POETICS

ELSEVIER Poetics 29 (2001) 125-134 www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic

From miscellany to homogeneity in concert programming

William Weber
Dept. of History, California State University, Long Beach, USA

Abstract One of the biggest problems in the study of classical music is the prejudice with which those brought up in the tradition view the mores of musical culture prior to around 1800. We have expectations about what we term serious music that easily turns us against the manner by which music was presented and appreciated two hundred or more years ago. If we sre to understand better what musical culture was all about back then, we have to begin questioning our own presuppositions and looking with a fresh eye at what people did in the pm-modern epoch. I would like to suggest some ways by which we might try that here today in regard to concert programs. In the process I will offer a pair of concepts by which to conceive of the main principles by which programs were formed then and now: Miscellany versus Homogeneity. The change from the one to the other around 1850 constituted a massive, fundamental change in the whole nature of musical experience. 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

One of the biggest problems in the study of classical music is the prejudice with which those brought up in the tradition view the mores of musical culture prior to around 1800. We have expectations about what we term serious music that easily turns us against the ways in which music was presented and appreciated two hundred or more years ago. It has become common to question whether people really did listen to music in that epoch, since the manners of their musical contexts did not have the strict, ideologically defined etiquette implicit in the design of the modern classical-music concert hall. If we are to understand better what musical culture was all about back then, we have to begin to question our own presuppositions and look with a fresh eye at what people did in the pre-modem epoch. I would like to suggest a way by which we can try to do that in studying concert programs. I will offer a pair of concepts to define how programs were formed before and after around 1850: from Miscellany to Homogeneity. The change from the one to the other constituted a massive, fundamental change in the whole nature of musical experience. By such concepts we can begin to understand in more subtle
0304-422X/01/$ - see front matter 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. AU rights reserved. PII: SO304-422X(01)00031-6

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and sympathetic terms the nature of musical culture prior to the arrival of our values. This paper has grown out of my interest in the little-discussed problem of musical classics and canon. We tend to take entirely for granted the existence of classics; we have just begun studying the extraordinary rise of classical music to hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Programs offer a crucial means by which to ask when, how and why that happened. To understand the gulf between classical and popular music we have to go beyond rehashing Theodor Adomos opinions on the matter and start doing some hard empirical research analyzing programs and the vocabulary of canonic notions. While working on the artifacts of music history we find in programs and music magazines we must always remember that their meanings are intimately linked to deep-rooted assumptions that color everything we say about music. First, think for a moment about how you react to a program presented in London in 1844 by Jules Benedict, a German who studied with Beethoven, moved to England, and ended up one of the most important musicians there between 1835 and 1880. Here (Program 1, Appendix A) we have an extreme example of what was then called a miscellaneous concert. Called by Benedict with a certain honesty a monster concert, it included thirtythree pieces and probably lasted around four hours. It presented a mixture of genres and composers that we would not hear together: classical overtures and arias; numbers from opera and oratorio; virtuosic instrumental works; and sentimental songs, most on national themes. The composers range from Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn to Donizetti and Bellmi, the most popular opera composers of the time, to a young Offenbach, and to a variety of now littleknown virtuosos such as Fuzzi. Are we not horrified by all this? We cringe and call something like this just a potpourri, something people went to simply for social reasons, not to listen. The program lacks the just proportions we expect in a concert: a few complete works in what we think of as serious genres by Great Composers. Program number 2 in Appendix A suggests the norm to which we are accustomed: pieces by Bach, Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven, all central composers in the canon. It is important to see that these programs predate a fundamental change in European musical culture: the rise of separate spheres of classical and popular music. What we are looking at is a quite different musical culture, in which a variety of tastes and groups of listeners coexisted. There was much less differentiation between serious and light musical events than in our day. While outdoor concerts had more casual etiquette that those indoors, and some songs were thought less artful than opera or oratorio arias, both kinds of music were often performed together, and people saw nothing wrong with it.
I have collected programs made in London, Paris, Leipzig, and Vienna for a book to be entitled The invention of classical music, 1770-1840-1910. I have written on aspects of this problem as well in Weber (1992, 1997, 1999). See also McVeigh (1994). On Adomo I recommend particularly Witkin (1998).

