Media, Culture an d Society 1982 4, 33 50

Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in America

PAUL DIMAGGIO-

Sociological and political discussions of culture have been predicated on a strong dichotomy between high culture—what goes on in museums, opera houses, symphony halls and theatres—and popular culture, of both the folk and commer­ cial varieties. Such culture critics as Dwight McDonald (1957) and Theodor Adorno (1941) have based on this dichotomy thorough-going critiques of popular culture and the mass media. Defenders of popular culture (Lowenthal, 1961; Gans, 1974) have questioned the normative aspect of the critique of popular culture, but have, for the most part, accepted the basic categories. The distinction between high and popular culture has been implicit, as well, in the discussion of public policy towards culture in both the United States and Great Britain (DiMaggio and Useem, 1978). Yet high and popular culture can be defined neither by qualities inherent to the work of art, nor, as some have argued, by simple reference to the class character of their publics. The distinction between high and popular culture, in its American version, emerged in the period between 1850 and 1900 our of the efforts of urban elites to build organizational forms that, first, isolated high culture and, second, differentiated it from popular culture. Americans did not merely adopt available European models. Instead they groped their way to a workable distinction. Not until two distinct organizational forms—the private or semi-private, non-profit cultural institution and the commercial popular-culture industry—took shape did the high/popular-culture dichotomy emerge in its modern form. Once these organizational models developed, the first in the bosom of elite urban status com­ munities, the second in the relative impersonality of emerging regional and national markets, they shaped the role that cultural institutions would play, the careers of artists, the nature of the works created and performed, and the purposes and publics that cultural organizations would serve. In this paper I will address only one side of this process of classification, the institutionalization of high culture and the creation of distinctly high-cultural organizations. While high culture could be defined only in opposition to popular culture, it is the process by which urban elites forged an institutional system em­ bodying their ideas about the high arts that will engage us here. In order to grasp the extent to which the creation of modern high-cultural institutions was a task that involved elites as an organic group, we will focus on that process in one American city. Boston in the nineteenth century was the most active center of

Institution for Social and Poluv Studies, Yale University

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American culture; and its elite—the Boston Brahmins—constituted the most well decisively from the commercial and co-operative ensembles with which it first defined status group of any of the urhan upper classes of this period. For this competed. The Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1873, was at the center of the reason the processes with which I am concerned appear here in particularly dear city’s artistic life, its exhibitions complemented by those of Harvard and the relief.' eccentric Mrs Gardner. Music and art critics might disagree on the merits o f indivi­ When wc look at Boston before 1850 we sec a culture defined by the pulpit, the dual conductors or painters; but they were united in an aesthetic ideology that dis- ■ lectern and a collection of artistic efforts, amateurish by modern standards, in tinguished sharply between the nobility of art and the vulgarity of mere entertain- which effort rarely was made to distinguish between art and entertainment, or ment. The distinction between true art, distributed by not-for-profit corporations I between culture and commerce. The arts in Boston were not self-conscious; they managed by artistic professionals and governed closely by prosperous and influen­ drew few boundaries. While intellectuals and ministers distinguished culture that tial trustees, and popular entertainment, sponsored by entrepreneurs and distri­ elevated the spirit from that which debased it, there was relatively little agreement buted via the market to whomever would buy it. had taken a form that has on what works or genres constituted which (see Hatch, 1962; Harris, 1966). persisted to the present. So, too, had the social distinctions that would differen-( Harvard's Pierian Sodality mixed popular songs with student compositions and tiate the publics for high and popular culture. works by European fine-arts composers, The Philharmonic Society played classical The sacralization of art, the definition of high culture and its opposite, popular 1 concerts, but also backed visiting popular vocalists. Throughout this period, most culture and the institutionalization of this classification, was the work of men and i of Boston music was in the hands of commercial entrepreneurs. Gottlieb women whom I refer to as cultural capitalists. I use the term in two senses to des­ Graupner, the city’s leading impressario in the 1830s, sold sheet music and cribe the capitalists (and the professionals whose wealth came from the. instruments, published songs and promoted concerts at which religious, classical participation of their families in the industrial ventures—textiles, railroads and and popular tunes mingled freely. (One typical performance included a bit of mining—of the day) who founded the museums and the symphony orchestras that Italian opera, a devotional song by Mrs Graupner, a piece by Verdi. 'Bluebell of embodied and elaborated the high-cultural ideal. They were capitalists in the sense ■ Scotland' and 'The Origin of Common Nails’, recited by Mr Bernard, a that their wealth came from the management of industrial enterprises from which 1 comedian.) The two exceptions, the Handel and Haydn Society and the Harvard they extracted a profit, and cultural capitalists in that they invested some of these | Musical Association, founded in the 1840s and 1850s respectively, were associations profits in the foundation and maintenance of distinctly cultural enterprises. They j of amateurs and professionals that appealed only to a relatively narrow segment of also—and this is the second sense in which I use the term—were collectors of what the elite. Bourdicu has called ‘cultural capital', knowledge and familiarity with styles and • The visual arts were also organized on a largely commercial basis in this era. In genres that are socially valued and that confer prestige upon those who have the 1840s, the American Art Union sold paintings by national lottery (Lynnes, mastered them (Bourdicu and Passeron, 1977. 1979). It was the vision of the ' 1933). These lotteries were succeeded, in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, by founders of the institutions that have become, in effect, the treasuries of cultural private galleries. Museums were modelled on Barnum's (Barnum, 1879; Harris, capital upon which their descendants have drawn that defined the nature of 1973): fine art was interspersed among such curiosities as bearded women and cultural capital in American society.1 mutant animals, and popular entertainments were offered for the price of To create an institutional high culture, Boston's upper class had to accomplish admission to a clientele that included working people as well as the upper middle three concurrent, but analytically distinct, projects; entrepreneurship, classification cjass. Founded as a commercial venture in 1841, Moses Kemball's Boston Museum and framing. By entrepreneurship, I mean the creation of an organizational form exhibited works by such painters as Sully and Peale alongside Chinese curiosities, that members o f the elite could control and govern. By classification, I refer to the stuffed animals, mermaids and dwarves. For the entrance fee visitors could also erection o f strong and clearly defined boundaries between art and entertainment, attend the Boston Museum Theatre, which presented works by Dickens and the definition of a high an that elites and segments of the middle class could Shakespeare as well as performances by gymnasts and contortionists, and brought appropriate as their own cultural propeny; and the acknowledgment o f that classi­ to Boston the leading players of the American and British stage (McGlinchee, fication's legitimacy by other classes and the state. Finally, I use the term framing , 1940). The promiscuous combination of genres that later would be considered to refer to the development o f a new etiquette o f appropriation, a new relationship j incompatible was not uncommon. As late as the 1880s. American circuses between the audience and the work of art.* The focus of this paper will be on the• employed Shakespearian clowns who recited the bard's lines in full clown make-up first of these three processes. (Fellows and Freeman, 1936). By 1910, high and popular culture were encountered far less frequently in the The predecessors: organizational models before the Gilded Age same settings. The distinction towards which Boston’s clerics and critics had groped 30 years before had emerged in institutional form. The Boston Symphony By the close of the Civil War, Boston was in many ways the hub of America's Orchestra was a permanent aggregation, wresting the favor of Boston's upper class cultural life. But, as Mattin Green (1966) has illustrated, the unity of the city's 1 The prtHtn. in other American ciries. war 10 a large eaieni influenced by the Boston model. A final, more 1 In a third sense, 'cultural capital' might refer to the entrepreneurs of popular culture—the Rarnurm, the mundane, cnnsideraiion recommends Boston as the focus for this study. The work in this paper is still in an Keiths, the Shuberts and others— who turned culture into profits. W hile wc will not consider this group at any exploratory stage, at which I am plundering history rather than writing it; the prolixity of nineteenth-century length, we must remember that it was in opposition to their activities that the former defined their own. Boston's men and women o f letters and the dedkation and quality of her local historians makes Boston an ideal My debt to Bernstein (1971*. b) and to Mary Douglas (1966) is evident here. My use of the terms 'classifica* site for sin It an enterprise lion' and 'framing' is similar to flrmttein*s

t 36 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEUR SHI I’ 37

economic and cultural elite, the relative vibrancy of Harvard and the vitality of the ground. And the numerous commercial orchestras that either resided in or roured communal cultural associations of the elite—the Handel and Haydn Society, the Boston during this period mixed fine-arts and light music indiscriminately, A Athenaeum, the Dante Circle, the singing clubs—made Boston unique among memoir of the period recalls a concert of the Germania Society (one of the better America's cities, Godkin called Boston 'the one place in America where wealth and orchestras of this type): the knowledge of how to use it are apt to coincide' (ibid.: 41), One of ihe numbers was the "Railway Gallop."—composer forgotten—during the playing of which Yet at the close of the Civil War, Boston lacked the organizational arrangements a little mock steam-engine kept scooting about the floor of the hall, with black cotton wool smoke that could sustain a public 'high culture' distinct and insulated from more popular coming out of the funnel. forms. As we have seen, the boundaries between high art and mass art were poorly The same writer describes the memorable drawn; artists and performers had not yet segmented elite and popular markets. It is not that the wealthy were uninterested in art. Henry Lee Higginson, later head of evening when a fantasia on themes from Wallace's "Maritana" was played as a duet for mourh the Lee, Higginson brokerage house and founder of the Boston Symphony harmonica and the Great Organ: a combination, as the program informed us, "never before Orchestra, could reminisce of his not atypical student days in Cambridge in the attempted in the history of music!” (William F. Apthorp, quoted in Howe, 1914). mid-1850s: As with the visual arts, the commercial treatment of serious music tended to the

