. It must be said, therefore, that the orchestral institutions and their repertoire are not, in the United States, a function of national solidarity. For the average consumer, they have remained essentially “above the battle.”

Seating Plans

If we could reverse the passage of time, transport ourselves to the epoch when the oldest American orchestra was founded, and deposit ourselves on the movable benches in the Apollo Rooms for the New York Philharmonic concerts of 1842, we would witness a performance which differed as much from today’s well-disciplined execution as the early practices in religion, government, housing, and costume differed from their modern counterparts. There would appear, of course, many fundamental resemblances to testify to the basic continuity from the order of that day to the present, but our transfigured visitor would be more conscious of the many mutations, through which have evolved the present institutions.

Musical Fund Society Orchestra of Philadelphia about 1845—the earliest known sketch of an est abolished American symphony orchestra in action. Note the leader, L. Meignen (A), in the concer master’s position, standing on a raised platform. The soloist, the Italian buff a, Sanguirico (B), occupies the center of the stage. Other personalities are identified in. the longBan legend. {From Madeira and Goepp.^

At the inaugural concert the musicians stood before their desks in the approved Leipzig Gewandhaus¹⁵ manner—a pattern wellknown in England and the United States too. A cartoon of about 1850 pictures the Musical Fund Orchestra of Philadelphia as standing;¹⁶ the Chicago Philharmonic, under Hans Balatka,¹⁷ in 1869, followed the same system; the Manchester (England) orchestra of 1840 is described by Richard Hoffman, the noted New York pianist of the Philharmonic days:

... I was taken and was allowed to be on the stage near my father whose chair I occupied while he was playing. The English orchestral players always stood while playing; they were not allowed the privilege of sitting and crossing their legs in the listless manner which so often offends the eye in our modern performances.¹⁸

The custom must have lingered some time in New York, for in 1853 a bewildered critic

cannot account for the necessity of the performers standing. Aside from being uncomfortable to them, this looks badly and impresses the spectators uncomfortably.¹⁹

The origins of this custom, which in Leipzig did not finally give way to general seating until 1905, are still obscure. Hanslick,²⁰ the student of Viennese musical history, averred that it had been necessitated by limited floor space, or possibly motivated by respect for royalty who were so frequently present. The “physical” logic of the standing position would have suggested the same practice. Players of wind and string instruments (excepting, of course, the cello), enjoy greater freedom of movement in the standing position than in the cramped seated posture. Accordingly, after the pattern set by Biilow of Meiningen, where all but the cellos stood, Gericke, Nikisch, and Paur in Boston and New York at times ordered their violins to stand, on the allegation that they thereby enhanced the volume of their tone.²¹ In exceptional cases even today, for dramatic reasons rather than for considerations of etiquette or physical convenience, violins may still rise for the rendition of such numbers as Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo, which features that instrument. Gericke theatrically performed Handel’s Largo in Boston and New York in 1887, the violins ranged across the stage in standing position.

Mendelssohn was the first conductor to direct the Gewandhaus Orchestra with a baton from the podiunz. The players were ranged on steeply terraced risers. Note the centrnl location of the double basses and cellos which, in spite of the addition of the tinze-beater, helped set the rhythm for the group. (Drawn fronz description ifz August Schmidt, Musikalische Reisemomente auf einer Wanderung durch Norddeutschland. Hanzburg: 1846.)

As Orchestras grew in size and complexity, the necessity for coordination of the individual players increased correspondingly. Therefore, in addition to the desire for sheer comfort, the most compelling argument for the seated position, which Hanslick refers to as the “Viennese style,” was the urgency for a mutually unobstructed view of the conductor and fellow players. The old Gewandhaiis orchestra had surmounted the obstacle of the standing position by steeply terraced risers.²²

The seating plan, which has been fairly well standardized during the last century, rests on three major principles: (1) the relation of the various choirs to one another and to the conductor for mutual visual and aural coordination and support; (2) acoustical effect upon the listener; and (3) the aesthetic and visual impression upon the audience. There is, of course, no precise unanimity of opinion as to which detailed pattern best promotes these ends, although the general plan, proposed by Berlioz in his notable treatise, is still basic today. That conductors were disposed to experiment drastically is evident from a critical comment on the disposition of instruments of the New York Philharmonic. In 1853, the previously cited New York critic was

surprised to see the tenors (violas) sent almost to the top (highest riser) of the orchestra—choked between the brass and the double-basses. To our thinking, the tenors, from their very character, must never be separated from the violins. . . . The celli were also scattered among the doublebasses. . . . The celli must, like the tenors, form a compact body. . . . The double-basses ought to bring up the rear of the orchestra and only by rare exception be placed in the center.²³

Costa was among the first to use a ground plan approximating the modern styles. Note, however, the divided cellos and double basses, and the location of the principal cello and double bass at the conductor’s feet. This is a survival of the period when the bass parts set the rhythm and tempo of the playing, and took their position next to the conductor, who sat at the clavier. (Redrawn from Reginald Nettel, The Orchestra in England. London: Jonathan Cape, 1946.)

Henschel followed the tradition of dividing the cellos and basses on the wings of the orchestra so that they could be plainly heard by the players. This seating of the basses persisted in America until about 1900, and was used by Theodore Thomas and Anton Seidl in Chicago and New York. (Compiled and drawn from various sources.)

Berlioz in 1856 recommended the semicircular plan, which is in universal use today. The players are ranged in arcs, with the conductor stationed at the hub facing the, orchestra, his back to the audience. Instead of standing in the midst of his players, facing half his orchestra and the audience, as did Jullien and many other conductors before 1850, he now stood aloof, more conspicuous and more responsible. First and second violins were divided to his left and right respectively, with the violas deployed in the middle; woodwinds behind the first violins and brass behind the violas; cellos and double basses in a double row in the rear, half of them on the right wing and half on the left; harp in the foreground close to the conductor, and percussion in the extreme rear.²⁴ This approximate arrangement has been preserved for us in a photograph of the newly founded Boston orchestra²⁵ under Henschel who, inexperienced in conducting, was probably happy to adopt the recommendation of the most authoritative text on orchestration of that day. However, the strangest detail of HenschePs seating for the first concert consisted in ranging the string sections (first and second violins and viola) in concentric semicircles around the podium. The first violins occupied the first semicircle, the second violins the second semicircle, and the violas, the third. Aside from the eccentricity of this system, the Boston habitues seemed to be most disturbed by the familiar faces peeking out of the most unaccustomed places. Wellknown viola players sat apparently ready to play first violin, and some first violinists were stationed where one had been accustomed to look for the seconds. Since all the strings were thus divided, the complete orchestra was spread over the whole stage, the right half duplicating the left half.

Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) was a popular French conductor who was active for some years in England and toured the United States in 1853-54. According to the custom which still prevailed in many orchestras, he faced the audience while conducting. Unfortunately no print of an American orchestra exists depicting this style of conducting. Here Jullien conducts a Promenade concert in London in 1849. The orchestra of sixty pieces which Jullien brought to America contained the finest instrumentalists available in Europe. (Drawing by Richard Doyle. Picture Post Library.)

Even before Berlioz had formulated his plan, the seating of the orchestra had already crystallized into recognizable form. Costa, the brilliant disciplinarian of the London Philharmonic, introduced a new ground plan as early as 1846,²⁶ while Mendelssohn in the same year was described by another observer²⁷ as having introduced in the Gewandhaus another system, in which the strings, woodwinds, and brass were ranged in separate tiers on a series of risers.

It is difficult today to understand the persistent tendency in all these arrangements to divide the cellos and double basses, half of each on opposite wings of the arc. Henschel, who had discussed the seating with his friend Brahms, had adopted the same pattern but soon abandoned it after having evoked this criticism, at the opening concert, of the “novel arrangement”:

We think it a mistake to divide the cellos and the basses into two bodies, separated by the entire width of the stage. ... The arrangement of the brasses at the back of the strings seems to be an improvement²⁸

Wagner, in his letter of advance instruction to Heckel of Mannheim, December 6, 1871, similarly requested that the double basses be stationed on the left and right wing-front of the orchestra; Seidl employed this arrangement in New York, and Thomas during the early years of the Chicago orchestra.²⁹ Probably no better explanation for the widespread practice of dispersing the basses has ever been found than the recommendation of Rousseau, who advises (under totally different circumstances) that:

the instruments of each section, except the basses, should be grouped together in the interest of unity and precision. The basses should be deployed around the two clavecins and throughout the orchestra, since it is the bass which must control)and support all the other parts, and every performer must be able to hear it equally well.³⁰ [Author’s Italics.]

One does wonder why this scheme, understandably necessary when the band was conducted from the clavier, held on so tenaciously into the period of the dominant, time-beating conductor.

Seating plan of the uo-piece Philadelphia Orchestra in 1950; the Principals of the sections are designated by asterisks. (Courtesy of The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.)

Since about 1921, following the innovation of Sir Henry Wood and Stokowski, some conductors have moved the cellos to the rightfront, occupying the area vacated by the second violins, which were placed inside the first violins. This conspicuous transfer is in recognition of the important thematic values of the cello voice, thus visibly dramatized in its new position. The second violins, on their part, are rendered somewhat stronger than previously since they are now turned out to the audience. On the other hand, they sacrifice the antiphonal emphasis which their separate location on the opposite side of the podium permitted in certain types of classical composition. A slight variation of the above, in which the violas occupy the old front location of the second violins, was introduced by Goossens and Koussevitzky in their respective orchestras—a seating which corresponds to the usual string quartet sequence.

A more drastic permutation of instruments, which today is more significant as historic testimony to the capricious experimentation of the young Stokowski³¹ than as a lasting contribution to orchestral lore, was the reversal of the position of strings and wind choirs sprung on the audiences of Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco during the season of 1939-40, by its author, who was indulging his flare for acoustics and electronics. Nearly ten years previously, the conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra³² had anticipated this reshuffle on another theory—that the prominence of the strings was an anachronism in a period when modern instrumentation featured wind and percussion. These theoretical demands were satisfied by placing the woodwinds to the immediate front-right and retaining the strings at left.

Stokowski’s “upside-down” orchestra not only was not imitated, but actually aroused universal aversion. It offended the visual habits of the audience, and was deemed unnecessary by musicians and critics, who reasoned that a good conductor had at his command many less circuitous ways of attaining balance. The pithy comment that, in this new order, the “front rows did not keep busy enough to put up a good show” epitomized the public verdict with more finality than any esoteric analysis.

In a “man’s world” the symphony orchestras were naturally manned by men. But in retrospect, it is obvious that it was only a question of time before the feminist assault against the male monopoly would be made. Indeed, music was rapidly being accepted as a particularly congenial pursuit for the “weaker sex.” Consequently the orchestra, like the barber shop, the halls of Congress, the army, and many another male sanctum, has experienced the infiltration of women. Although the harp was the entering wedge with which she gained early entry into the major orchestras, other instruments have subsequently been mastered, so that today very few orchestras still consider the orchestra as man’s exclusive domain. As in so many other occupations, the process has been accelerated during the last two world wars when large numbers of men were diverted to more strenuous and urgent duties.

The issue of admitting women to orchestral posts had been repeatedly ventilated in the musical press, which adapted all the familiar antifeminist aphorisms to the special circumstances. Although women had been prominent as vocal and instrumental soloists, and though many all-women orchestras performed successfully, there was some resistance to mingling the sexes in the professional orchestras.

With a light repertoire, no travelling to do and no arduous rehearsals, they (all-women orchestras) might make a success as a unique feature in social engagements.

So writes an,editor in 1895. There would be little prospect beyond that because of her alleged

physical incapacity to endure the strain of four or five hours a day rehearsal, followed by the prolonged tax of public performance . . . she cannot endure the strain of competition with men.³³

A similar opinion was pronounced as late as 1925, after women had already found a place in some of the more important orchestras of the world. Sir Henry Wood, conductor of the London Queen’s Hall Orchestra, claims to have been the first to admit women into a professional orchestra,³⁴ when in 1913 he “could not allow prejudice to prevail” and accepted six women in the string section. However, his colleague, Sir Thomas Beecham, who never fumbles an opportunity to express his sentiments in quotable style, takes diehard issue with the trend:

I do not like, and never will, the association of men and women in orchestras and other instrumental combinations. . . . My spirit is torn all the time between a natural inclination to let myself go and the depressing thought that I must behave like a gentleman. I have been unable to avoid noticing that the presence of a half-dozen goodlooking women in the orchestra is a distinctly distracting factor. As a member of the orchestra once said to me: “If she is attractive, I can’t play with her; if she is not, then I won’t.”³⁵

Semi-professional and amateur orchestras have long accepted women. However, it was a matter of public Comment when Cleveland included four women in 1923. A sample tally taken during World War II yielded the followiiig counts of women members in the principal American orchestras:

It is quite probable that the much discussed scarcity of good string players has been alleviated by the admission of women in what was formerly man’s exclusive domain.

The Conductor

In 1842, the differentiation of the conductor from the general membership of the American orchestra had just begun. In Europe, on the other hand, such conductors as Habeneck (Paris), Costa (London), Spohr (Cassel), Weber (Dresden)^ and Mendelssohn (Leipzig) had already lifted this function to a high professional level before midcentury; but since no body of instrumentalists comparable to such orchestras existed in this country, the profession of conductor had not yet evolved beyond the rudimentary stages.

For the first several years, the New York Philharmonic directorship was “passed around,” on the early pattern of the London Philharmonic, and had all the earmarks of being in part an honorific rather than a genuinely functional post. In fact, its constitution provided that the conductor should be chosen for each concert. Not only were no two concerts in succession conducted by the same person, but during the first season two or three musicians presided in that capacity within the same program. In 1842, the American orchestra was clearly at an intermediate stage where the person superintending the performance was no longer a Kapellmeister- composer of the eighteenth-century type, nor yet a modern conductor clothed with authority and interpretive rights which were soon to be his. This incipient conductor was then only the “first among equals” who devoted his energies exclusively to time-beating to achieve a minimum coordination in a common task. Before many years had elapsed, both the orchestra and public sensed the benefits of conductor discipline, and the selection of the conductor gradually narrowed down until one man, Theodore Eisfeld, after having been repeatedly elected, was thereby transformed into a “permanent” conductor of the Philharmonic.

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI

The most glamorous of American conductors, from 1919 to 1936 Stokowski kept the Philadelphia audiences in a constant state of excitement and expectancy. He continued his innovations with the experimental seating arrangement helow, in which the positions of the strings and wind choirs are reversed. He it shown conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (Courtesy of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association)

Two sketches of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Leipzig, about 1840. The members of the famous orchestra did not take seats until about 1905. (The Bettmann Archive)

But within the next half-century the conductor was elevated from these embryological beginnings to a position of dominance never before known in the history of music. Thereby was inaugurated the era of the “prima donna” or “virtuoso” conductor, who welded the orchestra into his personal instrument and, equally significantly, became an arbiter of taste in the community. “

The most powerful stimulant to the generation of this musical executive proceeded inevitably from the intrinsic nature of concerted music itself. The requirements of coordination of an increasing number of musicians, some of whom cherish their own aesthetic notions and are therefore “prima donnas” in their own right, would almost predestine the emergence of a kind of dictator who would impose his single will to guarantee the integration of the many. With the proliferating complexity of the score, which prohibits general familiarity on the part of the rank and file of the ensemble, the generalship of a conductor acquires both indispensability and prestige. It is easy to understand how this strategic function might be inflated, as in any other human relationship, by certain conspicuous personality traits which many conductors have not been loath to cultivate in both professional and public relationships. They thereby converted the baton into a wand, and the podium into a pedestal enshrouded in awe and fascination.

