The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain. By Kate Guthrie

Abstract

The middlebrow is still a term very much defined by its unfashionable and denigrated status. When talking recently to a former TV critic about bringing together postmodern media theory and football coverage in an issue of Time Out magazine in the 1970s, I asked him whether it could be described as a ‘middlebrow’ initiative. ‘Yes’, was the answer, ‘if you exclude all the negative connotations of that term’! Kate Guthrie’s The Art of Appreciation is a book that, through careful scholarship and archival research, sets aside these tired connotations to examine with fresh eyes certain educational middlebrow initiatives to foster appreciation of classical music. A close focus is maintained throughout on their aims and the extent to which these were achieved in the context of the rapidly changing, class-bound and highly fractious cultural climate that existed in Britain between the 1920s and the early 1960s. According to Guthrie, recent scholarship on the middlebrow has tended to focus predominantly on social questions—this book tries to instead look at how the debates around cultural hierarchies shaped the aesthetic and stylistic forms and cadences of middlebrow cultural products, as well as the contexts of their reception. Guthrie builds upon the kind of work undertaken by Christopher Chowrimootoo on Benjamin Britten (in Middlebrow Modernism, 2018) but adopts a longer historical view and puts musical works ‘into dialogue with the institutions that played an increasingly powerful role in mediating cultural access throughout this period’ (p. 11). In doing so we witness the ‘elective affinity’ that emerged between musical appreciation and various forms of public service media, including interwar BBC radio (Chapter 3) and the documentary film movement (Chapter 4), given their intersecting aims and concerns to educate and widen access to culture.