1

Reading and Classical Music in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

Joan Shelley Rubin

In the mid-1950s, the American Council of Learned Societies’ Committee on Musicology embarked on an

effort to publicize the new discipline it represented by ‘establishing in print its relations to all types of

music and music-making’. The result was a series of short books that included, in addition to more

narrowly focused volumes, a wide-ranging set of observations titled Music in American Life (1956). Its

author, the eminent Columbia University critic and historian Jacques Barzun, posited the emergence of a

‘new musical culture’ over the first half of the twentieth century. The hallmark of this culture, Barzun

noted, was democratization, traceable to the technological innovations—the phonograph, the film

sound track, the radio, and Muzak—that had increased access to opportunities for listening and

performing.1

As Barzun noted, in 1954 approximately $70,000,000 was spent on classical records, as opposed

to around $750,000 twenty years earlier, when discs contained only one-fifth the amount of music

available after the introduction of long-playing records in 1948. Another measure of democratization, on

Barzun’s account, was the fact that twenty-five per cent of the population was ‘reached by art music’.

The ‘first great truth about music in this country at the mid-point of the twentieth century,’ Barzun

stated, was that it had become ‘for many people a passionate avocation’.2 Yet however revolutionary

the consequences of modern technology (and, Barzun hypothesized, modern malaise) for musical

culture, what appears to have been a golden age for the reception of classical music in the mid-

twentieth-century United States depended not on new inventions alone, but, rather, on the intersection

of those breakthroughs with older ideologies and institutions related as much to print as to sound. As

the creation of the ACLS series signaled, the dissemination of musical knowledge involved a population

of listeners who were also readers.

2

A complete map of the universe of print surrounding the popularization of the classical canon

between, roughly, 1920 and 1970, would have to include the production of program and liner notes,

concert reviews, biographies and memoirs of composers and performers, music columns in general

periodicals, and specialized publications. Three aspects of that universe, however, stand out as

particularly pertinent to the reading experience. The first is the identification of listening to music with

the act of reading a book, an equivalency that led to the reconfiguration of school and public libraries as

sites for the distribution of phonograph records. The second, exemplified by the Book-of-the-Month

Club, is the marketing of records by capitalizing on the same anxieties that readers exhibited in their

quest for culture. The third is the production, dissemination, and reception of volumes about how to

understand classical music, a type of book that made reading a prerequisite for the full ‘appreciation’ of

a concert or radio broadcast. Those works by people who went on the air themselves were especially

visible. For the most part, such writings allow a glimpse of an implied audience, although, in the case of

Leonard Bernstein (discussed at some length below), it has been possible to recover the responses of an

actual readership.

These phenomena proceeded from a common ideal, widely shared in the nineteenth century:

the belief that familiarity with classic works of both literature and music were characteristics of the

refined or cultured person. The ideal was under threat in the post-World War I era, contested by the

trend toward specialization, challenged by the growth of mass entertainment, and rendered irrelevant

in some quarters by business priorities. Yet it was buttressed at the same time by a dramatic rise in the

number of college and high school graduates, an increase in leisure time, a booming book market that

packaged the humanities in various forms, and a concern among more thoughtful observers about the

dangers from rampant materialism to what they denominated ‘civilization’. 3 Those factors coalesced to

strengthen middlebrow audiences for both music and words, opening up new possibilities for mediators

to address Americans’ aspirations and fears.

3

Reading, Listening, and the Library

For decades, patrons of public libraries have had access to collections of recorded music as well as to

books, yet no one much thinks about how it came to be that a space designed to house objects for

readers also came to be repositories of objects for listeners. The beginnings of that story are somewhat

obscure, but it is clear that at its center was Victor—the Victor Talking Machine Company, manufacturer

of the Victrola. In 1911, ten years after its founding, the company hired a progressive music educator,

Frances Elliott Clark, to urge phonograph and record purchases on parents and teachers. Employing

Clark, who established an Education Department at Victor, was a brilliant stroke: by focusing on

exposing children to recorded music, the company could create a lifelong demand for its product. But

Clark’s effort also marks the evolving relationship between recording technology and reading, as well as

between a commercial entity and high-mindedness. In 1926, Victor donated over 400 discs to the

Library of Congress to augment its holdings of printed music materials, starting the Library’s Recorded

Sound Division.

By that time, Clark had generated a spate of her own writings to promote the idea that exposure

to ‘good’ music benefited both the individual and society. Her book Music Appreciation with the Victrola

for Children (1923), embellished on the title page with the famous ‘His Master’s Voice’ logo, included

lesson outlines—tied to a numerical listing of Victor recordings available for purchase—that helped turn

classrooms into sites for the encounters with ‘beauty’ and opportunities for ‘expression’ that accorded

with progressive pedagogy. Victor Educational Literature, in booklet format, was distributed free of

charge, with special materials aimed at rural schools. But Clark’s activities also intersected with reading

in another way. Recordings, she insisted, should become part of school libraries. In that way, her

recommendation bespoke the affinity she (and her librarian colleagues) assumed between classical

4

music and great literature: records and books belonged together as essential means to become fully

cultured.4

As the record industry grew and refined its technological capabilities, Clark’s vision of the place

of recorded music in an institution of reading had additional champions. On the eve of the Great

Depression, public libraries such as the one in St. Paul, Minnesota began lending records along with

books, although other institutions made patrons listen to music on site to prevent the damage that

librarians thought home circulation invited. The equation of readers and listeners is especially apparent

in the activities of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, formed by educators and

philanthropists in 1939. Eastman School of Music Director Howard Hanson headed the group in its first

year, 1939-40, and was succeeded by former Juilliard president and ‘great books’ proponent John

Erskine. One of its projects was the establishment of ‘Public Music Libraries’ to ‘encourage the lending of

or listening to recorded music in the same manner as books were available to the public’.5 The National

Committee piloted free home lending Washington, D. C., Newark, New Jersey, and Chicago and

Evanston, Illinois, by supplying libraries in those localities with symphonic ‘masterpieces’. In that way, as

one librarian commented, the Committee ‘put good music on the same plane as good reading’.6

The question of who has the authority to define ‘good’ hovers over any account of this activity;

librarians working with the National Committee generally limited collections to the classics but struggled

over where to draw the line between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’.7 In that respect, the Committee members

functioned as agents of the sacralization of culture that Lawrence Levine described in

Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988). But sacralization always coexisted with processes of desacralization, which

the inception of public music libraries beautifully exemplifies. The librarians who participated in the

project reported that ‘music appreciation is in no wise confined to a limited circle bounded by money or

educational advantage’. The overarching goal of the National Committee for Music Appreciation was to

5

create ‘a continuing opportunity for the masses of people to enjoy good music,’ not to confine the

pleasures of listening to an ‘elite’.8

This purpose carried with it the conviction that the individual enjoyment of music led to

certain social benefits—what the Committee’s director labeled ‘cultural community progress’. 9 The

spread of classical music to ever-larger audiences constituted, in the Committee’s view, a means of

creating better citizens. Such thinking was by no means confined to the National Committee. In America,

the conceit that musical performance would promote social harmony dated to the colonial period.10

The phrase ‘civic orchestra’, a type of ensemble proliferating at this time, is the most salient

manifestation of this idea in the twentieth century. But the leadership of the Committee invoked the

same rhetoric in touting its support for public music libraries. Especially given the outbreak of war in

Europe, the image of a community united by a shared commitment to the democratization of music

therefore gave the Committee’s efforts to make the classics accessible through institutions of print

culture a decidedly political cast.11

Listeners and Readers: ‘More or Less the Same People’

As educators and librarians conflated reading and listening in their endeavor to popularize compositions

by Beethoven, Mozart, or Schubert, entrepreneurs joined the Victor Company in devising marketing

schemes that depended on the recognition that American audiences for ‘good’ music and ‘good’

literature were one and the same. The richest example comes from that quintessential middlebrow print

culture institution, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which in the early 1950s began a classical record

distribution operation that served as a pilot for its broader-based record sales efforts later on.