we had been to the Italian opera, getting there seats for twenty-five cents in the upper gallery extravagant rather than to the sacred. In 1869, an entrepreneur organized a Peace enjoying it highly. I had an inborn taste for music, which was nourished by a few concerts in Boston Jubilee to celebrate the end of the Civil War. A structure large enough to and by the opera (Perry. 1921: 29), accommodate 30,000 people was built (at what would later be the first site of the His wife recollected Museum of Fine Arts) and ‘star’ instrumentalists and vocalists were contracted to perform along with an orchestra of 1000 and a chorus of 10,000. As a finale, the There were private theatricals, sometimes in German, there was a German class, and there were orchestra (which included 330 strings, 75 drums and 83 tubas) played the anvil readings which finished with a delightful social gathering in the evening. He IHigginsonl belonged to chorus with accompaniment from a squadron of firemen beating anvils, and the a private singing club in Boston, and often went to James Savage's room in Holworthy, where there was much informal singing and music (ibid.: 81). firing of live canon (Fisher, 1918: 45 46). An alternative form of organization, embraced by some musical societies, was Marty young Brahmins, like Higginson, spent time in Europe, studying art or the workers’ co-operative, in which each member had a vote, shared in the profits music (e.g. Adams, 1928). And many more learned and played music in or around of the enterprise and elected a conductor from among their number.4 The co­ Boston (Whipple, n.d.), or attended public lectures on the arts. operative was vulnerable to market incentives. Perhaps more important, however, Nor was there a lack of theories about the nature of good art. Although aesthetic it was (also like its privately owned counterpart) unable to secure the complete philosophies blossomed after the high-culrure institutions were established, even allegiance of its members, who supported themselves by playing many different the mid-1850s nurtured aesthetic philosophers like Brook Farmer John S. Dwight, kinds of music in a wide range of settings. The early New York Philharmonic, for editor o f Dwight's Journal o f Music. Some Bostonians were aware of the latest example, performed as a group only monthly. Members anticipated the concert developments in European music and acquainted with classical standards in the visual arts. as a pleasant relief from more remunerative occupational duties, and the rehearsal periods were High culture (and by this I mean a strongly classified, consensually defined body cluttered up with routine business matters, from which members could absent themselves with relative impunity (Mueller, 1951- 41). of art distinct from 'popular' fare) failed to develop in Boston prior to the 1870s because the organizational models through which art was distributed were not The lines dividing non-profit, co-operative, for-profit and public enterprise were equipped to define and sustain such a body and a view of art. Each of the three not as strong in the nineteenth century as they would become in the twentieth.- major models for organizing the distribution of aesthetic experience before 1870— Civic-minded guarantors might hold stock in commercial ventures with no hope of ; the for-profit firm, the co-operative enterprise and the communal association—was gaining a profit (e.g. Symphony Hall at the end of the century). The goals of the flawed in some important way. charitable corporation were usually defined into its charter, but otherwise it legally Thc problems of the privately owned, for-profit firm are most obvious. As resembled its for-profit counterpart. Even less clearly defined was what I call the Weber (1968, vol. 2, sec. 9: 937) has argued, the market declassifies culture: pre­ voluntary association: closed associations of individuals (sometimes incorporated, senters of cultural events mix genres and cross boundaries to reach out to larger sometimes not) to further the aims of the participating members, rather than of audiences. The Boston Museum, founded in the 1840s, mixed fine art and side­ the community as a whole. For associations like the Handel and Haydn Society, show oddities, Shakespeare and theatrical ephemerata. For-profit galleries which might give public concerts, or the Athenaeum, which took an active r6le in exhibited art as spectacle: when James Jackson Jarves showed his fine collection of public affairs, privateness was relative. But. ultimately, each was a voluntary and Italian primitives at Derby's Institute of Fine Arts in New York, ‘the decor of exclusive instrum ent o f its members. this . . . dazzlingly ornate commercial emporium . . . caused much more Why were these communal associations ill-suited to serve as the organizational( favorable comment than Jarves' queer old pictures' (Burt, 1977: 57). bases for high culture in Boston? Why could the Athenaeum, a private library, orj If anything, commerce was even less favorable to the insulation of high art in the the Boston Art Club, which sponsored contemporary art shows (Boston Art Club,/ performance media. Fine-art theatre in Boston never seems to have got off the 4 Sff Couch ( I97fij. h) and Mueller (19) I J7ff) for more derailed description' of dm form. 38 p niM ACicio c.u i.T ti it a i. I'.n i it i-p k i-:n i -:i ih s i 11 r 39

IH7H). not have developed continuous programs of public exhibitions? Could not enough to accommodate a range of conflicting purposes and changing ends. The / the Handel and Haydn Society, the Harvard Musical Association (formed by broad charters of Boston's major cultural organizations permitted their missions to | Harvard graduates who wished to pursue after graduation musical interests be redefined with time, and enabled their governors to claim (and to believe) that ' developed in the College's Pierian Sodality) or one of the numerous singing circles they pursued communitarian goals even as they institutionalized a view and vision have developed into a permanent orchestra? They faced no commercial tempta- of art that made elite culture less and less accessible to the vast majority of Boston’s tions to study, exhibit or perform any but the highest art. (Indeed, the Harvard citizens. Musical Association's performances were so austere as to give rise to the proverb ' 'dull as a symphony concert' (Howe, 1914: 8)). The context of cultural capitalism None of them, however, could, by the late nineteenth century, claim to speak for the community as a whole, even if they chose to. Each represented only a In almost every literate society, dominant status groups or classes eventually have , fraction (although, in the case of Athenaeum, a very large and potent fraction) of developed their own styles of art and the institutional means of supporting them. I the elite; and, in the case of the musical associations and the Art Club, members of It was predictable that this would happen in the United States, despite the absence the middle class and artistic professionals were active as well. The culture of an elite of an hereditary aristocracy. It is more difficult, however, to explain the timing of statusgroup must be monopolized, it must be legitimate and it must be sacralized. this process. Dwight and others wished (but failed) to start a permanent profes­ Boston's cultural capitalists would have to find a form able to achieve all these sional symphony orchestra from at least the late 1840s. The Athenaeum’s aims: a single organizational base for each art form; institutions that could claim to proprietors tried to raise a public subscription to purchase the Jarves collection in serve the community, even as they defined the community to include only the elite the late 1850s, but they failed. What had changed? and the upper-middle classes; and enough social distance between artist and Consider, first, the simple increase in scale and wealth between 1800 and 1870. audience, between performer and public, to permit the mystification necessary to At the time of the revolution, Boston's population was under 10,000. By 1800 it define a body of artistic work as sacred. had risen to 25,000; by 1846 it was 120,000. By 1870, over a quarter of a million This they did in the period between 1870 and 1900. By the end of the century, people lived in Boston (Lane, 1975). The increase in the size of the local cultural in art and music (but not in theatre (sec Twentieth Century Club, 1919; Poggi, market facilitated a boom in theatre building in the 1830s (Nye, I960; 264), a rise 1968)), the differences between high- and popular-culture artists and performers in the number and stability of book and music stores (Fisher, 1918: 30) and the were becoming distinct, as were the physical settings in which high and popular art growth of markets for theatre, music, opera, dancing and equestrian shows (Nye. were presented. I960: 143). The growth of population was accompanied by an increase in wealth. The form that the distribution of high culture would take was the non-profit Boston's first fortunes were mercantile, the fruits of the China trade, large by local, :corporation, governed by a self-perpetuating board of trustees who, eventually, but small by national standards. In 1840, Boston had but a handful of millionaires. ; would delegate most artistic decisions to professional artists or art historians By 1890, after post-Civil War booms in railroads, mining, banking and ‘(Zolberg, 1974; 1981). The charitable corporation was not designed to define a communications, there were 400 (Jaher, 1968, 1972; Story, 1980). Even the high culture that elites could monopolize; nor are non-profit organizations by their physical scale of the city changed during this period: beginning in 1856, developers nature exclusive. But the non-profit corporation had five virtues that enabled it to began filling in the waters of the Back Bay, creating a huge track of publicly owned play a key role in this instance. First, the corporation was a familiar and successful land, partially devoted to civic and cultural buildings. As wealthy outlanders from ■ tool by which nineteenth-century elites organized their affairs (see Frederickson, Lawrence, Lynn and Lexington migrated to Beacon Hill and Cambridge, streetcars 1963; Story, 1980; Hall, forthcoming). In the economic realm it enabled them to reduced the cost and the difficulty of travel to Boston from its suburbs (Warner, raise capital for such profitable ventures as the Calumet and Hecla Mines, the 1970). In short, Boston was larger, wealthier and more compact in 1870 than it had western railroads and the telephone company. In the non-profit arena, it had been been 50 years before. a useful instrument for elite communal governance at Harvard, the Massachusetts With growth came challenges to the stability of the community and to the General Hospital and a host of charitable institutions (Story, 1980). Second, by cultural authority (Starr, forthcoming) of elites. Irish immigrants flowed into entrusting governance decisions to trustees who were committed either to pro­ Boston from the 1840s to work in the city’s industrial enterprises (Handlin, 1972; viding financial support or to soliciting it from their peers, the non-profit form Thernstrom, 1972): industrial employment roles doubled between 1845 and 1855 effectively (if not completely) insulated museums and orchestras from the pressures (Handlin, 1972). With industry and immigration came disease, pauperism, of the market. Third, by vesting control in a well integrated social and financial alcoholism, rising infant mortality and vice. The Catholic Irish were, by provenance elite, the charitable corporation enabled its governors to rule without interference and religion, outside the consensus that the Brahmins had established. By 1900, from the state or from other social classes. Fourth, those organizations whose 30% of Boston's residents were foreign-born and 70% were of foreign parentage trustees were able to enlist the support of the greater part of the elite could provide (Green, 1966: 102). By the close of the Civil War, Boston’s immigrants were the stability needed for a necessarily lengthy process of defining art and developing ' organizing to challenge the native elite in the political arena (Solomon, 1956). ancillary institutions to insulate high-cultural from popular-cultural work, per­ If immigration and industrialization wrought traumatic changes in the city's social formance and careers. Finally, and less obviously, the goals of the charitable fabric, the political assault on Brahmin institutions by native populists proved even corporation, unlike those of the profit-seeking firm, are diffuse and ambiguous 1 more frightening. The Know-Nothings who captured state government in the 1850s 40 P D IM AG G IO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 41