In the remote period of orchestral infancy, some of the more imaginative musicians had already correctly sensed the needs of more forthright control over a disjointed musical ensemble. Thus Mozart wrote to his father, after having observed the celebrated Mannheim orchestra in action:

I wish you could see the subordination that prevails there, the authority that Cannabich exercises. . . . Cannabich, who is the best Director I have ever seen, is both beloved and feared by his subordinates. . . . This can never be the case in Salzburg unless the Prince will place confidence in either you or me and give us full powers which are indispensable to a conductor of music. . . . In Salzburg everyone is masterso no one is master. If I were to undertake it, I should insist upon exercising entire authority. The Grand Chamberlain must have nothing to say as to musical matters, or any point relating to music.³⁶

There have been conductors, both operatic and orchestral, who had actually achieved what Mozart so pathetically desired. Among the early conductors, there were a conspicuous few who possessed the executive abilities as well as the professional opportunities to enforce such discipline. Lully, at the Court of Louis XIV, with the aid of his famous “baton” and an ambition which was both shrewd and inflexible, set the standard and style of French opera for a century and more; Habeneck, the founder of the Concerts du Conservatoire (1828), conducting from the first violin part, with violin under arm or chin, succeeded, after several seasons of rehearsals, in disclosing for the first time, according to Wagner’s testimony, the real beauties of Beethoven’s Ninth; Michael Costa, the “drill sergeant” of the London Philharmonic (1848-54), paraphrased Mozart’s complaint and anticipated the ideology of the whole fraternity of modern American conductors when he declared his conviction “that no orchestra can go well unless the entire control is placed in the hands of him who is the only responsible person for the accurate performance.”³⁷

But the tradition inaugurated by such pioneers was a long time becoming a general convention. Until the middle of the nineteenth century and later, with a few exceptions, discipline meant not much more than the mere synchronizing of parts, and the insuring of a minimum degree of amalgamation and unity by means of sparse rehearsals. That even this elementary requirement was no mean achievement in those days of tentative orchestral morale, when players were often incompetent, lazy, or even insolent, usually of low social estate and almost never well remunerated, is amply evident from the charges itemized by Berlioz in the first important modern treatise on instrumentation and conducting (1856):

. . . players of stringed instruments rarely give themselves the trouble to play a tremolo; many double bass players . . . from idleness ... or from fear of difficulties . . . simplify their part; flute players often transpose entire passages an octave higher to gain ascendancy over the clarinets and oboes. ... It occurs everywhere (I do not say in some orchestras) . . . that violinists do not count their bars rest, and always from idleness rely on others doing it . . . scarcely half of them come in again at the right moment.³⁸

Individual show-offs could not resist the temptation to embellish their parts for grandstand effect or from mischievous impulses. Mendelssohn, with all his personal popularity, prestige, and aristocratic station, could not bend the London orchestra entirely to his will in manner of performance and choice of repertoire; Berlioz was not able-. to make his flutists in Stuttgart stick to the printed notes, nor to refrain from decorating their parts with trills and ornament.³⁹ These conductors would alL have commiserated with Hamlet, who admonished his players: “And let those who play the clowns speak no more than is set down for them.”

To a large extent such liberties derived from the undeveloped prestige of the composer as much as from the immature conception of the conductor. This prestige and authority was soon to materialize.

The romantic notion of the function of the conductor as transcending disciplined time-beating was firmly established by Hans von Biilow, Liszt, and Wagner, the first two as practicing conductors, and the third as both conductor and codifier of principles. Together they revolutionized the art of conducting by superposing on the practiced mechanical execution; which they now demanded from their players as a matter of course, an interpretative flexibility which reinforced the conductor’s position. After the appearance of Berlioz’UArt du Chef d’Orchestre (1856) and Wagner’s brochure Uber das Dirigieren (1869), the orchestra was bound to become a unified instrument, and a vehicle of the conductor’s personal musicianship. The difference between these pioneer tracts essentially that Wagner began where Berlioz left off. If Berlioz emphasized technical proficiency, Wagner took this for granted and made the conductor a full-fledged interpreter, seeking the ‘^melos” in whatever voice or section it was to be found. No Nikisch would have risen from the pages of Berlioz’Chef d’Orchestre. That both Wagner and his audience recognized this shift toward romantic emphasis is clear from the report of Amy Fay, an American music student in Germany, who later became the sister-in-law of Theodore Thomas. She sets down her observations of Wagner conducting his Faust Overture in May, 1871:

He didn’t beat time simply, as most conductors do, but he had all sorts of little ways to indicate what he wished. It was very difficult to follow him, and they had to “keep their eyes on him” as B used to say. He held them down during the first part, so as to give the uncertainty and speculativeness of Faust’s character. Then, as Mephistopheles comes in, he gradually let them loose with a terrible crescendo, and made you feel as if Hell suddenly gaped at your feet. Then, when Gretchen appeared all was deliciously melody and sweetness. . . . The effect was tremendous. . . . When he conducts he is almost beside himself with excitement. ... He really seems to be improvising on the orchestra. . . . Wagner controlled the orchestra as if it were a single instrument and he was playing on it.⁴⁰

An English critic made similar comments on the individualistic manner of Wagner’s conducting during his one-year tenure in London:

So many quickenings and slackenings of tempo we never heard in a Haydn symphony before. . . . Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave overture was taken slower than necessary at the beginning and faster than possible at the end. It was rather a zig-zag of a performance, but wonderfully vigorous and animated.

Professionally, Bulow established himself as the first virtuoso conductor when he startled Europe with the brilliant renditions of the traveling Meiningen orchestra in 1880-85. Bulow had all the virtues and vices subsequently associated with that species: talent, for discipline and skillful rehearsing, conducting from memory, picturesque histrionic presence, personal readings, speeches from the stage, and public idolatry. Nothing new has been added since that day in America excepting, of course, the element of munificent emolument. With the establishment of the system of guest conducting which has flourished in Europe as well as in the United States since about the turn of the century, the virtuoso conductor achieves his highest pinnacle. In fact, the interpreter has gained almost higher priority than the music itself. We have come a long way from the timid and apologetic interruptions of Spohr who, in conducting the London Philharmonic in 1820, reports that “I took the liberty, when the execution did not satisfy me, to stop and in a very polite but earnest manner to remark on the manner of execution.”⁴¹ Compare this to the modern paragon of musicianship, the stern authority who wields over his troupe the power of hiring and firing as a constant threat to the incompetent and a spur to the indifferent.

The enhanced prestige of the conductor is further reflected in his position vis-a-vis the orchestra. Berlioz had expressly mentioned that the conductor should turn his back to the audience and face the orchestra. Costa and Spohr had already done so, but the practice was not yet universally accepted. Devrient, who had shared with Mendelssohn the responsibility of reviving the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, described how Mendelssohn took his position between the choruses, his back on one, his eye on the other and on the orchestra “since it was not proper at that time to turn the back to the audience.”⁴² Such a position was still a survival of the informal eighteenth century arrangement in which the conductor stood, or sat at the clavier, in the midst of his men and, with bobbing head and stamping foot, somehow assumed enough initiative to carry them along. As late as 1843, a picture in the London Illustrated News shows the conductor in the midst of his men, with baton, facing the audience but actually out of sight of some of his own men.⁴³ Jullien, who visited America in the fifties, stood similarly in the midst of his players facing the audience. In London, the “conducting” was actually shared between the first violinist “leader,” who set the tempo, and the “conductor” who presided at the clavier with the score. This dual system was shaken, though not finally abolished, by Spohr in 1820 when he assumed entire charge of the rehearsal and concert, and shocked the assemblage with the employment of the baton to keep time.⁴⁴ Mendelssohn, who took the leadership of the Gewandhaus orchestra in 183 5, followed the example set by Spohr and others in assuming personal direction of the orchestra, which had previously been in the hands of the concertmaster; and he, too, took his position, baton in hand, in front of the band.

Although the conductor had now taken his position at the head of the orchestra, it was not yet agreed that he should beat out every measure. This continuous windmill of gyrations was judged to be disturbing and offensive to the listener, and a physical and aural barrier to the unhampered enjoyment of the music. Devrient and Mendelssohn, in preparing the Passion music:

had many discussions about the best way to conduct. The continued beating throughout the movement, that must necessarily become mechanical, vexed me, and does so still [1869]. . . . It always seemed to me that the conductor ought to beat time only when the difficulty of certain passages, or unsteadiness of the performers, renders it necessary. Surely the aim of every conductor should be to influence without obtruding himself. Felix determined on this occasion to show me how this could be done, and he succeeded to perfection. I recall these circumstances with peculiar satisfaction, as in late years the extraordinary gesticulations of the conductors have been made a feature in musical performances.⁴⁵

Devrient further refers with admiration to “the confidence with which he [Mendelssohn] would drop his baton during the longer movements when he knew they were safe.” Richard Hoffman, the New York pianist, who as a youth had attended the Birmingham Festival of 1846 at which Mendelssohn conducted, confirms this laissez-faire conception of the conductor:

Mendelssohn would seldom beat more than the first sixteen or twenty^ four bars of an overture or movement of a symphony; he would then lay down his baton and listen, often applauding with the audience. He would take it up again when he wished a crescendo or rallentando or any other effect not noted in the parts.⁴⁶

Schumann, early in his career, actually found the conductor a distraction. In 1835, reviewing a concert conducted by Mendelssohn during the first year of his incumbency at the Gewandhaus, this progressive critic declared that:

Personally, I was distracted by the baton in the Overture as weir as in the Symphony, and I agreed with Florestan who was of the opinion that in the Symphony the orchestra should stand as a republic over which no higher authority was to be recognized.⁴⁷

Apparently Schumann miscalculated the trend when he failed to welcome this innovation and preferred the manner of Matthai, the concertmaster, who had previously led the orchestra from the violin desk.

Mendelssohn, Biilow, Wagner, and Liszt soon made another advance in that they succeeded in compelling adequate rehearsals in advance of public performance. To impose upon the orchestra or chorus one’s own private interpretation by means of a grueling series of rehearsals would have seemed impudent to all but a few aggressive musical authoritarians. But conditions were ripening for such an eventuality. The orchestral personnel was becoming more numerous, entrance cues less routine, and tonal balance more difficult to maintain. Rubato and other earmarks of romanticism were being developed which not only made coordination more and more difficult but also rendered the conflicting individual improvisational inspirations increasingly impractical. Conductors, given some authority as a consequence of such merely practical concessions, were emboldened to arrogate to themselves still more. Even the conservative Eduard Hanslick, who characterized “that insufferable tempo rubato as musical seasickness,” was left not altogether unmoved by Wagner’s rendition of Beethoven, on the occasion of the latter’s 1872 visit in Vienna:

The new element in Wagner’s interpretation of the Eroica consists, in brief, in a frequent modification of the tempo within the same movement. . . . Wagner’s fluctuating measure, however, produces a thrilling effect especially in the Finale. . . . At other points, so it seems to us, Wagner goes too far with his “modifications.” For example, when he opens the first movement in rapid tempo, and takes up the second motiv (45th measure) in a strikingly slower rhythm, whereby the auditor is confused by the shift from a barely established tempo, and the “heroic” character of the symphony is diverted into the sentimental.⁴⁸

If not all the conductors indulged in the whimsicalities of a Biilow or Wagner, the pattern of conductorial supremacy was nevertheless set by the time of the founding of the Boston Symphony, at which time the scope of his authority was still further enlarged to include choice of repertoire and other functions then enjoyed by few conductors. The continental conductor was usually a member of the court and was by no means emancipated, as was indicated in Brahms’ facetious reply to Henschel who had consulted him on the seating of his new Boston orchestra:

Your experiments in regard to the placing of the orchestra look very good to me. I should almost give preference to the first of the two drawings on account of the horns; the violas, however, seem to give trouble up to now. By far the best feature in both arrangements is the fact that no committee will be sitting in front of them. There is not a Kapellmeister on the whole of our continent who would not envy you for that.⁴⁹

This evolutionary culmination, which made of the conductor an arbiter of taste and a performer on the collective instrument, attained its peak in America. Although it is plausibly argued that the music should have priority over the conductor, nevertheless, it is inevitable that, as the repertoire becomes more and more familiar, interest should shift to the manner and quality of presentation. Instead of an ever new repertoire, without rehearsals, as in the days of Mozart and Beethoven, the interest today lies in an old repertoire with neiv interpreters.

With the inauguration of the era of the virtuoso conductor, who was now not only a metronomic pace-setter, but also a subtle interpreter of moods and nuances, the baton seemed to some conductors to be just an expressionless little wooden stick. Wagner and other romantic conductors had already resorted to eyes, shoulders, and head to communicate their subtle nuances. Now the fingers were likewise to be mobilized, until the conductor fairly squirmed and wriggled with sentiment, and emotion. The well-worn cliche, a “musician to his fingertips,” was at long last to be rendered incarnate, and if the stick was an encumbrance to free use of the fingers, then the stick would have to go. A reporter’s impression of Stokowski, during the transitional period, was recorded in 1928-29, when that ever-inventive maestrb was a guest in Los Angeles:

He carries his baton as he comes in. . . . Perhaps the most impressive part of Stokowski are his hands ... there is not the slightest doubt that every bit of shading is transmitted to the players with their aid. . . . He is a two-handed conductor, for he shifts his baton at will from the right to the left. His fingers curl and extend. They close and open.⁵⁰

For Stokowski, the baton had obviously become a vestigial organ, and in the course of normal evolutionary processes soon disappeared altogether.

More usual than the dropping of the baton has been the habit of dispensing with the printed score. Ever since Biilow coined the phrase that the conductor must “either have his head in the score or the score in his head,” there has never been a lack of candidates for the latter achievement. Biilow himself not only conducted from memory but his orchestra at times followed his lead by playing from memory. About 1880 Hans Richter startled the London audience by conducting Beethoven and Wagner without score. Nikisch in Boston frequently dispensed with the score. Wagner, of course, conducted his own music from memory, for which he was criticized in London in 1855 by the uninitiated public, who “detected lapses of memory,” as well as “incorrect tempi and phrasings.” With the then limited repertoire, it was perhaps no great feat. In general, however, scoreless conducting has always excited admiration. Toscanini, whose eye affliction required it and whose photographic memory permitted it, has become a model for those who were not so gifted.

There is no unanimity of opinion on the desirability of the actual physical abandonment of the score in public performance, and many conductors very sensibly do not consider it worth the risk of tempting a capricious memory, of which any human being may be an occasional victim. Soloists, especially, may feel uneasy if the orchestral score is not available for ready reference in an emergency, for eminent soloists have been known to suffer lapses of memory and had recourse to the conductor’s score. The lapses of conductors are usually not so evident to the listeners, although a bassoonist who is expecting his cue after a long rest may suffer from the unreliable “showoff.” The fact that a conductor has not discarded the score does not, of course, indicate that he does not “have the score in his head.”

Some noted conductors have had the propensity to lecture their audience during the concert, although unfamiliarity with the native language of the audience forever barred most imported conductors from such amiable indulgence in America. The occasions for such verbal embellishments were manifold. Biilow, creator of quips and sarcastic sallies, and dubbed the Conzert-Redner of the Meiningen orchestra, was the prototype of this batonical liberty, and would frequently blend his platform art with disquisitions on patriotism or other congenial topics. In America, Walter Damrosch and Stokowski, both of whom introduced many musical novelties, possessed the extrovert temperament and the linguistic facility to wax didactic in the presence of any audience.

Both these conductors were at times inspirational, but often just plain “folksy.” Stokowski would often generate a schoolroom atmosphere, scolding his audience for the foibles of harassed people who had mistakenly expected an hour of aesthetic relaxation. Late arrivals, early departures, coughing during the rendition of a number, or any other evidence of apparent indifference or displeasure, likewise elicited from the Philadelphia leader rebukes of a kind not to be found in the linguistic repertoire of the more genial and aristocratic Damrosch. Both conductors, naturally, laid themselves open to jibes—sometimes not too gentle—of critics and laymen, friends and foes alike, who did not take kindly to the phenomenon of a conductor thus stepping out of his prescribed role. To those who were irked by such a dual role, it must be said in condonement that their remarks doubtless rendered tolerable compositions which otherwise would have engendered only bewilderment and hostility.

The virtual disappearance of this conductorial license is the result of the loss of free intimacy between the conductor and his audience; nor do the large anonymous audiences, on their part, feel the same personal interest in the conductor/Above all, the audience of today is more sophisticated and would even tend to resent the pedagogical talks which were given and accepted with such grace a generation ago.

The ideals of orchestral democracy, to which Schumann made nostalgic allusion, were not to retire before the advance of the dictatorial trend without struggle. In their abhorrence for all traditional authority and their exaltation of personal liberty and responsibility, which flares so magnificently in the heat of every revolution, the early Soviets resuscitated the idea of the old informal ensemble of equals, and abolished the rank of conductor by distributing his functions, committeewise, among the membership. The Pervyi Symfonitchesky Ansamble (First Symphonic Ensemble)—PersyTTtfans, for short—was organized in Moscow in February, 1922, by a group of about ninety musicians, some of whom had been members of Koussevitzky’s; State Orchestra previous to his departure from Russia.

