The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology by William Weber (review)

Lévi-Strauss doubts that an anthropology of high culture is possible, and trains attention on meals and marriage. But a few recent studies, emerging from backstage of the canon agon, have worked out terms for an anthropology of the arts in modern Western societies. Weber's book examines the "harvest festivals" (the concert schedule) of the English county elite and townsfolk in the eighteenth century and—with a density of detail worthy of the antitheorists to whom he makes a discreet nod—Weber arrives at something like a theory. Shy of statement, he describes its embodiment, the Handel Commemoration of 1784: "the reunion of Tory and Whig within a new political community," "a ritual solution to divisions created by the Civil War," "a celebration of the end of crisis." A canon of approved art is less aesthetic in motive than political—but not political in the sense we have presumed.