William Weber

From miscellany to homogeneity in concert programming

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 are 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 pre-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.

Redefining the Status of Opera: London and Leipzig, 1800¿1848

Between about 1750 and 1800, concerts of any significance usually included several numbers from opera, within strictly patterned miscellaneous programs. Around 1800, when the political condition of European society was particularly unstable, idealists began to challenge this old order of musical life, calling for a new, higher order of programming and musical taste. Distinct musical worlds evolved from this movement. Some concerts focused almost entirely on opera, or on excerpts from old operas, and others abandoned opera altogether. Chamber music and orchestral concerts tended to draw exclusively from repertories comprised of works from the classical era.

Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work in Music History

During the last twenty years the study of printed verbal culture has progressed in fundamental ways, thanks to the leadership of such scholars as Robert Damton and Roger Chartier. What, then, of the other arts? Historians have taken far less interest in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and the dance than in literature, journalism, and popular writing. Relations with specialists in these fields are much weaker than with those in literature, and historians often either abstain from discussing the arts or write about them in terms derived from fields they know better. Mores the pity, since music historians have moved in directions similar to those of European historians, essentially attempting to gain a deeper understanding of the contexts and practices from which music emerged. I will first discuss the problem of musics relations with society and the other arts and then survey some of the recent work in musicology from which historians could benefit.

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700- 1830 (review)

omy, government, and culture that they themselves perceived as dramatic, remarkable, revolutionary.” (15) But one gets little sense of how the Revolution— especially its social and political aspects—affected the social relations that are at the heart of Miller’s book. This may be an impossible question to answer, dependent, perhaps, on sources that do not exist. To ask it is not to detract from a notable achievement. Like the spectacular examples of eighteenthand early nineteenth-century needlework reproduced in its pages, The Needle’s Eye is a work of artisanry—and of art.

The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology.

The learned tradition of ancient music the modern classics - Corelli and Purcell the music festival and the oratorio tradition the public of the Concert of Antient Music the repertory of the Concert of Antient Music the ideology of ancient music the 1784 Handel commemoration as political ritual. Appendix: repertory of the concert of ancient music, 1776-1790.