william weber - mass culture and the reshaping of european musical taste 1770-1870

Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870Author(s): Wiliam WeberSource: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jun.- Dec., 1994), pp. 175-190Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/836942Accessed: 12/04/2009 09:01

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W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2 (1994) 175-190

MASS CULTURE AND THE RESHAPING OF EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, 1770-1870*

WILIAM WEBER

California State University, Long Beach, U.S.A.

UDC: 78.073"17/18"

Original Scientific Paper Izvorni znanstveni clanak First published in: / Prvi put objavljeno u: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1977

Abstract - Resume

The rise of the master composers - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, later Handel and J. S. Bach, and finally Schubert, Weber, Schumann, and others - to musical sainthood took place during the 1850's and 1860's. It can be regarded as an early, but clever and profit-seeking form of mass culture, whose evolution can be traced in Europe from about 1770 to 1870. In this the growth of the publishing industry is discussed, as the main

impetus behind the commercial development of the musical world in London, Paris, Vienna, and Leipzig. The main large-scale concerts which appeared during the middle of the 19th century brought a new impersonal social structure to life, and the classical repertoire of these concerts reshaped European musical taste since then by polarizing values for entertainment (>popularclassical

176 W. WEBER, MASS CULTURE AND EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, IRAMDA 25/1,2 (1994) 175-190

But upon closer inspection we can see that these tablets were made not of ancient stone but of modem plaster. The rise of the masters to musical sainthood took place during the 1850's and 1860's. It was only then that their works came to dominate the concert repertoire and their names were put up on hight for all to behold. Their elevation marked a fundamental change in the orientation of European musical taste, for never before had the music of dead composers been played so often or ascribed so lofty a status in musical life. As late as 1840 most Viennese and Parisian concertgoers scoffed at the idea that the greatest music might be the music of the past. In 1846, a Parisian journalist mocked the classical concerts at the Conservatoire - ?If music is dead /Well, then let us inter it!/ On the air of tra deri deri /On the air of tra deri deri!classical


graphically will be broad but will be limited primarily to the three major Euro- pean capitals - London, Paris, and Vienna - and to Leipzig, the German city most prominent in nineteenth-century musical life. I will also not delve into the differences among them.

In the musical field the term >mass culture< can be defined in a relatively concrete manner. It should be conceived as performance or dissemination of music which does not rest upon personal relationships between musicians and the public and for which obtaining - indeed, manipulating - a wide public is a primary goal. This is not just a matter of brute numbers of people buying music or going to concerts. What has characterized musical mass culture primarily has been rather the impersonality of relationships between listeners and performers and the active exploitation of a broad public by the music business. To be sure, neither the size of audiences nor the circulation of sheet music during the nineteenth century compares at all closely to contemporary levels, and early marketing techniques may seem crude by comparison with those used for Elton John or Leonard Bernstein. But the impersonality of concert events and the manipulative devices of the publishing industry had much the same basic qualities then as now. Be- cause of these dynamics, the appearance of 1,000 instead of 300 people at some concerts and the publication of tens of thousands instead of several hundred new pieces of music per year changed the social structure of musical life fun- damentally.3

Now, in the old society, in the world we have lost, music-making revolved around one-to-one personal relationships. Music was what one person did for another. There were no formal institutions where people went for the objective, impersonal purpose of simply hearing music. People danced and courted to music, passed the time making music, and celebrated with music. Most of the ceremonial occasions accompanied by music were directly associated with specific events in individuals' lives - marriages, funerals, namedays, saints days. Moreover, the relationship often counted for far more than the music itself. Even in the households of the upper classes of society musicians were not a discrete profession but rather simply those people who, for one reason or another, sang or played for those around them. In a shrewd study of English musicians of the late sixteenth century, Walter Woodfill has shown that few performers were formal, resident retainers but rather were people from a wide range of occupa- tions who made music for others and obtained an unspecific reward, some kind of personal gratuity, and often performed other services for the same households.4 Performers in the large-scale ensembles of the eighteenth century almost

3 The term has not been applied at all intensively to the history of European classical music thus far. The most useful works on the history of concerts which at least bear upon the subject are the following: Percy M. YOUNG, The Concert Tradition, London 1965; Arthur LOESSER, Men, Women and Pianos, New York 1954; and Hans ENGEL, Musik und Gesellschaft, Berlin 1960.