attacked the social exclusivity o f Harvard College frontally, amending its charter accommodate. Three years earlier the Athenaeum's Fine Arts Committee had and threatening state control over its governance, hiring and admissions policies suggested that the galleries be expanded, but nothing had been done. With the I (Story, 1980). Scalded by these attacks, Boston's leadership retreated from the Lawrence bequest, and his widow’s offer to contribute a wing to a new gallery, the | public sector to found a system of non-profit organizations that permitted them to trustees voted that I maintain some control over the community even as they lost their command of its the present is a proper time for making an appeal to the public and especially to the friends of the political institutions.' Fine Arts, to raise the sum required to make available Mrs. Lawrence's proposed donation, and, if Story (1980) argues persuasively that this political challenge, and the wave of possible, to provide even larger means to carry out so noble a design in the confident hope that it may institution-building that followed it, transformed the Brahmins from an elite into be attended with success . . . (Whitehill, 1970: 6 ■ 8). a social class." As a social class, the Brahmins built institutions (schools, almshouses A new museum promised to solve problems for several of Boston’s elite institutions: and charitable societies) aimed at securing control over the city's social life Harvard had a collection of prints for which it sought a fire-safe depository, and MIT (Huggins, 1971; Vogel, 1981). As a status group, they constructed organizations and the American Social Science Association possessed collections of architectural (clubs, prep schools and cultural institutions) to seal themselves off from their casts too large for them to store conveniently. After a series of meetings between the increasingly unruly environment. Thus Vernon Parrington's only partially accurate Athenaeum trustees and other public and private decision makers, it was decided to i observation that ‘The Brahmins conceived the great business of life to be the raise money fora museum on a tract of land in the Back Bay. (The land, owned by the ) erection of barriers against the intrusion of the unpleasant’ (quoted in Shiverick, Boston Water Power Company, was made available through the intervention of ) 1970: 129). The creation of a network of private institutions that could define and Mathias Denman Ross, a local developer who was keenly aware of the effects of public | monopolize high art was an essential part of this process of building cultural and cultural buildings on the value of nearby real estate.) In 1870 the state legislature boundaries. chartered the enterprise and, with the help of the Athenaeum, which sponsored The Brahmin class, however, was neither large enough to constitute a public for exhibitions throughout this period, fund-raising began.’ large-scale arts organizations, nor was it content to keep its cultural achievements The initial aspirations of the Museum founders were somewhat modest. The key solely to itself. Alongside of, and complicating, the Brahmins' drive towards figure in the founding was Charles Callahan Perkins, great-nephew of a China- exclusivity was a conflicting desire, as they saw it, to educate the community. The trade magnate, kinsman of the chairman of the Athenaeum's Fine Arts Committee growth of the middle class during this period—a class that was economically and and himself President of the Boston Art Club. Perkins wrote two books on Italian socially closer to the working class and thus in greater need of differentiating itself sculpture in the 1860s, championed arts education in Boston's public schools and from it culturally—provided a natural clientele for Boston's inchoate high culture. served as head of the American Social Science Association's arts-education panel in While we have all too little information about the nature of the visitors to Boston's 1869. (He had studied painting and sculpture in Europe for almost 10 years, before Museum or of the audiences for the Symphony, it seems certain from contemporary concluding that he lacked the creativity to be a good artist.) Perkins, in a report to accounts (and sheer arithmetic) that many of them were middle class. The same the ASSA had asserted 'the feasibility of establishing a regular Museum of Art at impulse that created the markets for etiquette and instruction books in the mid­ moderate expense', with primarily educational aims. Since Boston’s collections had nineteenth century helped populate the galleries and concert halls of the century's few originals, he recommended that the new collection consist of reproductions, last quarter (Nye, I960; Douglas, 1978). primarily plaster casts of sculpture and architecture. The breadth of response to the first appeal for funds for the museum is striking. Cultural entrepreneurship: the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Although the economy was not robust, $261,425 was collected for the building. Of Orchestra this amount, the largest gift was $25,000, only two were larger than $5000 and all The first step in the creation of a high culture was the centralization of artistic acti­ but $100,000 came from over 1000 gifts of less than $2000 from such sources as vities within institutions controlled by Boston's cultural capitalists. This was local newspapers, public-school teachers and workers at a piano factory. (By accomplished with the foundings of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston contrast, when the Museum sought to raise $400,000 for new galleries and an en­ Symphony Orchestra. These institutions were to provide a framework, in the visual dowment 15 years later, $218,000 of the initial $240,000 in contributions came arts and music, respectively, for the definition of high art, for its segregation from from a mere 58 donors (Whitehill, 1970: 42).) popular forms and for the elaboration of an etiquette of appropriation. One reason for the breadth of early support was that the Museum, although in Bostonians had sought to found a museum for some time before 1870. In 1858, private hands, was tb be a professedly communitarian and educational venture. the state legislature, dominated by factions unfriendly to Boston's elite, refused to The Board of Trustees contained a large segment of the Brahmin class: All but one provide Back Bay land for a similar venture (Harris, 1962: 548). The immediate of the first 23 trustees were proprietors of the Athenaeum; 11 were members of the impetus for the Museum, however, was a bequest by Colonel Timothy Bigelow Saturday Club, while many others were members of the Somerset and St Botolph’s clubs; most were graduates of Harvard and many were active in its affairs. The Lawrence of an armor collection too large for the Athenaeum's small gallery to public nature of the Board was further emphasized by the inclusion on it of perma­ ' Shivtfirk (1970) noiej the contrast between the founding of the public library in the 1870s and that of the nent and ex-officio appointments: from Harvard, MIT and the Athenaeum; the ptivate art museum 20 years later, both enterprises in which Athenaeum members were central. " I use the term 'class' to refer to a self-conscious elite united by bonds of economic interest, kinship and culture 7 This section relies heavily upon Walter Muir Whitehill's classic two-volume history of the Museum (1970) (see Thompson. 1966: R; Story. 1980: xi) and, to a lesser extent, on Neil Harris' fine paper (1962) for its facts, albeit not for their interpretation. 42 P DIMAGGIO C U LTU R A L I: N T R P. P R P. N F. U R S111P 43

Mayor, the Chairman of the Boston Public Library's board, the trustee of the As we have seen, a number of ensembles attempted to realize Dwight's Lowell Institute, the Secretary of the State Board of Education and the Superinten­ ambitions. But it was Higginson's organizational skills (and his money) that gave dent of Boston's schools. The trustees dedicated the institution to education; one Boston the nation's first permanent, philanthropically supported and governed, hoped that the breadth of the board’s membership would ensure that the full-season symphony orchestra, In achieving the dream of a large permanent Museum's managers would be ‘prevented from squandering their funds upon the orchestra devoted to fine-arts music, Higginson faced and overcame two private fancies of would-be connoisseurs'. Indeed, the articles of incorporation challenges: first, establishing control over fine-arts music in Boston as a whole; I required that the Museum be open free of charge at least four times a month. The and, second, enforcing internal discipline over the orchestra's members. Against public responded by flooding the Museum on free weekend days in the early years him were arrayed the supporters of Boston’s existing ensembles, principally the (Harris, 1962: 48 52). Philharmonia and the Harvard Musical Association, and the city's musicians, The centralization of the visual arts around a museum required only the jealous of their personal and professional autonomy. provision of a building and an institution controlled by a board of civic-minded Higginson published his plans for the orchestra in a column, headed ‘In the members of the elite. The Museum functioned on a relatively small budget in its Interest of Good Music', that appeared in several of Boston’s newspapers: early years, under the direction of Charles Greely Loring, a Harvard graduate and Civil War general, who had studied Egyptology when his physician sent him to the Notwithstanding the development of musical taste in Boston, we have never yet possessed a full and permanent orchestra, offering the best music at low prices, such as may be found in all the large banks of the Nile. The Museum's founders, facing the need to raise substantial European cities. . . . The essential condition of such orchestras is their stability, whereas ours are funds, organized both private and public supporc carefully, mobilizing a consensus necessarily shifting and uncertain, because we are dependent upon musicians whose work and time in favor of their project from the onset. are largely pledged elsewhere. To obviate this difficulty the following plan is offered. It is an effort By contrast, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was, for its first years at least, a made simply in the interest of good music, and though individual in as much as it is independent of one-man operation, forced to wrest hegemony over Boston's musical life from societies or clubs, it is in no way antagonistic to any previously existing musical organization (Howe, 1914: 41). several contenders, each with its own coterie of elite support. That Henry Lee Higginson, a partner in the brokerage firm of Lee, Higginson, was able to do so was In this last sentence, Higginson treads on delicate ground, He goes on to praise, a consequence of the soundness of his organizational vision, the firmness of his specifically, the Handel and Haydn Society and the Harvard Musical Association, commitment, and, equally important, his centrality to Boston’s economic and the two musical societies with the closest Brahmin connections, while indicating social elite. implicitly that there will be no further need for the services of the latter. To launch In a sense, Higginson began as a relative outsider. Although his father, founder this new enterprise, Higginson proposes to spend, annually, $20,000 of his own of the family firm, made a fortune in shipping, Henry was the first of his line to money until the orchestra becomes self-supporting. matriculate at Harvard; and soon he dropped out (claiming poor vision), visiting Despite a measure of public incredulity, and some resentment at Higginson's Europe and returning to private tutelage in Cambridge. Upon completing his choice of European conductor, George Henschel, over local candidates, the BSO education, he studied music in Europe for several years, ultimately against the opened in December 1881 to the enthusiastic response of the musical public. (The wishes of his father, as their tense and sometimes acrimonious correspondence sug­ demand for tickets was great; lines formed outside the box office the evening gests (Perry, 1921: 121 135). After an accident lamed his arm. he returned to the before they went on sale.) The social complexion of the first night's audience is United States for good, fought in the Civil War, married a daughter of the Harvard indicated by a report in a Boston newspaper that ‘the spirit of the music so affected scientist Louis Agassiz and, following a disastrous venture in southern farming and the audience that when the English national air was recognized in Weber's Festival a lucrative investment in the Calumet and Hecla copper mines, finally joined his Overture, the people arose en masse and remained standing until the close’. By father's State Street firm." employing local musicians and permitting them to play with the Philharmonic Higginson was a knowledgeable student of music, and a follower of the aesthetic Society and the Harvard Musical Association (both of which, like the BSO, offered doctrines of John S. Dwight. As early as 1840, Dwight had called for the founding about 20 concerts that season), Higginson earned the gratitude of the city's music of a permanent orchestra in Boston. 'This promises something’, he wrote of an lovers. amateur performance. The trouble began in February 1882, when the players received Higginson’s terms for the following season. To continue to work for the Symphony, they would We could not hut feel that the materials that evening collected might, if they could be kept together be required to make themselves available for rehearsals and performances from through the year, and induced to practice, form an orchestra worthy to execute the grand works of October through April, four days a week, and to play for no other conductor or Haydn and Mozart. . . . To secure these ends might not a plan of this kind be realized? Let a few of out most accomplished and refined musicians institute a series of cheap instrumental concerts. . . . musical association. (The Handel and Haydn Society, which had strong ties to the Let them engage to perform quartettes, etc., occasionally a symphony, by the best masters and no Athenaeum, was exempted from this prohibition.) The implications of the others. Let them repeat the best and most characteristic pieces enough to make them a study to the contract, which the players resisted unsuccessfully, were clear: Boston's other audiences (Howe, 1914: 4 5). orchestras, lacking the salaries that Higginson's subsidies permitted, would be unable to compete for the services of Boston’s musicians. (To make matters worse, " In Henry Adams words. 'Higginson. after a desperate struggle, was forced into Stare Street' (Adam s. 1928: a number of the city's journeymen musicians received no offers from Higginson at 210). In later years. Higginson told a relative that 'He never walked into 44 State Street without wanting to sit tlown on the doorstep and cry'(Perry, 1921- US) all.) 44 P DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 45