Harry Scherman had founded the club in 1926 in order to sell newly published books by

subscription through the mail. After three decades of success, Scherman decided to collaborate with the

Metropolitan Museum on a mail-order course in art history consisting of miniature reproductions of the

6

museum’s holdings.12 This venture built on the club’s attunement to an aspiring public’s desire for

tutelage in matters of cultural knowledge that went beyond the literary. The club’s launch of the art

print enterprise established the feasibility of creating other subsidiaries. But Scherman’s decision in

1953 to sell recordings depended on three additional factors. First, as Scherman recalled, the invention

of the long-playing record made it profitable to set a ‘reasonable price’ for a single classical

composition.13 Second, Scherman perceived that ‘there was a real demand for . . . ‘understanding

music’. . . . [People] felt they should have more information about what they were listening to’. 14 That

insight arose in part from a third factor—one that powerfully symbolizes the overlapping social worlds

of the publishing and the music business in New York City at this time: namely, the role in the club’s

operation of Harry Scherman’s son Thomas. Tom was the founder, in 1947, of the Little Orchestra

Society, and subsequently started a series of concerts for children involving greater instructional content

than similar fare for young audiences. Noticing that the parents were as interested as the kids, he then

staged concerts with WNYC radio commentator David Randolph that drew more diverse listeners than

the ones who attended the Little Orchestra Society’s Town Hall performances.15

These technological and personal circumstances melded in the determination of Scherman and

his associates to do something other than just to sell symphonies or concertos, which people were

already able to purchase by mail-order and through subscription from other concerns such as the

Literary Guild, and, beginning in August, 1955, from the Columbia Record Club. Instead, the Book-of-

the-Month Club management devised a combination of ‘enjoyment’ and ‘education’: Music-

Appreciation Records that featured classical music on one side and analysis of the piece, written or

supervised by Tom Scherman, on the other.16 Prospective purchasers could send in for free samples—

Debussy’s ‘La Mer’, Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony’—to decide whether to subscribe, a strategy that, as

Axel Rosin, Scherman’s son-in-law and a key figure in the club’s record operation explained, eschewed

the bargain appeal of a discounted price and hence won over a ‘higher level’ of customer.17 Obscuring

7

his commercial interests (a move which actually furthered them), Harry Scherman pronounced the plan

‘a straight educational job that, to our minds, is being done better on our records than in any other

way’. Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers were the first test market, with ‘very good results’, bearing

out the premise, as a club advertising executive put it, that ‘although it might seem that this would not

be the case’, the ‘people who are interested in books and in good music and in such educational and

cultural things . . . are more or less the same people’. A year into the venture there were around

175,000 subscribers to the records.18

In order to reach that audience, Scherman relied on all of the techniques that the company’s

distribution to readers had pioneered, including the avoidance of the bargain look. The Music-

Appreciation Records product entailed not only the subscription obligation and the ‘negative option’ to

send back the monthly selection, but also the development of a printed pamphlet, analogous to the

Book-of-the-Month Club News, that carried the judgment of an expert—in this case, the music

commentator Deems Taylor—about the merits of the offering. ‘Many people are bewildered by the

proliferation of recordings,’ Scherman declared in his interview with the Columbia Oral History Project

the year distribution of the Music- Appreciation Records began. ‘They don’t know where to turn’. 19 That

bewilderment paralleled the confusion of the hapless book-buyer on which the club had staked its

success since 1926.

The advertisements for Music-Appreciation Records addressed an additional anxiety that

musical encounters amplified: consumers’ uneasiness about exactly what to listen for in ‘good’ music.

The ads’ underlying message emphasized the purchasers’ personal inadequacies. ‘Our minds wander’,

one ad in Popular Science Monthly declared, ‘and we realize afterward that we have missed most of the

beauties of the work’. 20 The subscription arrangement promised the knowledge required to prevent

that state of disarray. This psychological approach displaced the emphasis on civic responsibility in the

rhetoric of the National Committee for Music Appreciation. Nevertheless the ad, like middlebrow

8

culture generally, balanced competing appeals. It combined allusions to listeners’ deficiencies with the

celebration of their powers of ‘self-education,’ assuring potential subscribers that the records would

enable them to hear what ‘great conductors’ hear. Scherman’s assumption that deeper ‘aesthetic and

intellectual pleasure,’ as the ad put it, would result from developing one’s analytical skills (a premise he

shared with Clark) amalgamated homage to longstanding ideals of the cultured person as serious and

disciplined with explicit references to the heightened ‘enjoyment’ that a subscription would provide; the

ad highlighted Scherman’s sense of the dual purposes the double-sided records served. A similar

balance between the modern consumer’s demand for time-saving devices and respect for the social

standing of college graduates appears in an endorsement from the publisher and television personality

Bennett Cerf, which ran initially in the quintessentially middlebrow Saturday Review: ‘In a few minutes

Music-Appreciation Records taught me more about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony than I learned in a

month in a course at college!’21 That selling point had been a staple of advertisements for commodities

accommodating consumers’ desires to acquire culture on relatively painless terms at least since Dr.

Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books proffered the equivalent of a university education in fifteen minutes of

reading a day.

At the time of his interview with the Columbia Oral History Project, Scherman was pondering

whether to do ‘something for new records comparable to what is done for new books’, including the

possibility of instituting a Board of Judges like the one that selected the ‘book-of-the-month’. 22 By 1957,

the club had entered into an arrangement with RCA Victor to promote such a plan: the RCA Victor

Society of Great Music. The Society’s brochure employed domestic imagery, a feature of earlier

distribution campaigns such as one mounted by the Washington Star newspaper in 1939, to sell its

product, declaring that its offer embodied ‘an idea so natural and so widely needed it seems sure to be

welcomed in every home where music is loved’. 23 The innovative feature of the enterprise, however,

was the Selection Panel, which included Jacques Barzun and a raft of notable musicians and

9

musicologists—Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Carleton Sprague Smith, and G. Wallace Woodworth

among them. This group especially served a type of cultural consumer who had emerged as records had

become less novel and more accessible: the collector engaged in building—in a revealing phrase—a

‘record library’. As one Society document declared, ‘A cardinal feature of the plan is guidance... to keep

your growing library at once valuable and enjoyably balanced’. 24 Although the Book-of-the-Month Club

paid panelists for their printed remarks about the music in the newsletter Great Music, the ‘experts’

chose the repertoire, not the recordings, a means of positioning them above the market. As Barzun

wrote to Scherman in some unhappiness concerning the club management’s failure to keep the panel

informed about the outcome of their deliberations, the Society was ‘in part an intellectual enterprise’. 25

Yet, echoing the club’s calculated effort, with respect to book selection, to preserve a space for the

authority of the reader, the Society of Great Music announced that its ‘dependable’ guidance

‘obviously... need not be slavishly followed whenever one’s personal tastes dictate otherwise’. 26

The Book-of-the-Month Club’s Music-Appreciation Records and RCA Victor Society of Great

Music endeavors thus illustrate the fully complementary relationship between middlebrow print and

musical cultures of the 1950s. By 1974, Book-of-the-Month Club Records (not limited to classical music)

had superseded those efforts; ten years later the club began manufacturing its own recordings, available

in retail outlets as well as through the mail. The Schermans’ function in mediating classical repertoire

was thereby diminished, but the alignment of records with books under the club brand continued to

assure consumers uncertain about what to buy that they were purchasing music that they could

‘respect’. 27

Reading about Listening

Books about how to understand the intricacies of classical music were available to American readers in

the second half of the nineteenth century. As technological advances widened audiences for classical

10

performance, however, an increasing number of writers took up the subject of what those audience

members should listen for in order to arrive at understanding and enjoyment. A large group of

individuals embraced radio and television as a means to convey that knowledge, while at the same time

constructing listeners as readers by expressing their precepts and opinions in print. By mid-century, that

group of commentators-cum-authors included Deems Taylor, Sigmund Spaeth, David Randolph, George

Marek, Olin Downes, Abram Chasins, and Leonard Bernstein. Edward Tatnall Canby, who reviewed

records for the quintessentially middlebrow Saturday Review and did the same on WNYC, New York

City’s municipal station, deserves special mention as the son of Henry Seidel Canby, longtime chair of

the Book-of-the-Month Club board of judges. To be sure, numerous books and periodicals about

classical music appeared that were only indirectly related to radio or television programs. Furthermore,

it must be acknowledged that, while some books on music published in the mid-twentieth century

became best sellers for idiosyncratic reasons, for the most part individual titles either fell into the

category that historians of print culture have denominated ‘steady sellers’, accumulating sizeable

readerships only over time, or earned notice in the trade for a season or two. Yet radio and television

personalities who became authors enhanced their authority with their listeners and corroborated their

status as celebrities through the use of both media.28 In the process, they made reading books about

classical music an antidote to the anxieties of their audiences, and augmented the experiences that

permitted individuals to fulfill their aspirations to culture.

Nevertheless the terms on which these doubly visible intermediaries created accessibility varied

significantly. Two such individuals—Sigmund Spaeth and David Randolph—exemplify some of the

possibilities. Spaeth illustrates an extreme version of desacralization, coupled with an open disposition

toward the commercial. In 1924, while working as a piano salesman, he did a series of programs on

music appreciation that stressed the importance of learning to recognize melody; the same year, he

carried that conviction to readers in a book, The Common Sense of Music. Within its pages, he argued as

11

well that classical music was not ‘highbrow’ or ‘something difficult’, but, rather, a source of ‘fun’.