In performance the ensemble was seated in concentric circles, the front, or outer row, with its back to the audience. The players were therefore in a position to maintain rapport by watching one another, and giving and receiving discreet gestures of shoulders and eyes. Since overall coordination could not be wholly dispensed with, the concertmaster sat somewhat elevated in the center, and gave the essential signals. Each choir had its leader who presided over section rehearsals and who was a delegate on the general committee which conferred on interpretation. At the full rehearsal, a member of the group usually sat in the auditorium to judge the effects. The right of democratic comment on matters of interpretation was preserved by the membership. That this could lead to procedures strange to Western habits might well be expected. Egon Petri, who appeared with the Moscow orchestra, once related how the double bass player complained that he could not hear the left hand of the soloist, and suggested that he play a little louder.⁵¹

The quality of the performance seemed to have met with considerable approval, though Glazounoff, on a visit to the United States in 1929, reported that their symphonic performances were superior to their accompaniments for soloists. The organization survived long enough, though very precariously, tb celebrate its tenth anniversary in 1932 . Toward the end of its career, it was experiencing increasing difficulties because of the staggered work week and the conflicting engagements of musicians who held other posts.

Similar organizations were founded in Leningrad, Kiev, Leipzig, and other cities, while in America, the American Symphonic Ensemble, “modelled after the Moscow Persymfans,” was founded in New York in the fall of 1928, with the announced purpose to “heighten the musicianship and personality of each performer . . . and to permit the listeners to focus attention on the music.” With a change in name to the Conductorless Symphony Orchestra, it presented a diversified repertoire including modern works and accompaniments to many soloists. Like the Moscow organization, it was built on a profit-sharing basis, assigned interpretive problems to a committee, and left the coordination to the concertmaster, Paul Stassevitch. It survived two years.

The externals of conducting, which are so dramatically obvious to the lay audience, recede in importance before the principal function of the conductor: the interpretation of the composition before him. Essentially, of course, any performance should be viewed as a cooperative enterprise between the composer (through the medium of his work), the performers, and the conductor. This leads to obvious jurisdictional problems. When, in the eighteenth century, composer and conductor were identical, expression marks were unnecessary, infidelity to the score not censured—if, indeed, it was noticed—and repeat performances were accompanied by considerable license and circumstantial tamperings.

Today, with such high specialization in both composing and conducting, conductors do not ordinarily compose, and composers are often poor conductors of even their own creations. Consequently there has arisen a kind of competitive cooperation between composer and conductor for the rights of decision on controversial problems which arise in the process of transmuting the dead notes into live performance. This issue is all the more complex in that the older scores—analogously, for example, to the United States Constitution—were written in response to conditions some of which no longer obtain. Present interpretations are therefore by no means unambiguous.

Now, in a manner of speaking, both the American Constitution and the Beethoven symphonies have “survived”; but neither has escaped amendments, and there is a range of influential opinion on still further editing. The interpretation of Beethoven, who constantly revised his own manuscript, raises many problems not unlike the interpretations of the words of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. There are the fundamentalists who ascribe a kind of clairvoyance, an infallibility, to the founding fathers, political arid musical, whose wisdom must be shielded from the fallible interpretations of lesser men. There is, secondly, the leftish opinion, which is willing enough to take its point of departure from history, but which will not be ruled by its dead hand and is intent upon adapting the past to the interests, needs, and pleasures of the present. This latter conception of the function of the conductor has been formulated into a philosophy. In the words of Dr. Hugo Goldschmidt, a German musicologist:

The interpreter’s work, is no mere execution, comparable, let us say, to that of the builder who transmutes the architect’s plans into material reality. His task is, rather, to seize the vital conception of the art work, to blend it with his own ego and the views of his period. . . . His artistry is a product of its mental culture. . . . Consequently we shall always approach thle art productions of earlier times through the medium of our own spiritual and emotional nature. . . . We hear the works of the masters of former centuries ... with other ears than our forefathers. . . . What we have experienced since their time, this it is which sounds in those works to our ears. . . . Consider the history of Handel’s art. The eighteenth century . . . admired it in the form of arrangements by Hiller and Mozart. Our present musical interpretation—on Dr. Chrysander’s initiative—has gone back to the historically authenticated form. . . . But it owes its success, not to a recognition that things must be so because Handel would have them so, but because they appeal more directly to our sense and feeling than do the arrangements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁵²

The founders of this liberal wing in the realm of conducting were Wagner, Liszt, and especially Bulow. They modified the instrumentation, tinkered with tempo and nuances, and projected their own personalities into their renditions. They expressed contempt for the brittle metronomic style of conducting, as represented by Berlioz and Mendelssohn, who indulged in relatively little interpretive discretion. Of this school of free thought, the most distinguished exponent was Arthur Nikisch, conductor of the Boston orchestra in the early nineties, who in forthright manner announced his own conception of the conductor as a “recreator of the masterpieces according to my own ideas.” By no means a disciplinarian, he indulged freely in almost capricious rubato style. He was never able “to leave a phrase alone”; he embellished the score until it fairly vibrated with’ his personality. Popular in some quarters in this country, he created a sensation in Europe, in Berlin and Leipzig, though he caused many of the judicious to grieve. Today, this extreme libertarianism has become obsolete, and there is no doubt that Wagner, Liszt, Billow, and Nikisch would sound strange to our conventional ears.

This strain of conductors has been opposed by the more elegant, austere, and scholarly Weingartner, Thomas, Muck, and Toscanini, who profess to withhold their own subjective impulses in favor of the composer who, of course, is “always right.” Although, of course, never literally adhered to, authenticity of performance, rather than personal taste, is for them the criterion of acceptability. The first obligation of the conductor is to seek diligently the composer’s intention; the second, to be faithful to it.

The innocent bystander may ask: “What is meant by the ‘intention’ of the composer, and how recover it from one who has been dead a century?” How can we be sure of his actual performance manner, or the manner which he would employ if he were with us today? Practically the only clue to the composer’s intentions are the lifeless black symbols on the printed page, together with fragmentary instructions and supplementary inferences from the evidences of the day. Because of certain very obvious changes in the size of orchestras, character and balance of instruments, area and acoustics of concert halls, listeners’ habits, and innumerable other circumstances, many minor modifications have of necessity been made, especially in the older scores, merely to restore the conditions assumed by the composer. Beyond that, the “intentions of the composer” would presumably call for the literal observance of the available score details, without undue liberties in tempo, nuance, cuts, and other specifications.

It remains a real question, however, whether such literalism—in the case of Beethoven for example—is actually more faithful to what, at best, is an awkward and incomplete symbolization of the creator’s intention, than is the “free” fantasy of a Biilow or a Nikisch. Indeed there is some evidence that Beethoven, himself, was not a calm interpreter, but rather indulged in exaggerated extremes of emotional expression and rubato style while performing before the Viennese nobility. Who can confidently assert that the relatively metronomic renditions of a Weingartner or Toscanini correspond more faithfully to the intentions of a Beethoven than the quixotic latitudes of rhythm of Biilow or Arthur Nikisch?

The veneration of the past results from the intense preoccupation with historical scholarship, and thus the “return to authority”—which may be termed “fundamentalism”—is a popular and convincing slogan met with periodically in religion, politics, art, and other disciplines of life. The Bible, the American Constitution, the Communist Manifesto, the capitalistic doctrines of Adam Smithall have been looked upon as final authorities, digressions from which are branded as reprehensible. However, it is not a simple assignment, this “return to the past,” for its intentions are not easily discerned. Even those who claim conformity to authority are merely conforming to their conception of that authority.

Changes in political, economic, and aesthetic tastes are very complicated and cannot be set down as mere willful or “mistaken” divergence from past hypothetical norms. Norms are themselves the product of innumerable factors, the needs and interests and pressures of the epoch, from which they emerge. At a time when the tempo of a Beethoven scherzo depended on the technical competency or the lackadaisical habits of an underpaid musician, when first chairs were gained by seniority, and violists were recruited from superannuated and decrepit violinists, the greatest needs felt by a conductor and composer like Berlioz were discipline, accuracy, ability, and determination to “stick to the notes.” Only after these basic requirements were satisfied could romanticists like Nikisch poetize.

In the meantime, the audience, tod, was educated to the accumulated repertoire, became familiar with the manner of interpretation, and habituated to certain styles of rendition. It thereby developed into a pressure group on the conductor and performer. Like the child who knows the fairy tale from memory and is disturbed and puzzled by “errors” in the recital of the plot, so the informed audience is offended by liberties that are too unexpected. One need only read responsible criticism to learn that the most noted conductors have been charged with such aesthetic arrogations, resulting either from inexperience with certain styles or from personal caprice. In other words, with a sophisticated audience—or at least in the face of sophisticated critics—today’s conductor cannot escape a kind of scholastic censure if he introduces interpretative innovations in which he would have been allowed to revel seventyfive years ago.

We offer the hypothesis, therefore, that styles of conducting, like political ideologies, are conventions which fluctuate from period to period and group to group, contingent upon many factors: the nature and erudition of the audience, instrumental competence of players, psychological satiety of the listener, the level of public criticism, the assumed function of music, and the like. In the better sense of the word, there are fashions in conducting, as sure as there are fashions in play-acting and oratory. The floral designs in the oratory of Daniel Webster and William Jennings Bryan now seem stilted and affected, and have been replaced by the direct, unpretentious clipped style usually associated with the British debate. The impassioned speech of Sarah Bernhardt, splitting the atmosphere with strident voice and extravagant gesticulation, seems now ridiculous rather than thrilling.

The “return to authority,” evoked by the growth in historical scholarship, has been further intensified by the antiquarian interest in eighteenth-century instruments. Harpsichord recitals, originally designed for drawing-room soirees of the nobility, are now presented in concert halls before a public whose ears are attuned to the Steinway Grand. Like true believers in an ancient faith, we insist on the harpsichord as an accompaniment to the recitatives of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, without consciousness of the anachronism of an orchestra of one hundred players, of modern instruments, the cavernous auditorium and the chorus of three hundred voices, to say nothing of the modern ears of the auditors. William Apthorp, Boston critic in the mid-nineties, conjectured:

the harpsichord was a noble instrument to the perception of people who had never dreamed of a Chickering or a Steinway. ... Use it in the accompaniment of a great air of Handel, and you introduce at once an element of quaintness—just the one of all others most foreign to the spirit of composition.⁵³

Mozart and Bach wrote not only for their instruments, but also for their audience. The audience of the eighteenth century, with its listening habits, its religious, political, and social association, is beyond recovery, thereby making the instrumental renaissance sociologically and psychologically incomplete and subject to grave misinterpretation. Toscanini, in performing the Haydn Symphony in G, once reduced the strings by half in order to recapture the “balance” of Haydn’s day. This was no doubt interesting and instructive, in a museum sense, but balance is more than a count of instruments and is unsuccessful unless many other acoustical and technical matters are considered. Furtwangler, like Berlioz, Nikisch, and other romantic conductors, protests against this scholastic antiquarianism. He recently described his reactions to an “authentic” Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion:

The impression created by this most soulful masterpiece was one of unbelievable monotony. I was all the more astonished when, on the following day, I read in the press that we had finally witnessed a model performance of the Passion. The utilization of old instruments, the small choir ... reflected the current scholarship on the original production of Bach himself. . . . Here was, to be sure, not sentimentalizing, but the true Bach had no opportunity to speak to the hungry soul. The performance showed more interest in historical fidelity than in exposing the fundamental spirit of the work for the living audience.⁵⁴

It is not to be implied that such throwbacks may not produce legitimate aesthetic pleasures. It is intended only to emphasize the futility of the belief that we are hearing Bach or Haydn as they were intended to be heard, and that we are duplicating the musical experiences of their audience/There is no true, unconditioned perception. A mind conditioned to Wagner, Strauss, and Stravinsky is incapable of perceiving a primitive orchestra in the manner of Haydn’s audience of 1791 in Hanover Square Rooms of London.

Perfect fidelity to the composer’s intention obviously does not permit the reconstitution of only one element (the orchestra) without similarly reconstituting the others. Since it is, of course, impossible to reconstitute the ears of the modern audience by causing them to miraculously forget all its intervening experiences, perfect fidelity would suggest the maintenance of the relation between the orchestra and the ears which perceive it. This end is best served by utilizing the modern orchestra, which is matched to the ears of the audience. The aesthetic pleasure that we sense in listening to the reversions to the past has little resemblance to the pleasures felt by Haydn’s audience. To it, Haydn represented the comfortable upper limits of dissonance. In 1770, Burney suggested that

some of the discords in modern music, unknown until this century, are what the ear can just bear. . . . But I am convinced that, provided the ear at length make amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it.⁵⁵

The modern audience has, of course, “made amends,” and Haydn is today far within the limits of tolerance. It is clear that the “intentions of the composer” is a far more complicated problem than the superficial revival of a few antique instruments.

The late Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes once expressed himself in an epic phrase on the “intentions” of the Constitution. He shocked the absolutists by declaring that the “Constitution is what the judges say it is.” Perhaps this is an intellectual problem which transcends the field of music, and is of concern to all those who are faced with the interpretation of social history in any form. It is therefore impossible to arbitrate with finality between the Beethoven of Nikisch and Toscanini, or the harpsichord and Stokowski versions of Bach. To some critics, the staging of the uncut version of the Passion stems from misguided ancestor-worship.⁵⁶ It is not a cynical belief in the utter lawlessness of human judgment, but rather the recognition of period norms that prompts one to paraphrase the statement of the noted jurist: “Bach is what the conductor says he is.”

Management and Union

The American symphony orchestra, like the genius in the garret, has almost always led a precarious hand-to-mouth existence. There is not a single orchestra in this country whose history does not include a number of assorted financial crises which have either threatened, or in some cases suspended its existence. It is well known that today they all must pass the hat and none could endure without some form of philanthropy.

This is not necessarily an accusation against our present social order and its tepid hospitality toward that high art. Perhaps, in the nature of the case, symphony orchestras cannot be expected to run the gantlet of our economic system, and be obliged to pay their own way. One’s verdict on that issue would depend oil his conception of the social function of the symphony orchestra, and on his economic ideology, which might range all the way from the capitalist extreme of Higginson, who was prompted to “share his good fortune with the rest of society,” to official socialistic sponsorship as a public necessity. These policies of financial support have all gained a measure of adherence in this country during the one hundred years of the existence of the symphony orchestra, and have all been accorded a brief or lengthy trial.

The present financial structure of the American symphony orchestra is a culmination of a succession of short-term, and often desperate, policies to recoup deficits and straighten out periodic emergencies. Many times these vicissitudes of fortune have been glibly “explained” as the aftermath of economic depression, withdrawal of guarantors, or human miscalculation of resources and events. But these are not truly isolated and chance dilemmas; they are the manifestation of fundamental changes in the social order and are the very stuff that life is made of. It is their cumulated potency that turns the course of affairs.

American orchestral history brings to light seven more or less distinguishable economic devices for their support, which show relatively little overlap, excepting that the last will be found to permeate all the others. These schemes are: (1) the cooperative plan; (2) plutocratic support by one or more guarantors; (3) private enterprise, the risk being carried by conductor or manager; (4) endowment, accumulated from various sources; (5) broad popular support of small donors, usually referred to as the “maintenance fund”; (6) municipal or state taxation; and (7) self-support or pay-as-yougo system.

The cooperative plan is a mutual organization whereby the risks are distributed over the entire membership of the orchestra. The membership forms a democratic or communistic body which is completely and solely responsible for its own policies and their implementation. It elects qualified members, determines rehearsal and concert periods, owns or rents its library and equipment, selects its own officers, engages conductor and soloists, sets the program, pays all incidental expenses of management—and finally divides the proceeds. The New York Philharmonic Society carried on under this system for sixty-seven years, from its inception in 1842 to 1909, when it was taken over by a group of guarantors. Much more recently, in 1929, a group of Indianapolis instrumentalists likewise organized a cooperative society when the depression and sound pictures deprived them of their individual livelihoods. This organization similarly succumbed to philanthropic support in 1937.