The response of the press, particularly of the Brahmin Transcript, suggests that thai is ih c best thing wc can do, and if you have any confidence in my judgment, pray drop all loyalists of the other ensembles responded to Higginson's actions with outrage. conditions in the contract except those relating to our own welfare. I mean now the conditions of The Transcript editorialized of Higginson discipline, etc. (Pfrry. 1921: 299).

Hr ihus "makes a corner" in orchestral players, and monopolizes these Tor his own concerts and those Despite his frequent assertions that he yielded in all cases to his conductors’ advice of the Handel and Haydn Society. . . . Mr. Higginson’s gift becomes an imposition, it is something on orchestral matters, Higginson, as we have seen, insisted on exclusive contracts in that we must receive, or else we look musical starvation in the face. It is as if a man should make a the orchestra's second year, threatening to break any strike with the importation of poor friend a present of several baskets of champagne and, at the same time, cut off his whole water European players. Although he won that battle, he nonetheless replaced the locals supply. gradually, over the course of the next decade, with new men with few Boston tics, A more populist newspaper complained that the 'monopoly of music' was ‘an idea mostly European, of greater technical accomplishment, upon whose loyalty he that could scarcely have emanated from any association except that of deluded could count (Howe, 1914: 121 123). wealth with arrant charlatanism’. Even Music, a New York publication originally In this, Higginson was not merely following a European model. ‘My contracts’, friendly to Higginson's efforts, called his contract he wrote an associate in 1888, 'are very strong, indeed much stronger than European contracts usually are . . .' (Perry. 1921: 398). Characteristic of the 2 direct stab at the older organizations and rival conductors of Boston. It means that one or two orchestra contract was section 12: organizations may make efforts to place their concerts on the off days which Mr. Henschel has been pleased to allow them, but some must he left in the cold, orchestraless and forlorn. . . . The manner Tf said musician fails to play to the satisfaction of said Higginson, said Higginson may dismiss said in which the proposal was made was also one that forebodes tyranny. Some of the oldest members of musician from the Orchestra, paying his salary to the time of dismissal, and shall not be liable to pay the Orchestra, men whose services to music in Boston have entitled them to deference and respect, him any compensation or damages for such dismissal (Perry, 1921: 398). v/ere omitted altogether, and will he left out of the new organization. It was intimated strongly that in case the offer was rejected by the men, their places would be filled from the ranks of European Higginson was undeniably an autocrat. In later years he rejected the suggestions orchestras (Howe. 1914: 67~69). of friends to place the Orchestra under a board of trustees; and he used the threat : Higginson and his orchestra weathered the storm. Attendance stayed up and, of discontinuing his annual subventions as a bludgeon to forestall the unionization within a year, his was the only orchestral association in Boston, co-existing peace­ of the players. Yet Higginson accomplished what all orchestras would have to fully with the smaller Handel and Haydn Society. In order to achieve the kind of achieve if orchestral work was to be separated permanently from the playing of ensemble he desired, however, Higginson had to ensure that his musicians would popular music and Dwight's dream of a permanent orchestra devoted to high-art ; commit their time and their attention to the BSO alone, and accept his (and his music achieved: the creation of a permanent musical work force, under exclusive j agent's, the conductor's) authority as inviolate. Since, in the past, all musicians, contract, willing to accept without question the authority of the conductor. ' whatever their affiliations, were freelancers upon whom no single obligation weighed supreme, accomplishing these aspirations required a fundamental change in the relationship between musicians and their employers. The Brahmins as an organization-forming class In part, effecting this internal monopolization of attention was simply a matter The Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were both organiza- / of gaining an external monopoly of classical-music performance. With the tions embedded in a social class, formal organizations whose official structure was , surrender of the Philharmonic Society and the Harvard Musical Association, two draped around the ongoing life of the group that governed, patronized, and major competitors for the working time of Boston’s musicians disappeared. None­ staffed them.'* They were not separate products of different segments of an elite; or • theless, while his musicians were now more dependent upon the BSO for their of artists and critics who mobilized wealthy men to bankroll their causes. Rather livelihoods, and thus more amenable to his demands, his control over the work they were the creations of a densely connected self-conscious social group intensely force was still challenged by the availability of light-music or dance engagements, unified by multiple ties among its members based in kinship, commerce, club life teaching commitments and the tradition of lax discipline to which the players were and participation in a wide range of philanthropic associations. Indeed, if, as accustomed. Stinchcombe (1965) has argued, there arc ‘organization-forming organizations'— ; Throughout his life, Higginson fought to maintain control over the Orchestra's organizations that spawn off other organizations in profusion—there are also | employees, and the issue of discipline was foremost in his mind from the begin­ organization-forming status groups, and the Brahmins were one of these. This they I ning. In an early plan for the Orchestra, he suggested engaging a conductor and could be not just because of their cultural or religious convictions (to which Green eight to ten exceptionally good younger musicians from outside Boston at a fixed (1966), Baltzell (1979) and Hall (forthcoming) have called attention), but because salary, ‘who would be ready at my call to play anywhere', and then to draw around they were integrated by their families' marriages, their Harvard educations, their them the best of our Boston musicians, thus refreshing and renewing the present joint business ventures, their memberships in a web of social clubs and their trus­ orchestra, and getting more nearly possession of it . . . (Howe, 1914: 28). At that teeships of charitable and cultural organizations. This integration is exemplified time, exclusive employment contracts were so rare that the more timid Henschel, after agreeing to serve as conductor, tried to convince Higginson to abandon his 11 In James Thompson's terms, they were organizations whose resource dependencies all coincided. For their financial support, for their governance and for their clients, they looked to a class whose members were insistence on total commitment. ‘I assure you', he wrote as the first orchestra was 'functionally interdependent and interactlcdl regularly with respect to religions, economic, recreational, and being assembled. governmental matters' (Thompson, l%7* 27)