Spaeth extended his role as a pitchman for approachability in more than a dozen subsequent volumes,

symbiotically related to his growing fame as a radio star. He was on the air in some capacity every year

between 1921 and 1951. The moniker he adopted—’the Tune Detective’—became the title of an NBC

show in the early 1930s.29 In 1945, Spaeth brought out perhaps his most representative book, At Home

With Music, for which he partnered with Magnavox, the manufacturer of ‘radio-phonographs’.

Addressing ‘frightened’ readers who suffered from an ‘aesthetic inferiority complex’, he offered lists of

recordings categorized into ‘What Every Music Lover Should Know’ and ‘Music You Enjoy’. Yet, despite

Spaeth’s stance as an expert, At Home With Music reiterated the importance of trusting one’s judgment

and listening for the familiar.30 In that respect, it echoed the marketing strategies for the Book-of-the-

Month Club’s records, alleviating audiences’ self-doubt both by supplying guidance and by bolstering

individuals’ confidence in their own taste. If acquiring Music-Appreciation records was worth more than

a month in college, the act of reading Spaeth was arguably worth more than an hour on a therapist’s

couch.

David Randolph’s writing tendered the same benefits, but configured the availability of those

benefits differently. Randolph came to radio not from sales but from a background as a choral

conductor. In 1943, he founded The Randolph Singers, a five-voice madrigal group that gave concerts,

made recordings, and appeared on the radio. He became host of his own program on WNYC in 1946.

The initial title of Randolph’s show, ‘Music for the Connoisseur’, suggests, if not a deliberate attempt to

counteract Spaeth’s emphasis on ‘fun’, a paradoxical attempt to widen the audience for classical music

by preserving its status as a rarefied form of expression—by playing, in other words, to listeners’ desires

to join the cultured few. He also strove to play works that were, in Musical America’s phrase, ‘off the

beaten path’. 31 The premise of ‘Music for the Connoisseur’ was, as one implicitly self-congratulatory fan

put it, that ‘the listener has some intelligence and knowledge’. Yet not too much knowledge: the

12

program was in reach, the Musical America reviewer stressed, of those who might have ‘relatively

limited musical background’. Randolph achieved this aura of accessibility by adopting a stance that

Deems Taylor called ‘erudite without being soporific’. One woman wrote WNYC to praise him as ‘a ‘radio

personality’ whose authority and friendliness is untouched by affectation and conceit’. Randolph’s voice

added to that aura because it was as ‘dry and crackling as Crispy Corn Flakes’ and ‘quavering’.32

When Randolph turned to a major engagement with print by bringing out This is Music in 1964,

he solidified his several appeals. At least fifteen years in the making, This is Music contained no musical

notation, but rested solely on Randolph’s adamant argument that music had no meaning or subject

matter except for ‘our inner emotional condition’. According to Randolph, telling listeners to identify the

‘pictures’ that music created was far from harmless, because it deflected their attention from the chief

source of ‘pleasure’ in music: a grasp, not primarily of melody, as Spaeth would have it, but of the

complexities of form. Operating on this principle, Randolph devoted a third of This is Music to non-

technical exposition of the nature and purposes of classical music’s formal elements, which, he averred,

were ‘determined by our emotional needs’. In Randolph’s view, both ‘sensuous’ and ‘intellectual’

satisfaction were ‘open to everyone’ who embraced his perspective.33

By freeing listeners and readers from the necessity of discerning meaning, Randolph

disenfranchised the ‘expert’ who could demystify works that seemed beyond the audience’s

understanding. Concomitantly, he empowered amateurs to shed their ‘feeling of inadequacy’.34 As

Randolph declared, ‘Appreciation of a very high order is possible for the listener with no technical

knowledge’. The notice of This is Music in the Book-of-the-Month Club News for March, 1964

underscored the book’s reassuring quality, stating that it should be ‘helpful’ to those who have ‘listened

to a great deal of music’ but erroneously suspect ‘that its deeper meanings are beyond their ken’. 35

Evidence for that effect on readers came from the editor of Stereo Review, who reported that a 1979

reissue of the volume had transformed the life of a friend previously ‘intimidated by the whole aura of

13

classical music’. 36 For all his apparent disdain for Spaeth, then, Randolph’s turn to print sounded, in

another key, the same comforting message that the ‘Tune Detective’ had promulgated about the

relationship between reading and listening. But the two commentators relied on opposite strategies to

supply that comfort—Randolph bolstering the sacralization of culture by admitting his followers to its

restricted precincts, Spaeth (more the desacralizer) by tearing down the gates.

Leonard Bernstein’s Reading Listeners

Not all readers about classical music in mid-twentieth-century America, however, required the same

degree of reassurance. A segment of the middlebrow public sought primarily to confirm their

attainment of culture more than to relieve their worries about their deficiencies—although the two

impulses are admittedly not entirely separable. This alternative relationship between reading and

listening is strikingly apparent in the fan mail that the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein

received about his first book, The Joy of Music. The letters to Bernstein are all the more interesting

because, while there is no extant correspondence to Spaeth and only scant material from readers in

Randolph’s papers, the Bernstein archive make it possible to document reader response directly.37

The Joy of Music landed on the nation’s bookshelves in November, 1959, in time for the

Christmas trade.38 By then, its author was famous as the principal conductor of the New York

Philharmonic orchestra, as a master of diverse compositional genres (including the Broadway musical),

and as the commentator about classical music on two television series: Omnibus and Bernstein’s Young

People’s Concerts. The Joy of Music drew on those activities: it consisted of seven Omnibus scripts and

three ‘imaginary conversations’ about musical interpretation and composition, together with a piece on

film scoring and a section of photographs. For the purposes of locating Bernstein culturally, however,

perhaps the most important part of The Joy of Music was the introduction, subtitled ‘The Happy

Medium’. There Bernstein staked out a middle ground between what Virgil Thomson called the ‘music-

14

appreciation racket,’ whose exemplars explained music in oversimplified, extra-musical terms, and

technical analysis. Bernstein aligned his interpretive stance with his presumptive readers, who, he said,

were ‘intelligent’ and ‘more often than not longing for insight and knowledge’. 39

The circumstances governing the production and marketing of The Joy of Music made that

readership possible. The volume’s publisher was the New York house of Simon and Schuster, one of the

upstart, young, mainly Jewish firms that had originated in the booming book trade of the years following

World War I. Its co-founder, Richard L. Simon, came from (and later fathered) a musical family. Dick

Simon had spent some time as a piano salesman before entering the book business. In the 1940s,

authors on Simon and Schuster’s music list included Deems Taylor and Leopold Stokowski; a steady

seller for the firm was Charles O’Connell’s Victor Book of the Symphony, along with several other

compendia, such as Henry W. Simon’s A Treasury of Grand Opera. Thus the firm well understood the

ready market for titles that capitalized on the insecurities and ambitions fueling the book-buying public’s

musical interests.

But it was Henry Simon, Dick Simon’s brother, who made the crucial difference in the

publication of The Joy of Music, as Bernstein acknowledged in calling him in his acknowledgments the

‘godfather’ of the book. Simon, who joined S and S as an editor in 1944, wrangled with Bernstein

throughout the late 1940s and 1950s in hopes of getting a manuscript out of him. Perhaps because of

his own desire to cement his credentials as an intellectual, the maestro finally took time from his

numerous commitments to complete the volume. But Simon exercised a heavy shaping hand

throughout the process. A letter about the manuscript from Simon to Bernstein’s secretary Helen Coates

in 1956 is instructive, first of all, for highlighting how reading words differs from listening to them. ‘On

account of the nature of the occasions and the type of audience they are written for’, Simon wrote,

‘there creeps, occasionally, into the language a certain air which did not sound like it on TV or on the

records but reads suspiciously like condescension’. Secondly, Simon’s critique reveals his effort to

15

acknowledge prospective readers’ ambivalent regard for expertise. Simon’s sense of Bernstein’s

audience likewise dictated the structure of the book, which moves, as Simon put it, ‘from the sort of

piece that can be read by the musical illiterate to the sort that will at least seem to be more technical

because of the inclusion of musical examples’—a progression calculated to appeal to a wide swath of

the public and to strike, in form, the balance that Bernstein and Simon strove for in tone and content.40

The advertisements for The Joy of Music targeted the eclectic readership the author and his

editor envisioned. The most inventive and revealing of the ads’ themes is the deployment of the phrases

‘Leonard Bernstein in Book Form’ and ‘Bernstein between covers!’41 This pitch can be read on several

levels. It affirms Bernstein’s skill as a writer. Implicitly, it also alludes to his television appearances,

promising to substitute permanence for the evanescence of broadcasting. (‘Millions of us’, the

publication day advertisement stated, ‘have wanted to revisit Leonard Bernstein’s inspiring television

programs on Omnibus’. 42) ‘Leonard Bernstein in Book Form’ also suggests the containment of

Bernstein’s wild energy even as advertisers sold an encounter with pages that ‘glow[ed]’ with the

author’s ‘genius’. The slogan reduced the phenomenon of Bernstein to manageable proportions. In book

form, music became ‘clear’ as well as ‘entertaining’.43 Presenting Bernstein between covers was

analogous to putting the genie (or genius) back in the bottle, where readers inclined to feel uneasy

about their musical knowledge could view it at a safe distance.

