Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (review)

Derek B. Scott begins his work by addressing the assumptions of scholars concerning the history of not only popular music but also western music in the 19^th century. Simply, Scott's work is corrective to the histories of popular music, which he sees as focusing exclusively on the 20^th century, by framing the story of Western popular music as indicative of massive socio-cultural shifts experienced primarily in urban areas during the 19^th century. For him, four specific styles—Viennese waltz, minstrel song, cabaret, and music hall—reveal the creation of the cultural marketplace, and by extension the notion of popular music itself. Moreover, these specific examples emphasize the appearance of distinctions of high and low culture, of commercial art and true art, and of class-based popular culture, although Scott problematizes such simplistic cultural schematics. Scott operates along several registers of methodology, including cultural criticism and new musicology, but perhaps he is most strongly informed by the sociologist Howard Becker, whose Art Worlds serves as the starting point for much of Scott's argument. Becker's conclusions on cultural conventions provide frisson for Scott, allowing him to move beyond the established cultural divides of high and low culture and the emphasis on high culture that dominates much of the existing scholarship on 19^th century music.

Scott organizes his work into two sections: in the first, he examines the social context and historical transformations that fostered the development of popular music; and in the second, he focuses on the specific case studies of the aforementioned styles to show aesthetic responses to the contexts elaborated on in the first section. Urbanization in the 19^th century, in Scott's view, was vital to the development of popular music by creating the possibility of professionalization and transforming the relationship between musical creators and audiences. Certainly, as William Weber and James Johnson have argued, musical performances were transformed by the ascendance of the middle class in the cultural sphere in France and Europe.¹ For Scott, popular music undermined "middle-class" notions of musical value, since the European middle classes continued to draw from the cultural capital of elites,² by making the market the arbiter of taste. Indeed, Scott argues that it is here, at the confluence between art and commerce, that contemporary notions of taste were established with commerce being indicative of a lesser taste (59-61).

From this perspective, popular music was seen as evidence of moral disorder and vulgarity. It is this high/low divide that has taken on a life of its own in musical scholarship, and Scott points out its genesis in the cultural debates concerning popular music in the 19^th century. Here is where Becker's work is so vital to Scott's conclusions. Conventions, for Becker, were patterns that defined the "rules" of a particular art world, and the necessary creation of new conventions in popular music marked for it a different aesthetic path than concert and symphonic music (93), indeed one that is much more indicative of the cultural amorphousness of modernity through its fluidity and hybidity. Scott is quite fruitful in his analysis of the response of critics and elites to popular music, particularly in his examples of transgressions between "cultured" audiences and popular song. The value that Queen Victoria gave to the popular tune "Home Sweet Home" illuminates how the tensions surrounding popular music in the cities of Vienna, Paris, London, and New York were not merely aesthetic in nature but also rooted in social debates.

In the second part of the work, Scott does focus on aesthetics to show how stylistic changes in popular music constituted cultural revolutions. Scott's focus on musicology here reinforces his earlier arguments by clarifying the processes of change and the influences of popular music. Here, he stresses the continuities between contemporary popular music and its...