I I’ niMACCIO CUI.TIIRAI. I!N'I Klil’RIiNF.UK.SIIIP -17

in ihc associations of Higginson, and in the ties between the Museum and the President for twenty years), the Wednesday Evening Club, the Wimcrsnighi, Orchestra during the last 20 years of the nineteenth century. Friday Night and Officers Clubs, New York’s Knickerbocker Club and, from 1893, It is likely that Higginson's keen instinct for brokerage—and the obligations he the Saturday Club. Among his Tavern Club colleagues were Harvard's Charles accrued as principal in one of Boston's two major houses—served him well in his Eliot Norton (spiritual godfather of the Museum’s aesthetes), William Dean efforts to establish the Orchestra. At first glance, Higginson's achievement in Howells and Henry Lee. At the Friday Club he consorted with Howells, William creating America's first elite-governed permanent symphony orchestra in Boston James and Henry Adams. At the Saturday Club, his clubmates included the MFA’s appears to be the work of a rugged individualist. On closer inspection, we see that Thomas Gold Appleton and Martin Brimmer. it was precisely Higginson’s centrality to the Brahmin social structure that enabled In the 1890s, Higginson’s career in Boston philanthropy blossomed. (By now he him to succeed. Only a lone, centrally located entrepreneur could have done what was on the MFA's Board. Earlier, when the Museum's first President, Martin Higginson did, because to do so ruffled so many feathers: a committee would have Brimmer, asked Charles Eliot Norton if Higginson should be invited, Norton wrote compromised with the supporters of other musical associations and with the back that 'Higginson would be excellent, but he never attends meetings' (Harris, patrons of the more established local musicians. Nonetheless, if Higginson's 1962: 551).) He lavished most of his attention (beyond that devoted to the youthful marginality permitted the attempt, it was his eventual centrality that Orchestra) on Harvard, which elected him a Fellow in 1893. He gave Harvard enabled him to succeed. His career illustrates the importance of kinship, Soldiers Field and a new student union, was Treasurer of Radcliffe College, played commerce, clubs and philanthropy in Boston elite life. Ties in each of these areas a key role in the founding of the Graduate School of Business, patronized the reinforced those in the others; each facilitated the success of the Orchestra, and medical school and gave anonymous gifts to deserving faculties.'" Higginson's each brought him into close connection with the cultural capitalists active in the position as Fellow of Harvard placed him at the summit of Boston's institutional MFA and led, eventually, to his selection as a Museum trustee. life and undoubtedly reinforced his contacts with the Museum’s trustees and Higginson was born a cousin to some of the leading families in Boston: the friends. His personal art collection, which included Turners. Corots and Rodins, Cabots, the Lowells, the Perkins, the Morses, the Jacksons, the Channings and the encouraged such interactions as well. (In 1893, he donated a valuable Dutch Paines, among others (Perry, 1921: 14). (The first four of these families produced master to the MFA.) trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts during Higginson's lifetime. His kinsman Thus was the Orchestra’s founder embedded in the Brahmin community. When Frances W. Higginson was also a Museum trustee.) In Cambridge, he was close to Lee, Higginson furnished an emergency loan of $17,000 to the Museum of Fine Charles Lowell and, after his first European adventure, he studied with Samuel Arts in 1889, with little prospect of repayment, was this because he was on the Eliot, a cousin of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, and later a trustee of the Board; was it a consequence of Higginson's kinship ties with the Cabots, Perkinses Museum. During this period, he spent a great deal of time in the salon-like house­ or Lowells; his business alliances with Kidder or Endicott; his club friendship with hold of Louis Agassiz, befriending the scientist’s son and marrying his daughter. Norton; Harvard ties to the Eliots? The range of possibilities renders the question So close did Henry remain to his Harvard classmates that, despite his withdrawal trivial and illustrates how closely knit was Higginson's world. after freshman year, they permitted him to take part in their class’s Commence­ In 1893, when Higginson demanded that Boston build him a new and suitable m ent exercises. Symphony Hall, lest he abandon the Orchestra to bankruptcy and dissolution, the When Henry went into business, he brought his family and college ties with initial appeal for funds was signed by a broad cross section of the city's elite: his him. A contemporary said of the Lee, Higginson firm, it ‘owed in some measure to friends and kinsmen Agassiz, Lodge, Lowell, Lee and John Lowell Gardner; family alliances its well-advised connections with the best financial enterprises of Harvard’s Eliot, Norton, Longfellow, Shattuck and Parkman; Peabody of Kidder the day' (Perry, 1921: 272). Indeed, Higginson's first successful speculation was his Peabody, to name a few. Present on the list were at least four of Higginson's fellow investment in the Calumet and Hecla mines, at the behest of his in-laws Agassiz MFA trustees: the President (Martin Brimmer), the Treasurer (by now, John L. and Shaw (the latter an early donor of paintings to the Museum). The family firm Gardner), Eliot and Norton." The group raised over $400,000, a substantial stake was instrumental in the development of the western railroads, through the efforts in that financially troubled year. of cousin Charlesjackson Paine. In this enterprise, Higginson associated with John M. Forbes and with Charles H. Perkins (kinsman of the MFA founder). Higginson Conclusions was so intimate with the latter that he invested Perkins’ money without consultation. Lee, Higginson made a fortune in the telephone company, and The Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were creations of Higginson, in later years, was a director of General Electric. In some of these the Brahmins, and the Brahmins alone. As such, their origins are easier to

ventures, the firm co-operated with other Boston financiers. Higginson was on HiRRmson, whose visioh extended beyond Bosmn. also Rave Renerously 10 Princeion, Williams, ihc close terms with his competitors Kidder of Kidder, Peabody (the Museum’s first University of Virginia and Middlesex, and sent the Orchestra to play, at his expense, at W illiam s, Princeton and treasurer) and Endicott, President of the New England Trust and Suffolk Savings Yale. 11 Higginson's relationship with Gardner and his mildly scandalous wife Isabella Stewart Gardner, is revealing. (and the Museum's second Treasurer). Gardiner Martin Lane was a partner in Lee, When Isabella, a New Yorker, entered Boston society in the ISROs, she was accorded a frosty reception. According Higginson when he resigned his position to assume the Museum’s presidency in to Morris Carter, her biographer and the first Director of her collection, she won social acceptance by employing • 1907. the BSO to entertain at one of her parties (Carter, 192)). an action that would have required Higginson's approval After her palace opened (more or less) to the public in 1909, Higginson presented her with a book Higginson was also an active clubman, a member of the Tavern Club, (and its compiled by her admirers (Green, I9f»(r 112) P D IM A G G IO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 49

understand than were British or Continental efforts in which aristocrats and Acknowledgments bourgeoisie played complex and interrelated r&les (Wolff, 1982). The Brahmins For advice and encouragement I am indebted to Randall Collins, Oavid Karen, were a status group, and as such they strove towards exclusivity, towards the defini­ Michael Schudson, Ann Swidler and to the members o f Professor Mary Douglas's tion of a prestigious culture that they could monopolize as their own. Yet they 'Mass Media and Mythology’ seminar at the New York University Institute for the were also a social class, and they were concerned, as is any dom inant social class, Humanities, of Theda Skocpol’s graduate research seminar at Harvard University with establishing hegemony over those they dominated. Some Marxist students of and of Paul Hirsch's production-of-culture session at the 1980 Sociology and the culture have misinterpreted the cultural institutions as efforts to dictate taste or to Arts conference in Chicago. Research and institutional support from the Andrew inculcate the masses with the ideas of elites. Certainly, the cultural capitalists, W. Mellon Foundation and from Yale University’s Program on Non-Profit consummate organizers and intelligent men and women, were wise enough to Organizations is gratefully acknowledged. understand the impossibility of socializing the masses in institutions from which they effectively were barred. Their concern with education, however, was not References simply window-dressing or an effort at public relations. Higginson, for example, ADAMS. 11. (1928). The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, New York. Book League of devoted much of his fortune to American universities and secondary schools. He America once wrote a kinsman, from whom he sought a donation of $100,000 for Harvard, ■ ADORNO, 1' w (1941). On popular music. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 9. no. 1 ‘Educate, and save ourselves and our families and our money from the mobs!’ RALTZELL. E, D (1979). Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, N ew York. Free Press (Perry, 1921: 329). Moreover, a secret or thoroughly esoteric culture could not have RARNUM. P T. (1879). Struggles an d Triumphs; or Forty Years Recollections, Buffalo, New York. The served to legitimate the status of American elites; it would be necessary to share it, Courier Company BERNSTEIN, n (197V). On the classification and framing of educational knowledge, in Class, Codes at least partially. The tension between monopolization and hegemony, between and Control, vol. 3, London, Routledgc and Kegan Paul exclusivity and legitimation, was a constant counterpoint to the efforts at RERNSTEIN. B (197’sb). Ritual in education, in Class. Codes an d Control, vol. 3. London. Routledgc classification of American urban elites. and Kegan Paul This explains, in part, the initial emphasis on education at the Museum of Fine BOSTON ARI C.I.UB (1878). Constitution and By-laws o f the Boston Art Club, With a Sketch o f its Arts. Yet, from the first, the Museum managers sought to educate through distin­ History, Boston, E. H. Trulan ROURnif.lL P and PASSERON, i -C (1977). Reproduction in Education. Socrety and Culture, Beverly guishing true from vulgar art—at first, cautiously, later with more confidence. In Hills, Sage the years that followed they would place increased emphasis on the original art that BOIJRDIEU. P and PASSERON. J C (1979). The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to became available to them, until they abandoned reproductions altogether and with Culture, CRicago, University o f Chicago Press them their emphasis on education. In a less dramatic way, the Orchestra, which BURT. N (1977). Palaces fo r the People, Boston. Little, Brown and Co. began with an artistic mandate, would further classify the contents of its programs CARTER. M (1925). Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court, Boston, Houghton Mifflin -- COUCH. S R (197V). Class, politics and symphony orchestras. Society, vol. 14. no. I and frame the aesthetic experience in the years to come. COUCH. S R (1976A). The symphony orchestra in London and New York: some political considera­ In structure, however, the Museum and the Orchestra were similar innovations. tions, presented at the Third Annual Conference on Social Theory and the Arts, Albany, New York Each was private, controlled by members of the Brahmin class, and established on DIMAGGIO. P. and USEEM. m (1978). Cultural property and public policy: Emerging tensions in govern­ the corporate model, dependent on private philanthropy and relatively long-range ment support for the arts. Social Research, vol. 45, Summer financial planning; each was sparely staffed and relied for much of its management DOUGLAS. A (1978). The Feminization o f American Culture, New York, Avon DOUGLAS. M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis o f Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledgc and on elite volunteers; and each counted among its founders wealthy men with Kegan Paul considerable scholarly or artistic credentials who were centrally located in Boston's f e ij o w s . D w and FREEMAN. A. A.. (1936). This Way to the Big Show: The Life o f Dexter Fellows, elite social structure. The Museum was established under broad auspices for the New York, Viking Press education of the community as a whole; the Orchestra was created by one man in fish fr . w A (1918). Notes on Music in O ld Boston, Boston, Oliver Ditson the service of art and of those in the community with the sophistication or motiva­ FREDRICKSON, g . M (1965). The Inner Civd War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis o f the Union, New York, Harper and Row tion to appreciate it. Within 40 years, the logic of cultural capitalism would GANS. II I (1974). Popular Culture and High Culture, New York, Basic Books moderate sharply, if not eliminate, these historically grounded differences. The GREFN. M (1966). The Problem o f Boston. New York. Norton Symphony would come to resemble the Museum in charter and governance, and IIAIJ.P D. (forthcom ing). Institutions and the Making o f American Culture, Westport Connecticut. the Museum would abandon its broad social mission in favor of aestheticism and an Greenwood elite clientele. I1ANDIIN. O (1972). Boston's Immigrants. 1790 1880, New York, Alhcneum HARRIS. N (1962). The Gilded Age revisited- Boston and the museum movement. American The creation of the MFA, the BSO and similar organizations throughout the Quartedy, vol. 14, Winter United States created a base through which the ideal of high culture could be given HARRIS, n (1966). The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790 I860, N ew York. institutional flesh. The alliance between class and culture that emerged was George Braziller defined by, and thus inseparable from, its organizational mediation. As a conse­ HARRIS, n. (1973). Humbug: The Art o f P. T. Bamum, Boston. Little. Brown and Co. quence, the classification 'high culture/popular culture' is comprehensible only in HATCH, c (1962). Music for America: A cultural controversy of the 1850s. American Quarterly, vol. 14. Winter its dual sense as characterizing both a ritual classification and the organizational HOWE. M A. r) (1914). The Boston Symphony Orchestra: An Historical Sketch, Boston, Houghton systems that give that classification meaning. Mifflin, 50 P. DIMAGGIO Media, Culture and Society 1982 4. 51-61