The New York Philharmonic Society illustrated all the weaknesses of this pattern of communistic organization. Its very objective contains the seeds of its own destruction. The objective of such an organization is not primarily to provide the finest music in the most artistic manner, but rather to create self-employment. One must admit that this motive is both innocent and laudable, and much can be accomplished in such a society of like-minded colleagues. But for the necessary discipline, such an organization is completely dependent on self-discipline; and what Anton Seidl, as the leader of this part-time organization in the late nineties, had to contend with even during its most profitable era is intimately revealed in the confession of a member of the orchestra:

Nearly all the members of the Philharmonic play at balls and dances during the greater part of the year. They then get together to play a half dozen doubled up programs during the year, rush through old scores during five hour rehearsals preceding a concert and are then expected to play their programs artistically. Take into additional consideration that some of them never play at all except at the few Philharmonic concerts, and the tale of woe and disheartening anguish is soon told. ... Many sincere men play incessantly at balls, dances, dinners, and parties for six weeks night after night until early morn and then after a Philharmonic concert find themselves denominated in the papers as great artists after scratching through a symphony.⁵⁷

Sooner or later civic pride and aspiration, as well as the growing sophistication of the audience, which such a society has itself created, will inevitably render it obsolete. An “outside” committee of civic-minded persons will take over, a new conductor will be “imported.” Amid injured feelings, economic hardship, and pathetically impotent protests of displaced members, the rejuvenation of the group will proceed until an orchestra is fashioned of which “the city will be proud.” That was the monotonous story, with only the slightest variation, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati^ Indianapolis, and many other cities.

Under very exceptional circumstances, a cooperative orchestra has been known to cultivate high excellence. The Vienna Philharmonic, also founded in 1842, noted beforeWorldWar I as one of the finest in Europe, was such a body, which selected its own conductors. However, its membership contained the pick of that musical metropolis, and was practically identical with the well-trains permanent orchestra of the Imperial Opera, which Was the site of its major activities. Like every other cooperative, it was reluctant to spend much time on rehearsals, and it was once reported that Furtwangler had not been invited to conduct its concerts in the late twenties because ofthe severity of his discipline.

In order to overcome the fatal weakness of inadequate remuneration, which in turn sets off the chain reaction of missed performances by its otherwise employed personnel, inadequate rehearsal time, retention of incompetent but loyal personnel, irresolute and inoffensive conducting by a conductor who reigns only at the pleasure of his subjects, it is necessary to shift financial responsibility from the players to some one who can assure adequate subsistence. This means the substitution of an aggressive management for the dead-level drift, to the end that the orchestra be the player’s first love rather than a last resort. >

This was the aim of Theodore Thomas when, in 1863, he organized his own orchestra, had daily rehearsals, personally guaranteed wages and, in short, gave full employment to the orchestra, which he made his private enterprise. In order to take up the seasonal slack, it became the painful necessity of the orchestra to travel and to organize tours, even during the unpleasant winter months. This extremely distasteful circumstance, as well as periodic personal financial losses, soon taught Thomas that such a “permanent” orchestra had no real permanence at all and could make no artistic progress. He had forged an excellent instrument, had welcomed occasional financial lifts from William Steinway and other friends (in those days the piano manufacturers—Steinway, Knabe, Weber, etc.—actuated by business as weir as artistic motives—were the im-presarios and musical philanthropists); but, after 1881, he not too secretly envied the Boston orchestra with its personally guaranteed philanthropic security. The double function of impresario and conductor was too great a load even for such a strong back as that of Theodore Thomas.

The regime inaugurated by Mr. Higginson in Boston was destined to be one of the most dramatically significant experiments in the whole history of the American symphony orchestra, for it became the ideal pattern emulated, or at least envied, by all major orchestras for several decades. This system which, for want of a more elegant nomenclature may be called “plutocratic,” consists in a happy segregation of the artistic and financial functions, in that one or a few persons of affluence take over the responsibility of meeting the deficits, which are assumed to be temporarily or permanently inevitable. The conductor then assumes sole responsibility for all the professional details including the employment of a corps of musicians whose major duty is to the orchestra concerts and rehearsals.

Besides Higginson and, later, E. B. Dane of Boston, other philanthropists who virtually signed a blank check to the credit of the orchestra for a shorter or longer period were: H. H. Flagler (oil) for the New York Symphony, W. A. Clark (mines) of Los Angeles, and Edward Bok (publishing) of Philadelphia. There were others, equally important, who shared economic responsibility in a more fragmentary but still substantial degree: E. L. Carpenter of Minneapolis, Charles Norman Fay and others of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Phelps Taft of Cincinnati, Robert S. Brookings of St. Louis. For the ideology that motivated their philanthropy we may turn to Mr. Higginson, who was never pretentious, yet certainly not inarticulate, either in private conference or public ceremony. Having seen state subsidies in Europe, he epitomized the American philosophy of paternalistic capitalism on the occasion of the dedication of Symphony Hall, the new home of his orchestra, in October, 1900:

It is fitting in a Republic that the citizens and not the Government in any form should do such work and bear such burdens. To the more fortunate people of our land belongs the privilege of providing the higher branches of education and art.⁵⁸

Although this was not the same social conscience which prompted the pre-Napoleonic princes to employ musicians as they did their cooks and coachmen, it still provided comparable security and stability in this modern commercial era.

History, however, in the derisive manner which she so often affects toward man’s most noble designs, began almost immediately to reveal cracks in this handsome edifice. However magnificently conceived, a foundation consisting of one or a few individuals turned out to be too narrow to provide a stable equilibrium. Something more predictable and reliable—a broader base—was needed than the periodic liquidation of each annual deficit by a capricious individual. Death, financial adversity, or simple fatigue in the pursuit of what was once an exciting adventure, constantly threatened to wreck the structure in which the welfare of so many persons, and so much community pride, was involved. Some of the early philanthropists and energetic promoters had been sustained by their personal musical accomplishments: Higginson had been a student of piano in Vienna, Clark was a proficient violinist, and Flagler a pianist. Carpenter, Mrs, Leonora Wood Armsby (San Francisco), and Mrs. Adella Prentiss Hughes (Cleveland), were schooled musicians. But other projects were beginning to compete with music for the attention of potential donors: international peace, public libraries, medicine, research, and education. If that were not enough, the handwriting on the wall, which prophesied the liquidation of their huge personal fortunes, could already be deciphered. The era of buccaneering capitalists, who amassed their millions with no questions asked and no federal taxes to siphon them off, was soon to pass, as had the epoch of the proud nobility. Then, as now, their passing endangered the institutions which they had founded and sustained.

It was now beginning to dawn on public-spirited persons that, instead of the annual temporary relief of large direct gifts, a grant of investment capital, rooted in the industrial wealth of the nation, would be the source of a more continuous, automatic, and predictable flow of benefits. The earliest instance of this new direction was an endowment by Joseph Pulitzer who, in 191 r, left, among the many other benevolences he created, a bequest of almost $1,000,000 to the New York Philharmonic. In Cincinnati, Miss Cora Dow (1915) and Mrs. Nicholas Longworth (1923) left substantial bequests, and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Phelps Taft contributed $1,000,000 on condition that another two and a half millions be raised as an endowment. In Chicago and Cleveland, endowments took another, but equally profitable, form. A popular subscription made it possible to build and present a “home” (Orchestra Hall) to the Chicago orchestra, which, in addition, yields an income of rents which has contributed to its financial stability. Cleveland, in Severance Hall, also possesses a beautiful auditorium, the gift of the late J. L. Severance, which houses the offices of the orchestra as well.

But in a changing world, endowments also have their frailties. Although designed to cover future obligations, they actually never did so. The reasons are very simple: the progressive decline in purchasing value of the dollar and the shrinking interest yields, while obligations of all kinds have been expanding at a fantastic rate. Augmentation of dwindling endowment funds from dried-up sources is obviously a vain hope, and outright gifts of large dimension have long gone out of fashion with a more equable distribution of the national income. As a result, instead of a few large gifts, the new arithmetic calls for a multitude of little ones.

There are many variations to this theme, but the tune is always the same: no principle of orchestral finance has today gained more general adherence than the principle of the “broad base.” Individual “friends of the orchestra,” business houses, and local industries who make it a routine rule to contribute to almost any worthy cause, are solicited for annual subscriptions. This places the orchestra in a category not unlike the beneficiaries of the community chest, so that even the oldest and the finest orchestras find these handouts indispensable to a balanced budget.

In setting forth the cheerless recital of deficit financing, one may unintentionally produce an exaggerated impression of the plight of the orchestras. They obviously do enjoy some earned income of their own. In 1948 the Cincinnati orchestra rendered a public accounting to its subscribers, which may be briefly illustrated by limiting the bookkeeping to the best seats in the house:

In other words, the customer purchased $1.00 worth of music for $.51. Although any estimate of an orchestra’s degree of self-support is almost meaningless without a close analysis of its accounting system, one may still assert that most orchestras are seventy-five to ninety per cent self-supporting in terms of ticket sales, endowments and other fixed income. However, it is this last ten to twenty per cent, gifts by “sustaining members,” that spells the difference between mediocrity and excellence. The largest single earned income is derived from ticket sales, supplemented by recordings and radio sponsorship, which in the last decade have constituted a providential intervention. However, the last-named sources vary enormously from orchestra to orchestra, for in general it is only the larger and more eminent organizations that can command such outlets in significant volume. Nor can relief be sought in increased admission fees, for music differs from such luxuries as tobacco and liquor in that its elastic patronage fluctuates greatly with varying economic conditions and the fickleness of public interest.

A half-century ago, guarantors had quietly assumed, and often overtly expressed the conviction, that symphony orchestras would and could ultimately stand on their own feet; that after a period of pump-priming, or through the farsighted provision of an endowment of capital stock, the orchestra would become a self-supporting business enterprise. It had not yet dawned on them that a deficit was not an occasional and unfortunate episode, but rather a chronic affliction. Instead of being a “grocery store” which, when well managed, shows a balance between income and outgo, the orchestra was rather to be classed as an educational institution in which the fees can never be raised to the level of costs. Today, no one sees any prospect that it will ever be otherwise.

Many musicians have deplored the fact that music is a victim of the economic processes, and its values distorted by those nefarious forces.⁵⁹ But in a manner of speaking the symphony orchestra cannot, of course, escape the economic processes. As long as the conductor receives his fee, the musicians their contractual salaries, the printer of the scores his profits, the owner of the hall his rentals, the custodian his wage, they are all enmeshed in its pressures. It is only a question as to how the costs will be distributed.

In a rigidly laissez-faire economy, those services and industries which do not attract sufficient support to sustain them, are simply left to perish unless they are willing to adapt the quality and volume of their services to the public demand. But insofar as any service or industry is affected with the public interest, such service is protected against destructive competition by society in its collective capacity. Therefore, after all other means of economic support have either failed or become obsolete, there remains finally, in default of private and voluntary aid, recourse to public taxation for the support of what to many citizens is a public cultural asset, and consequently a responsibility of the community. Libraries, museums, parks and zoos are educational undertakings which are a source of prestige and delight to the citizenry, and a symphony orchestra could appropriately be added to the list, so the argument runs. A few cities, notably Baltimore, San Francisco, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and a number of smaller cities⁶⁰ have lent assistance in a direct or indirect manner, in exchange for which the orchestra often presents a series of concerts either without admission or at popular prices. Since most of these grants assume some service in return, they cannot be considered genuine subsidies, but rather earned income. But they all have the same purpose and effect—to alleviate the struggle for existence.

Subsidies by public taxation are still sufficiently infrequent in number and small in value to render the issue a controversial one among managers and public alike. Such a provision sometimes puts the symphony orchestra in competition with the fire department, street maintenance departments, public hospitals, grade schools, and all other municipal undertakings for a share in the tax resources. Taxpayers, whose streets need repair, have at times protested against the public subsidizing of this “luxury of the leisure class.”

There are likewise those, especially among the spokesmen for orchestras that can limp along under the present system, who have expressed their apprehension that public assistance would, of necessity, be followed by its shadow, public corruption. Not only would politicians ultimately insist on the right of “nominating the fourth horn,” but the character of the programs would deteriorate to the level of the strongest pressure groups. For whatever material gain music might thus achieve, it is feared she would bargain her very soul, her priceless artistic virtue.

It is countered by the proponents of the public system that, while political aggression is a melancholy fact, it is still true that our cultural institutions have, by and large, kept free of such venality, and that politicians have left them alone. Until recently, the accumulated experience was insufficient to venture confident predictions on the receptivity of the orchestras to public grants. It is, however, difficult to believe that any management, which now theoretically spurns such aid, would in the end choose to die a virtuous death rather than compromise a bit of its soul in exchange for material survival. This view is steadily gaining converts.⁶¹

In such dilemmas, it must be difficult for the well-wishers of the present-day orchestras to inhibit an anxious side glance at the dramatic theatre, which is a cultural institution of no less respectable ancestry. The theatre worries along without benefit of endowments, without philanthropic coverage of deficits, without radio or record sustenance. The theatre consists of a series of small enterprises, each of them entirely dependent upon the box office to recoup the investment which is usually furnished by a risk-taker. Therefore, it tends to scale its repertoire (to the great grief of many a judicious author) to that imperious circumstance. This necessity to appease the box office, according to some playwrights, has brought about the descent of the theatre from the realm of art to the level of “show business,” with a businessman’s criterion of success. It is not at all certain that the hand-to-mouth existence of some orchestras has not similarly resulted in a lighter, if not a deteriorated repertoire, as well as in a compromising collaboration with glamorous soloists to insure the success of “orchestral” concerts.

Artistic supremacy was a logical goal in the days of unfettered wealth, when fabulous fortunes were lavished upon private picture galleries, private yachts, private orchestras, and other “playthings of the rich.” Today, when the “guarantors” consist of thousands of little men, from whom subsidies are coaxed in chicken-feed lots, reckless expenditures may not be practical. They may desire a quid pro quo in musical entertainment as well as an increment of prestige. In most instances today there is a “freedom within limits,” a negotiated freedom with mutual dependence, in the dual administration, the degree of which varies from city to city and from year to year. The romantic concept of artistic supremacy, in the old sense, has given way to practical coordination. There is thus an inevitable relation between the economic security of the orchestra and the quality of the repertoire. In part to prevent the deterioration of the repertoire, and in part to prevent wholesale unemployment in a skilled occupation, the British government subsidizes directly or indirectly about ten symphony orchestras. The medium of distribution of government funds is the Arts Council, which was established in 1940.⁶²

From the foregoing analysis, it is clear that the American symphony orchestra has always been, in the economic sense, a “parasitic” industry—in no way to be construed derogatorily—subsisting upon the surpluses earned by other industries which are then distributed through the medium of open-handed friends. It has long been observed that there are many cherished social values which will crumble if subjected to the rigors of the laws of commerce and exchange. Warnings have been repeatedly sounded against allowing serious music to become enmeshed in the natural economic processes and to become a victim of their criteria of survival. On the other hand, to expect an existence outside the social order may also appear to be a contradiction in terms. Certain forms of the arts have, perhaps, succeeded in establishing a modus vivendi within the commercial society, but not without encountering vital dilemmas. Conductors, opera and orchestra, have learned that prolonged financial embarrassments are not conducive to a good bargaining position in the maintenance of the integrity of the repertoire. Unsold season tickets are a constant temptation to sell “singles” with a seductive program. But it is a question whether strong popular support would be forthcoming for the financially weak aristocratic taste. By a program that is too esoteric, the orchestra may “aesthetisize” itself out of the market and endanger its existence more fatally than if it made some concessions to public taste.

THE MUSICIANS’ UNION At critical periods in the history of the symphony orchestra, management has often accusingly laid its plight at the door of the musicians who, because of their intractable demands, were charged with biting: the hand that was feeding them. The salaries of the personnel, which amount to approximately half of the operating expenses, do constitute the largest single budget item.⁶³ Under the old cooperative system, these musicians had been satisfied with a mere trickle of pin money, but as the orchestra was transformed into a major occupation, they naturally endeavored to extract from it their major livelihood. Here was a fertile field for strife in which the musician naturally made strenuous attempts to strengthen his position.

Another source of friction was the growing authority and power of the conductor. Under the democratic cooperative system, he “ruled” at the pleasure of his subjects. Under the new regime, inaugurated by Higginson and followed by every other major orchestral administration, the responsible conductor held the power to hire, and the threat to fire for incompetence or insubordination, over every member of the band. In general, the musicians have now conceded this right to the musical director in the interest of musical efficiency, but the struggle has at times been a bitter one.

Both of these powers—business managers and musical directorsare, in a manner of speaking, the musician’s natural enemies against whom the man in the ranks feels called upon to consolidate his forces for his own protection. Following the pattern set in the fields of industrial employment, unionization became the principal protective device which he adopted to insure his job and to improve his condition. The “competitive cooperation” which obtains between these contending parties is laden with many implications for the perpetuation of the orchestras, thp competence of the membership, the effective artistry of its ensemble, and, not too indirectly, the nature of the repertoire.