4 Walter WOODFILL, Musicians in English Society, Princeton 1953, pp. 59-62.

177


always had other functions in the household; a list of the members of one German Hofkapelle in 1783 cited, among others, two porters, one cupbearer, two man- servants and the chaplain.5

Relationships between performers and their patrons were therefore the central source of social order in musical life. The key to success for musicians was not expanding the number of such ties but rather maintaining them with careful diplomacy in the smallgroup social context of the time. The frequency of vaga- bondage among low- (and in some cases not so low-) ranking musicians made this concern important to all concerned; reputations depended as much upon simple trustfulness as upon musical ability.6

The rise of public concerts during the 18th century changed the nature of these relationships surprisingly little. The most prominent early concerts were performances by dedicated amateurs - Kenner und Liebhaber, as they were called in German - assisted by musicians of usually greater ability from a lower social standing who lived in part by teaching and performing in bourgeois and aristocratic homes. The people who went to these events where accordingly the friends and relatives of the performers, and members of the local community. Such concerts thus rested upon a structure of personal relationships and the complementary needs of the different kinds of participants. Their highly personalized character limited their growth into large-scale or professional institutions. When that did happen, as in the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde of Vienna after the Revolution of 1848, it came only through force- ful and controversial actions by professionals.7

Even commercially-oriented concerts sponsored by individual musicians had such a fabric of relationships. To be sure, such concertgivers now acted in a enterpreneurial capacity, since they put on events for more than one household and charged a fee for admission. An element of commercial objectivity thereby entered into the relationships with their patrons. But these concerts did not have an impersonal public, for they remained dependent upon domestic music-making until after the middle of the nineteenth century. The growth of amateur musical training during the eighteenth century had made teaching in bourgeois and aristocratic homes a broad, highly lucrative market and provided a stable source of income from which musicians could launch careers as public performers. These events, usually called >Academies< of >Benefit ConcertsHerkunft und Sozialstatus des h6fischen Orchestermusikers im 18. und friihen 19. Jahrhundert in DeutschlandZur sozialen Stellung des Stadtmusikanten


primarily of the families for which the sponsor had taught or performed, since hiring a musician for such purposes carried with it an obligation to buy tickets to his or her annual concert. The web of relationships extended to the performers themselves, since these concerts had long, elaborate programs played largely by the colleagues of the sponsor, many of whom were often amateurs. Touring performers drew upon the same network of ties, for musicians provided each other with help in obtaining supporting performers and attracting audiences.8

The benefit concert, like the amateur ensemble, could not become a large- scale event because personal relationships were so central to it. No musician could develop enough contacts to draw more than at most five hundred people to a concert, and many had to give tickets away to get big houses. It is doubtful whether many concerts showed much profit; their purpose was rather to main- tain contacts and develop reputations. In any case, the whole idea of trying to attract audiences on an impersonal basis was far from the imagination of eighteenth-century musicians.

The publication and dissemination of music rested upon a similar matrix of relationships. Because the cost of printed music was so high, such scores remained the exception, and few cities had retail outlets for their sale. The German music historian Klaus Hortschansky has shown that the vast majority of music written in most European countries was sold copy-by-copy through a complex web of ties among composers, musicians, and interested amateurs. Each com- poser would ask colleagues in different cities to solicit subscriptions to a new composition (whether printed or not) for a small remuneration, usually adver- tising these agents in periodicals. The principal buyers were the local ensembles we have just discussed, therefore a quite limited market. Many musicians spent a considerable part of their time selling music in this manner. Once again we find that trusting relationships were the key to success: Hortschansky cites in- stances where certain composers incurred the wrath of their colleagues of refus- ing to return expected favors of this kind. Here, too, we can see that this system was self-limiting, since only rarely could a work receive more than four or five hundred subscribers.9

The personalized commerce and concert life of the eighteenth century never disappeared completely from European musical life. Amateur orchestras today still have an internal structure not very different from those back then; recitals have remained in many cases presentations by local performers to their students and colleagues. But around them have developed broadly based, impersonal social systems which have come to control these concerts in powerful ways. Indeed,

8 YOUNG, op. cit., pp. 2845; LOESSER, op. cit., pp. 88-96; William WEBER, Music and the Middle Class, London 1975, Chap. III. 9 Klaus HORTSCHANSKY, >Der Musiker als Musikalienhandler in der zweiten Halfte des 18.