MUGGINS. N J. (1971). Protestants against Poverty: Bosttln's Charities, 1870- 1900, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood JAIIFR, F C. (1968). The Boston Brahmins in the age of industrial capitalism, in Jaher, p. C. (cd.), The Age o f Industrialism in America, New York, Oxford University Press J A IIF R . F. C. (1972). Nineteenth.century elites in Boston and New York, Journal o f Social History, vol. 6, Spring LANE. R. (1 9 7 5 ) . Policing the City: Boston, 1822' 85, New York, Atheneum I.OWEN1HAI, L (1961). Literature, Popular Culture, and Society, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall LYNNES. R (1953). The Tastemakers,New York. Grosset and Dunlap MCDONALD, D. (1957). A theory of mass culture, in Rosenberg. B, and White, D. M. (eds).Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Glencoe. Illinois, Free Press MCGLINCI IFF, c. (1940). The First Decade o f the Boston Museum. Boston. Bruce Humphries MUELLER. J II. (1951). The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History o f Musical Taste, Bloom ington, Indiana University Press n y f . r . B (I960), The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776 1830, New York, Harper and Row PERRY, B. (1921). Life an d Letters o f Henry Lee Higginson, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press P O G G I.J (1968). Theater in America: The Impact o f Economic Forces, 1870 1967, Ithaca. Cornell University Press RYAN. K. (1915). Old Boston Museum Days, Boston, Little, Brown and Co. SHIVERICK. N. C. (1970). The social reorganization of Boston, in Williams A. W ., A Social History of the Greater Boston C/ubs, New York. Barre SO lO M O N. B. M. (1956). Ancestors and Immigrants, New York, John Wiley STARR. P. (forthcoming). The Social Transformation o f American Medicine, New York, Basic Books ST1NCHCOMBE, A. L. (1965), Social structure and organizations, in March, J. G. (ed.), Handbook o f Organizations, Chicago, Rand McNally STORY. R (1980). The Forging o f an Aristocracy: Harvard an d the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870, M iddletown, Connecticut. W esleyan University Press THFRNSTROM, S. (1972). Poverty an d Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City, New York, Atheneum THOMPSON. F. P (1966). The Making o f the English Working Class, New York, Random House THOMPSON, J D. (1967). Organizations in Action, New York. McGraw-Hill TWENTIETH CENTURY CLUB (1910). The Amusement Situation in Boston. Boston v o tiF L . m (I9RI). The Invention o f the Modem Hospital, Chicago. University o f Chicago Press WARNER. S B (1970). Streetcar Suburbs: The Process o f Growth in Boston, 1870 1900. New York, Atheneum WEBER. M. (1968). Economy and Society, 3 volum es, New York, Bedminster Press WHIPPLE. G . M. (n .d .). A Sketch o f Musical Societies o f Salem, Salem, Massachusetts. Essex Institute WHnEHIIJ.. W. M. (1970). Museum o f Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History, Cambridge, Harvard University Press WOLFF, J, ( 1 9 8 2 ) . The problem o f ideology in the sociology o f art: a case study o f Manchester in the nineteenth century. Media, Culture and Society, vol. 4, no. 1 ZOl.BERG. v. L. ( 1 9 7 4 ) . The art institute of Chicago: the sociology of a cultural institution, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago ZOLBERG. v . l (1981). Conflicting visions of American art museums. Theory and Society, vol. 10, January Media, Culture and Society 1982 4, 303-322

Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston, part II: the classification and framing of American art PAUL DIMAGGIO*

