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Fifth and last, and this is what is essential to the rest of the talk, the performing venues change, and with them the essential and intensely private relationship of the listener to the music itself. It seems to me that in our efforts to feel one in our country we've given ourselves quite a dilemma, and that is, how do we feel one through music? How can I feel that I can communicate with you in a microsecond? We try to find ways for our culture to help us to feel one. We have franchise hotels, we've invented transportation systems, we have Burger Kings and McDonalds. Trying to feel our unity, trying to pull together as one, is actually beginning to cause severe cultural problems in the rest of the world as we translate our need to become one into other cultures that don't need our brand of oneness. It's posing some interesting problems. To study waves of transportation I divided up the years from about 1750 to about 1956 into four major periods, and I went to the map division at the Library of Congress. (I had no idea how much fun maps are. Have you spent time with maps? Maps are emotional, they're just amazing!) I needed to find maps that gave me transportation and communication patterns. I constructed four time periods, and chose colored dots to represent the kinds of concert halls, performance venues, and gathering halls that were put in place during those time periods. The first map was drawn up in 1883. That was the year that the railroads gave us standardized time. Before 1883 we did not have the time zones that we have now; we had fifty different time zones in the United States, calculated by high noon. Because the railroads had become connected, and they needed to have a schedule, we have standardized times. The first period that I worked on was the period 1750 to 1869 using that particular map. Working with a couple of assistants I researched the performance halls in America and we put red dots wherever we could find a documented performance hall. There were some red dots along the Ohio River, some in what would become Illinois, a couple up in what would become northern Illinois and Wisconsin. These performance venues were anything from small churches to mining tents, to large tents, to hurdy-gurdy houses—these I had never heard of before; they were dance halls in which you paid to dance with a female. These females were not prostitutes; their job was to dance with you in places where the proportion of male to female was low because these people were going out building the country. From 1750 up until 1869 we saw what the country looked like in terms of congregant spaces. We did not count small churches in each community. The red dots represented discrete gathering places other than churches. 1869 was when the transcontinental railroads were joined in Utah, and people began to be able to transport interesting things—lots of lumber, mud from Arizona, building supplies, people, and big instruments. After 1869 we saw an explosion of spaces. We used green dots to represent 1869-1903. (1903 represents the first transcontinental car trip.) In areas around Denver, St. Louis, in Illinois, we had about five red dots. Between 1869 and 1903 it's just an explosion. And then between 1903 and 1926 an explosion of blue dots. What happened to the green dots? They became movie houses. The blue dots represent discrete spaces, spaces that were built for the purposes of music, or theater, or dance, spaces that were built in the way that we build spaces now. The sound was appropriate for music but not for speech. And so we had a refinement in the kinds of halls that we built between 1869 and 1903. At the end of the 1800s life became very interesting for classical music. Up until 1870 or so classical music in this country was not European. It was American classical music—camp songs, minstrel songs, the singing of psalms. Music began from the voice. After about 1860 a switch began, from voice to instruments. The opening of the conservatory at Leipzig had a tremendous effect on music in the United States. We began to send our potential music teachers not to singing schools but to Leipzig, to learn about music, how to teach it, what to teach. In the United States the music that was to be studied was the music that was brought back from Leipzig, played on those instruments, by the immigrant wave that began to arrive in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s. At the same time people began to experiment with telegraphy and sound. Morse code was invented in 1844. People began to want to communicate by radio telegraphy. From about 1844 to 1900 was the big period of the formation of what would become radio and television. Gugliemo Marconi is extraordinarily important in what will happen in the next fifty years in classical music and the concert hall in America. He is the fellow who made telegraphy practical. He made radio possible. He made ship-to-ship experiments and ship-to-shore experiments, and he formed the Marconi Company that was one of the first radio companies. And the rest is history. At this period—the 1890s to 1910—there was an extraordinary convergence of personalities germane to this talk today. Four people's paths crossed. Marconi was one of them. Then there was Walter Damrosch. He was born in Berlin in 1862, came to the United States, and founded the Oratorio Society of New York, the New York Symphony Society. Damrosch was the conductor of the day. He conducted Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz. He was really the first well-known conductor. Then there was Edward Krehbiel. Edward Krehbiel was the foremost arbiter of musical taste of his time. He wrote books about music, how to listen to music, and what to listen for. These two men knew each other. Edward Krehbiel wrote How to Listen to Music: Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art (1897), and in that book he talked about the oratorio, the symphony, the opera, how to listen to a piano concert. He laid out what became the fundamental structure of how we approach music education and the definition of classical music in our country. He talked about choir, but choir was not so important. Whereas choral music had once been the vehicle for studying music it now became less important. He listed the instruments of the orchestra, told us about each instrument, and solidified the structure of the orchestra by saying "This is the symphony orchestra." Who knows the name Francis Clarke Elliot? I didn't know the name either until I began my research. I stumbled across Francis Clarke Elliot, and I stumbled across the NBC Music Education Program. These four people began to work not only with each other but with the Marconi Company, which bought out the Victor Company. Now the Victor Company is the fifth participant preparing the concert hall to become a car radio. The Victor Company, which had been developing ways of recording in the late 1890s, began seriously producing discs and records in the early 1900s. 1901 was when they began to record the voice, and they had an entire repertoire of records by 1910. The idea was that they would invent a portable gramophone, that they would sell a bazillion of them, and that people all over the country would be able to have music with them wherever they went. You took your gramophone with you, and you also had to take the music with you. You took music with you because Victor had sold you a set of records, and those records were repertoire, and that repertoire was set by Damrosch and Krehbiel and Elliot and those who were forming what was the basis of a contemporary music education at the time. Now comes the car. This car is a Winton. In 1903 the first transcontinental car trip was made by Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson who made a bet of $50 that he could drive from San Francisco to New York. At that time there were only one hundred fifty miles of paved road in the country—everything else was dirt and mud. Dr. Jackson got in his car and made it to New York—it took him a long time. I tried to see if he could take a Gramophone in this car, and he couldn't. In 1910 Francis Clarke Elliot joined the Victor and Marconi companies, and was developing the Victor Redseal record music curriculum, which was used over the radio until 1943. I went through the Victor Redseal catalog index just to see what I could see, and I saw in the index 1638 separate subject headings. It is comprehensive. There are 704 pages. It is biased toward instrumental, German, French, European, and folk music. Four people in the book are mentioned by last name only, Beethoven, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare. Everybody else gets a first name. I don't know what that means but I think it is kind of interesting. |
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