The origins of the musicians’ union in America may be traced to a small group of German musicians in New York who, in i860, formed an association jestingly titled the Aschenbrodel Club, “for the cultivation of the art of music . . . and the relief of such members as shall be unfortunate.” But before many years, a more serious atmosphere prevailed, and its members incorporated as the Musical Mutual Protective Union. Meanwhile Baltimore, St. Louis, and other cities established similar clubs, which, in 1886, consolidated as the National League of Musicians. Somewhat squeamish about considering themselves “laborers,” the League resisted the urge to affiliate with the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor until 1896, when a small number of Western locals attended the A.F. of L. convention in Indianapolis and laid the foundation for the American Federation of Musicians. The League soon capitulated and all locals finally entered the Federation. Its first president was Owen Miller of St. Louis. He was succeeded in 1900 by Joseph N. Weber of Cincinnati. In 1940 the presidential choice was J. C. Petrillo of Chicago.

The greatest source of competition for orchestra jobs in our undeveloped country up to the time of the first World War were the finished players from Germany and, to a lesser extent, from France and other European countries. It was not until the early eighties that the unions reacted energetically to this hazard, provoked by the members of the traveling bands and orchestras, particularly from Germany, who would often desert their native organization and seek work in the American theatre and concert orchestras. On the occasion of the World’s Fair at Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and St. Louis (1904), as well as in ordinary years, hundreds of musicians of every grade entered this country while American musicians stood by powerless and unemployed. In order to secure well-trained talent, American conductors not only abetted this policy, but actively recruited especially competent players from Europe and imported them on contract for the best positions in their orchestras. To counteract this peril to their security, the American unions at first attempted to invoke the Alien Contract Labor Law enacted by Congress in 1885 for the primary purpose of preventing industrial employers from inducing immigration by making contracts abroad. Since the law, however, expressly exempted professional persons, it was not immediately clear how the musicians^ unions could find relief in its provisions. As early as 1885 Theodore Thomas, who had obtained many members for his famous orchestra in Europe, secured an injunction from a Judge Potter against the Musical Mutual Protective Union of New York which was at that time trying to prevent the Belgian Felix Bour, oboist, from taking his place in Thomas’ New York orchestra. In 1893, the same union dispatched a protest to President Cleveland on the interpretation of the law which “allowed bands and orchestras to enter this country . . . under the flimsy pretext of classing them as artists.”⁶⁴ Even Arthur Nikisch, imported to conduct the Boston orchestra in 1889, and the opera composer Mascagni, who entered this country for a triumphant tour in 1902, were challenged, but merely evoked the expected ruling that they could legally enter to “pursue their calling.” Taking no chance of being intercepted, Nikisch slyly landed in Boston after his arrival had been announced for New York.

A Jullien concert in 1843. By this time the differentiation of the conductor from the general membership of the orchestra was well established in Europe but just beginning in the United States. (Picture Post Library)

The American orchestras have been through crises before. This is a sample of the civic interest in the Philadelphia Orchestra during the 1919 campaign. (Courtesy of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association)

As a deterrent to this foreign infiltration, the union had recourse to a contrivance of its own: the “six-months rule” concocted in 1882 by the New York local as a countermeasure against the engagement of Schreiner’s German orchestra at Long Beach. It withheld union membership, arid therefore employment, from a foreigner during the first half-year of residence in this country. However, when candidates for particular vacancies were clearly not available in the United States, the union usually waived this requirement. Such was the case in 1891 when Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New, York Symphony Society, imported as his concertmaster the distinguished Russian violinist,, Adolf Brodsky. It was this artist who had gained notoriety for his sensational premiere in Vienna (iSSj) / of the now standard Tschaikowsky Concerto and occasioned one of the choicest examples of Hanslick’s vitriolic style. Such a celebrity clearly merited the exemption accorded him.

Although many such instances of administrative tolerance could be cited, the unions could just as easily be aroused to drastic action. Two years after the Brodsky episode Damrosch, perhaps feeling himself secure, invited the much less famous Danish cellist, Anton Hegner, to take the first chair in the same orchestra. On Sunday evening December 17, 1893, shortly after his arrival in this country and without observing the “six-months rule,” Hegner took his seat on the stage—a signal for the rest qf the orchestra to walk off and desert their posts.⁶⁵ Pre-concert negotiations having failed, the union thus made its reply in the form of the first strike in American symphonic history. The musicians had, of course, acted under union orders. The chagrined Damrosch could only dismiss the audience with a few tactful and dignified remarks, of which he was always so eminently capable, and retire to the conductor’s room.

This episode turned out to be a critical step in the establishment of the power of the union. Although Theodore Thomas had successfully defied the union in 1885 on the principle of restraint of trade, Damrosch had weakened his case by previously recognizing the six-months rule in successfully requesting its suspension in the Brodsky case This time, however, the conductor for some reason chose to ignore the rule. After some weeks of negotiation, during which Hegner had twice illegally appeared with the orchestra, the showdown was set for the Sunday concert in question. The union had no choice but to follow through with the conventional fines for conductor and players: $20 for the first, and $10 for the second offense. There followed several days of uncertainty before Darnrosch conceded defeat and paid the fine. The players, who had “acted under false assurances of the conductor” received remission of their fines.

There was some speculation that Damrosch after all may have enjoyed the last laugh. The strike automatically abrogated all contracts, which he then renegotiated on more favorable terms to himself. Some have even insisted that the whole strategy of the financially hard-pressed conductor was diabolically designed to that very end.⁶⁶

Again, in 1905, the same Damrosch clashed with the union, and the rebuff assumed the still characteristic pattern. He was fined a “nominal” amount of $1,000 by Joseph N. Weber, president, for importing five French musicians for his recently reorganized orchestra—punitive action which was sustained at the May, 1906, convention of the American Federation of Musicians. Damrosch had proferred the usual claim that America could not supply his needs, while Weber had charged that the conductor had made no honest attempt to determine the availability of the supply in this country. The offending French musicians were, however, magnanimously permitted to join the union since “these men came to this country in good faith and were not responsible for their embarrassing predicament.”⁶⁷

On the more fundamental issue, the courts had always ruled since 1890 that musicians were “artists” and not laborers, and therefore not under the protection of the Contract Labor Law. In 1902 Alexander Bremer, then president of the New York Musicians Mutual Protective Union, directed another futile protest to President Theodore Roosevelt, in which he again insisted that musicians were “wage earners entitled to the protection of the law as were other wage earners.”⁶⁸ On the same principle, in 1927, Joseph N. Weber submitted a brief to the United States Department of Labor anent an imported orchestra at the Carleton Hotel, Washington, D. C.⁶⁹

The union interpretation really did not seem too inconsistent with the actual fact. Many of these musicians, either through incompetence or lack of broader opportunity, plied their music only as a part-time occupation, and simultaneously held cards as cobblers, stove-molders, saloon keepers, and what-have-you. In fact, Alexander Bremer was himself a minor official in the New York city government and his opponent in the election for the presidency of the M. M. P. U. in 1897 Was a boss carpenter and violinist.⁷⁰ They were a versatile lot in those unspecialized days, and their varied talents undoubtedly dulled their devotion to a single art and facilitated the spread of the pattern of unionization of the “artist” with the artisan. Nor did those who were fortunate enough to gain their entire livelihood in music always scale the exalted heights of artistry, for there is nothing necessarily elevating or divinely inspiring in fiddling, night after night, in the squalid pits of cheap theatres, or in scraping through the popular rounds and dance tunes of the day. Such players quite justifiably felt themselves more akin to the hack worker than to the symphony artist, whose dignity might have inhibited crude protests. ‘

But there were some symphony players who were conscious of a higher tradition, and who often winced a bit when “contemplating the fitness of the Bach and Beethoven interpreters, hod carriers, bricklayers and longshoremen forming a union to strengthen our position, while architects, painters, composers, actors and poets live a life of weary isolation.” They feared that too close an affinity between symphony men and the run-of-the-mine theatre and dance musicians would aid the incompetent in rising, to jeopardize their own position and thereby depress the relative opportunities of the better-class musicians by placing all on one level.⁷¹

When it was not a question of importations from abroad, the local unions endeavored to protect their jobs from migrations from other cities. Because of the principle of local autonomy in the Federation, union cards are not normally transferable from one local to another. Hence there is always a union-imposed barrier to free migration which constitutes a vexatious restraint to the conductor or local management in strengthening his orchestra by bidding in the national market. Here too, however, amicable agreements are often made for the good of the order, although strife and friction were common, especially during the period of the founding of the permanent orchestras a half-century ago. When Theodore Thomas was engaged to organize the Chicago orchestra in 1891, he literally transferred almost his entire New York orchestra of sixty men to Chicago as the nucleus for the new body. In retort to union protests, Thomas insisted: “I shall select my players where I find them . . . New York ... or Europe. ... If there are good men in Chicago I will use them.”⁷² Van der Stucken in Cincinnati; Scheel in Philadelphia; Henschel and Gericke in Boston; Gabrilowitsch in Detroit; Rothwell in Los Angeles—all these conductors encountered this normal, but impotent, impulse on the part of the local musician to protect his job as it came in conflict with the principle of artistic supremacy as entertained by conductor, civic committee, and guarantors. On this front, too, the union lost its battle, for the modern orchestra had now reached a kind of “industrial stage” in which musical efficiency was the controlling law, and generally had priority over job security.

The displaced personnel of these early orchestras, and their public sympathizers, of which there were many, fought grimly and sometimes “split the community” in their pathetic efforts to protect the “local boys.” The usual promise that “all competent musicians will be retained,” was scant consolation to the mediocre majority. In extenuation of the demands of the perfectionist, most of the local orchestras had been mere “sandlot” affairs whose strength lay not in their musical ideals, but in social and professional companionship. In the cooperative manner, they usually divided the modest “take,” which was never considered anything but a pleasant source of extra income, much less remunerative, but more exhilarating than the tedious theatre routine and humdrum teaching. But now the orchestra was to be organized from above, with the membership, and even the conductor himself, put in the role of salaried employees. At last, the conductor could choose his men rather than the men the conductor. Although the union has preserved certain safeguards against arbitrary and exploitive tactics, nothing is now more generally conceded than the essential and responsible right of the conductor in the selection of personnel.

With the problems of basic employment settled in principle, there is still the whole area of “working conditions” and their enforcement—including wage scales, hours, and the host of details—which are, of course, subject to continuous negotiation between union and management.

Although it was not until after World War I that negotiations on salaries and working conditions became momentous, periodic tiffs between union and orchestral management were not unknown before that. Early in 1904, while rehearsing the new and difficult score of Symphonia Domestica under Richard Strauss, who was then making his first tour of the United States, the members of the Wetzler orchestra of New York walked off the stage when the contractual rehearsal time had expired. This episode, which some have condemned as a rude and inhospitable gesture toward a distinguished foreigner, incidentally could not have befallen anyone with greater poetic justice, for no musician and composer had achieved a more deserved reputation for calculated negotiation with musicians and publishers than the fabulously successful Richard Strauss.

By 1920 the unions were entering into a period of increased bargaining power, arid their demands for revision of salary scales, stimulated by the postwar inflationary spirals, threatened the very existence of some of the major orchestras. This bargaining power was enhanced by the relative scarcity of musicians during that postwar period. Not only was the competitive European supply cut off by more stringent immigration laws, but the fashion for symphony orchestras was spreading to the Middle West and the Pacific Coast where newly founded, or reinvigorated, organizations were bidding for the limited supply of competent players. During this period of Coolidge prosperity even moving-picture theatres were adding pit orchestras of symphonic proportions to the sumptuous decor of their cinema palaces. Clearly, it was a propitious time for unions to press their advantage. And this they did, to the great distress of the philanthropists whose economic surpluses, once the rich economic topsoil from which the arts had extracted their nutriment, were now being washed away by the slow but fatal erosion of the changing industrial climate.

Whether or not the contending parties fully realized the ruthless drift of events in which they were helplessly dragged along, there is nothing in the light of contemporary or subsequent developments which would suggest that either side was bluffing. H. H. Flagler, the guardian angel of the New York Symphony Society, was irked by the “continued attempt by hampering restrictions and purely commercial methods to destroy artistic projects,” and warned that “if the worse element prevails I see but two courses open, (1) to give up altogether the maintenance of the symphony orchestras, or (2) to found nonunion orchestras.”⁷³ In Chicago in the spring of 1923, the union threatened to strike “in the fall.” These ominous soundings subsided only when “both sides compromised.” This was the same orchestral management that, in 1928, had already notified the musicians that “they were free to seek employment elsewhere” when the differences were again patched up. Orchestras had folded up before. Cincinnati was dark from 1906 to 1908 when the management, even in those early days, met with “labor troubles.”

As is usual in a democracy, both sides appealed for aid and comfort to the public conscience, each presenting its own case in the best possible light and that of its opponent in the worst. The “exorbitant and shortsighted demands of the union” were set off against the selfless generosity of the philanthropists, whose benefactions to society were made difficult, and even impossible, by the aggressive and myopic “commercial” motives of the players’ union. As for the musician, he in turn considered himself worthy of his hire. He had a great investment in his long years pf concentrated study and in the acquisition and maintenance of a costly instrument and delicate skills, The legitimately expected return on this investment was rendered precarious by the brevity of the concert season, the un-. certainty of the yearly contracts, and the postwar inflation. All this obviously argued a sympathetic review of the player’s plight.

This clash between the imperious demands of rising costs and the dissipation of available philanthropic resources assumed national proportions, and in the minds of some leaders required consultation on a national scale. In February, 1924, Clarence H. Mackay, who had recently become chairman of the board of the New York Philharmonic, invited the patrons of about a dozen major orchestras to New York for the specific purpose of discussing the now universally experienced mounting deficits. Many of the leading philanthropists were present: Van Rensselaer (Philadelphia), Hamill (Chicago), Carpenter (Minneapolis)> Flagler (New York Symphony), together with Juilliard, Kahn, and Marshall Field, of the host orchestra. The managers, among whom were Judson (of New York and Philadelphia), Mrs. Hughes (Cleveland), Mrs. Caroline Estes Smith (Los Angeles), and others, joined in the deliberations. Some of their plans to reduce deficits had no durable significance, but the informal organization, expanded to meet developing needs, still exists and is convoked annually for the discussion of common problems.

There was one orchestra that did not avail itself of the opportunity to participate in the council on the pending crisis. Boston, which had operated the best of all major orchestras, and the only one on the open-shop principle, apparently felt no need for collaboration and, in fact, might even have pointed up the embarrassing anachronism of its position if it had taken part in the sessions. During all these decades, when union arid management were learning to live together to promote their common ends, the Boston orchestra had been able to cultivate a splendid isolation from the inexorable trends.

There were several factors that contributed to the amazing selfreliance of the Boston organization. First, the paternalistic foresight of its owner had provided for a long and profitable season. Not only was the winter season of twenty-four pairs of concerts then the longest of any in the country, but the famous “pops,” founded in 1885, and the Esplanade concerts, beginning in the late twenties, guaranteed to many a member almost full-year employment, and at a high wage scale. The Boston orchestra never stopped playing! Dignified supplementary income from teaching and summer resort contracts was facilitated by the universally acknowledged prestige of the orchestra. Consequently the musicians were somewhat less receptive to alarms of exploitation than they might have been under average circumstances. A large proportion had been imported expressly for membership in this orchestra and so felt a loyalty to it.

Over and above this whole scene, there hovered the ominously possessive philosophy of the guarantor, who, until 1918, assumed full personal responsibility for the economic security of the orchestra, and kept its membership dependent on the pleasure of owner and conductor. This watchfulness against any discontent must have been a powerful deterrent to overt expression of any latent restlessness. When, in 1903, murmurs of revolt became audible, Higginson rendered his usual obbligato in his typical unambiguous manner: “No one will interfere with my orchestra. If there is interference I will abolish it and declare publicly who is at fault and why it was done.”⁷⁴ A much more serious crisis was weathered in 1920 when, as a result of a strike, the orchestral board dismissed the concertmaster and about thirty members of the orchestra in a desperate attempt to halt the inevitable.