The letters that Bernstein received in response to the book’s publication attest that, as another

ad for the volume proclaimed, it was ‘snapped up by readers of all ages and all degrees of musical

sophistication’.44 These items, it should be noted, are a small fraction of his voluminous fan mail, most of

which refers to television programs or live concerts alone. Yet that fraction includes notes from high

school students and middle-aged correspondents in about equal proportion. It contains as well some

complaints about readers’ frustrations at not being able to decipher the book’s printed musical

examples, along with earnest queries from young performers about how to pursue musical careers. That

16

is, Simon and Schuster’s targeted mixed-level audience materialized. As for the rest of the broad

demographic picture, these documents substantiate Bernstein’s appeal to both male and female readers

(with the latter predominating) and his national reach. By the same token, none of the writers to

Bernstein about his first book mentioned that they were other than white or middle-class.

More noteworthy are the revelations that the letters contain pertaining to how readers thought

about and used the The Joy of Music. The frequency with which Bernstein’s audience relied on

conventions of response—on formulaic phrases that might be applied to any book—is in itself worth

observing. ‘My parents bought your book and gave it to me’, a thirteen-year-old girl wrote, ‘and it

trapped me. I could hardly let it down [sic]. Every bit of it fascinated me’. 45 Another reader remarked

that she had ‘devoured’ the chapter in The Joy of Music on the art of conducting.46 Letter-writers

commonly thanked Bernstein for writing a work that they ‘enjoyed’. 47 That language was, and remains,

the stock-in-trade of fan mail, but it usually conveys the intensity and pleasure associated with the

reading of fiction. The fact that The Joy of Music evoked the same statements argues that, while one

might expect otherwise because of the specialized nature of the subject matter, for part of Bernstein’s

audience the experience of reading a work on music—albeit one in an accessible register—was not

qualitatively different from reading a novel.

Readers’ recourse to convention, however, coexisted with their description of the particular

practices that The Joy of Music permitted. A young woman student affirmed that one advantage of

‘Leonard Bernstein in Book Form’ was the opportunity it presented for re-reading—an implicit contrast,

again, to the ephemerality of attending a concert or watching television. ‘I have read ‘The Joy of Music’

so often’, she declared, ‘that the pages of my book are crumbling. I can quote you quite accurately’.48 A

high school student documented another form of intensive perusal. ‘This past summer, I read your book

The Joy of Music’, she wrote, ‘and I found it so interesting that I spent the whole day reading it. It was

one of the few books on music that I have ever completely understood’.49 Greater depth of knowledge

17

was the primary goal of this immersion in the text. ‘I think I could read it 100 times’, a correspondent

averred, ‘& still find something each time I hadn’t learned before and I have been told that quality is

what constitutes a great book’.50

Yet while those comments implied that the printed volume could stand on its own, other

responses signaled the reciprocal relationship between reading and listening on which the ads that

promised ‘revisiting’ Omnibus sought to capitalize. Readers used Bernstein’s book to reinforce

performances and to prepare for new ones. A woman from Illinois first told him that ‘at the end of your

broadcasts, I know an awful lot more than I did an hour earlier, and that I have a far greater appreciation

of those composers whose works I hadn’t known well nor particularly liked before’. She went on: ‘I am

frank to admit that this year, since I have spent time reading (and re-reading) ‘The Joy of Music’ I find I

am enjoying your concerts even more than in previous years. I only wish that all your TV concerts were

available on records. With your book on my lap and your concerts on the Victrola, I might be able to call

myself a student of music appreciation quite honestly’.51 For other individuals, Bernstein’s volume

compensated for missing telecasts.52 Most important, while a number of letter-writers regretted the

absence of recordings to accompany the book, others indicated that reading enabled them to relive the

sound of the commentaries integral to Bernstein’s televised concerts. One woman wrote: ‘After hearing

and seeing you on TV so often, when I read your book, I could hear your voice as I studied each word’.53

A fan who read The Joy of Music in two days and who had watched Young People’s Concerts asserted,

‘As I read your book I could almost hear your voice and see your expressions . . . ’.54 The latter remarks

suggest that Bernstein ‘in book form’ created a sense of intimacy between audience and conductor,

offsetting the distance imposed by Bernstein’s position as a celebrity. Hearing Bernstein’s voice in one’s

head while encountering him on the page allowed for the feeling that he was speaking directly, and

only, to oneself.

18

Moreover, experiencing a sense of connection to Bernstein through reading (and then writing

to) him could have the effect of confirming the reader’s identity as a cultured person. One way to

understand the references to love of classical music that pepper Bernstein’s fan mail is to see them as a

way for the letter-writers to certify themselves as part of Bernstein’s milieu. Reading Bernstein possibly

signified even more seriousness than watching him on television, and licensed a correspondingly greater

confidence in one’s cultural credentials. ‘The Joy of Music I have enjoyed a great deal’, a woman from

suburban Boston informed the author, ‘and have recommended it to many not-awfully-musical people

who also seem to have ‘got something’ out of it, if you know what I mean’.55 A subset of this

correspondence is the mail from teenagers who look to Bernstein as a source of approval for their

rejection of rock ‘n roll.56

The impulse to affirm one’s identity likewise governed the act of owning Bernstein’s work (as

distinct from the act of reading it). Released as it was for the Christmas market and later sold as a

graduation present, The Joy of Music falls into the tradition of the Victorian gift book, which was

designed as a keepsake and decorated for display. While Bernstein’s hardcover volume lacks any

embellishments, it accrued some of the gift book’s effects. Many readers told Bernstein that they had

put the book on their ‘Christmas list’ or obtained it as a welcome holiday present—one that

acknowledged their musical interests and potentially endowed The Joy of Music with the status of a

treasured object.57 A letter from a seventeen-year-old girl in Bennington, Vermont reflects the same

phenomenon: ‘I have just finished your book and have decided it is the only present I hope to receive

when I graduate this June. And as I told mother, ”It will be one of the few chosen books I will take to

college next fall’’’.58 A key piece of documentation for this point comes from my own copy of The Joy of

Music, bought with five dollars that I received for a poem published in a now-defunct teenage magazine.

In an inscription on the flyleaf, I wrote that I had ‘made this book a sacred possession of mine’. These

readers, including myself, turned the material embodiment of Bernstein’s stature and sensibility into a

19

token of their own sensitivity, which could conveniently be displayed to others. As the seventeen-year-

old wrote Bernstein, ‘The music I thought I knew so much about never existed for me until now... and I

am beginning to learn all about it all over again. . . . It’s as if I never before had any feeling for it’.59 In my

own case, a desire to stand out from my peers as artistic and intellectual was surely wrapped up in my

Bernstein purchase.

With some exceptions (‘as far as classical music is concerned we are practically illiterate’60),

then, Bernstein’s correspondents, regardless of their level of musical ability, do not reveal the distress

about their shortcomings that Spaeth and Randolph attributed to their readers. Rarely do they admit

that they used to feel intimidated by the mysteries of the classical canon until they heard or read the

maestro. Instead, Bernstein’s fans mainly write as musical insiders—or at least reveal their wish to join

an inner circle of cultured individuals. Bernstein’s apparently less anxious readership may be an artifact

of the self-selection attending the writing of a fan letter. The greater opportunities for prior exposure to

classical music in the years between Spaeth’s and Bernstein’s books may account for the more confident

tone of the Bernstein archive. Was the television audience more affluent, and therefore perhaps more

knowledgeable about classical music to begin with, than the population that tuned into Spaeth or

Randolph? Or was the act of writing to Bernstein in an assured voice simply a different strategy for

managing underlying feelings of inadequacy about one’s cultural credentials?