JahrhundertsPranumerations- und Subskriptionslisten in Notendrucken deutscher Musiker des 18. Jahrhunderts


one of the most fascinating aspects of modem mass culture is how it has inter- locked with personalized institutions in this manner.

Musical mass culture first appeared in the publishing industry. The key to these changes was the opening up of a vast new market of music played by amateurs at home. Between 1780 and 1850 technological breakthroughs and a forthright new brand of entrepreneurship made both publishing and retailing of music a burgeoning consumer business. The most striking thing about the technological advances was that they were exploited so soon for specific needs of musical merchandising. Publishers seized upon lithography immediately after its invention at the turn of the century to print sheet music for home use with flashy, colorful illustrations which proved easily saleable. New methods of movable type served a different market, the mass choral movement, because they were able to produce cheap, easy-to-read vocal parts for singers still struggling to scan their lines. Lastly, improvements, in engraving techniques provided the sharp detail needed for the complicated virtuosic and orchestral scores at large-scale concerts.10

The problems of rising productivity rates and falling prices in publishing industry are too complex and have been studied too little to be worth discussing at any length here. More to our purposes is to see how the simple availability of music increased so enormously after the turn of the century. During the 1770's and 80's most publishers' catalogues listed between 100 and 1500 items. By 1824 the London firm of Boosey cited 10,000 foreign publications alone; by 1827 the general catalogue of Whistler and Hofmeister in Leipzig had accumulated a total of about 44,000 items; and in 1838 Parisian firm of d'Almaine claimed to have access to over 200,000 the plates.ll

The spread of retail outlets had much to do with the increase in publications. Hortschansky reports that during the 1780's some of the people who dealt in subscriptions began buying in quantity and selling after publication at a mark- up; he suspects that publishers then started dealing with them directly to get better terms.12 The subscription systems could not handle large quantities of music and displaced by full-time music-sellers, many of them the musicians who formerly had sold music on the side and now began to specialize in that field. The person-to-person distribution system thus gave way to a professionalized international trade network. In London directories listed twelve shops selling music in 1750, 30 in 1794, and 150 in 1824; in Germany one such source cited 333 shops in 1843, but that was probably only half the number.13

10 See A. Hyatt KING, 400 Years of Music Printing, London 1964; F CHRYSANDER, >A Sketch of the History of Music Printing


Crafty merchandising also had a lot to do with the speedy expansion of the publishing industry. Arthur Loesser has given a marvellously vivid description of the exploitative techniques which publishers employed.14 They obtained music aimed directly at the tastes and performing levels of the average amateur, and symphonies or concerti of the older school were transcribed so as to be easier and more flashy; everything was advertised as >>brilliant but not difficult


the market for sheet music. These outrageous showmen - Spohr and Hummel in the 1810's and 20's and Thalberg and Liszt in the 30's and 40's - began the tradition of plying public musical taste which shifted quickly and easily from sheet music to the recording and proceeded to give us Paul McCartney and Elton John. An even more explicit action in the commercial direction by nineteenth century composers was their campaign for a universal copyright. This movement was, clear and simple, an effort to obtain a legal mass market. It is sobering to one's classical fancies to remember that one of the key exponents of the reform was the master of the masters, Ludwig van Beethoven.16

Let us turn to the second area in which the early dynamics of mass culture emerged: public concerts. Tradition and change mingled in a curious way in one area of concerts, for those by virtuosi developed the least into large-scale events. Individual performers stayed within the conventional form of the benefit concert and the network of personal relationships which was its base. Few of these events had audiences larger than 500 people.17 Since the virtuosi were operating on a hectic international schedule, they were not able to build permanent institutions with large publics. We should note, however, that the primacy of sheet music in their fame nonetheless made their concerts more than just the localized gatherings of the eighteenth century. When one went to a concert by Liszt or Thalberg, or even to one by a minor performer playing works by the giants, one went because of the fads which surrounded that music. The functioning of the relationships within the concert's life was now controlled by the larger musical market. During the last quarter of the century the new profession of concert managers then turned recitals into internationally managed, large-scale events.