But finally, when the scepter had dropped from the hands of the ruler, the orchestra lost its independence through a series of squeeze plays maneuvered by Mr. Petrillo: his refusal to allow Bruno Walter and Carlos Chavez to conduct the nonunion Boston orchestra; his threat to prevent Koussevitzky from accepting invitations from union orchestras; his threat to blacklist the auditoriums where Boston might appear. Most alarming of all was the imminent danger of interference with broadcasting and recording, which would have struck at the very subsistence of the orchestra. Finally* enmeshed in the larger world of affairs, the management could only capitulate in December, 1942, after having wrung from Petrillo certain minor concessions.

All symphony orchestras are now fully organized and, in that sense, the union “problem” may be written off as “solved.” Harassed more than ever by deficit financing, management still resents many detailed restrictions imposed on its freedom to act in its own interests, and occasionally accuses the musician of not thinking beyond the tip of his bow. On the other hand, any idealism which the practitioner of the “queen of the arts” may have inherited from the nineteenth century, and any professional enthusiasm which formerly sustained him in the old cooperative days, must now be tempered by the realities of the competitive age. Although the symphony artist may at times still feel the discomfort of being yoked with the popular musician, they all present as solid a front as do the members of any other union.

The economic welfare of orchestra personnel has been severely affected by the technological revolution of the. last decades. The incessant fear of displacement by the machine has gripped the modern musician as it has gripped the workers in every industry since the industrial revolution. The close of the last century witnessed the invention of the phonograph. In 1926 the Vitaphone made its debut in New York with Marion Talley, Elman, Zimbalist, and the New York Philharmonic. Alarmed, the American Federation of Musicians authorized a budget of a million dollars in 1930 to fight “canned music.” In 1933, the American Society of Composers and Publishers published a brochure entitled The Murder of Music which endeavored to prove that the mechanization of music had had an adverse effect on the welfare of composers and performers. The charge, as made by the union, is simply that the musician is in danger of recording himself out of business. This crisis calls for a new pattern of emolument and a new principle of division of the income yield on musical recordings.

The new conditions touch on the symphony orchestra in several respects. Not only is the orchestra interested in tapping larger returns on its recordings—it has been suggested that the orchestra itself enter into a cooperative business in making and distributing recordings—but the decline in live music on the lower levels has robbed the symphony member of a large part of his supplementary livelihood and discouraged recruitment for the profession. The symphony orchestra draws its vitality from the broad base and general health and abundance of the profession at large. The struggle for survival in that respect is as critical as is the more fully publicized financial problem of the symphony orchestra.

The Audience and Its Folkways

It has always been the professed intention of modern orchestral leaders and sponsors to appeal, if not to the masses, at least to the middle class of limited financial resources. Henpe, popular prices have played an important role in the policy of every orchestra. The basic audience of the subscription concerts of symphony orchestras is, of course, a small one compared to that of the commercial entertainments. A rough indication of this ratio may be gathered from the relative capacities of the concert halls and the moving-picture theatres. The New York Philharmonic, for example, estimates its annual attendance at between 250,000 and 300,000 in that city of seven million. In order to calculate the proportion of the New York City population which actually attends concerts more or less regularly, one would necessarily have to eliminate duplicates, compute suburban and out-of-town patronage, and make many other finer adjustments. If this were done, it would be impossible to conclude that more than two per cent of the eligible (adult) population habitually attends symphony concerts during the winter season.

This visible audience is, of course, significantly augmented by the uncounted listeners to radio and records, together with patrons of summer concerts, which may tap other strata of the population. There are no reliable estimates as to the extent of this dissemination of serious musical interests. There can, however, be no doubt that, in spite of the numerical limits to concert patronage, there has occurred a democratization in musical knowledge and appreciation not unlike the democratization in all other amenities of life. It is characteristic, especially of the United States, that the gap between the privileged and the common man has narrowed in every respect.

This transformation of the character and membership of the concert audience during the last 150 years has been one of the significant features in our concert life, for the audience is, of course, an essential ingredient of that life. From a small, closely knit band of aristocrats and nobles, socially more or less acquainted with one another, assembled periodically for a convivial gathering in which the musical program was only one attraction, the audience has been inflated into a large anonymous body, in which the consumption of music is the central event. While the noble European patrons looked down with some condescension on the socially inferior musician on the stage, the present bourgeois audience views the musician with respect and some awe. The parallel evolution of concert manners in part reflects this increasing prestige of the orchestra and conductor vis-a-vis the audience, as the latter has grown in intellectual stature and in its aesthetic grasp of more complex musical thought. As a result there has been a veritable social revolution in the nineteenth century, which is reflected in the general maturity of public decorum.

The primitive crudeness of the early American frontier folkways has been the subject of many a supercilious comment by urbane European travelers for two centuries. That such conduct should appear in the presence of serious music, which requires sophisticated attention and uncommon concentration, is only to be expected. Though many traveling virtuosi noted the diminutive aesthetic sense of the American frontier public, it should be remembered that the most elementary standards of deportment enforced nowadays in every motion picture theatre were by no means commonplace among the aristocrats of Europe. That Mozart was not accustomed to undivided attention from his audience was evident from a letter written to his father from Vienna in 1781:

I told you about the applause in the theatre, but I must add that what delighted and surprised me most was the amazing silence while I was playing.⁷⁵

In the early days of the Gewandhaus concerts, organized by J. A. Hiller in 1781, conversation was freely carried on during the concert. When confusion became too unbearable, quiet was restored by the presiding merchant, who rapped for attention not with a gavel but, appropriately enough, on the keys of the piano.⁷⁶ In a letter to his family while conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, Mendelssohn reported under date of October 6, 1835:

I wish you could have heard my Calm Sea with which the concert commenced. Both in the room and in the orchestra there was a quiet so that the finest tone could be heard.

Hanslick quotes instances of ill-mannered disturbances in various European centers, including Berlin and Vienna, “especially when women were present.”⁷⁷ Drawings of scenes in the London orchestral concerts of the forties reveal similar informal behavior on the part of the fashionable patrons. Perhaps this period of immaturity was of longer duration in America, for with us it seems to have extended almost to the twentieth century. Dwight’s Journal reports on the Thomas concerts in New York in 1875:

Not a week passes without some scathing rebuke from him [Thomas] to those illbred and ignorant people who keep up a continued buzzing during the performance of the music to the annoyance of all decent folk.⁷⁸

That he must have been harassed by the same misconduct, even in his later Chicago days, can likewise be surmised from the following review of one of his concerts in 1896:

The chef d’oeuvre, of course, was Beethoven’s Eroica, and in this the Thomas orchestra was at its best. It was received and followed with the closest attention and there was noticeably less conversation than on previous occasions. Perhaps this may be accounted for in the fact that few beyond the truly musical were present . . . because of bad weather.⁷⁹

The New York Philharmonic tried to enlist public opinion as a corrective to the disturbances in their audiences. In their annual report of 1857, they declare:,

We must necessarily insist upon musical good manners. The inattention and heedless talking and disturbance of but a limited number of our audience are proving a serious annoyance to our Philharmonic performances. The remedy for this, after all, lies rather with the audience itself than the society authorities, If each little neighborhood would take care of itself, and promptly frown down the few chance disturbers of its pleasures, perfect order would soon be secured. We hope this will be done. In foreign audiences it is effectively done. *

The Metropolitan Opera House of New York, for all its aristocratic patronage, displayed no higher standard of propriety than prevailed in orchestral concerts. Henry T. Finck, the noted New York critic, relates:

Many of the stockholders have converted the anterooms of their boxes into luxurious parlors into which they retire and talk if the music bores them. But unfortunately there are some black sheep among them and their invited guests who do not make use of this privilege, but give the rest of the audience the benefit of their conversational accomplishments.⁸⁰

Such improprieties on the part of the boxholders amounted to a minor scandal for many years. As late as 1915, Toscanini stopped the performance of Euryanthe as a reprimand to the disturbers of the peace, a remedy which Colonel Robert Ingersoll, who always sat in the pit, had recommended to Seidl in a public statement as early as 1890.

George Bernard Shaw, while serving as critic in London in the nineties, aptly analyzed the psychology of the chattering London audiences:

. . . the extreme smartness of these functions leaves the audience entirely preoccupied with the thoughts of being immensely in it.⁸¹

In the mid-twenties, Stokowski, Monteux, and Koussevitzky all had trouble quieting the New York audience at the beginning of the concert. Monteux would angrily rap the desk, while his successor, Koussevitzky, would quietly fold his arms and wait. Some conjectured that these visiting orchestras from Philadelphia and Boston attracted a similar “smart set,” which had not quite accommodated itself to the restrained amenities of a symphony concert.

Whispering was not the only disturbance in the uncouth days. Late arrivals, early departures, premature donning of wraps during the last number, boisterous applause and demonstrations (especially for soloists), coughing, and other evidences of unappreciative restlessness were common vexations for orchestra and audience alike. Many conductors have been distressed over such profane intrusions on occasions which were to them devout and exalting experiences. Various methods have been employed by them to train their audiences and render them “concert-broke.” Biilow, the irrepressible eccentric, Walter Damrosch, Stokowski, have all been known to pause in mid-concert to discourse on social manners. Lamoureux, an excellent but uninhibited Paris conductor, resorted on one occasion to a more personal method of bringing home to a thoughtless culprit the sin of leaving the hall before the completion of the concert. Stopping the orchestra and fixing the victim in his gaze, he followed him with pointed baton until he had safely disappeared at the exit, after which the concert was quietly resumed.⁸² Even Frederick Stock, the very model of tact and diplomacy would wave his handkerchief when coughing got out of hand. In 1910 he once suddenly halted his musicians during Smetana’s Moldau, to allow the public to put on their wraps without musical accompaniment.

Barring the doors to latecomers brought many protests from patrons who, on their part, frequently complained of the inconsiderateness of the conductor who performed long opening compositions, thereby inflicting unfair punishment for what was after all only a thoughtless, or even unavoidable, tardiness. In Paris in 1899 one such tardy concert-goer, who arrived late for a performance of Tristan und Isolde by the Lamoureux Company, brought suit against the company for refusing to honor his ticket. The fact that the first act was more than an hour in length excited some sympathy for the victim. However, the French courts did not uphold the petition of the plaintiff/Recognizing that the ticket represented a bilateral contract, the courts held that, since the ticket carried a warning concerning the barring of latecomers, the plaintiff could claim no damages.⁸³ In Boston, the doors were not definitely closed to tardy patrons until 1922.

Audience reaction to a performance has taken many forms. Nothing would seem more in accordance with the laws of human nature than a spontaneous expression of appreciation for the enjoyment gained from a concert well done. The physiological tension, cumulated during the rendition of a number, may be discharged by almost any kind of overt manifestation: stamping of feet, cheers and calls, standing and waving of arms, and the more restrained handclapping. This whole range of public display of gratification, from sheer animal boisterousnfess to the most refined manual methods, is found in the history of concert and other performances. Clapping of hands, with occasional cheers, has now remained the only genteel manner in which an audience may vent its emotions.

However, there are those who have attempted to discourage even this simple demonstration as a violation of the solemnity of art. Untimely interruptions of a particularly brilliant passage in a vocal or instrumental solo, once considered the acme of flattery, and the inability of an audience to await the closing notes of the orchestral accompaniment to a concerto, have become a legitimate grievance in England, America, and the Continent that has long since been “corrected.” The growing tendency to consider a symphony as one .continuous number, which should not be interrupted by applause, first became a matter of editorial comment in American musical journalism about 1925. Some conductors, notably Stokowski, Toscanini, and Koussevitzky during the thirties, aroused controversy by their insistence on abolishing such interim applause. These new manners have not yet found complete acceptance among all audiences, and listeners are frequently beset by uncertainty unless the gestures of the conductor at the close of a movement are unambiguous. The contemporary public objection most commonly heard is that the uninterrupted symphony is a pretty long endurance test. This is balanced by the conductor’s claim that applause breaks the spell and snaps the continuity of an integrated whole.

It should be observed that intermediary applause has long been deteriorating into the merely perfunctory. In the nineteenth century individual movements were considered units in themselves, individually applauded and individually encored. But in more recent times, no audience has considered the pause between movements as anything more than minor punctuation marks; applause at this point has become a vestigial convention without much meaning, often downright embarrassing in its listlessness. The conductors who wish to eliminate it are only pruning what has already withered away.

The total abolition of all applause, proposed by the whimsical Stokowski about 1930, had already been suggested 150 years earlier by his prototype, Friedrich Reichardt,⁸⁴ conductor of the Concerts Spirituels instituted in Berlin in 1783. He requested his audience to substitute bravo calls for the more childish hand-clapping. If the British-born Stokowski was a reader of the London Musical Times, he undoubtedly had noticed that similar suggestions to outlaw the “uncouth and barbaric noises” had been made by British critics in the twenties. Applause during the oratorios, a very popular concert form in that country, had long offended the delicate sensitivities of religious-minded folk. England’s most noted critic, Ernest Newman, averred:

The day will come when audiences will not want to applaud after each movement. Later the day will come when they will not want to applaud at all, but will go out in rapt silence after a great performance of a great work.

Another critic, more facetious than fastidious, philosophized:

If you think of it, striking one palm against the other with a resounding smack is a queer way of expressing your delight; it suggests a monkey trick of primeval man.⁸⁵

To which one may be permitted to counterphilosophize that there is not a single custom in food, dress, or behavior that excessive and uninhibited reflection cannot turn into the ridiculous.

Direct expression of displeasure is relatively rare among American concert audiences, for formal courtesy in public relations is one of the most firmly rooted folkways in a country which proudly professes the principles of social equality. This sense of diffident politeness on the part of the audience is significantly reinforced, however, by its feeling of inferiority and lack of self-confidence when confronted with the necessity of making aesthetic judgments. Hence, almost all music, even the most cacophonous, will generally receive at least token applause.

European audiences and musicians have often been much more forthright. George Bernard Shaw has described the catcalls from the balcony at the sight of a particularly execrable tenor. The excitability of the French audience at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre is well-known to program annotators. None of these instances can rival the perils of the Lohengrin rehearsals during the anti-Wagner craze in Paris, when Lamoureux carried a pistol in his pocket against any possible eventuality.⁸⁶

Occasions have been known, however, when segments of American audiences, temporarily acquiring a streak of bluntness and completely forgetting their manners, make their disapproval known in the brusque, old-fashioned, continental manner. Such nonconformist behavior could only have been encountered by the nonconformist, Stokowski, whose repertoire, speckled with musical curiosities, so frequently strained the aesthetic tolerance of his patrons. In the early twenties, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra touched off a shower of forthright hisses, as it had in London. The indignant conductor turned to his audience and defensively pleaded freedom of expression for the artist. Those who agreed with him applauded; those who preferred freedom of expression for the audience made known their opinions by a contrary sign. Having apparently enjoyed their first taste of this new freedom, Stokowski’s audience during the season 1928-29 expressed similar dissatisfaction with Villa-Lobos’Choros No. 8. On this occasion the conductor invited the disaffected members of the audience to leave “and smoke the classic cigarette.” A few years later, in the fall of 1931, the audience tittered and became audibly restless during the rendition of Webern’s ultra-modern Symphonie. The offended ^conductor stopped the orchestra and left the stage, but ultimately returned to repeat the number. Such isolated instances do not invalidate the generalization that the typical American audience observes all the good manners of the concert hall. Stokowski was, after all, at that time hardly a typical conductor, and any dereliction in observing the proprieties of the occasion was probably more an expression of a sporting impulse than a breakdown of social decorum.

The code of deportment that has evolved in the serious concert is somewhat relaxed in the “pop” concert. Because of the lighter repertoire, which is constructed for the avowed purpose of pleasure and relaxation, enthusiastic acceptance of the program is the rule. In the early days of the Boston “pops” a pleasant hum of chattering often disturbed the more serious listener and a program note sometimes requested silence for special solo numbers. Today in the Boston “pops,” which are the oldest series of that genre in this country, general silence usually prevails during the actual rendition of a number, especially during solo renditions, although the conductor does not usually find it convenient to wait for the audience to calm down completely before raising his baton. He does not rap for attention, for under these informal circumstances, with the first-floor audience engaged in drinking and smoking, with waitresses slithering through the aisles as inconspicuously as possible, dead silence would be both unnecessary and impossible. Nevertheless, the principle is definitely accepted that the public is in reality an audience, and that it has its drinks with its music rather than its music with its drinks. The Carnegie “pops,” instituted in 1946, come a shade closer to formal concert conditions since refreshment service during the concert is permitted only in the boxes.

