William Weber . The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms . New York : Cambridge University Press . 2008 . Pp. xv, 334. $99.00.

Abstract

Music historian Henry Raynor once called the orchestras of the nineteenth century the “essential expression of the personality” of industrial civilization, at war and at peace. For Raynor, this personality derived from the “precise co-ordination of many disparate specialist functions,” displayed with particular intensity in the performance of a symphony by Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Ludwig van Beethoven (Raynor, Music and Society Since 1815 [1976], p. 100). But to examine all the music that such orchestras played in concert, as William Weber has done with great verve and unmatched thoroughness in his new book, is to understand orchestras (large, medium, and small) as also an “essential expression” of the disorder, playfulness, and sheer miscellany always hanging around the edges of that precisely coordinated machinery. For Weber, a slightly shifted and shortened nineteenth century, running from about the 1780s to about the 1860s, saw a “great transformation” in how orchestras functioned in social and musical life. After a period of commingling and mutual accommodation among different sorts of music—vocal and instrumental, simple and complex—in the concert programs of the late eighteenth century, this “old order” broke down around 1800 and was followed by more than a half century of what one can only call confusion and experimentation in the ways in which music was presented to the public. By the 1850s, Weber sees this settling into a situation that lasted until 1914 and was marked by more or less clear distinctions among serious concerts and popular ones, with opera positioned comfortably between them, each to some significant degree in a taste community of its own.