Orchestras provided the fullest and most permanent basis for mass concerts. The earliest form, found during the 1830's in many European cities, was informal events held in dance halls during the winter and parks during the summer. ?Promenades


Paris - they drew people from the whole of the middle class and also young, unmarried apprentices from the more prosperous artisanry. The crowds were for the most part from the lower-middle class. Genteel music lessons had nothing to do with why such people went to these shows.18

After 1850 formal orchestral concerts with classical programs replaced the promenades in the French and English capitals, though not in Vienna. There had been attempts at this kind of concert in Paris before mid-century by Hector Berlioz and other entrepreneurs, but the first permanent series was begun by Jules Pasdeloup in 1854. Charles Lamoureux and Edouard Colonne set up similar concerts in the next two decades. In London Auguste Mann began the same kind of low-priced series at the Crystal Palace in 1855, and the new St. James's Hall initiated several series of both chamber-music and orchestral concerts during the next ten years.19

Concerts of this order spelled the death of the public amateur orchestral tradition in the three major capitals. During the 1830's and 40's in London and Paris several orchestras derived from the model of the eighteenth century tried to obtain a larger public by hiring professionals as soloists and first-chair players, but the incumbent costs were far too great for them to bear, and the ensembles either disappeared or became strictly private gatherings by 1850. Entrepreneurial musicians set up pay-as-you-go amateur sight-reading ensembles as something of a replacement. In Vienna the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde tried valiantly to stay with strictly amateur membership, but after the Revolution of 1848 the Society's new leaders professionalized the ensemble and instituted sepa- rate private sessions for amateurs.20 Indicative of what had happened to the personalized tradition of dilettante performance was a letter to a London music magazine in which an amateur violinist complained that because the city was so big and impersonal he had no way to locate other players and needed the periodical's help to do that.21 Thus did the media take on new functions in urban society.

Even elite symphony orchestras manifested tendencies toward impersonality in their social fabric. Most series attended by the aristocracy and the upper- middle class during the early nineteenth century not only had exclusive ticket policies, but also forbade the use of tickets by anyone other than the purchaser and granted single tickets only in exceptional circumstances. In most places these rules were eliminated during the 1830's and 40's because of demands by subscribers.22 Then in the second half of the century all of the orchestras moved to

18 Ibid., pp. 108-113. 19 YOUNG, op. cit., pp. 234-238. 20 WEBER, op. cit., Chapter V, part 2. 21 Dramatic and Musical Review, September 27, 1845, p. 493.

2It is significant that the change came about in both London and Leipzig - two radically different cities - during the 1830's. For London, see Harmonicon, March 1833, p. 80; Programs of the Concerts of Ancient Music, 1834, xxii; Minutes of the Directors' Meetings of the Philharmonic Society

183


larger halls, most of which seated more than 1000 people. Since exclusiveness remained, one can not call these concerts true mass events. But they did lose their earlier tight social bonds and now operated within a larger context of mass publishing and mass taste.

Choral concerts developed the widest social range among the new large- scale concerts. Many of the choruses grew directly from small singing clubs. The main one in London, the Sacred Harmonic Society, was formed in 1832 from a collection of local groups based primarily in Dissenting chapels and made up of people from the artisanry as well as the lower-middle class. The Society es- tablished a concert series in Exeter Hall, a church headquarters, which by the middle of the 1840's had become one of the most prominent musical locales in London. The extent to which the former clubs had changed into a mass institution was indicated by the invitation extended to the Society to perform at the opening the Crystal Palace in 1851. A second source of large-scale choral concerts was the singing school. Begun by highly entrepreneurial singing teachers, the schools quickly changed from small-group educational centers into choruses numbering in the hundreds which put on festivals all over England. John Hullah, the most successful teacher-manager, opened up a hall in London for classes and concerts by his choruses.23

Similar choruses appeared in Paris with public rather than private bases and had an even broader scale. In 1833 the singing teacher Guillaume Wilhem began the >>Orpheon< instructional program in elementary schools under mu- nicipal sanction and shortly after extended it to adult classes. The program drew a predominantly artisanal clientele derived in large part from traditional tavern singing groups, and some of the students themselves became professional choral directors. Wilhem's successors expanded the >Orpheon< into a massive national choral program which climaxed its first decade in 1859 with a concert at the Palais de l'Industrie in which the press claimed, undoubtedly with some exag- geration, that 6,000 singers from 204 societies from all over France performed before a crowd of 40,000 people.24

That certainly was mass culture. Throughout the concerts of the 1850's one can feel a lusting for identification with the mass of the population, a desire to celebrate the emerging urban-industrial civilization with a grand thronging to- gether in public places. The minutes of the directing committee of the Sacred Harmonic Society reveal complaints that singers balked at attending rehearsals regularly and only wanted to appear at the big concerts. That does not just show

of London, British Museum, May 22, 1831 and March 11, 1832 (refusals of permission for exchange of tickets), January 19, 1834 and August 10, 1842 (removal of the rule). For Leipzig, see Programs of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Museum der Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig, November 30, 1822 (warning to subscribers not to exchange tickets) and February 13, 1837 (removal of the rule). The Parisian Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire carefully avoided the rule at its inception in 1828, as did the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1842 and the London Musical Union in 1845.