The Program

“The Program’s the Thing” for which the elaborate apparatus of the orchestra and its satellite institutions must justify their existence. It is the musical unit offered in the concert market to the consumer public. The repertoire, which is the aggregate of individual programs, is the critical point of contact with the auditors and the ultimate test of their success.

Although each program constitutes a small installment of the repertoire, each does also possess a life of its own and is usually built on identifiable principles. Conductors are often tagged by critics and populace as “good” or “poor” program builders, although such pat judgments are invariably related to the subjective standards of the observer; and the critics who launch them are often inarticulate as to the exact criteria employed in their formation. If there can be no universal standard for “good” program construction, there are, nevertheless, distinguishable patterns that have been followed, and perhaps a few basic principles that have at various times received some acceptance.

In former days, as an inheritance of the presymphonic period, when orchestral music had not yet gained its autonomous status, the prevailing type of program consisted of a miscellaneous collation of numbers devoid of unity in the modern sense. The predominant motif was, of course, variety. Such a conglomeration was the initial program of the New York Philharmonic Society (December, 1842), which consisted of the following numbers:

This juxtaposition of chamber music, operatic arias, and bona fide orchestral numbers was not only usual for that day even in Europe, but fifty years later in New York and Ghicago such an intrepid defender of the primacy of symphonic music as Theodore Thomas was still finding it necessary to present a similar miscellany, which included even unaccompanied piano solos. Although the present “straight” orchestral program was already crystallizing in the minds of the conductors, it was far from being spontaneously accepted by the audiences.

One of the early customs, which seems strange today, was the fragmentation of a concerto or symphony into its component movements, which were then interspersed with solo numbers. The purist of today is conditioned to conceive of a symphony as a unified whole to be interrupted not even by applause: “What the composer hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” But such dismemberment of multiple items was rather common as late as the 18 30^ in Europe.⁸⁷ Chopin himself performed his Second Piano Concerto in Warsaw at that time, dividing it into two segments separated by a French horn solo. The *span of attention necessary for a long and continuous musical exposure is a matter of long habituation. Audiences of that time were accustomed to shorter selections. It will be recalled that Beethoven recommended that his Eroica, playing somewhat less than an hour, be performed at the beginning of a concert before the audience was too fatigued to endure it. By the time of the founding of the New York Philharmonic this practice of fragmentation seems to have been practically abandoned, though in 1845 and again in 1846, Beethoven symphonies were sectioned for operatic entremets in the Musical Fund concerts in Philadelphia.⁸⁸

Single movements of concertos were still extracted at a much later date in major orchestral concerts, not only without apparently causing offense, but actually with the approval of Finck, Hale, and other top American critics, who emphasized the separability of symphony and concerto movements in accordance with their individual merits and the expedience of the program. In 1894 Philip Hale,⁸⁹ the scholarly Boston critic, complained that a certain Boston Symphony concert was too long, and suggested that “the second and third movements of the [Beethoven Violinl Concerto could well have been omitted.” About the same time Cesar Thomson, in his appearance with the Boston orchestra in a New York concert, actually did play only the first movement of the Bruch Second Concerto. The Finale of the Beethoven Ninth has frequently been dropped, and in March, 1894, the Boston orchestra performed on its regular concerts only Movements III and II, in that order. Such violations of the supposed sanctity of a symphonic unit are practiced today only in “pop” concerts, although excerpts from operas and suites, as well as manifold other cuts, are executed without the protest of even the most fastidious.

Conductors of the American symphony orchestras have always conceived of themselves as educators rather than entertainers. Any differences among them lie in the intensity with which they have felt dedicated to their mission, and the degree to which they have compromised with the practical necessity of offering some relaxation to their audiences. Theodore Thomas, especially in his pre-Chicago period, knew at times how to effect such compromises and won many a patron with his delicate rendition of Trdumerei, pianissimo, or with a vibrant Strauss waltz. But they knew also when to be obstinate. With a veritable Messiah complex, they were determined to preserve the integrity of Art and make no Mephistophelian compact with the vulgar appetites of the untutored masses. Henschel, undertaking a grave responsibility in founding the new Boston orchestra and prompted by an understandable desire to enlist the good will of his audience, announced it as his policy that only the first half of the program would adhere to the elevated didactic principle, and that the second half would be devoted to lighter numbers—Hungarian dances, rhapsodies, overtures—a kind of dessert to top off a nutritious meal. While Henschel placed the symphony in the middle of the program, as the main dish, flanked on either* side with the aperitif and sweetmeats, the more severe Gericke, not wishing to break the spell, as he himself explained, placed the symphony almost uniformly at the end.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus, catering to an audience not nearly as mature as is popularly supposed, pursued a similar policy, but for slightly different reasons. The “heavy” symphony occupied the latter half of the program, which, like the final blessing in the church, some of the less faithful by an early departure might be permitted to forego,⁹⁰ But in spite of Gericke’s zealous piety, the Bostonians, too, could occasionally be unfaithful, and even scoff mildly at the aesthetic creed of their conductor, as is pointedly evidenced by the uninterrupted procession that filed out to the music of Brahms’ Second (Jan. 22, 1887).⁹¹ They had similarly walked out between the movements of Brahms’ First, November ‘16,1885.

Some conductors strive for internal homogeneity of the program. They have a horror of disorderly hodge-podge thrown together for mere contrast and hedonistic surprise. To them, a program is knit together in a consistent unity, with an integrating idea, very much like the classification of artifacts in a museum. Such an intellectual approach to program building was entertained by Karl Muck, for example, who would avoid the juxtaposition of classic and romantic numbers as an intolerable incongruity, while less squeamish conductors might so join them in the interest of desirable variety.

In the late nineteenth century another form of “unity” was cultivated, namely, the “genre” program, which integrated the items on the program around a specific topic such as a composer, a nationalistic group, or a historical sequence. In the interest of popular appeal, rather than a more academic motivation, Theodore Thomas launched such concerts during his summer night Garden Series in New York and Chicago, and attracted the crowds with his Mendelssohn nights, Wagner nights, Schubert, Mozart, Scandinavian, and English programs—though these were not always topically entirely homogeneous. In July, 1876, this conductor, who had been at times attacked for his seeming aversion to American music, discreetly included an “American Night” at the Philadelphia Exposition. By the twentieth century the genre program had become a common practice in program design, of which Stokowski availed himself abundantly, and perhaps uniquely in a Bach program with a Bach encore (December, 1926). The composer cycle is an extension of this system to encompass a series of programs.

Such unified programs did not escape their critics, some of whom contended that inferior items were often included to satisfy mere titular requirements. At least one American composer injected a personal interpretation into what was developing into a common practice, and took offense at the segregated treatment of his nationality. He said so in a now famous letter to Felix Mottl, then conducting at the Metropolitan Opera, who had announced an all-American orchestral program in February, 1904:

I see by the morning papers that a so-called American composers’ concert is advertised for tomorrow evening at the Metropolitan Opera House. I have for years taken a strong stand against such affairs and although I have not seen the program, fearing that there may be something of mine on it, I write to protest most earnestly and strongly against this lumping together of American composers. Unless we are worthy of being put on programs with other composers to stand or fall, leave us alone. By giving such a concert you tacitly admit that we are too inferior to stand comparison with composers of Europe. If my name is on the program and if it is too late to have new programs printed, I beg you to have a line put through the number, erasing it off the program. If necessary I will pay the expense of having it done. ...

(Signed) Edward MacDowell⁹²

It is extremely doubtful whether such an unkind cut was intended by the noted Austrian visitor. MacDowelFs resentment was, of course, a comprehensible reaction of a sensitive nature, sharing the prevalent frustration produced by the foreign domination of American musical life. Although we harbored no illusions as to the veneration for American music on the part of the proud exponents of the art in the land of Beethoven and Wagner, it must be said that genre programs had already gained such vogue that it was probably intended as a tribute to America to include them at all.

Mottl acquiesced, and substituted the Rakozcy March of Berlioz!

Critics of this earlier era occasionally commented on mere tonal and formal imbalance of programs. Thus William Apthorp, Boston critic, cited his own reaction during the nineties to both key and pitch relation:

I can remember an instance, not many years ago at our symphony concerts in Boston when Mozart’s “Batti, batti” was sung immediately after an orchestral piece in C major. Now, “Batti, batti” is in F majorand no two keys are more closely related than F and C. Yet the difference in pitch of a fifth lower than the preceding piece somehow made the poor “Batti, batti”—one of the coyest, brightest inspirations Mozart ever put on paper—sound positively dull and heavy.⁹³

Symptomatic of this type of standard, which may seem strange to modern post-Romantic ears are the prescriptions set down by L. C. Elson, one of Boston’s most prominent musical pedagogues of that period. He enunciated the following canons of good program-building for “classical” programs: (1) contrasts of major and minor; (2) no two successive works in the same key; (3) no two similar works on the same program, e.g., Schubert and Mozart; (4) avoidance of abrupt transitions. He admitted that romantic programs almost automatically evaded these pitfalls.⁹⁴

There are countless more or less external considerations which circumscribe the make-up of a program. Because of the rhythm of daily routine to which everyone is subjected, a certain predictability of length is essential, while the attentive powers of the audience set certain psychological restrictions on its maximum duration. The early English programs of the London Philharmonic often contained two symphonies in addition to minor works, a length against which Wagner, to mention only one conductor, complained during his one-year tenure in 1855. Most orchestras today set an approximate limit of about ninety minutes of playing time which, together with an intermission, establishes a norm of about one and three quarter hours for the total concert. Within these limits must be compressed selections of interest and variety ; consequently any item of unusual length, no matter how meritorious, is handicapped in competition for acceptance, and particularly in radio presentations where time limits must be rigidly enforced.

The juxtaposition of selections must be controlled not only for unity and contrast or interest, but also in deference to the physical capacity of the players. Numbers involving unusual endurance of wind players, for example, are so placed as to afford adequate relief.

The day of the encore in the regular subscription concerts has almost passed, except in the case of an occasional soloist. But time was when the encore was a live issue and conductors of serious concerts sometimes encountered resistance in their attempt to educate audiences away from that survival of the “pop” concert. In 1896 Theodore Thomas, who was not known for any infirmity of purpose, caused a sensation in Chicago by refusing to grant an encore after three minutes of boisterous applause. In the same year the mild-mannered Walter Damrosch, usually given to condescending flattery rather than pedagogic censure toward his audiences, rebuked his listeners for their crude manners in drowning out with continued applause the orchestral number which followed a sensationally received piano concerto played by Joseffy.⁹⁵ Thomas, to whom the encore was an unmitigated evil, summarized, as succinctly as anyone, the conductor’s point of view, when he stated that encores (1) break the predetermined continuity and balance of the program, (2) over extend its length, (3) tax the endurance of the players, (4) cause restlessness among those members of the audience who differ with the demonstrators, and (5) often disappoint the audience, since repetitions are not necessarily as effective as first renditions.⁹⁶ Popular programs, however, still maintain the encore since selections are shorter and most of Thomas’ objections are less relevant. The encore issue has in recent times taken an additional turn. Formerly, it implied the repetition of the encored item. Today, with the acknowledged gap between the strenuous program and the general audience, the customarily lighter encore is often eagerly anticipated as a relief.

Above all these aesthetic policies, there hovers the shadow of sheer “public strategy” in program construction. This is an important consideration for every orchestra, though the old-fashioned philanthropic orchestra was relatively free from these pressures. In brief, it means that in order to gratify all segments of the heterogeneous audience certain requirements must be observed: the inclusion of standard and familiar items, of “box-office” numbers, of modern and unhackneyed compositions, experimental novelties to satisfy the intellectual patron and members of a cult, some pieces for light relief, and a certain minimum number of regional representatives. It is not easy to reconcile these conflicting demands with one another, or with the rules of prudent management. Deploring the hidden costs of many experimental novelties, an official of a Midwest orchestra appraised the cost of a certain novelty at more than $750, made up of the out-of-pocket expenses of rental, royalty, extra players and extra rehearsal, together with the loss of single admissions “which we would have had if a sure-fire number had been billed.”

The symphonic repertoire has at times been invaded by the opera in concert form, usually sponsored by conductors whose career included operatic experience. Overtures and operatic excerpts have, of course, long been a program staple, and it would seem only a step to extend these fragments into a full length presentation. This expectation is all the more logical because the average American, exposed for the most part to foreign operas whose plots have little in common with his cultural background, often ignores the libretto in favor of the music. In other words, to the average American patron, a nineteenth-century opera is not much more than a dramatic concert in any case. The earliest of these denatured operatic performances was the concert version of Parsifal rendered by the Oratorio Society and the Symphony Society of New York in under the leadership of Walter Damrosch, who in 1908 presented Tschaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin in similar manner.

Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, among others, have proceeded a step farther by presenting completely staged operas, either as an integral part of the regular series or supplementary to it. At times such performances have been found too costly for the orchestral management; in other cases the critics see in them a violation of the bounds of the orchestra’s sphere, if not its competence. On the other hand, they undoubtedly serve a function in that they inject novelty into the repertoire, supply an outlet for the conductor Who is trained in, and enamored of that musical genre, and afford their audiences the opportunity to indulge a taste which otherwise might remain ungratified.

To many a confirmed symphony addict, the soloist is an intruder who disturbs the proper enjoyment of pure orchestral music; but to the rank and file of box-office patrons the star has always been a glamorous attraction that compensated for many a dull moment of more abstract music. Although from the first program of the New York Philharmonic, many soloists were accompanied by the orchestra, such was by no means the universal rule. As the virtuosity of the orchestra increased, however, it waxed in pride and prestige; it was no longer a chance ensemble which was content to share in a melange of musical offerings, but had matured into an autonomous entity, well qualified to furnish in its own right a full evening of inspiration and pleasure.

Not a small factor in the partial repudiation of the soloist was the emerging conception that the conductor himself was the “soloist” whose glamour might be dimmed by that of a competitor. It is still a moot question whether the soloist is a member pro tem of the orchestra subordinate to the conductor, or whether he is a genuine soloist with the conductor reduced to the role of the accompanist. Temperamental clashes arising out of this ambiguity in their jurisdictions are, of course, common. The more sensational features of the soloist still constitute an enormous attraction to an orchestral audience and are a good investment on the part of the management. Generally, however, solo contributions are restricted to numbers which are an integral element of the symphonic repertoire. For that reason vocalists, who in the early days were often featured, and just as often performed to piano accompaniment, are much less likely to be engaged by some of the orchestras now than formerly, while concertos are added with more thought to the requirements of the balanced orchestral repertoire. Some conductors, notably Toscanini, were notorious for the rarity of solo appearances on their programs. In his case, at least one obvious explanation is, of course, near at hand: no management would feel any inducement for adding an expensive soloist to a conductor who could fill the hall alone.

American patrons who suffer from an inferiority complex vis-avis Europe may be inclined to suspect a more elevated taste on the part of European audiences. But the conductors of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Rietz (1848-60) and Reinecke (1860-95), also considered themselves afflicted with the “solo evil.” To the distress of the conductor, the soloist would often monopolize a concert by playing a number in both parts of the program. This occurred in Boston and Chicago as late as the i89o’s.

In accordance with the educational function of the orchestral program, it has been customary to supplement the printed program with “program notes,” which facilitate its understanding and enhance its appreciation. The present style of analytical notes is the culmination of an evolution which proceeded approximately through the following stages: (1) printed titles of musical selections, (2) printed words of vocal selections, (3) biographical data on the composer and other historical material, and (4) analytical notes presenting the formal structure of the musical composition. Scholarly fusion of the preceding rudimentary beginnings was made as far back as 1784 when Reichardt prepared notes for his Concerts Spirituels in Berlin.⁹⁷ The New Philharmonic Society of London, organized as a rival for the old Philharmonic, added analytical notes of scholarly merit to its programs in 1852, while the old Philharmonic instituted the practice in 1869. The New York Philharmonic offered notes on certain isolated compositions during the early years, and by the eighties these notes became more systematic. To modern patrons, these old annotations often sound crude and embryonic. Thus the last movement of the Eroica (second concert of the first New York season) “is a combination of French Revolutionary airs put together in a manner that no one save Beethoven could have imagined.” The programmatic penchant is illustrated in the description of the Dramatic Overture, Columbus, of George F. Bristow.

The Andantino . . . depicts the vessels of the daring discoverer rocking idly at anchor . . . horns give signals to depart . . . tremolo movement in accompaniment indicates the bustle of preparation ... an .allegro agitato movement portraying the restless conspiracies of the enemies of Columbus during his protracted absence . ..