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If we look more closely at this program we can see patterns, indeed a great deal of coherence: it offered a limited number of genres that themselves were related in important ways. The program alternates between instrumental and vocal numbers, the most basic principle of the miscellaneous program. Vocal and instrumental virtuosity were closely related: several of the pieces for pianists and violinists here are medleys of tunes from the most popular operas, and the style in which the instruments were employed was influenced deeply by opera. The first five pieces outline the different genres in the program And these pieces were carefully chosen: Benedict offered his listeners a choice selection of what was regarded as the best moments of a whole variety of operas, done by the best musicians in London. People were accustomed to hearing vocal and instrumental idioms up against one another; they indeed would have found a program incomplete without that. Such concerts were not nearly as miscellaneous, in the negative sense, as we think. Why was the concert so long? That derived from the practice by which people would go to several events in an evening to hear or see specific pieces, sections, or performers. Benedict had a large number of highly prestigious patrons, and he therefore gave them full opportunity to get to some part of his annual concert. The compact nature of urban centers, and the small size of elites lay behind this practice. The idea of the great work of art had not yet been established; it was not thought offensive to play parts of works that people would hear complete in other contexts. While we may not approve of such etiquette, we have to admit that it grew out of coherent musical principles. Indeed, historically the program has considerable homogeneity: the oldest music, by Mozart, was fifty-five years old, and the great majority of the pieces were no more than fifteen. By contrast, later classical-music concerts, number #2 for example, usually ranged two to three hundred years, from Johann Sebastian Bach to the present, touching base with a great variety of musical periods. The term miscellaneous originated within poetry. During the late sixteenth century books of poems set in diverse genres began to be published under the denomination of miscellany. That meant the reader would find a variety of poetic entertainment in a single volume. The term served as a way by which an author would welcome readers, suggesting that the volume would please the tastes of different people, or the varied needs of any one person. It thereby made clear that the book was not intended for specialists for much the same reason that the titles of magazines often included the words general or universal. By the late seventeenth century musicians began doing much the same in public concerts, and for similar reasons. A concert program usually offered a variety of genres opera, oratorio, song, solo instrumental numbers, overtures, symphonic works and would alternate between them in highly patterned ways, alternating between vocal and instrumental numbers, and between voices in contrasting ranges. A concert was given the title miscellaneous usually when it was an ad hoc event where the word recognized reality, that the sponsor was bringing together a variety of musicians to play works they had in hand. The prototypical such event was called a benefit concert that was put on by one, perhaps two musicians to his or her own benefit.

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But concerts put on by established institutions as series of events also usually offered programs with much the same kind of patterned variety. The Philharmonic Society of London followed the principle of miscellany strictly in the sequence of ten pieces it offered at almost every concert during the first half of the nineteenth century. If you look at program 3 in the appendix, you see a program from 1826 that followed the usual order of symphony, opera number, concerto, opera number, and overture in each half. The Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig had a similar framework, though with eight pieces rather than ten. What all this suggests is that, basically, prior to around 1830 the great majority of concerts followed the principle of miscellany. It is vital to see that the term miscellaneous had a positive connotation in that time, as it does not today. It implied a coherent set of practices that concertgoers knew and enjoyed; it was based upon a rhetoric intended to attract the listener. Now, the musician performed a role in what is best called negotiation between musical genres, tastes, and favored performers and composers. It is incorrect to treat any audience as a single public, since in the vast majority of cases a public is comprised of various groups with different tastes. Moreover, any one person has contrasting musical needs and preferences. It is up to the sponsoring musician to negotiate between these factors as they manifest themselves within musical culture, and to fashion programs that reach some kind of compromise among them. The very reason that musicians would call a concert miscellaneous was to assure the public that he or she had accomplished this central task to satisfy their various needs and tastes. My argument here derives in part from an extremely important article by the musicologist Kallberg (1988) that applies the concept of contract to the composers relationship with the public. Kallberg argues that in the nineteenth century a musician such as Chopin by definition approached the composition of a piece with a mix of social and musical expectations in mind for its genre but had the opportunity to renegotiate this in new ways, permitting him to transform the genre. I add to that the argument that the conventions by which a program offered a sequence of genres formed an integral part of the process of negotiation. All of which shows how skillful leading musicians were socially and politically. They were not pandering to the public. Rather, in negotiating among different musical needs, tastes and publics, they played a creative role in reshaping musical life in fundamental ways. We can see a less extravagant miscellaneous concert than Benedicts in program 4 (Appendix A). Ignaz Moscheles, also a German who moved to London, was the leading young virtuoso pianist in the 1820s; he learned unusually well how to blend British with Italian, indigenous with cosmopolitan works, along with German music that was beginning to achieve cosmopolitan status. He opened with an overture by Mendelssohn, the leading contemporary descendant of the classical tradition who was highly respected in Britain, then an aria by that countrys main musical icon, Handel (also born in Germany) and in the second half he offered a new setting of a popular British song by an Austrian. He included two Italian arias, not many for a concert like that; one was unusually old, thirty-five years, not exactly a classic but at least a work of special repute. He was a good diplomat; he knew how to work each with the more popular and the more learned parts of the public and keep them both

