Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs & Consumer Culture in Victorian America (review)

In his book, Manufacturing the Muse, Dennis Waring has effectively held a magnifying glass to Victorian society, offering significant insights into the role of the reed organ in the consumer culture of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. Certainly his study encompasses the Estey Organ Company in particular; but the scope of the work is much more far-reaching than would be permitted if he confined himself to a single product of a specific company. Instead, Waring has focused on the development of American material culture, on both social and economic implications of industrialization, on the position of this particular musical instrument in society through years of great change, and—not quite incidentally, but almost as a case study—on the Estey Organ Company, unique in its longevity and ability to change with the prevailing fickle tastes of American culture.

As an ethnomusicologist Waring is well prepared for such a task, for perhaps no discipline is more meticulous about the contexts in which music functions than is ethnomusicology. In fact, Waring begins the preface by noting the role of musical instruments as primary cultural indicators, citing Alan Merriam's principles concerning the socio-cultural functions of music (p. xiii). The appendices include a general history timeline, a further nod to the idea that music does not exist in a vacuum. The ethnomusicological premise of music and its instruments as part of the continuum of life is nowhere more clear than in this splendid study of Estey and the emergent consumer culture of America.

From the stance of scholarly comprehensiveness such thorough attention to context is laudable, but the reed organ afficionado and casual reader may need to exercise patience through the first third of the main text. One begins to wonder what happened to Estey until recalling that Waring pointed out in the introduction that he will devote part 1 entirely to contextual material related to Victorian society and consumer culture, mapping "cultural contexts and iconographic significance of the reed organ in a rapidly changing, consumer- oriented American society" (p. xiv). Part 2, then, places Estey in the cultural context, focusing on the "life and legacy of Jacob Estey and [examining] his formidable enterprise within its historical and cultural context" (p. xiv). Here again Waring demonstrates his concern for the broader picture when he notes that the biographical emphasis is deliberate, functioning as a paradigm mirroring the country's mood in general (p. xiv).

Although the contexts of music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America are central to the text even in the chapters concentrating on the history of the Estey company, the photographs, from the Brattleboro Historical Society and the collection of Harold A. Barry, focus exclusively on the Estey concerns. With more than one hundred photographs of the Estey family, factory buildings, trade cards, and instruments, both Estey aficionados and organ scholars will find material sufficient to keep them enmeshed in iconographical observations for quite some time.

A danger inherent in such intense or prolonged research about one individual—and it is clear that the amount of information amassed in this work is the result of decades of study—is for the researcher to develop a rather myopic outlook regarding the qualities of that individual. According to all reports, Jacob Estey was a paragon of virtue. Nevertheless, Waring remains refreshingly objective, urging, for example, that it would be naïve to assume Estey's involvement with the church was purely an issue of spiritual or social concern; he was a shrewd businessman, keenly aware of the ties he needed to cultivate on behalf of his organ enterprise. Further, although the Estey craftsmen were well cared for in comparison to the industrial standards of the day (or more precisely, the...