23 WEBER, op. cit., pp. 100-108. 24 Albert LAVIGNAC, ed., >>l'Orphon-, Encyclopedie de la musique, Paris 1931, p. 3727.


dislike for choral discipline; it illustrates also how far the organizations had gone from the tradition of intimate, local singing clubs.25

But the musical mass culture of the middle of the nineteenth century was not simply people going to impersonal concerts in large numbers. To understand how musical taste became mass culture in a broader respect we must return to the matter raised at the beginning of this lecture: the masters. By 1860 both the orchestral and choral concerts we have been discussing and elite concert societies had shifted their repertoire primarily to music by the dead >great composersMusic in the Culture of the Renaissance


This intermingling of tastes broke down at the turn of the nineteenth century. With the simultaneous collapse of the patronal tradition and rise of the printing industry, musical taste suddenly went to extremes of levity and seriousness. At one pole stood the virtuosi, those entrepreneurs who created a fire-storm of popular demand for music they advertised as ?brilliant but not difficultserious< repertoire. Most concertgoers not only did not think you needed to know much about the music; they did not even think it was nice if you did. To most people at concerts, said a Parisian journalist in 1833, ?musical feeling, taste, the study of the great masters, the science of composition are dissonances to their ears that you would be ill advised to pronounce before them


the bills would sometimes not appear or the whole concert prove a hoax.30 The power of novelty had worn thin. That shrewdie Franz Liszt certainly saw which way the wind was blowing; in 1849 he quit giving concerts and moved to Goethe's Weimar, where he began writing symphonies in his own serious way and ended up joining the Augustinian order. By 1866 a reporter from Vienna - the town where virtuosi had ruled more triumphantly than anywhere else - declared with surprise that >individual concert-givers now scarcely dare any longer present themselves to the public without Beethoven, Chopin, or Schu- mannIt is not longsince we endeavored to show what a change has taken place here during the last ten years


in Europe, showed much the same change, but topped the Philharmonic by de- voting only 11 percent of its repertoire to living composers during the 1860's.35

Public taste swung to the masters in part because the conductors of the symphony orchestras learned to use the new mass musical market. The conductors active during the 1840's - Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig, Otto Nicolai in Vi- enna, Francois Habeneck in Paris, and John Ella in London - all made themselves into charismatic figures at the podium and devised grand programs which made the music of the masters seem awesome rather than esoteric. They did not depart from the new aesthetics of serious taste; they simply devised ways of making people think they had the necessary knowledge. Ella, who conducted the chamber-music concerts of the highly prestigious Musical Union, flattered his public, calling it >the happy few< of >amateurs of cultivated and refined taste? who knew the secrets of the masters as cruder dilettantes did not.36

One should not, however, be overly cynical about that puff. The growth of amateur performance had made a sizable proportion of the upper levels of the capitals' population musically literate. In fact, given the weaker competition from other leisure-time activities during that era, musical literacy was certainly higher than today and possibly higher even than at any point in the twentieth century. Amateurs now wanted to brag about their skills in a more concentrated, indeed more serious manner than before.

A key element in the public was particularly responsible for the change. During the late eighteenth century there had emerged in each of these cities a corps of highly trained, sometimes semi-professional listeners who poured their energies into advocating the music they regarded as the bastion of serious music culture. They learned the entire classical repertoire, wrote about it for magazines and newspapers, and went unfailingly to orchestral and chamber-music concerts, often in leadership capacities. While during the early decades of the century their activities had an oldfashioned and rather esoteric air, at mid-century a new generation of accomplished listeners arrived which knew how to speak persua- sively to the larger public. Most important of all, they respected true professional standards of performance as their predecessors had not. After 1850 they became the dominant force among musical amateurs and shaped concert life to their model. These connoisseurs did not put up with any chatter in the concert hall.