In any event, a larger lesson emerges from exploring reading and the popularization of classical music in

the mid-twentieth-century United States: the patrons who checked out recordings from public libraries,

the subscribers to Music-Appreciation records, and the readers of books proffering musical

understanding were not a monolithic group of consumers. Put another way, there were multiple

middlebrow publics. That point comes across in an invitation Jacques Barzun received around 1960 from

the magazine High Fidelity, itself a print manifestation of technological advances in the reproduction of

sound. The editors asked Barzun—as well as other ‘writers, businessmen, teachers, actors, public

20

servants, etc’. —to contribute to a series titled ‘Living With Music’. The idea was to offer models of

‘home music listening’ on the part of amateurs, not professional performers, so that High Fidelity

readers could both gain understanding and feel comfortable with their own habits. ‘The readership

these articles will reach’, the invitation observed, ‘is an attentive and grateful one. Nearly all our readers

are thoroughly in love with music, but some on very short acquaintance, extending back only through

the current renascence of the phonograph. They are very adventuresome and curious, much more so

than concert audiences. They expect music to affect them intimately, and they are keenly interested in

the experiences of people who have lived intimately with music’.61 High Fidelity’s readers differed from

the run of concert-goers not least because they had taken the step of subscribing to a specialized

periodical. One is tempted to go further and argue that the variability among individuals who sought

musical knowledge through institutions and forms of reading undermines any coherent formulation of

‘middle-class taste’.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, the striking thing is that the

assimilation of transformations in music culture to book culture rested on a set of common assumptions

that have now dissolved. The ACLS committee disbanded early on, in 1959, consigning musicology to the

academy. To many, the ideal of the cultured person appears elitist and outmoded. Niche marketing

prevails. In the twenty-first century, public libraries still offer music to borrowers, but the compact disc

is going the way of the LP. The voice of the expert guide largely has been replaced by that of the

empowered Amazon reviewer. Book-of-the-Month Club records are collectors’ items in the era of digital

downloads. Fundamentally, listening to music at home with focused attention has dwindled.62 Although

fear of the classical canon crops up in a minority of individuals—worsened, perhaps, by the mysteries of

modernism, the impulse to assuage that fear through reading is not detectable on publishers’ lists. In

those circumstances, my copy of The Joy of Music remains a ‘sacred possession’ not only for evoking my

21

youthful self-image but also for pointing to the vanished values and practices attending the convergence

of technological change, reading, and listening in what seems a distant past.

22

Notes

1 Jacques Barzun to Frederic Cohen, 1 April 1955, Series II, Box 75, Folder ‘Music—General

Correspondence July 1953-August 1955’, Jacques Barzun Papers, Butler Rare Book and Manuscript

Library, Columbia University, New York, NY. Used by permission of --.

2 Jacques Barzun, Music in American Life (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 15-17, 20, 77.

3 I have elaborated on the context for the emergence of middlebrow culture, and discussed its literary

components, in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,

1992).

4 Frances Elliott Clark, Music Appreciation With the Victrola for Children (Camden, New Jersey: Victor

Talking Machine Company, 1923), pp. 9, 16, 28, 37, 44, 65, 67-68.

5 Projects and Program of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1940-41 (Washington, DC:

National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1940), p. 28.

6 Ibid. p. 36.

7 Projects and Program of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1939-40 (Washington, DC:

National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1939), p. 34.

8 Ibid. p. 28.

9 Ibid. p. 48.

10 Kirsten E. Wood, ‘’Join with Heart and Soul and Voice’: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early

American Republic’, American Historical Review 119:4 (October 2014), pp. 1083-1116.

11 Projects and Program of the National Committee, 1939-40, pp. 3, 46-59.

12 ‘The Reminiscences of Harry Scherman’, interview by Louis M. Starr, 1955, Columbia University Oral

History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY, 323-29. Hereafter cited as

Scherman, COHC.

13 Scherman, COHC, p. 329.

23

14 Ibid. p. 331.

15 Ibid. p. 332.

16 ‘The Reminiscences of Oscar Ogg’, interview by Louis M. Starr, 1954-55, Columbia University Oral

History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY, p. 34.

17 ‘The Reminiscences of Axel Rosin’, interview by Louis M. Starr, 1954-55, Columbia University Oral

History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY, pp. 36-37.

18 Scherman, COHC, p. 334; ‘The Reminiscences of Warren Lynch’, interview by Louis M. Starr, 1955,

Columbia University Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY, pp. 8-9.

19 Scherman, COHC, pp. 332, 336, 339.

20 Popular Science Monthly, January 1955, p. 13.

21 Life, 21 February 1955, p. 7.

22 Scherman, COHC, p. 337.

23 Copy of brochure ‘Great Music’ in Series II, Box 157, Barzun Papers.

24 John M. Conly, ‘Credo: RCA Victor Society of Great Music’, in Series II, Box 157, Barzun Papers.

25 Jacques Barzun to Harry Scherman, 8 April 1958, Series II, Box 157, Barzun Papers.

26 ‘Great Music’.

27 Scherman, COHC, p. 339.

28 Starr Cornelius, ‘Music—Food of Books’, Publisher’s Weekly, 23 September 1940, 1960.

29 ‘The Reminiscences of Sigmund Spaeth’, 1958, Columbia University Oral History Collection, Butler

Library, Columbia University, New York, NY, pp. 54-56, 60 (hereafter Spaeth, COHC); Sigmund Spaeth,

The Common Sense of Music (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), pp. 13, 29-31.

30 Sigmund Spaeth, At Home With Music (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), pp. vii; Spaeth, COHC, p.

82.

31 ‘For Record Programs—A Sounder Pattern’, Musical America, September 1946, pp.--.

24

32 Ray Papineau to David Randolph, 14 November 1946, Box 4, Folder 4.1, David Randolph Papers, New

York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York, NY; Sidney Alexander to WNYC, n.

d., Box 4, Folder 4.1, Randolph Papers; Ruth Van Norman to WNYC, 13 August 1946, Box 4, Folder 4.1,

Randolph Papers; Deems Taylor to David Randolph, 18 December 1949, Box 4, Folder 4.1, Randolph

Papers; Fred Rayfield, ‘Randolph Is a New Kind of Favorite’, The Daily Compass (New York City), p. 31

January 1950.

33 David Randolph, This Is Music (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), pp. 17, 32, 42-43, 188.

34 Ibid. pp. 45, 140.

35 Leon Wilson, ‘This is Music: A Guide to the Pleasures of Listening’, Book-Of-The-Month Club News,

March, 1964.

36 Bill Livingstone to David Randolph, 31 October 1979, Box 4, Folder 4.8, Randolph Papers.

37 The Leonard Bernstein Collection is housed in the Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Hereafter cited as Bernstein Collection.

38 The initial print run was 24,000; within its first six weeks almost 70,000 copies were sold.

39 Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 11-17.

40 Henry Simon to Helen Coates, 19 November 1956, Box 1016, Folder 6, Bernstein Collection.

41 New York Times, 28 April 1960, p. 33.

42 New York Times, 22 November 1959, p. BR31.

43 Ibid.; New York Times, 22 May 1960, p. SM17.

44 New York Times, 21 January 1960, p. 29.

45 Deborah Stein to Leonard Bernstein (LB), 10 January 1960, Box 400. All of the readers’ letters to

Bernstein are in the Bernstein Collection in alphabetically organized files.

46 Marjorie Anderson to LB, 30 April 1960, Box 399.

47 E. g. Paul B. Simpson to LB, 16 January 1960, Box 400.

25

48 Vicki Anne Young to LB, 7 July 1960, Box 402. 49 Mary A. Daly to LB, 14 September 1960, Box 403. 50 Joan Shapira to LB, 7 December 1959, Box 400. 51 Mrs. George M. Landon to LB, 9 February 1960, Box 399. 52 E, g, Judy Wilt to LB, 27 December 1959, Box 400, 53 Mrs. Arthur C. Grebner to LB, 27 June 1962, Box 411. 54 Janet B. Clark to LB, 24 November 1959, Box 399. 55 Pamela E. Anderson to LB, 24 April 1960, Box 401. 56 E. g. Ruth May Ames to LB, 26 December 1959, Box 399. 57 E. g. Bradford Gowen to LB, 28 January 1960, Box 399. 58 Cathy Elwell to LB, 25 February 1960, Box 399. 59 Ibid. 60 Mrs. Lon Rankin to LB, 10 February 1960, Box 400. 61 The circular from High Fidelity is in Series II, Box 75, Folder Music—general correspondence July 1953-

August 1955, Barzun Papers.

62 Miles Hoffmann, ‘A Note to the Classically Insecure’, New York Times, 18 April 2018; Benjamin Carlson,

‘How to Listen to Classical Music, and Enjoy It’, The Atlantic, 9 June 2010,

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/06/how-to-listen-to-classical-music-and-

enjoy-it/57867/ accessed April 29, 2018.

1

Cultural Hierarchy in Literature and Music

Joan Shelley Rubin

University of Rochester

The old joke about readers who, when discovered with a copy of Playboy

magazine, insist that they acquired it “for the articles” turns out not to be entirely

implausible.(slide 1) In the April, 1964 issue, for instance, the literary critic John W.