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happy. Still, he placed the focus of the concert upon his own playing and indeed his own music, as you can see, and he accomplished that with full confidence and authority. The rise of homogeneous progr amrning began soon after that, around 1850. It grew directly out of the emergence of an international canon for music that had its origins in eighteenth-century England but was transformed by developments in central Germany - Saxony and Thuringia chiefly. Integral to the canon was an ideology that defined its authority upon a high or serious purpose and gradually separated it out from what was by 1900 commonly called popular music. Basic to the new taste for classical music - as it was called by 1830 throughout Europe - was the notion of a homogeneously serious repertory. By the 1840s the proponents of the new taste ridiculed concerts like Benedicts, arguing that the sentimental songs, Italian operas and virtuoso pieces should not accompany anything by Mozart, Beethoven or Mendelssohn on a program of good music. The first area where homogeneous programs developed was chamber music. By 1848 the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was putting on concerts where only quartets, quintets, trios and duo sonatas were performed, and only by a limited range of canonic or highly learned composers. Orchestras followed suit by the 1860s. Solo performers began putting on what we call the recital, programs entirely different from the benefit concert in that they were focused upon a homogeneously canonic repertory, plus a few new works. At the same time, the miscellaneous concert came into strong disrepute among the cognescenti. Entrepreneurial performers such as Benedict had begun commercializing the benefit concert in aggressive new ways. That seemed to threaten the balance negotiated in the eighteenth century between learning and popularity in musical taste. Idealistic critics such as George Bernard Shaw deprecated such programs as a means by which to call for a more serious approach to concertgiving, and in so doing they gave the term miscellaneous a terrible reputation that still exists today. Shaw wrote in 1890 that:
There are few things more terrible to a seasoned musician than a miscellaneous concert. A ballad concert, a symphony concert, a pianoforte recital: all these are welcome when they are not too long; but the oldfashioned grand concert, with an overture here, a scena there, and a ballad or an instrumental solo in between, is insufferable. Besides, it creates a discomfiting atmosphere by assembling a vast crowd of people without definite musical ideas, loosely strung goodnatured creatures who are attracted solely by the names of the performers, and can distinguish between Edward Lloyd and Sims Reeves, but not between a Donizetti cavatina and a Bach fugue. (Shaw, 1910: 80)

Here we see a central component of the critique of miscellany and the reverence for classics: a certain snobbery, a disparaging of publics with less educated ears, people with different tastes. By professional definition, we music historians tend to carry this prejudice when we approach the subject. By 1900 a set of massive changes had come about in concert pro gramming that we music historians have only started to study. What began to govern programs was a principle of homogeneity: a growing separation of vocal from instrumental music, the reduction in the number of works, and