One also cannot discount certain commercial motives behind the rise of the masters in musical life. The virtuosi had driven hard bargains with publishers; they had been such hot properties that music houses did not like to cross them and often granted them surprisingly high fees.37 But the market was a chancy

35 Edouard DELDEVEZ, Histoire dc la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire, Paris 1887, passim. 36 Musical Record, June 24, 1845, pp. 53-54. These were the programs of the concerts.

3Joel SACHS, >Authentic English and French editions of Johann Nepomuk Hummel


one, there was a lot to be lost by poor investments, and reforms in copyright laws had begun to limit publishers in some respects. By comparison, publication of works by dead composers had lower cost, greater stability, and fewer attendant problems. Many of the publishing houses had close ties with the major symphony orchestras and probably exerted some influence in the shift in program- ming.

By the 1870's there was indeed an active suspicion of new music in concert life. In 1887 the conductor of the Socie'te des concerts meditated upon the past and the future of his orchestra: >Can it not today conserve its title of glory, follow the mission of the last fifty years; can it not continue to devote itself to the cult of great art, to the masters of the masters, without excluding the modems, the contemporary members of the young school?>Reflections on Mod-

ernism: Or Aimez-vous Brahms?<

189


Sa'etak

MASOVNA KULTURA I PREOBLIKOVANJE EUROPSKOG GLAZBENOG UKUSA U RAZDOBLJU GD 1770. DO 1870. GODINE

Masovna kultura u europskom glazbenom zivotu nije se pojavila u 20., ve& u 19. stoljeeu. Ma- sovna je kultura bila temeljna snaga koja je transformirala europski glazbeni ukus u njegovim fun- damentalnim pretpostavkama. Tradicija klasicne i tradicija zabavne glazbe proizvodi su suvremene glazbene masovne kulture.

Radna je definicija masovne kulture, koja se upotrebljava u povijesne svrhe, u tome da je treba shvatiti kao izvedbu ili girenje glazbe na na6in koji ne po6iva na osobnim odnosima izmedu glazbenika i publike, i u okviru kojeg je zadobivanje, u stvari manipuliranje giroke publike prvotni cilj. Premda se kvantitativna Ijestvica glazbene masovne kulture 19. stoljeea ne moze usporediti s onom iz 20. stoljeea, bezliknost koncertnlh dogadaja i manipulativna sredstva izdava&ke industrije bila su u osnovi istog karaktera tada kao i danas. Masovnu kulturu ne bi trebalo shvatiti samo kao puki broj ijudi koji idu na koncerte ill kupuju plo&e ihi muzikalije, vee kao osobitost glazbenog iskustva specifiknog za modemo urbano drultvo.

Europska je izdava&ka industrija tako inicirala masovnu kulturu u glazbenom livotu pri kraju 19. stoljeea putem tehnololkih inovacija i vjegtim metodama prodaje. Glazba s plora bila je k1ju&na za razvitak. Sirenje glazbe time se promijenilo od neposredne osobne distribucije u razgranati medu- narodni sistem. Instrumentalni su virtuozi imali glavnu ulogu u novom sistemu jer su se pomrou njih razvile nove prodajne metode koje su najavile suvremeni fenomen glazbenog bestselera.

Ovaj je razvitak temeljito preobrazio europski glazbeni ukus. Prvobitna pretpostavka glazbenog ukusa u 17. i 18. stoljeeu bila je otmjeno uvjerenje da su znanje i ozbiljan interes za glazbu bill pozeljni no ne i nuini za razumijevanje glazbe. >>Nije potrebno da znate mnogoo, govorili su, >no zgodno je ako je tome takoo. Uspon glazbene masovne kulture slomio je taj polimorfni skup vrijed- nosti. Otkad su se procesi proizvodnje glazbenih aktivnosti giroko razvili i postali ekonomski snahni, lakoumnost i ozbiljnost rastali su se u glazbenom 2ivotu i svaki od ta dva aspekta postao je temeljem odvojenog glazbenog svijeta. Do tridesetih godina 19. stoljeea razvile su se potpuno neovisne glazbene institucije za >ozbiljnu? simfonijsku i komomu glazbu s jedne a virtuoznu i opemu glazbu s druge strane. U prvoj se pretpostavljalo da se negto mora znati, dok se u drugoj preferiralo ako se nije znalo.

Nove klasikne institucije nisu bile nigta manje proizvod masovne kulture nego zabavne. I sfm pojam )>majstora

william weber - mass culture and the reshaping of european musical taste 1770-1870

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