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  • The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art
  • William Weber
The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art. By Tim Blanning (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2008) 400 pp. $29.95

Blanning conceived of this book from hearing listeners react to his pre-concert talks, telling him that music went into great decline during the twentieth century. Thus, avant-garde composers only wrote "plinks and [End Page 121] plonks accessible only by other musicians" or popular artists explored "ever more subterranean depths of offensive vulgarity" (325). Finding such reactions subjective, Blanning proposes to show that music triumphed as the most successful of the arts in the modern age. He writes to a broad public, as is common among British music historians, to illustrate how music's importance grew from the time of Claudio Monteverdi to the present. The book treats five social aspects in successive sections, showing how musicians captured public attention, reshaped the purposes of music, developed new performing venues, expanded their technology, and liberated national consciousness. Blanning characterizes the argument at the start by showing how British golden jubilees brought musical triumphs: George III (1809), Queen Victoria (1887), and Queen Elizabeth II (2002), the latter mingling popular and classical music before an audience of 200 million people. What results is provocative, a good read, though with some problematical aspects.

The most specific aspects of the book work the best, thanks to Blanning's vivid examples. In the section on venues, he portrays rock concerts in football stadiums as the cathedrals of the modern day, bringing the "religion of the people" to the widest possible public (172). The performance of classical music in big halls in the middle of the nineteenth century—Hector Berlioz performing in a circus palace holding 5,000 people—brought the "democratization" of musical taste and then the standardization of dance forms, everyone doing the same steps even if in different spaces.

The section on technology is imaginative, portraying the musical "saturation" of many social contexts, first through keyboard instruments, then saxophones, and finally the "electrification" of music for the youth. Seeing how inventive musicians have been, Blanning scoffs at journalists who herald the death of the music industry. He also scorns the hierarchical ordering of listening practices so common in music history today, the Whiggish argument that "attentive" listeners did not arise until the early nineteenth century and can be found only in sacralized classical music.

The sections on "Status" (musicians' self-promotion) and "Purpose" (why compose music or perform it?), however, are built on a problematical argument, that singers and conductors replaced composers as mediators between music and society during the nineteenth century. For one thing, the boundaries between composer and performer remained vague in many instances. For another thing, by the 1860s two-thirds or more of the pieces played by orchestras and string quartets were classics, giving composers a profoundly subordinate position in musical culture. Blanning has little to say about this change.

Blanning mentions the invention of classical music when discussing matters in 1900, even though its origins can be seen in eighteenth-century British repertories drawn from the music of William Byrd, Henry Purcell, and George Frideric Handel. He is wrong to blame composers [End Page 122] for abandoning the public from the turn of the twentieth century. A fragmentation of musical life began in the 1850s, severing classical symphonies from popular songs and from "new classical" songs or symphonies. The section on "Liberation" is also problematical. Blanning uses the same term to discuss the operas that Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote in Paris during the 1670s and the influence of the Risorgimento on Giuseppe Verdi (which has come into considerable dispute recently).

But the notion of musical triumph rings true. Music has achieved a special public prominence in Western culture. To Blanning's list of examples might be added the wide dissemination of Benjamin Britten's music (the Ceremony of Carols, for example) during a period when contemporary music was at a historic low. Rather the same goes for American composers John Cage and John Adams, whose works 4' 33" and Nixon in China, respectively, have had a major...

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