Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Translations
- Bibliographic Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World
- PART I PUBLISHERS
- PART II PERSONALITIES
- PART III INSTRUMENTS
- PART IV REPERTOIRES
- PART V SETTINGS
- Index
- Music in Society and Culture
12 - The Business of Music on the Peripheries of Empire: A Turn-of-the-Century Case Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Translations
- Bibliographic Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World
- PART I PUBLISHERS
- PART II PERSONALITIES
- PART III INSTRUMENTS
- PART IV REPERTOIRES
- PART V SETTINGS
- Index
- Music in Society and Culture
Summary
IN recent decades, the musical life of cities has received increasing attention within musicology. As Tim Carter has pointed out, it is not surprising, given the field's history, that many studies of cities have focused on Italian centres in the Renaissance, or that one of the prominent early exceptions to the predominance of Italy, Reinhard Strohm's study of Bruges, examined a city associated with another foundational interest of the discipline, Franco-Flemish polyphony. Urban musicology, however, has broadened to include a variety of other cities, prominent among them the great metropolitan centres of Vienna, Paris, London and New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonial cities, too, particularly in Spanish and Portuguese America, have been the subject of pathbreaking studies.
There is one type of city, however, whose musical practices have so far received little attention: settler colonial cities, that is to say, the myriad cities that quickly grew from nothing, or from small and sleepy origins, to metropolitan areas of sometimes remarkable size, across central and western North America, Australia and New Zealand during the long nineteenth century. This is not, of course, to suggest that the music history of all these cities remains unknown: those that grew into major cities in their own right – Chicago and Los Angeles for instance – have attracted considerable musicological attention, and local historians have provided records of many other locations. But in part because historians and urban geographers have themselves only relatively recently begun to recognize the settler colonial city as distinctive and in part, perhaps, because of a reluctance to acknowledge that the American West, in particular, was populated through a process of colonization, studies of the musical life of those cities have been informed primarily by local and national perspectives. We have not yet considered what the peculiar dynamics of urban development in settler colonialism might have to do with musical practices that involved millions of city dwellers worldwide by the time of World War I.
There are good reasons to explore those issues, however. For one, the ‘instant’ nature of these cities – their extraordinarily rapid growth to sizes that in many cases rivalled those of European cultural centres that had existed for centuries, if not millennia – means that their cultural institutions too were newly created rather than evolving from pre-existing local practices.
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- The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930 , pp. 274 - 296Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016