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the exclusion of light music from serious programs. Program 5 by the British pianist Harold Bauer illustrates what had happened: seven works for solo piano by canonic composers, something unheard of in 1830. Unlike Moscheles, Bauer rarely performed his own works, though he did tinker with some of the classics he played. Yet since his programs ranged from Bach to Liszt they had much more variety historically and stylistically than those of Moscheles. One could indeed argue that the expansion of historical range in concerts required a reduction in variety as to idiom. There is, after all, only so much variety an audience can handle. Orchestral concerts became the most prominent kind of homogeneous concerts. If we look at the program done at the Philharmonic Society on March 1, 1911 (Appendix A, program 2), we see a program that offered not one piece by a living composer. That was not typical of the time, but it was not entirely unusual either. Even though the program opened with Mendelssohn - an overture was still a normal beginning - it spells out a musical chronology from Mozart to Wagner, Brahms, and Dvoi%k. In so doing the canonic framework of programs homogenized the disparate styles of composers from different epochs. While Wagners music had been most controversial during his time, by this point pieces such as the Faust Overture seemed tame compared to what Claude Debussy or Max Reger were doing. Still, a good deal more contemporary music was performed in London around 1910 than we are accustomed to today. What had changed was that the public, indeed most critics, had come to expect a certain homogeneity in terms of canonic repertory. Any recent work was now regarded with suspicion, whether or not it was in a modernistic style. During this time composers were developing a new practice by which an orchestra or a chamber-music group would normally perform one recent work on a typical program. The London Symphony Orchestra, quickly recognized as Londons leading ensemble after its founding in 1904, almost always had one work usually by a British composer on each program, and only occasionally two, rarely three. Program 6 shows a typical such instance - a recent piece by Edward Elgar for unaccompanied chorus. By the same token, by 1900 the great pianist Ignaz Paderewski might include a concerto or symphony of his own on a program, but to get away with that he would have to perform one of the more popular concertos by Beethoven, Schumann or Liszt. A lot had changed in musical life since 1850, hadnt it? Yet at the same time performers as well as composers had begun negotiating with the public for inclusion of works by their colleague composers. Musicians were not servile to the public; chamber-music groups, for example have played an important role in introducing new works to their listeners at a time when such music is not popular. The homogeneous program had far more historical variety - miscellany, we might call it - than the programs of 1840. One could argue that separating out vocal from instrumental music came about in part because audiences can tolerate only so much variety. If in 1800 they heard a diversity of genres within a limited historical range, their successors in 1900 heard the opposite. The historical diversity in place by 1900 required less variety in the genres and instruments employed. Yet ultimately works from Bach to Brahms were homogenized by their common ideological identity

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as a canon. The Great Composers were thought to share a common spiritual stature not found in newer music; a hind of aesthetic and ideological narrative united them in musical as well as historical terms. Bach might have written in a wholly different style from Beethoven, but people saw them as intimate musical relatives. The rise of the new concept of popular music was very much involved here. Musical genres common in programs of the early nineteenth century were separated out into the two worlds of popular and classical music by World War I. That happened most notably to the ballad, songs we saw in both Benedicts and Moscheless programs. You can fimd them occasionally in the programs of the main London chamber music series that began in 1859, a series called the Popular Concerts because at that time the word did not distinguish it from classical. By World War I ballads had become devalued aesthetically, dropped from classical-music concerts, and performed at what was called ballad concerts. The same happened to the potpourri or opera paraphrase, medleys or variations of tunes from a famous show. While such pieces had often been done at the Philharmonic Society in the 183Os, by the 1890s they were heard only in informal concerts offered by theaters or bands. Much the same happened to the best-known excerpts from operas by Donizetti, Bellini, and Meyerbeer. A great deal of miscellany remained in band concerts, such as did not in classical-music programs. You would often hear overtures and individual symphonic movements, played by fit-rate instrumentalists, along with marches and potpourris, but classical-music concerts no longer reciprocated such exchange. All of which should lead us to rethink our attitudes toward the musical culture of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the transformation of taste after 1850 we gained in some respects, acquiring a sheltered world of concerts that elicited an unusual manner of attentiveness from audiences. But we lost seriously in other respects. In the process classical-music life became isolated from contemporary music and from the earthier aspects of musical experience. That is why I would quite like to hear a program such as Benedict or Moscheles put on, done with the mores of the time, since I suspect I would like it a lot.

Appendix A: From miscellany to homogeneity in concert programming - Programs from the Library, Royal College of Music
1. Jules Benedicts Annual Morning Concert Great Concert Room of Her Majestys Theatre, June 14,1844, I:30

Mozart, Sent0 oh die, from Cosi fan Tutte, quintet Puzzi, horn solo Donizetti, duet, Senza tani complimenti Sivori, Variations for violin with piano on Lucia di Lummermoor Auber, Air, Que viens-je dentendre, from L Ambassadrice Alvars, harp solo, La dame des fees Ricci, Trio, Scaramuccia, La scene e uu mar isablie Monpou, Air, Adieu, mon beau navire, from L+es Deux Reines Verdi, Romanza, Ciel pietoso, Uberto Conte di San Bonifazio