Aldridge offered an analysis of the state of the American novel that could just as well

have appeared in more sober publications such as the recently founded New York

Review of Books. Aldridge argued that what he called “serious” novels, a category

denoting distinction since the nineteenth century, no longer served as guides to

modern life for the middle-class public. Equating social status and cultural level, a

formula that we may question, Aldridge observed that highbrow fiction, exemplified

by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, James Baldwin, and Joseph Heller, was

flourishing, but that the focus of those writers on “minority” experiences had

“estranged” them from the middlebrow audience earlier American novelists had

reached. Aldridge did not lament this distance. Rather, like his more famous

contemporary Dwight Macdonald, whose “Masscult and Midcult” (1960) was the

culmination of complaints Macdonald had voiced throughout the 1950s, he was bent

on protecting the “ugliness of the really new” from the “pretensions” and comforts

of middlebrow style.1

One notable feature of Aldridge’s Playboy essay was the irony of its

appearance in a periodical that had its own middlebrow appeal. (2) Even more

striking, however, was its author’s certainty about the demarcation between the

2

“brows.” Aldridge showed the same inflexibility that Russell Lynes, albeit in a more

playful spirit, had evinced in his well-known April, 1949 Life magazine chart of

hierarchies in Americans’ “everyday tastes.” One has only to reflect on the current

status of some of the figures whom Aldridge venerated as highbrow to recognize the

permeability of the boundary between high art and the cultural spaces ostensibly

beneath it. J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye today appears in American high school

curricula, and Philip Roth, while occupying a secure place as a novelist of the first

rank, is the subject of study guides for book clubs. Recently a critic reappraised

Heller as a writer who “used postmodernist techniques to middlebrow ends.”2

More generally, by now many scholars have come to appreciate the

convergence of high and low in forms of literary and artistic expression that evade

the simple scheme on which Aldridge depended. Michael Kammen’s American

Culture, American Tastes was an important contribution to the re-evaluation that

has, at least in some quarters, called a rigid understanding of cultural hierarchy into

question. As Kammen wrote of the mid-twentieth century, “Just when Russell Lynes

and so many other observers were emphasizing ladders and scaffolds of taste,

abundant evidence shows that the ladders were insecurely positioned and the

scaffolds precarious.”3 A more recent exposition of the instability of “brow” labels in

the realm of the novel establishes the role of gender in the assignment of such

classifications.4

If scholarly efforts to map the middlebrow have produced a picture of

shifting ground, they have also accepted middlebrow expression on its own terms

rather than regarded it only in relation to the highbrow. Literary historians have

3

shown that middlebrow reading afforded pleasure and freedom, particularly for

women. Progressive women’s rejection of stylistic modernism in favor of

alternative, more accessible “modes of authorship” resulted, we have learned, not in

travesty or sham but instead in fiction with strong emotional resonance and the

power to promote reform. Likewise conventional prose forms and popular success

did not eradicate the “serious” messages of women writers or render invalid their

credentials as observers of modern mores; instead, “middlebrow moderns” crafted

skilled, purposeful responses to “the pressing issues of their era.” Those scholarly

perspectives have made possible a more accurate and equitable account of the

production and reception of writing in both the United States and abroad.5

Informed by the view that the middlebrow is not a static, walled-off space

between high and low, and freed from the assumption of what Aldridge called

“middlebrow meretriciousness,”6 I turn from literature to classical music to amplify

those premises. At the same time, my paper explores an essential aspect of how

cultural hierarchy works: the mediations of figures who shape the understandings

that attach to activities such as reading and listening. Let us transport ourselves to

New York City, and to a venue in the northern reaches of Manhattan called Lewisohn

Stadium.

In 1917, the Lithuanian-born conductor Arnold Volpe (3) conceived of a

series of symphonic concerts to be held in a new athletic facility on the campus of

the City College of New York.(4) Volpe imagined orchestral programs that would be

easily affordable to all, and free to the American soldiers and sailors then involved in

4

fighting World War I. He appealed to the stadium’s donor, Adolph Lewisohn, a

copper magnate originally from Hamburg, enlisting Minnie Guggenheimer, a socially

well-connected young woman distantly related to the Lewisohn family, to seek

Lewisohn’s support.(5, 6, 7) Subsequently, Volpe introduced Lewisohn to the

pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who described open-air concerts in Europe and

convinced the industrialist to start a fund so that New York could offer the same

cultural opportunity, which existed nowhere in the United States. In June, 1918,

with 5,000 people in attendance, Volpe raised his baton for the first of what came to

be known as the Stadium Concerts. The planned two-week season of nightly

performances was so successful that it was extended for five more weeks.7

There are several things to notice about the Stadium Concerts’ beginnings.

One is that everyone involved in launching the project was Jewish; most were

German Jews, and many were first-generation immigrants. This fact is worth

mentioning because it suggests that the founders of the concerts had a relationship

to classical music different from that of the majority of Americans in 1918. While in

some respects the classical genre in the United States acquired an aura of

inaccessibility during the late nineteenth century, a process that one prominent

scholar labeled “sacralization,”8 to Europeans such music was an integral part of a

widely shared culture and identity—especially in Germany. For families like the

Lewisohns and Guggenheimers, endorsing Brahms and Beethoven may also have

constituted one of the strategies of assimilation that German Jews adopted both in

Europe and in New York. In any event, the founders’ backgrounds would have

5

predisposed them to assume the importance of the classical tradition, to venerate its

exemplars, and to feel an emotional connection to the Stadium project.

Also in evidence from the start of the concerts was the presence of both

democratic ideology and elite power. A champion of the idea, as his obituary put it,

that symphonic music should be “the property of the people, especially in a

democracy,” Volpe “bent his efforts toward the popularization of standard works.” 9

Lewisohn likewise believed that art should be widely available. The Stadium was

reachable by public transportation, and the ticket cost (from ten to fifty cents) was

designed to be affordable for anyone, despite the deficit the concerts incurred.10

These democratic measures coexisted with a dose of moral superiority. A

commendation that the industrialist received from the War Department after the

first season lauding his efforts to “brighten and uplift the morals of the people by

furnishing high-class musical relaxation at popular prices” both affiliates classical

music with high culture and implies that ordinary citizens require improvement.11

Such sentiments were consistent with Lewisohn’s membership in the wealthy

German-Jewish community in New York, which looked down on Jews from Eastern

Europe. Here again one wonders if, consciously or unconsciously, its proponents

embraced classical music because it promised to foster assimilation into a

supposedly more civilized society. The attitude that the elite knew what was best

for the populace made the Stadium concerts one more site for the sacralization of

the classical canon. Nevertheless it is imperative not to lose sight of the fact that the

net effect of accessibility and cheap or free tickets was desacralization, as well as a

disconnection between high culture and high social standing. The arrangement of

6

the seating at the venue is a symbol of the tension between elitism and

democratization at work in the space: a section of rich patrons was distinct from

the areas for the soldiers and other members of the public, yet the audience—and

the experience—cannot be reduced to or equated with a single social class. The

Stadium concerts were, from the outset, a middling milieu.

Many aspects of the Stadium Concerts in 1918 remained the same for almost

the next fifty years.(8) Beginning in 1923, the musicians were largely drawn from

the ranks of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Minnie Guggenheimer, who

raised funds and became the guiding spirit for the concerts, is credited with shifting

the repertoire in a more serious direction,12 although eventually certain nights of

the week were reserved for “pops” favorites, including Gershwin and Rodgers and

Hammerstein. Conductors changed; attendance grew; performers debuted and

returned. But the governing objective—to make classical music widely available—

did not waver.

That summary, however, does not fully capture the middlebrow cultural

location the concerts came to occupy as a consequence of certain interventions by

city officials, a cadre of music reviewers and, starting in 1950, a veteran press agent

named Alix Williamson.(9) Their efforts occurred within a thriving New York

newspaper culture; Williamson’s list of contacts included representatives from large

New York dailies, the ethnic press, and local weeklies.13 Another print publication

for Stadium-goers was the Stadium Concerts Review (10), a souvenir guide carrying

articles, advertisements, and program notes that was independently produced by

Sigmund Gottlober (also a German-Jewish immigrant). Radio stations, which aired

7

weather conditions on concert nights, occasionally played Stadium program

highlights. These outlets supported the representations of the concerts to the public

and the meanings they thereby acquired.

