Reclaiming the Past: Musical Boston Reconsidered

Abstract

twentieth century are called Age. The term is pejorative; it evokes materialism, philistinism, and political chicanery. Concomitantly, high culture of Gilded Age is stereotyped as feeble footnote to exploits of Morgan, Carnegie, and Vanderbilts, futile resistance movement stressing moral function of art. The intellectual life of late Gilded Age is said to exemplify tradition--another pejorative term, coined by philosopher George Santayana, who taught at Harvard from 1889 to 1912. Santayana disdained genteel custodians of culture as deluded Germanic idealists, grandmotherly in that sedate, spectacled wonder with which [they] gazed at this terrible world and said how beautiful and how interesting it all was.' The ostensible voice of gentility is pretentiously noble, prudish, and pure. It pretends not to notice flophouse and slum. It serenades an audience of housewives, ministers, and effete professors. Genteel intellectuals regarded music as queen of arts. They took pride in concert life of such cities as Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York, and in achievements of American musicians. This endorsement proved poisonous after World War I. Surveying their would-be precursors, American composers saw complacent clones of German teachers. Virgil Thomson called music of John Knowles Paine, George Chadwick, Amy Beach, and other prominent turn-of-the-century Americans a pale copy of Continental models and reckoned their scale of achievement a sort of adolescence.2 Leonard Bernstein termed this the kindergarten period of American music, whose fine, academic imitations of