The organizers and early managers of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and similar institutions throughout the United States were in the business of mapping and defining cultural boundaries. By cultural boundaries, I mean boundaries between cultural forms that also serve to define and to maintain boundaries among people, since shared tastes and cultural experiences provided a fundamental source of feelings of solidarity to participants in social groupings (DiMaggio and Useem, 1977). Mary Douglas (1966: 138) has written, ‘It is my belief that people really do think of their own social environment as consisting of other people joined or separated by lines which must be respected’. The same can be said of cultural forms—varieties of art, leisure, cuisine or sport—that are identified with or monopolized by specific status groups. People perceive such forms as naturally distinct. An orchestra that performed a popular tune on a program of Beethoven would shock its audience. We do not expect to hear chamber music at a rock concert, nor do we expect to see magazine advertisements hanging next to old masters on the walls of an art museum. Such juxtapositions shock because they violate ritual boundaries that emerge out of and reflect the ways in which social groups organize themselves and categorize one another. Cultural categories reflect social distinctions and transform / them symbolically from social accomplishments to natural facts. The strength of the boundaries among artistic genres varies with the importance of those genres to the ritual life of social groups. Strong classifications are highly ritualized. In modern societies, performances and exhibitions are often what Bernstein (1975a: 54) has called ‘differentiating rituals’, rituals that ‘deepen local attachment behaviour to, and detachment behaviour from, specific groups’.1 Every status group needs elements of a culture that it can call its own. A shared culture plays an important role in the ritual life of a group; it also serves as a signalling device, enabling members to recognize other members and to detect outsiders. As Weber noted, mastery of the elements of a status culture becomes a source of honor to group members. Particularly in the case of a dominant status group, it is important that their culture be recognized as legitimate by, yet be only partially available to, groups that are subordinate to them. For Boston’s cultural capitalists of the nineteenth century, the organizational separation of high from popular culture (described in DiMaggio, 1982) was necessary, but not adequate. High culture would have to be imbued with sacredness, and, as sacred, removed from contact with profane or popular culture (see Douglas, 1966). The purification of the classification high v. popular, the driving of profane culture Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University. 0163-4437/82/040303 + 20 $03.00/0 © 1982 Academic Press Inc (London) Limited 304 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 305 out of the temples of art, and the ideological and ritual framing of the relationship The implications of this were not lost on contemporaries: When part of the between the work of art and its public were the necessary sequel. In accomplishing Sumner collection was deaccessioned,^one newspaper writer warned the trustees this, Boston’s cultural capitalists, and the artists and art historians who assisted that ‘The common people will turn to [the items] gladly, if they are not them, altered the initial missions of the organizations that they founded and appreciated by those of artistic and travel-improved tastes . . . ’ (ibid.: 558). The established a partial monopolization (with educated members of the middle class early trustees were not doctrinaire in their efforts to purge the popular, in part as junior partners) of high culture that has persisted to the present. because they recognized their own limitations. Thus trustee Martin Brimmer sagely During the period between the founding of the Museum of Fine Arts and the cautioned, Boston Symphony Orchestra and World War I, both institutions followed similar Judgements of intrinsic merit are nowhere infallible. They vary somewhat with individual tastes; they paths of development, albeit with emphases differing as a consequence of their vary more with the shifting tendencies of the time. . . . What we need is a collection of permanent origins and technologies. Each experienced two stages of classification: first, the value, and in forming it, it will be well to avoid too strict an adherence to the theories of the day. The purification of their programming through the elimination of residual elements of function of the managers of a museum is not criticism, but the collection of materials for the criticism popular genres; second, the further subclassification, within the realm of high art, of others. (Harris, 1962: 554). of specific genres. Individuals active in each also worked to frame the artistic Nonetheless, Brimmer noted, those managers ‘should carefully guard against the experience by strengthening boundaries between professional and amateur art, inroad of pictorial rubbish’. and between artist and audience; and by delineating an etiquette of appropriation, Part of the framing of artistic experience involved a strengthening of the a normatively defined attitude towards artistic experience. Ideologically, this boundaries between artist and amateur. In the visual arts, as in music, one way to process involved the evolution and eventual supremacy of aestheticism and create distance between the profane audience and sacred art would be to avoid the connoisseurship. Organizationally, it entailed a limited but crucial transfer of work of living American artists, particularly those of a commercial stamp. In the authority from laymen to professionals (see Zolberg, 1980). In both institutions the early days, the Museum was open to a range of American artists: Stuart and processes of classification and framing led to a shift in goals—subtle in the case of Boston’s Dr William Rimmer exhibited there; and, in 1881, there were exhibitions the BSO, dramatic and contested at the Museum—away from education. And in of the work of Washington Alston, American wood engravings, Christmas cards, both cases, the processes made art less accessible to immigrants and members of the and colored glass. Annual contemporary-art exhibitions enabled local artists to working class. advertise their wares. Yet the locals were dissatisfied with the warmth of the welcome they received, and with the museum’s careful avoidance of the commercial. Local professional artists attacked the Museum for banning salesmen The revolution of the aesthetes and price tags from the contemporary exhibitions. The Art Amateur condemned The efforts of segments of the elite and of professionals to classify high culture the MFA as ‘the latest born pet of our aristocracy of culture’, criticizing its more carefully in the Museum of Fine Arts were more dramatic than similar efforts expenditures on foreign textiles, furniture, and pottery (ibid.: 558). at the Orchestra because they required a more striking alteration of its original ‘High art’ began to become more strongly classified almost as soon as the mission as a fundamentally educational institution. The founders drew inspiration Museum gained the wherewithal to develop its own collections. As early as 1881, from Ruskin and Jarves, his American disciple, looking towards the industrial Charles Perkins, in his annual report, complained about the lack of money for museums of England as their models (Harris, 1962: 557). The public was admitted acquiring art. A committee of the trustees, reporting two years later, reasserted the free on one, and later two, days each week; and the collections were used for the emphasis on reproductions, but on pragmatic grounds. Given the Museum’s instruction of public-school children almost from the beginning. limited resources, the committee noted, it seems ‘too plain for argument that we Yet the record suggests ambivalence on the part of at least some of the trustees must rely principally upon the liberality of others for original works of art’ towards a strictly educational conception of the museum’s purpose. Founder and (Whitehill, 1970: 82). Originals would be purchased only when prices were President Charles Perkins wrote, ‘We aim at collecting materials for the education extremely low for the quality of the work, or when private subventions were of the nation in art, not at making collections of objects of art.’ But he added, available to finance the acquisitions. The committee frankly viewed reproductions ‘That must be done at a later stage’ (ibid.: 553). The museum founders were as a pragmatic expedient, not an ideal. Even Curator Edward Robinson, who as pragmatists: They recognized that, lacking original art, they must put something Director 15 years later was the champion of the casts, devoted his first annual in their museum, and they were optimistic about the educational value of casts and report to original objects of art. reproductions.2 But some, at least, hoped that originals would one day come to By the late 1880s, then, a change in emphasis from reproductions to originals form an important part of the collection. awaited only the emergence of the means for obtaining the latter. The Museum’s The early museum, however, had much besides what is now defined as high cul­ managers would not have to wait long. After almost two decades of financial ture to exhibit. The bulk of the holdings consisted of reproductions. Charles Sumner instability, several major bequests afforded the Museum the opportunity to build had given a set of curiosities, another donor had provided seven Egyptian mummies, Upon the gifts of art already received. In 1894, the trustees began to permit the and others had loaned such objects as a Philippine chain cutlass, a buffalo horn, an purchase of original art. In just one decade, the Museum, which had spent only old sled from Friesland and Zulu weapons (Whitehill, 1970: 9). While the casts $7500 for original art in its first seven years, expended $1,324,000 on new remained central, the more Barnumesque items were soon discarded. acquisitions (ibid.: 180-214; Carter, 1925: 195“96). 306 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 307 Although the original Museum had expanded in 1890, the sheer volume of the First of all, the casts had to go, for they profaned the art with which they dwelt. new art had begun to crowd the casts, which had originally inhabited the entirety Robinson wished to keep the casts as the museum’s centerpiece, as a model of the Museum’s first floor. The acquisition of land for a new and larger building educational resource that could be copied throughout the United States. Prichard in Boston’s fashionable Fenway district might have allayed the competition for and his supporters sought to exile them to basement rooms under collections of space that was emerging. Instead, the planning process for the new Museum originals or to another building altogether. Casts, he wrote, are became the occasion for a scarring battle between the supporters of education—the engines of education and should not be shown near objects of inspiration. They are data mechanically Museum’s Director, Edward Robinson (who succeeded General Loring in 1902) produced; . . . [They] even destroy that contemplation which Mr. Gilman [Benjamin Ives Gilman, and allies among the trustees—and the champions of aestheticism, led by the the Museum Secretary] calls the ‘consummation of a work of art’ (ibid.: 202). professional art historians who had entered the Museum as it expanded in the Casts, wrote Prichard, are 1890s, and supported by Board President Samuel Warren and several of his colleagues. the Pianola of the Arts . . . The exhibition halls of our Museum have the same right to be free of To understand the battle lines that formed around the issue of the r61e that casts mechanical sculpture as the programmes of the Symphony Concerts, which set the standard of and reproductions would play in the new building, it is necessary to understand musical taste in Boston, have of exemption from mechanical music (ibid.: 202). changes in both personnel and ideology that occurred in the 30 years that followed The reformers also sought to purge the Museum of lesser originals. Curator Paul the Museum’s founding. The original Museum was sparely staffed. As the Chalfin urged that the Museum deaccession 371 of its 1101 original paintings, and collections began to grow, new departments were established and curators hired. f store another 230, exhibiting 250 to the general public and displaying the rest in With the ascendency of Robinson, a Harvard art historian, to the directorship, the special study collections. Prichard advocated this plan more generally: trend towards hiring art historians to these positions accelerated. The first curators were, for the most part, either members of the Brahmin aristocracy (men like Naturally the higher the standard of excellence it is wished to maintain, the larger will be the size of the study series, and the fewer the objects it is possible to show to the public. The air grows rarer the Walter Mason Cabot) or outsiders, men with somewhat exotic backgrounds. A few nearer you reach the summit of the mountain (ibid.: 184). of the latter, like Print Curator Kohler of Harvard, or Curator of the Japanese collection Ernest Fennelosa, a Spanish musician’s son who had married the The art that did remain in view would be reorganized. According to the South daughter of a Salem China trader, had close Boston connections. Others, like Kensington philosophy, separate rooms had been devoted to different kinds of Matthew Prichard, an intimate of Board President Warren’s expatriate brother artifacts, in order to facilitate their inspection by craftspersons. By contrast, Ned in England, or librarian Almy Morrill Carter, who had gone to Harvard then Prichard advocated the historical classification of objects by period and nationality. worked at Princeton for several years, had few Boston ties. These outsiders, whom The implications of this new framing of aesthetic experience were unfriendly to Prichard later referred to as ‘people that chance rained into the place,—German the goal of education. The ideology of connoisseurship—the view that nothing blood, Japanese blood, Jewish blood, English blood as well as Yankee—with no should interfere with the direct unmediated communion between the viewer and ties to the community’ (ibid.: 215), served an important role. The cultural the work of art—was hostile to interpretation. Benjamin Ives Gilman argued with capitalists were, in Lewis Coser’s terms (1974), a ‘greedy’ elite. They distrusted Robinson that ‘in an exhibition of fine art, instruction becomes a means, the end individuals not of their class; and when they had to employ them, they sought men being appreciation’ and that ‘the knowledge of art history is not the same as the who were classless, who belonged to no other party in Boston. Thus Carter recalled comprehension of art history, but a very different and immeasurably less important of his interview with President Warren, thing’. The Museum, wrote Prichard, I can remember only one question that he asked me: Whom did I know in Boston? 1 feared that 1 is dedicated chiefly to those who come, not to be educated, but to make its treasures their friends for would lose the job because I had to admit that I knew absolutely no one in the city; but perhaps that i life and their standards of beauty. Joy, not knowledge, is the aim o f contemplating a painting by was my best recommendation to him and I did receive the appointment . . . (Whitehill, 1970: 181). Turner or Dupre’s ‘On the Cliff,’ nor need we look at a statue or a coin for aught else than inspiration and the pleasure of exercising our faculties of perception. . . . (T]he direct aim of art is the pleasure The new professionals were, for the most part, aesthetes, raised on the derived from a contemplation of the perfect (ibid.: 201). philosophies of Matthew Arnold and Charles Eliot Norton but, as Martin Green Thus Gilman, when he created the docent program in 1907 urged the instructors to (1966) points out, more interested in finding perfection outside this world than in avoid instruction: ‘The essential office of the docent is to get the object thoroughly making the world more perfect. Art, for them, was ineffable and exquisite; the perceived by the disciple. Hence draw attention to the object first; talk about it Museum was a temple for the appreciation of art, not an engine of education. Joy, , afterwards, and only if the occasion offers’ (ibid.: 295). not improvement, was to be its raison d'etre. As Prichard put it, in an early sally in Supported by President Warren, Prichard, Gilman and their allies were what Whitehill calls ‘the battle of the casts’, victorious. Although both Robinson and Prichard resigned from the Museum as a A museum of art, ultimately and in its widest possible activity, illustrates one attitude toward life. I* I consequence of the struggle, the new Museum embodied the latter’s philosophy contains only objects which reflect, clearly or dimly, the beauty and magnificence to which life ha* | when it opened in 1909. The casts, which were to have occupied another building attained in past times. The fruits of this exalted and transcendent life are gathered within its walls, and it is the standard of this life with the noble intellectual activity it presupposes that a museum of art offers i (never built) were consigned to the basement, from which they ultimately entered for acceptance by its visitors . . . the Museum’s equipment is designed particularly to further the I oblivion. Gilman stayed on and Robinson’s successor as Director embraced enjoyment of the public, and not to prepare artists for their calling (quoted in Whitehill, 1970: 183)- I Prichard’s views. 308 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 309

