Artisans in Concert Life of Mid-Nineteenth-Century London and Paris

Abstract

In the nineteenth century the ruling classes said they gave the masses culture; in the twentieth they have said, much more cynically, that it just trickles down. Historians have tended to buy one or both of these self-serving claims in viewing the growth of formal entertainment in the modern age. There is actually some truth to each of these explanations, though generally for rather different reasons than are supposed, but if we want to understand the growth of serious culture we have got to go beyond cliches such as these. Cultural interests do not just come out of nowhere; an elite group cannot just wave a magic wand of educated taste. What's more, cultural pressure downward (whether in a trickle or a stream) will usually generate something of a corresponding force back-up in reaction to it. The lesser strata of society have their own artistic traditions, and they will shape whatever comes down to them from above. The expansion of formal concert life into the upper reaches of the working class, into the artisanry, during the middle of the nineteenth century can provide an interesting field in which we can test out these ideas about the diffusion of culture. We will look here at events in London and Paris the two capitals which in many ways had more to do with each other than with the rest of their respective nations to examine the roles of artisans in choral and orchestral concerts. We will see, in sum, that the institutional frameworks within which artisans participated came mostly from the top down but that they carried their own traditions into these concerts and through them exercised a not inconsiderable influence in European concert life. For all the patronizing words about bringing music to the masses,