DQ for Weber "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste"

DQ for Weber, “Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste”

[Please read and by prepared to respond by Thurs 1.18 meeting]

Please be prepared to respond in either seminar meeting or in "Comments" on the course blog. In all venues, you must be prepared to cite specific passages (by page, paragraph, line, and quotation) in support of your responses.

(1) Though the model of “great works” and/or “great composers” have been ubiquitous in music history studies for at least the past 100 years, this model is in fact of relatively recent provenance—that is, prior to the 1850s-‘60s, according to Weber, the model of “great composers” did not really exist. Please cite at least four factors, overall, which Weber argues contributed to that period’s new emphasis upon composers’ “names seem written into the heavens.”

(2) Implicit in this article is the idea that perspectives in music historiography, just as is the case with musical style or musical usage, are themselves time- and context-bound. That is, models of music history may be seen as “going in and out of fashion.” What does this emphasis upon “greatness” of individuals or works reveal about cultural values (and arbiters) of the past hundred years?

(3) Despite the fact that the “great works” and/or the “great composers” have typically been associated with high art and social class, with an aristocracy of culture or economics, Weber suggests that the rise of the “great composers” was in fact a direct result of the rise of mass culture in mid-19^th-century Europe. How does Weber explain this paradox? Why did mass culture “need” great composers? What social/economic/class aspirations did this model serve?

(4) Related to (3) above: what other musical innovations or shifts of musical practice and behavior of the 19^th century can similarly be traced to the rise of European mass culture? Can we, in turn, relate these shifts (in “who’s paying,” “who’s playing,” “who’s listening,” “what’s it doing”) to the “great composers” model?

(5) In this great composers model, what were determined to be the markers or indiciators of greatness? In other words, how did a composer (or a composition) for inclusion in the ranks of the great? Did this lead to shifting critical perspectives on certain composers, genres, or SHMRG characteristics? Did it lead to shifts in composers’ own perspectives or approaches?

(6) In what ways can we find the roots of musical “modernism” in the modernist elements of mass culture as a whole? In other words, can we trace modernism in social/cultural/economic spheres to the mid-19^th-century, just as we can so trace it in compositional circles?

(7) How did “modern” mass culture trends change the makeup of orchestras? How did it change the makeup of audiences? What was/were the responses of those groups who had dominated audiences previously? (Hint: look at the implications of Kenner und Liebhaber; what are the literal translations of these terms, and what do those translations imply?)

(8) How were composers implicated in adapting to shifts of audience and of tastes? Which composers catered to these shifts? How and why were they or were they not successful?

(9) What genres were impacted by these shifts? Which went out of compositional favor as a result? Which became more dominant or were more extensively a focus of compositional attention?