Three of those representations or ideological constructs are especially

salient. First, the press sustained the concerts’ image as democratic and laudably

eclectic in both audience and repertoire.(11) Once Williamson became publicist

(she does not seem to have had a predecessor), she repeatedly promoted the

summer season on the basis that it made “the world’s greatest music” available to

thousands of people “from every walk of life.” Williamson focused less on sound

than on scene: at the Stadium, she wrote, were “young couples arm in arm,

romancing to soft airs of Strauss and Romberg; weary oldsters seeking release from

stress and cares in the heaven-storming measures of Beethoven and Brahms; the

serious music students who follow each note in a score; and many who are

experiencing for the first time the thrill of watching a great conductor.” All this

occurred “in a romantic setting ideally air-conditioned by nature, under a starry

sky.”14 Despite the reference to the “serious,” Williamson’s annual pre-season press

release minimized education or criticism in favor of relaxation. In that way, she

invited diverse listeners of varied musical background to encounter high culture not

in some sacred space but, rather, in a “delightfully informal atmosphere” that was

intrinsically unintimidating.(12)

A second tendency marking the representation of the concerts was their

construction as a form of public service, a conceit that strengthened the project’s

highbrow dimension by positioning it above the market. In some respects, of

8

course, that idea was the consequence of certain logistical arrangements. As a

public educational institution, the City College site itself implied a connection to

civic welfare, not profit. During his tenure as mayor from 1934-45, Fiorello

LaGuardia spearheaded efforts to raise funds from private donors, served as

honorary chairman of the enterprise, opened each season with a speech, and even

conducted the orchestra on a few occasions.15(13) His successors continued the

tradition of greeting the audience on opening night. By the 1950s, the mayor was

enlisted every year to proclaim “Stadium Concerts Week” in order to encourage

attendance.16 In 1954, the city spent $21,000 to support the purchase of tickets for

college students and to aid management in meeting expenses.17 The view of the

concerts as a public service likewise dictated the assumption, visible in one mayoral

proclamation urging “every cooperation” from the media, that newspapers, radio,

and television had an obligation to supply press coverage for the Stadium events

without charge—a mandate that many followed.18

But the construction of the concerts’ cultural position as above the market

was also accomplished rhetorically. The basic message that the performances were

“a civic undertaking in the interest of fine music for New York” can be glimpsed in a

document from 1919, and recurs when City College honored Minnie Guggenheimer

in 1951. The citation of Guggenheimer equated her “tireless labors on behalf of

supplying the best possible music . . . to a vast body of popular audiences” with

“significant public service.” If that theme held constant, however, it prompted a

number of variations in light of changing historical circumstances.19

9

In 1939, for example, with Europe at war, New York Herald Tribune music

critic Lawrence Gilman endowed the Stadium Concerts with the power to instill in

listeners a sense of “our common humanity.” In a variant on the trope of music as a

“universal language,” Gilman identified “the communal response to music” as a force

for creating the bonds of “human brotherhood.” Rather than disparaging the large

assemblage at the Stadium as a symbol of mass culture, Gilman exulted in the size of

the audience, because it promised to produce the collective consciousness of

“beauty” that the defense of American values required. “For years,” Gilman wrote,

“the Stadium Concerts have provided means of bringing together in great numbers

lovers of music. For an almost negligible price, they can hear the greatest of

symphonic music . . . It was never more essential than it is this year that this

enterprise should be continued: for it is one of the means by which we may make

clear to thousands of Americans how precious a thing our civilization is.” Planning a

gala in 1942, Guggenheimer echoed that view, urging New Yorkers to “make an

effort greater than ever before to preserve art for the people, one of the basic issues

at stake in the war.”20

Such comments, which made cheap open-air concerts seem an American

invention, were equally adaptable to the context of the Cold War: Gilman’s

comments reappeared in press releases throughout the 1950s and early 1960s,

followed by Guggenheimer’s observation that it was “true, if not truer, today.”21 (14)

On opening night in 1951, Mayor Vincent Impellitteri made even clearer the political

uses the Stadium Concerts could accommodate. The series, he remarked, “is a

symbol of art in a free world. It represents great music, which is the international

10

language of civilized people. These concerts are a living proof of the democratic

principle in art.”22 Like earlier references to democracy in Stadium publicity,

Impellitteri’s statement is a striking rejoinder to the depiction of classical music as

elitist, and an equally striking demonstration of the concerts’ location between the

high and the popular. Yet by the 1950s the term “democracy” was laden with the

specific purpose of countering Soviet communism. Impelliteri’s comments thus

establish a kinship between the Stadium Concerts in their post-war incarnation and

the well-known musical projects of the United States government in the same period

to send classical (and jazz) musicians on tour in order to showcase the superiority of

the “American way of life.”

Other anxieties and preoccupations of the post-war years inflected additional

representations of the concerts’ civic benefits. After the advent of the hydrogen

bomb, the Stadium promised not just to provide release from the pressures of the

workday but also to offset the fear of nuclear annihilation. The antidote to death, an

advertisement from 1958 implied, was to enter the home of “deathless melodies.”

There people would “shed the cares and anxieties of atomic age life, finding

reassurance, inspiration and spiritual refreshment” in a “morale-building”

atmosphere.23 Moreover, at the moment when some parents conflated juvenile

delinquency with rock ‘n roll, classical music at the Stadium venue held a double

promise: to expose children to high (and therefore redemptive) culture and to give

them something to do on summer evenings. A “Committee of the Clergy for Stadium

Concerts,” founded in 1952 by Rabbi William F. Rosenblum, made much of that

potential in the “ministry of music” sermons its interdenominational members gave

11

for several years running during the weekend before the opening of the summer

season. Religious leaders endorsed the program for “its moral and spiritual as well

as cultural merit and for doing so much to keep thousands of young people in the

right kind of environment and to stimulate them towards better living.” (15, 16)

The composition of the committee, which included a prominent African-American

minister, itself reflected another development of the postwar period—the

configuration of American religion in terms of three major faiths and the concern

with interfaith and inter-racial cooperation.24

The concept of the Stadium Concerts as a public service—as a civic and

spiritual activity with no transactional value—perpetuated the Romantic vision of

the artist as free from the taint of commercialism. Yet it is an inescapable fact that

the mission of the “ministry of music” was to sell subscriptions. At a time when

more Americans were graduating from university, and when spreading affluence

made acquiring the attributes of the cultured person seem attainable, the notion of

being above the market was itself a powerful marketing strategy. This had been

true for middlebrow institutions such as the Book-of-the-Month Club in the 1920s

and ‘30s, as Williamson, twenty years later, undoubtedly knew.25 Nevertheless the

postwar effort to build an audience for the concert season and to offset its deficit

(which was mounting in the 1950s) also entailed a more explicit accommodation of

the priorities of a modern consumer economy—a third representation of the

Stadium series, one that pushed it in a lowbrow direction by emphasizing the

concerts’ utility as a vehicle for public relations and advertising.

12

A speech that Williamson gave in 1959 at a dinner for New York singing

teachers embraced those priorities. In her remarks, she frankly identified singers as

“manufactured” and “commercial products” that had to be “merchandized.” The

“overall health of the concert and opera business,” Williamson declared, “is directly

attributable to pre-cultivation of the public’s taste and the creating of a demand

where none exists. . . . America buys brand, whether it be a soup, a soap, a shirt, or

a singer.” Williamson practiced what she preached, creating a multivalent brand for

the concerts: one that not only featured their civic contributions but also their value

to the relationship between a business and its paying customers.26

In this effort, Williamson collaborated with Minnie Guggenheimer’s daughter

Sophie G. Untermeyer. In 1952, Untermeyer invented, and Williamson publicized,

an Industrial Sponsorship Plan. Replicating orchestra fundraising in other cities, the

plan recruited sponsors (there were twelve by 1953) to donate at least $1000 a

season to the Stadium series, in return for recognition in concert promotions, free

ad space in the Stadium Concerts Review, and 1,000 tickets to distribute to their

employees. As Williamson phrased it, the scheme was “a successful formula for

combining support” for a worthwhile activity with “good public and employee

relations.”27 Sponsors included Loft’s Candy Shop, TWA, and the brewery that

manufactured Rheingold beer. The response among employees, Williamson

reported, was “more than enthusiastic,”28 improving labor relations at the

sponsoring companies. Untermeyer also lobbied personnel directors to sell

reduced-price ticket books as employee benefits; garment workers’ union locals had

sold discounted books since 1950 as well.29 Untermeyer’s biggest triumphs of the

13

early 1950s, however, came in 1954, when she persuaded the department store

Lord and Taylor to let customers charge Stadium ticket books to their accounts. She

even convinced the owner of Sachs Quality Stores to sell the books on a “pay as you

go” basis. The most succinct example of this representation of the Stadium Concerts

as a form of public relations may be the slogan that the Daitch-Shopwell

supermarket, known for its dairy products, adopted when it became a ticket outlet:

it offered shoppers “Cream Cheese and Culture.”30

If these devices sold classical music by turning it into a consumer product,

the print advertisements in Gottlober’s Stadium Concerts Review simultaneously

sold other items by relying on “musical lore to lure the eye of the music minded

reader.” In some cases, the products had something to do with music, as with

Victor’s ads for phonographs or the Book-of-the-Month Club’s for its records. But

others did not. For example, a cigarette company ran ads headlined “Important

Notes in Music,” juxtaposing notation for the main theme of a symphony with a

picture of the composer and the phrase “Important Note to Smokers.”31 (17) Season

after season, Williamson devised a set of promotional suggestions to merchants,

including ideas for department store windows featuring clothing that alluded to

concert highlights. With scores, batons, and other props in the background, window

displays, she proposed, could link popular colors to music by calling them “B-

Natural Beige” or “C-Sharp Red.” Another possibility was for merchandisers to use

the theme “Summer Melodies” to sell any outfits “that have a lyric feeling.”

