The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms
If you have ever wondered why concert programs in the modern world are constructed as they are, Weber’s fascinating book will help you understand. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a period in which programming stressed “miscellany,” the coexistence of different kinds of music on a single program, vocal, instrumental, virtuoso, Weber traces the gradual separation of programming into different venues. Moved by an idealism that expressed itself in the glorification of “classics,” audiences and impresarios separated “serious” music from operatic excerpts, glees and men’s choruses, chamber music, virtuoso extravaganzas. By the early twentieth century they had done their work too well, for worship of the “classics” implied a serious decline in the presence of “new” music, a problem that begins in the nineteenth century and is not restricted to the twentieth or twenty-first. Weber draws his data from a vast range of contemporary programs, painstakingly accumulated, many reproduced in facsimiles, others summarized.
Philip Gossett, recipient of the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and book prizes from the American Musicological Society and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, is Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Awarded the Italian government’s highest civilian honor, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, he is general editor of both The Works of Giuseppe Verdi and The Works of Gioachino Rossini, as well as the author of Divas and Scholars and other books on Italian opera and textual scholarship.