During the epoch when music still required a literary crutch to be comprehended by even the best audiences, the following program note was typical of the New York Philharmonic programs. The composer Rubinstein himself supplied the annotation for his Piano Concerto No. 3 on the program of November 16, 1889, Theodore Thomas, conductor:

In the first movement the Piano repeatedly requests admittance in the temple of the Orchestra. The Orchestra takes the matter into consideration and decides to test the capacities of the Piano. After frequent trials and consultations the Orchestra concludes that the Piano is not worthy to enter into the sanctuary. ... In a later movement the decision of the Orchestra is again adverse. . . . Now the Piano loses its temper and challenges the Orchestra to imitate what the Piano can do and in the tumult of this attempt the concerto closes.

Instead of the crassly pictorial analysis, some annotators took a more mystic trend. Witness a few exuberant phrases, taken almost at random, from Wagner’s analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth, which have at times been lifted for American programs:

The first movement appears to represent a nobly conceived conflict between the soul and the power whichever opposes its strivings for earthly happiness. . ., Here and there we just perceive the sweet yet sorrowful smile of that happiness so much desired which seems now to invite us, but the attainment of which is prevented by our mighty and malicious enemy who spreads around us his gloomy wings. . . . How different is the effect of the opening strains of the third movement! Heavenly pure and soothing, they melt the wild energies of the anxious and despairing soul into soft and sorrowful sensations. . . . This is the last attempt to express by instrumental music alone, a certain £nite and unalloyed joy; but the intractable element does not seem fitted for such restrictions: like the roaring sea, it foams up, sinks down again, and louder than ever the loud chaotic shriek of unsatisfied passion assails our ears. A human voice with the clearness and distinctness of language is now heard above the tumult of the instruments, ...

If the first reaction of the modern reader is characteristically one of sophisticated disdain for such flamboyant romanticism, he should recall that such picturesque portrayals are well-matched today in the descriptions of the tone poems of Richard Strauss, even though many contemporary listeners may wish to ignore the story in order to apprehend the pure music. Modern scholarship, and the accumulated background of the audiences who are no longer listening to the classics for the first time, have conspired to cast program notes into different molds of historical and musicological stripe. Some of these have attained a certain distinction and permanency of value, e.g., those of Philip Hale, of Boston, and Krehbiel, of New York, and have enriched our musicological literature. This shift in the nature of program notes is an obvious adaptation to the fact that the current repertoire is predominantly old and familiar, and the crutch of programmatic and literary analysis is no longer essential to the audience’s comprehension.

The Concert Series

Ever since the public concert system has been in existence, orchestral and ensemble concerts have been offered in series, given at more or less regular intervals during the season of the year. The Concerts Spirituels in Paris, Berlin, arid Vienna; the London Philharmonic Concerts; the Gewandhaus concerts of Leipzig; the Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire of Paris; the New York Philharmonic, and the Theodore Thomas concerts in the same city—all customarily purveyed their entertainment in “subscription series” rather than in single concerts. The reasons for such an arrangement arise from the character of the audience and, more particularly, from the requirements of artistic rendition.

A century and more ago, when concert halls were smaller, the audience was characteristically a more closely knit group than today. It consisted of the aristocracy and wealthy merchants who were known to each other and associated in the neighboring boxes, broke bread and sipped their beverages together during the intermissions, and even carried on their social intercourse during the rendition of musical numbers. A concert was a social institution of like-minded folk who periodically looked forward to gratifying their gregarious impulses.

As for the orchestra, the subscription system is necessary to its very existence. The great investment in time, money, and rehearsal energy required to build up an ensemble fit for public appearance by modern standards renders a single performance downright prohibitive. This proportion between overhead costs and concert sales does not obtain in amateur organizations, whose objective is selfcultivation rather than public approval, nor among those groups where rigorous artistic standards are, for any reason, not enforced. Hence, during the colonial days, the single performance of concerted groups, often instituted for an “occasion,” was rather the rule than the exception. In the relentless evolution of things, however, these casual aggregations, with their informal standards, have been displaced by well-equipped and rigorously rehearsed groups for which a continuity of existence is the prime prerequisite. As a consequence, the series of subscription concerts, most of which are given today in weekly pairs, has become the backbone of symphonic organization.

The number of weekly pairs varies from city to city and has varied widely in the history of the individual orchestras, as may be gleaned from their respective histories. Most older orchestras offer a series of from twenty to twenty-eight weeks which includes shorter supplementary series of diverse nature. Minneapolis, of the older major orchestras, is the only one that limits its subscription series to single weekly concerts, for the very good reason—among others—that the University auditorium, which is its home, has almost twice the average capacity of the auditoriums in other cities.

Originally called “public rehearsal,” the first of the pairs of concerts was instituted for quite another purpose than it now satisfies. The New York Philharmonic Society opened its rehearsal of its second annual series, as a privilege of its associate membership, and later invited the general public at a nominal admission charge. For most patrons the function of this preview of the program was a purely educational one, and they availed themselves of the opportunity for repeated hearings at a time when radio and recordings did not exist to fulfill that desire much more effectively. In addition to this educational facility, the public rehearsals which were held in the afternoon were advertised as especially appealing to “out-of-town patrons” and to “unaccompanied ladies.”

In Boston the “public rehearsal” was planned by Mr. Higginson as a philanthropic concession to the less affluent population, but it did not long remain so. By the fifth season, the afternoon concerts had become so attractive to the wealthy class that the admission prices for the two series were equalized* and by 1915 the designation of “public rehearsal*” by now a misnomer, was formally abolished. Today in all cities the afternoon concert is a “society” event. Unfortunately, in some of the smaller cities, this public is not now sufficiently numerous to maintain the solvency of matinee concerts. In view of such unprofitable luxury, some cities, e.g., Cincinnati and St. Louis, have shifted a portion of the Friday matinee concerts to Sunday afternoon in the hope of enticing another audience.

In addition to the basic repertoire of the subscription concerts, the major orchestras offer supplementary series which for the most part, cater to special segments of the population. One of the oldest and most firmly rooted in tradition is the Young People’s and Children’s series. Based on the reasonable theory that the children of today are the adults and potential subscribers of tomorrow, they are designed to “bend the twig” toward orchestral music, to nurture good taste* and so to assure an abiding interest in good music. To heighten this appeal, the conductors often empty upon the platform their bag of tricks: memory contests, quizzes, instrumental demonstrations, dramatic paradigms, lantern slides, anecdotes of famous composers, performance by an occasional W under kind and many pleasant variations on those themes. Extraordinary success in this specialty concert has been achieved by Walter Damrosch, Oberhoffer, Stock, Ganz, Schelling, Sokoloff, Stokowski, and Wallenstein. For some years after his retirement from the New York Symphony, Walter Damrosch, under the auspices of NBC, conducted the weekly radio broadcasts to the children of the nation. Although children’s concerts had been tried before the beginning of the century, the radio carried the familiar salutation, “My dear children,” to many areas which the major orchestras had never reached.

An intermediary link between the children’s concerts and the regular subscription series is the “pop” program. Purveyed to those who may not have the musical maturity for the contemplation of masterpieces, the “pops” gratify the desire for less strenuous relaxation. The line of demarcation between the serious and the popular is perhaps not easily drawn and certainly is never permanent or of universal applicability. Beethoven’s Fifth, the Lohengrin Prelude, and innumerable other compositions, which were formerly included exclusively on “serious” programs, are now listened to without special exertion. Thomas, as late as his Chicago days, included “popular” programs periodically in his regular series, and these were distinguished from the rest of the programs primarily by the absence of a complete symphony.

As the audiences became more cultivated arid less allergic to “symphonies,” conductors tended to specialize by segregating the popular items from the subscription series. Gericke instituted this reform in Boston in 1885, and Theodore Thomas for years adapted his repertoire to his New York audiences by catering to popular interest and the more sophisticated taste in separate series. In St. Louis and Minneapolis, under Zach and Oberhoffer, the Sunday afternoon “pops” usually overshadowed the serious concerts in patronage and frequency, and for some years constituted the bulwark of the season. Today popular concerts during the winter months are definitely on the wane and are scheduled only intermittently. The decline may be ascribed to three factors: (1) the competition of other recreational opportunities, such as motion pictures, sports, the automobile, all of which have enjoyed an unprecedented upswing during the last decades, (2) the demand on the part of those who have survived the “pops” age and have graduated to the serious concerts, and (3) the availability of popular music at convenient hours on radio programs.

Sunday concerts have been a fixture in most cities for many years. But there was a time when Boston, New York, and Philadelphia looked askance at such desecration of the Sabbath. Although Theodore Thomas, in the sixties, evaded the Blue Laws by an occasional “sacred” concert, it was not until 1891 when Walter Damrosch inaugurated his Sunday evening series that the interpretation of the laws was relaxed. His first offense, however, drew important protests, and the embarrassed board of directors declined to stand behind the conductor. Nevertheless, the concerts were soon resumed.

Another brush with the law occurred in 1907, when the Court closed Carnegie Hall on two successive Sundays in December. But a well-placed remonstrance reopened it immediately. After Sunday concerts were held as “private musicales” open to “members” only, Philadelphia legalized public concerts in 1934.

The Standard Repertoire

The “standard repertoire” is a concept which inevitably emerges from the accumulated experience of both producers and audiences of symphony concerts. It comprises the music that has survived competitive selection, and is therefore a kind of social heritage firmly grounded in human habit. Like every other social custom, it is in a constant state of flux so that the central core cannot always be clearly demarcated from the new experimental fringes, or from the obsolescent remnants which are about to be sloughed off. Abstractly, however, the standard repertoire can be simply defined. Anything that is “standard” (1) is more or less enduring rather than ephemeral, (2) transcends personal whims, (3) appears with more or less predictable frequency, and (4) is approved by those who profess the standard.

Realistically, the standard repertoire should be determined from the records of the actual programs. For, if the concept of “standard” has any meaning, it surely carries the assumption that we are abiding by it. Compositions which never appear, or appear very irregularly, could not lay claim to that term. To set up contemporary standards we need only agree on a certain frequency of appearance and a reasonable period of time which fairly represents the present era. This cross-section of today, should include, of course, today’s immediate roots in the past and a brief portent of the future.

The statistical array of standard works, if it is carefully computed, will reflect local color. New York and Boston are, perhaps, a little more adventurous than smaller orchestras in other regions. Shorter seasons will present the standard repertoire in smaller installments, and their period of observation will therefore have to be lengthened if orchestras with long and short seasons are combined.

To bear the stamp of national standard, the compositions will have to appear in a representative sample of all orchestras, and extend over a period of years sufficient to yield an adequate sample of the repertoires of orchestras with relatively short seasons. While most of the following standard works tabulated on that basis appeared with much greater frequency, the minimum frequency was set at two performances in at least eight of the ten orchestras in the period 1940-50 to allow for short seasons and chance variations. But even the marginal compositions which are heard in only five or more orchestras are of some interest.

COMPOSITIONS PLAYED AT LEAST TWICE IN PERIOD 194O-5O, IN EACH OF EIGHT OR MORE ORCHESTRAS: 59 PIECES OF 19 COMPOSERS

Beethoven: Symphonies No. i, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8; Overtures, Leonore No. 3, Egmont, Coriolanus; Concerto for Piano, No. 5; Violin Concerto.

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique; Overture, Carnaval Romain.

Brahms: Symphonies No. 1, 2, 3 and 4; Overture, Academic Festival; Variations on a Theme by Haydn; Concertos for Piano No. 1 and 2; Concerto for Violin.

Debussy: UApres-midi d’un Faune; La Mer; Iberia.

Dvořák: Symphony No. 5.

Falla: Three Dances from The Three-Cornered Hat.

Franck: Symphony in D minor.

Mendelssohn: Concerto for Violin.

Mozart: Symphonies No. K550, K385, and K551.

Rachmaninoff: Concerto for Piano No. 2;Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe (Second Suite);La Valse; Rhapsodie Espagnole.

Schubert: Symphony No. 7.

Schumann: Concerto for Piano.

Shostakovitch: Symphony No. 5.

Stravinsky: Suite from The Fire Bird.

Strauss: Death and Transfiguration; Don Juan; Don Quixote; Till Eulenspiegel.

Tschaikowsky: Symphonies No. 4, 5, and 6; Concerto for Piano No. 1; Concerto for Violin; Overture, Romeo and Juliet.

Wagner: Preludes to Meistersinger, Lohengrin, and Tristan; Love-Death from -Parsifal. TAsuFtow*

Weber: Overtures to Der Freischiitz, Euryanthe, Oberon.

COMPOSITIONS PLAYED IN EACH OF FIVE, SIX, OR SEVEN ORCHESTRAS, AT LEAST TWICE IN PERIOD 1940-50: 51 PIECES OF 31 COMPOSERS

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3.

Beethoven: Symphonies No. 2 and 9; Overture to Fidelio; Concertos for Piano No. 3 and 4.

Chausson: Symphony in B-flat.

Chopin: Concerto for Piano No. 1.

Debussy: Fetes and Nuages.

Dvořák: Concerto for Cello.

Dukas: The Sorcerers Apprentice.

Elgar: Enigma Variations.

Enesco: Roumanian Rhapsody, No, /.

Handel \ Water Music.

Haydn: Symphony No. 88.

Lalo: $ymphonie Espagnole for Violin.

Mahler: Symphony No. 1.

Mendelssohn: Symphonies No. 3 (Scotch); No. 4 (Italian); Midsummer Night’s Dream (Excerpts).

Moussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Prelude to Khovantchina.

Mozart: Symphony K543; Overture to Figaro.

Prokofieff: Symphony No. 5, Classical Symphony.

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2; Concerto for Piano No. 3.

Ravel: Bolero; Alborada del Gracioso.

Respighi: The Pines of Rome.

Rimsky-Korsakoff: Overture, The Russian Easter.

Schubert: Symphony No. 8.

Schumann: Symphonies No. 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Shostakovitch: Symphony No. 1.

Sibelius: Symphonies No. 2, 5, and 7.

Smetana: Symphonic Poem, The Moldau; Overture to The Bartered Bride.

Strauss: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier.

Stravinsky: Suite from Petrouchka.

Tschaikowsky: Franc esc a da Rimini.

Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Wagner: Overture to Flying Dutchman; Good Friday Spell from Parsifal; Overture to Tannhauser; Siegfried Idyll.

The younger orchestras such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, in some years of the 1940-50 decade, had only twelve to eighteen concerts as against the twenty-four or twenty-eight of Boston, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. By actual count of total volume in that decade, the most productive orchestra played exactly double the volume of the least productive. In so limited a series of subscription concerts, an orchestra could hardly be expected to cover all the standard repertoire twice in ten years. Hence the required frequency has been set generously low. The four orchestras with the greatest volume of music show a failure to play only eleven out of the fifty-nine items at least twice in the ten years; while the four orchestras with the shortest seasons total forty-five such failures.

Some familiar favorites are missing from these lists. Bach is almost entirely absent, although a long list of twenty-six items were played repeatedly in one, two, or three orchestras. The composer is standard enough, but his patronage is distributed among several equally acceptable numbers. The Brandenburg Concertos were almost always represented but the choices were scattered among Numbers One, Two and Three. Preludes, Toccatas, Fugues, Suites, and the Passacaglia appeared often, but each orchestra has developed its own favorites in these various forms. Haydn and Mozart especially are underrepresented in the first list because of the variety of works presented by the different orchestras. Such a circumstance could never occur with Cesar Franck, who wrote but one symphony and very few other acceptable works for the orchestra.

Whether or not there is any virtue in referring to these pieces as “standard,” there is good evidence that they do represent the music to which the subscription audiences have been most constantly exposed for the past generation. The nineteen composers on the first list account for sixty per cent of the total current repertoire, and those on the two lists together more than seventy-five per cent of it. The standard names leave less than a quarter of the volume of present-day music for the hundreds of other composers of all ages and countries who hope for a hearing, including, of course, the three-hundred American composers who have failed to place a single composition in this “standard” list.

While the itemizing of the standard numbers may seem to some as having only museum interest, the important fact is that it can be done at all. It can therefore be said that the core of the orchestral repertoire is quite beyond the discretion or control of a single individual, whether conductor or manager. The list represents the power of “social heredity” absorbed and transmitted by musicians arid audience in a collaborative enterprise.