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Costa, Terzetto, Vanne a colei the adoro Mercadante, Or la sull onda, II Giuramento Gucco, Duetto, Oh guardate, La Prova Donizetti, Regnava nel Silenzio, Lucia Thalberg, Etude in A minor Benedict, Cavatina, La Fidelta Ernst, Variations on the March in Otello for Violin Persiani, Polacca, Ah non e ver, 11Fantasma Beethoven, Adelaide Mozart, Duet, Sull[aria], Le Nozze di Figaro Chopin, Nocturne and Valse brillante, 3 performers, two pianos John Parry, New Song, Mon dejeuner a la fourchette __-Rossini, Un segreto, La Cenerentola Auber, Voyez-vous la-bas, La Sir&e Benedict, Rage thou angry storm, The Gipsys Warning Alary, Duetto, Vieni bellangiol Offenbach, Musette, Air de Dame Benedict, Ballad, By the sad sea waves Bellini, Duet, Prendi lanel ti dono Mendelssohn, Reiselied Balfe, Trio, Through the world, The Bohemian Girl Benedict, Ballad, Scenes of my youth, The Gipsys Warning Ricci, Romanza, Corrado dAltambura Cimarosa, Trio, Le faccio un inchino, I1 Matrimonio Segreto Benedict, At mom upon the beach, The Brides of Venice Donizetti, Lamor sue, Roberto Devereux Mazel, Ballade FranGaise, Jeanne dHarvilliers, la Sorciere Rossini, Duo, Mira la bianca hma Martini, Finale, Vadasi via di qua 2. Philharmonic Society, March 1, 1911 Wagner, Mozart, Brahms, Dvoiak, Faust Overture Mentre li lascio, Figaro Violin Concerto Symphony No. 4

3. Philharmonic Society, London, May 1,1826 Haydn, Symphony in E flat Weigl, Vocal quartet, Stupefatto Fiirstenau, Concerto for Flute Rossini, Trio, 0 nume benefice, La Gazza Ludra Weber, Overture, Oberon ____ Beethoven, Symphony in C minor Zingarelli, Recitative and aria Romeo e Giuletta Rode and De Beriot, Concerto for Violin

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Mozart, Duet, 0 Statua gentilissimia, A. Romberg, Overture in D

Don Giovanni

4. Ignaz Moscheles Morning Concert, May 8,1834 Mendelssohn, Overture, Melusina Handel, From the Mighty Kings, from Judas Muccabueus Moscheles, Concerto Fantastique Donizetti, Cavatina, Non ve squardo, Anna Bolena (1830) Fioravanti, Terzetto from La Cantatrice Villane (1799) Mendelssohn, Rondo Brillant, piano and orchestra Van Bree, Dutch Ballad, Marin Moscheles, Mayseder and Giuliani, Les Adieux des Troubadours, concertante piano, violin and guitar ____ Herz, Grand Concerto on a Theme in William Tell Panseron, New French Romance, Tyrole ma vue m&e Chevalier Neukomm, Our own British Oak, first performance Ghys, New Swiss Airs Moscheles, Extemporaneous performance 5. Harold Bauer, Aeolian Hall, London, November I, I901
J.

for voice,

S. Bach, Italian Concerto Mendelssohn Prelude & Fugue in E minor Beethoven, Sonata in C minor, Op. 13 Schumann, Fantasia Schubert Impromptu in B Chopin, Nocturne; Polonaise Liszt, Mephisto Waltz 6. London Symphony Orchestra and the Shefield Musical Union, London, February 14,191O
Mozart Symphony in B flat, K. 319 (1779) J. S. Bach Motet for Double Chorus, Sing ye to the Lord (1727) Elgar (1857 1934): Go Song of Mine, unaccompanied chorus (1909) ____ Beethoven Mass in D, Op. 123 (1823)

The London programs cited here are held in the Department of Portraits, Programs and Manuscripts in the Royal College of Music. The Gewandhaus programs are found in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig. I am greatly indebted to the staff of the two archives.

References
Kallberg, Jeffrey, 1988. The rhetoric of gem: 238-261. Chopins Nocturne in G Minor. 19th Century Music 11,

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McVeigh, Simon, 1994. London concert life from Mozart to Haydn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, George Bernard, 1910. Music in London. Vol. 1. London: St. Martins. Weber, William, 1992. The rise of musical classics in eighteenth century England: A study in canon, ritual & ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, William, 1997. Did people listen in the eighteenth century? Early Music 25, 678-691 (special issue, Listening Practice). Weber, William, 1999. The history of musical canons. In: Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook (eds.), Rethinking music, 340-359. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Witkin, Robert, 1998. Adomo on Music. London: Routledge.