Similarly, a spread in the New York Journal American for July 2, 1954 shows a

14

violinist modeling clothing available at Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel with

the slogan “for New York’s Most Fashion-Minded Women.”32 (18)

In addition, advertising by the late 1950s promoted the bargain appeal of the

concerts themselves (19). The impact of America’s fully developed celebrity culture

is also evident by then. “The public,” Williamson had once written, “worships

names.”33 Hence the reference to “famous conductors” in a poster from 1958. (20,

21) Around the same time, the Commercial Bank of North America began giving out

pocket calendars listing Stadium programs, duplicating the baseball and football

game schedules that customers found on the bank’s counters.34 The format stripped

away any association of classical music with edification, equating the concerts to

mass entertainment instead. All these manoeuvers, with their echoes of commerce,

Hollywood and professional sports, made the Stadium concerts susceptible to

Theodor Adorno’s famous indictment of the commodification of culture, and

particularly of classical music, under the sway of American capitalism. Yet we can

dispense with Adorno and rely on the words of Nathan Sachs, the president of Sachs

Quality Stores, for the same point: “Symphony concerts,” he declared in announcing

that people could buy tickets at Sachs locations, “are no longer to be regarded as a

luxury, but as a vital necessity in the lives of many New Yorkers, and I believe the

public should be entitled to buy subscriptions for these concerts in the same way

that they are now able to buy any other necessity for complete living.”35 (22)

Even so, it is important to look beyond the temptations of dismissive critique

for two reasons. First, as Williamson foresaw,36 corporate tie-ins have made it

possible for cultural events—including this one—to exist. That is a gain, not a loss.

15

Second, we must always recognize the value that the Stadium Concerts held for

audiences—the knowledge, pleasure, and joy the events provided regardless of their

ideological or commercial dimensions. In 1962, on a questionnaire for concert-

goers, a Yonkers resident who had been attending since 1918 wrote that his

memory was “not good enough” to recall which performances had “given him the

most satisfaction,” but that he wanted to thank the organizers “for furnishing me

with more than 300 pleasant evenings.” As Olin Downes had argued over thirty

years earlier in a column testifying to the spread of open-air concerts beyond the

Stadium to the Hollywood Bowl and other venues, for the “thousands” in attendance

the “art” is “what it should be for every one: a rod and a staff and a comforter; a

solace to body and spirit, and a revelation of beauty.”37

A full history of the Stadium Concerts requires more analysis of the audience,

as well as the repertoire, which time does not permit. But even a preliminary

exploration of the overlapping, competing representations of the concerts as public

service and public relations indicates what one is tempted to call, despite the pun,

the instrumental capacity of classical music—its malleability as a practice that could

serve multiple social and cultural agendas. The Stadium was a middle space where

desacralization as well as sacralization occurred, where high and low mingled,

where classical music became middlebrow and even popular culture. In the 1940s

and ‘50s, when moviegoers listened to Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” on the

soundtrack to Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” the chances are that many of them had

heard it before, under a starry sky.

16

1 John W. Aldridge, “Highbrow Authors and Middlebrow Books,” Playboy, April

1964, 171, 173; Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult: I, Partisan Review 27

(Spring 1960), 203-33; Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult: II, Partisan

Review 27 (Fall 1960), 589-631. Both Macdonald essays are reprinted in Dwight

Macdonald, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New

York: Vintage, 1962), 3-75.

2 Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s, February 1949, 19-

28, reprinted in Life, April 1, 1949, 99-102; Birte Christ, “The Aesthetics of

Accessibility: John Irving and the Middlebrow Novel after 1975,” Post45, July 1,

2016.

3 Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the

Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 100, 115-16.

4 Anna Creadick, “Gendered Terrain: Middlebrow Authorship at Midcentury,”

Post45, July 1, 2016.

5 Among the numerous works attesting to the cultural work of middlebrow fiction, I

have been most influenced by Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-

the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1997); Jaime Harker, America the Middlebrow: Women’s

Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith,

Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (Boston:

Northeastern University Press, 2003); and the essays in the July 1, 2016 issue of

17

Post45 cited above. The quotations in this paragraph are from Harker, 16 and

Botshon and Goldsmith, 6.

6 David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 7; John W. Aldridge quoted in Robert

Gorham Davis, “Nothing Good,” New York Times, May 1, 1966, 332.

7 Sophie Guggenheimer Untermeyer and Alix Williamson, Mother is Minnie (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 77-81. 8 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9 “Dr. Volpe, Founded Stadium Concerts,” New York Times, February 3, 1940. 10 Untermeyer, 71. 11 “Adolph Lewisohn Dies at 89,” New York Times, August 18, 1938. 12 Charles Cooke and Russell Maloney, “Minnie,” New Yorker, July 10, 1937, 10-11.

13 The Alix Williamson Papers, located at the Music Division, New York Public

Library for the Performing Arts, are a rich resource for the history of the Stadium

Concerts and the career of a prominent classical music publicist. Hereafter cited as

WP. Lists of Williamson’s press contacts appear, for example, in Box 52, Folder 3

(1958).

14 “Stadium Concerts,” 1954 press release, Box 51, Folder 10, WP. 15 “Mayor to Help Stadium Raise $25,000 Fund,” New York Times, April 9, 1934;

“Mayor Speaks for Drive,” New York Times, May 23, 1934; “Stadium Opening Hailed

by 15,000,” New York Times, June 24, 1937; “Drive Opens to Aid Stadium Concerts,”

New York Times, March 22, 1938.

18

16 “Stadium Concerts Week Starts June 16,” New York Herald Tribune, June 13, 1958. 17 “City to Spend $21,000 As a Patron of Music,” New York Times, November 3. 1954. 18 “Proclamation,” March 21, 1952, Box 51, Folder 6, WP. 19 “Summer Symphony Concerts for New York,” Box 52, Folder 8, WP; “Text of Citation Presented by the College of the City of New York to Mrs. Charles S. Guggenheimer,” Box 51, Folder 5, WP. 20 “Silver Jubilee,” Box 53, Folder 1, WP. 21 “Stadium Concerts,” 1953 press release, Box 51, Folder 8, WP. 22 “Remarks by Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri At Opening of 34th Season of Stadium Concerts,” Box 51, Folder 5, WP. 23 The ad is in Box 53, Folder 4, WP; “Stadium Concerts,” 1953 press release. 24 A “Stadium Concerts, Inc.” press release, 1950 refers to the “temptation of the

streets.” Box 51, Folder 2, WP. On the ministry of music, see “Clergy Committee

Backing ‘Ministry of Music’ In Summer Stadium Series,” 1952, Box 51, Folder 6, WP;

“Churches, Synagogues, Backing Stadium Concerts in Pulpit Tributes This Weekend

To ‘Ministry of Music,’” 1953, Box 51, Folder 8, WP; press release, 1956, on

“combating juvenile delinquency,” Box 52, Folder 1, WP..

25 I discuss the Book-of-the-Month Club in The Making of Middlebrow Culture

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

26 Alix Williamson, speech March 17, 1959 to Annual Dinner of New York Singing

Teachers’ Association, Box 4, Folder 5, WP.

27 “Industrial Plan Inaugurated for Stadium Concerts,” Box 51, Folder 6, WP. 28 Press release about response to Industrial Plan, 1954, Box 51, Folder 10, WP.

19

29 “Trade Unions Aid Stadium Concerts Pre-Season Subscription Drive,” May 12, 1950, Box 51, Folder 2, WP. 30 Press release, 1954, with Lord and Taylor reference and “pay-as-you-go”

arrangement, Box 51, Folder 10, WP; “Cream Cheese and Culture” Package Available

at 65 Metropolitan Supermarkets,” press release June 14, 1956, Box 52, Folder 1,

WP.

31 The ads in Stadium Concerts Review are described in the press release, 1954, cited

in note 31.

32 “Possible Window Display, Advertising and Promotion Tie-Ups with 1950

Stadium Concerts,” Box 51, Folder 2, WP; “Possible Window Display, Advertising

and Promotion Tie-Ups with the 46th Season of Stadium Concerts—June 25th

Through August 10th, 1963,” Box 52, Folder 10, WP.

33 Alix Williamson to Stephen Baker, May 27, 1949, Box 53, Folder 1, WP..

34 “12 Banks to Distribute Concert Schedules as Customer Service,” Box 52, Folder 7,

WP.

35 Press release, 1954, cited in note 31. 36 Ibid.

37 T. L. Minsker questionnaire, July 27, 1962, Box 52, Folder 12, WP; Olin Downes,

“Open-Air Concerts,” August 31, 1930.