Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-l82ql Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T18:51:06.071Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Economic History and Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1976

Cyril Ehrlich
Get access

Extract

It is a privilege for an outsider to be allowed to address a distinguished body of professional musicians. But such excursions across the conventional frontiers of academic disciplines are hazardous. Even if we escape the trammels of professional jargon, it is difficult to avoid an appearance of futility or of arrogance: a posture of such humility as to offer nothing worth notice, or one of such pretension as to incur resentment from specialists who rightly distrust intrusion by amateur busybodies. I have therefore prefaced this paper with a quotation chosen, insidiously, for its modesty and the distinction of its author. But it would be less than honest to pretend that I entirely share its pessimism. Not that Tawney ever doubted the existence of a ‘connexion between the quality of intellectual activities and the dull facts of social systems’. He was determined, however, to trounce those who found ‘in infallible formulae of universal application a painless alternative to thought’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 103 , 1976 , pp. 188 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Tawney, R. H., ‘Social History and Literature’ (Cambridge, 1949); reprinted in The Radical Tradition (London, 2nd edn., 1966), 219.Google Scholar

2 ibid., 206.Google Scholar

3 ibid., 198–9.Google Scholar

4 Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 1976, 652.Google Scholar

5 The Musical Times, xcvii (1956), 194.Google Scholar

6 See, for example, Klaus Wachsmann, ‘Spencer to Hood: A changing view of non-European Music’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1973), 5–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Gombrich, E. H., ‘The Social History of Art’, The Art Bulletin, March, 1953; reprinted in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London, 1965), 86–94.Google Scholar

8 Edgar Morin, quoted in Jean Duvignaud, The Sociology of Art (2nd edn., London, 1972), 10.Google Scholar

9 Theodor W. Adorno, quoted in Alphons Silbermann, ‘A definition of the sociology of art’, International Social Science Journal, xx (1968), 575.Google Scholar

10 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xxix (1976), 242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 ibid., 247.Google Scholar

12 ibid., 273.Google Scholar

13 Silbermann, op.cit., 573.Google Scholar

14 Pritchard, B. W., The Musical Festival and the Choral Society in England in the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Social History. (Diss., University of Birmingham, 1968).Google Scholar

15 Woodfill, W. L., Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I (Princeton, 1953).Google Scholar

16 Crosten, W. L., French Grand Opera, An Art and a Business (New York, 1948).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Charles Kensington Salaman, ‘On Music as a Profession in England’. Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vi (1880), 116.Google Scholar

18 Nettel, R., ‘The Influence of the Industrial Revolution on English Music’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, cxxii (1945), 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (2nd edn., London, 1964), 14–15.Google Scholar

20 Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1937), i, 149.Google Scholar

21 Cyril Scott, Music: its Secret Influence throughout the Ages (2nd edn., London, 1954), 28.Google Scholar

22 ibid., 53.Google Scholar

23 ibid., 58.Google Scholar

24 ibid., 88.Google Scholar

25 But compare a recent effusion, high in nonsense content: Jacques Attali, Bruits: Essai sur l'économie politique de la musique (Paris, 1977).Google Scholar

26 Charles Morazé, The Triumph of the Middle Classes (London, 1966), 152.Google Scholar

27 See W.J. Baumol and W. G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York, 1966) and Mark Blaug (ed.) The Economics of the Performing Arts (London, 1976).Google Scholar

28 Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano, a History (London, 1976).Google Scholar

29 G. I. C. de Courcy, Paganini the Genoese (Oklahoma, 1957). A. Carse, The Life of Jullien (Cambridge, 1951). Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé, ed. C. E. M. Hallé (London, 1896).Google Scholar

30 John M. Mueller, The American Symphony Orchestra: a Social History of Musical Taste (London, 1958).Google Scholar

31 Blaug, op.cit., 17.Google Scholar

32 Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: a History of New York's Orchestra (New York, 1975), xii.Google Scholar

33 This criticism does not apply to three pioneering books: R. Nettel, The Orchestra in England (London, 1946), A. Carse, The Orchestra in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1940) and The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz (Cambridge, 1948).Google Scholar

34 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: the Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London, 1975).Google Scholar

35 Alan Peacock and Ronald Weir, The Composer in the Market Place (London, 1975).Google Scholar

36 The following argument owes much to Asa Briggs, Mass Entertainment: the Origins of a Modern Industry (Adelaide University, 1960).Google Scholar

37 Plumb, J. H., The Commercialisation of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (Reading University, 1972), 19.Google Scholar

38 Parke, W. T., Musical Memoirs. An account of the General State of Music in England from the First Commemoration of Handel in 1784, to the Year 1830 (London, 1830), i, 305.Google Scholar

39 ibid., i, 287.Google Scholar

40 ibid., i, 319.Google Scholar

41 ibid., ii, 82.Google Scholar

42 Philharmonic Society Archives; British Library, Dept. of Manuscripts, Loan 48/13/36. 14 March 1864.Google Scholar

43 loc. cit., 48/13/7. 13 March 1888.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 loc. cit, 48/13/23. 1 December 1890.Google Scholar

45 These Philharmonic fees, c1907, were probably lower than prevailing levels elsewhere. The letter about Casals is no. 165 in Loan 48/13/6.Google Scholar

46 Ioc. cit., 48/13/6. 18 November 1879.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 loc. cit., 48/13/9. 1 December 1834.Google Scholar

48 H. Foss and N. Goodwin, London Symphony: Portrait of an Orchestra (London, 1954), 22.Google Scholar

49 Mackerness, E. D., A Social History of English Music (London, 1964), 233.Google Scholar

50 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Motions, (1776, ed. Edwin Caiman, London, 1904), i, 109.Google Scholar

51 Weber, W., op.cit., particularly ch. vi.Google Scholar

52 Philharmonic Society Archives, Loan 48/13/7. 8 February 1821.Google Scholar

53 Harmonicon, London, October 1831, 236.Google Scholar

54 Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Lord Mount Edgcumbe's musical reminiscences’ (London, 1834), reprinted in Critical and other Essays (Halliford edn. London, 1926), ix.Google Scholar

55 Punch, ii (1842), 206.Google Scholar

56 Cf. Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (London, 1971).Google Scholar

57 Quoted in H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London, 1976), 242.Google Scholar

58 Forster, E. M., Howards End (London, 1910), 44.Google Scholar

59 Meller, op.cit., 63.Google Scholar

60 Denis Arnold, God, Caesar and Mammon: a study of patronage in Venice 1550–1750 (Nottingham University, 1970), 3.Google Scholar

61 Gerald Abraham, The Tradition of Western Music (London, 1974), 104. Compare Ernest Newman's indictment of ‘The London Inferno’ in 1855: op.cit., ii, 446–480.Google Scholar