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  • Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna
  • William Weber
Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. By Derek B. Scott (New York, Oxford University Press, 2008) 287 pp. $39.95

This book makes a major contribution to a major aspect of music history: It shows when and where music that might be called popular first appeared in the Western world. Scott demonstrates that such a cultural revolution took place during the 1840s, most significantly in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. The book brings discussion of the term to a new sophisticated level, explaining how popular music sprang variously from differences between social classes and between (purportedly) high and low culture. Scott encourages thinking outside the conventional box. Might the nineteenth-century nobility have wanted to hear lighter kinds of music? Did the educated middling classes take strong leadership in promoting classical music? Did singers and entrepreneurs bring such groups together in some venues? The first part of the book tackles a set of big, tough problems extremely well: commercial practices, new markets, musical morals, and the "rift between art and entertainment." The second part looks in detail into the Viennese waltz, blackface minstrels, music-hall Cockneys, and Montmartre cabarets. [End Page 83]

Discussion of high and popular culture generally has been plagued by "mapp[ing] it directly onto high- and low-class consumers," as Scott puts it (9). He instead draws on the thinking of Bourdieu to define "fractional interests" that cut across boundaries of social classes and thereby opened up fascinating interactions between groups of diverse kinds.1 His narrative of how the word popular evolved in musical culture is itself a major contribution to our understanding of musical life. We cannot identify entertainment music (or Unterhaltungsmusik, in German) entirely with the middle class, since nobles went to concerts by Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss, and the more well-to-do members of the working classes appeared in some of these contexts as well, though not in great numbers. Yet Scott also recognizes that class divisions did come into play in specific circumstances, for example, in the riots outside the Astor Place opera house in New York in 1849.

Another accomplishment of the book is its balanced and historically accurate re-definition of the aesthetic issues involved in the terms high and low, or light and serious. Scott offers a dispassionate critique of the notion of "triviality" in music, which Carl Dahlhaus, an influential musicologist, saw leading to a "trivialized listening" that degenerated taste as a whole. Looking at Viennese taste of the 1830s, Scott argues that "serious music might be simple in style, and it might be fun (scherzando), but it was regarded as music that ought always to be listened to" (87). His opinion is welcome, since English commentators tended to condemn less-learned musical taste to a special extent—for example, Arthur Bedford in 1710, John Hawkins in 1776, and George Bernard Shaw in the 1880s. For this very reason, music halls did not obtain the aesthetic legitimacy that French commentators accorded the cafés-concerts by the 1870s.

The book provides both broad and specific discussion of the four areas of popular music. Scott does not buy the conventional wisdom that semiformal "promenade" concerts offered a considerable amount of classical music, since he sees that dance pieces and opera medleys framed the repertory. Readers will benefit particularly from his comparison of movements found in the waltz, the Ländler, and the Dreher in reference to the kinds of contexts in which they were danced. The chapter on minstrelsy shows that "blackface" (white) singers set up expectations that black performers following them more or less had to follow. Yet, minstrelsy made room for new cultural attitudes, since "the mask provided, metaphorically as well as literally, a cover" (169). Cockney acts, Scott argues, were much indebted to Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (London, 1836–1837) and remained fundamentally middle class in perspective. The cafés-concerts in Montmartre developed a link with the artistic avant-garde that foreshadowed progressive rock and role.

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