The purification of Boston music organizational requirements for the institutionalization of his philosophy. Early on, he credited the success, such as it was, of the Harvard concerts to the If the MFA was born in harmony and experienced a traumatic youth, the BSO’s association’s freedom from commercial constraints and interests, and of the difficult infancy was followed by a robust, happy childhood and adolescence. Elite susceptability of musicians to guarantees of regular work. In his appraisal of those ideas about music were more firmly set than those about visual art in mid-century, concerts, he stressed'two other features that were to be bulwarks of the BSO: and at least a core of Bostonians had experienced pure fine-arts music in the concerts of the Harvard Musical Association and the Handel and Haydn Society (of 2. The guarantee of a nucleus of a fit audience,—persons of taste and culture, subscribing beforehand to make the concerts financially safe, and likely to increase the number by attraction of their own which Higginson became a trustee in 1882).3 What is more, Higginson promised example. less in the way of education and community service than the Museum’s 3. Pute programmes, above all need of catering to low tastes; here should be at least one set of incorporators; that the BSO would have an elite constituency was clear from the concerts in which one might hear only composers of unquestioned excellence, and into which should beginning. Yet the Orchestra’s development in the 30 years after its founding enter nothing vulgar, coarse, ‘sensational,’ but only such as outlives fashion (Howe, 1914: 10—11). resembles that of the Museum’s in several important ways: the programs became These ‘persons of taste and culture’ were, in most cases, those of the highest more highly classified, the boundaries between popular and high-art music and status. It was clear to Dwight, as it was to Higginson, that this group would between artist and audience were more firmly drawn, and the musical experience necessarily represent the core of any audience for ‘pure programmes, above all need was framed in terms of an ideology similar to the ethic of connoisseurship. These of catering to low tastes . . . ’. The identification, here, of taste and nobility of changes, in the aggregate, sealed the Orchestra off from the community as a whole spirit and, implicitly, of taste and social standing, is a crucial syllogism that would and ensured that it would become more fully a part of the culture of the elite and legitimate the dominant status culture then being consolidated. But as Dwight of middle-class aspirants to elite status. understood, even with the founding of the Orchestra, the process of the The form, the repertoire, and the style of the Orchestra were presaged in the sacralization, beyond a narrow group of afficianados, of symphonic music was not writings of Edward Dwight, editor of Boston’s Journal of Music, to which yet complete. It remained for Higginson and the conductors to whom he entrusted Higginson contributed while studying music in Vienna. Dwight and Higginson the orchestra, to complete the process. were close, as their correspondence indicates, and Dwight was an active supporter Higginson had high aspirations for his orchestra, particularly for the winter of Higginson’s efforts. He himself had lamented, just six months before Higginson concerts: ‘anything unworthy’ was to be ‘shut out’. Like Brimmer at the Museum, announced his project: ‘We have a hall, an organ, and an art museum. Now we Higginson in his plans sought to exclude the clearly popular without being narrow­ want an orchestra . . . We are falling behind New York. We will become minded: provincial without it’ (Mueller, 1951: 80). Dwight, influenced by Hegel, believed that music represented a higher-order . . . all the catholicity possible seems to me good. I do not like Wagner’s music, and take little truth than words or logic. As early as 1852, he had a keen sense of the need for an interest in much of the newer composers, but I should not like to bar them out o f our programmes. orchestra to define what, in fact, the best music would be, writing People of education equally objected to the later compositions of Beethoven as those of a lunatic. Possibly they are right (Howe, 1914: 30—31). Very confused, crude, heterogeneous is this sudden musical activity in a young, utilitarian people. A thousand specious fashions too successfully dispute the place of true Art in the favor of each little In the Orchestra’s first year, Henschel, an advocate of mixed programs, public. It needs a faithful, severe, friendly voice to point out, steadfastly, the models of the True, the attempted to keep the concert’s second half decidedly light. Each concert would Beautiful, the Divine (McCusker, 1937: 19-20). include a Beethoven symphony, but also a solo and a second part to be ‘short and Dwight and the early promoters of fine-arts music were quick to devalue the of considerable lighter popular character’ (Henschel in ibid.: 39). The first concert popular, as well. Theodore Thomas wrote, ‘light music, “ popular” , so-called, is included a solo by vocalist Miss Annie Louise Cary, as well as some ballet music by the sensual side of the art and has more or less the devil in it’ (Mueller, 1951: 30). Schubert. In a benefit concert for a deceased musician’s family, later that year, High and popular culture must be separated. When the managers of the Music Henschel himself joined his wife in a vocal duet, ‘Oh, that we two were maying’. Hall, which held the Harvard Musical Association’s concerts, permitted Barnum to As Mueller writes, Henschel hold a baby show there in 1865, Charles Perkins threatened to withdraw his offered was not averse to musical titbits, which could be instantly enjoyed by the audience, and generally gift of a statue of Beethoven, lest it ‘be subjected to the indignity of presiding over designed his program with appetizing deserts at the end (Mueller, 1951: 99). a Baby Show’. But if Henschel did not purify his concerts of vocal and popular songs to the degree We would think Boston sufficiently disgraced by having such an Exhibition held in any low building that later conductors would, he did make some strides in that direction. Indeed, he within its limits—but to have it held in our Music Hall, a place consecrated to the endeavor to elevate was frequently criticized for his inclusion of Wagner and Brahms in the repertoire. the taste of the community, is really intolerable (McCusker, 1937: 23). A New York critic called him ‘a veritable Brahmin in his passion for Brahms’, and a Dwight himself printed Perkins’s protest in his journal, adding, ‘Let not the Bostonian remarked, on the occasion of an all-Wagner memorial that marked master works of the great composers be heard in a building which will ever after Wagner’s demise, ‘The programme was gloomy enough in all conscience, and the merit the name of Barnum’s Nursery’ (ibid.). necessity for its performance gave one more cause for regret at the composer’s Dwight, perhaps more than his peers, had a keen understanding of the death’ (Howe, 1914: 80). Higginson did not commence popular summer concerts 310 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 311 under Henschel (although he would under the stricter Gericke). Indeed, he In addition to curtailing light music, Gericke occasionally broke with precedent to forbade his players from playing dance music on days that they were committed to omit solo performers, particularly vocalists, from the program.4 the Orchestra—effectively forbidding such employment, since this prohibition The Orchestra/as Higginson conceived it, was classical in orientation. But included weekends. Higginson was a practical man, and he hoped that his offspring would some day To Henschel fell the difficult responsibility of enforcing discipline upon his become self-supporting. In his initial plan, he included the provision of light- restive minions. He enforced punctual appearance at rehearsals and concerts, and music concerts, including dance music, in the summer. This was not surprising, banned private discussions during rehearsals. It was left to Henschel’s successor, given the popularity in this period of band music, which combined marches, arias, the stem Gericke, to finish what he had begun. classical numbers and dance tunes. Yet Higginson showed some ambivalence Gericke arrived from Austria to replace Henschel in 1884. He quickly clashed towards his plan during the first few years. As early as 1883, Higginson was urged with some of the established players, and recalled, many years later by the manager of the Music Hall to institute a summer series. The BSO’s I was not popular in the Orchestra, especially as they did not yet understand why I should ask for manager, Charles Ellis, wrote Higginson of a proposition better playing and more exact work than had been done heretofore. Before I came to Boston the members of the Orchestra had been used to a great deal of freedom . . . (Howe, 1914: 111). to decorate Music Hall with plants, etc., making a kind of garden of it, and will either rent it to us at a low rate, or for a percentage of receipts sharing the risk with us. I believe such a series would go (Perry, After the first season, Higginson sent him to Europe to find replacements for some 1921: 301). of the older players, whom he regarded as unfit. He came back with 20 European musicians. The purge of the local men caused serious dissension, and Gericke Higginson was unconvinced. In his original memorandum he had written recalled that ‘The remaining old members took the part of the dismissed ones, and I do not know whether a first-rate orchestra will choose to play light music ot whether it can do so opposed me where they could’ (ibid.). There was criticism in the press as well. One well. I do not believe that the great opeta-orchestra in Vienna can play waltzes as Strauss’s men play critic wrote, in the Thanksgiving edition of his newspaper, them, although they know them by heart and feel them all through their toes and fingers—simply because they are not used to such work—and I know that such work is in a degree stultifying. My We are thankful that Mr. Gericke, in his sweeping discharges, did not discharge Mr. Higginson. We judgment would be that a good orchestra would need, during the winter season, to keep its hand in are thankful that one or two Americans are still left in our Symphony Orchestra, so that the United by playing only the better music, and could relax in summer, playing a different kind of thing. But I States language may be reserved from oblivion (ibid.: 124). should always wish to eschew vulgar music, i.e. such trash as is heard in the theatres, sentimental ot sensational nonsense; and on the other side I should wish to lighten the heavier programs with good As the Museum of Fine Arts would turn to outsiders—both of nationality and of music, of a gayer nature. temperament—for professional staff, so the Orchestra turned to Europe for its conductors and musicians. The work of framing an aesthetic experience—of The emergence of the Pops as a profane and profitable summer supplement to separating the artistic and the mundane—required the strengthening of the austere winter programs represented a kind of watershed in the classification of boundaries between audience and performer. It would not do for Bostonians to see high and popular genres. These light concerts were not only less strongly classified their kinsman or acquaintances on stage: professionalism was vital not just for the than the winter series, but also consciously less strongly framed: consumption of quality of the performance but for the strength of its frame, as well. Only outsiders alcohol and tobacco was permitted (indeed, the one year that a liquor license was with few ties to Boston could be trusted to implement the strict changes that were not forthcoming the series was cancelled), and quiet and decorum were not in store. Gericke played the role of eunuch, serving the Orchestra without demanded. (Their repertoire, similar to Henschel’s light programs in the 1880s, distraction. Desperately homesick on his arrival, the conductor was grasped quickly diverged more markedly from the regular concerts in later years.) to the bosom of Higginson and his comrades at the Tavern Club, where, he By now, the format and style of the Orchestra were set. Gericke’s romantic recalled, ‘I found kindred spirits and some good and staunch friends, who did their successors, Nikisch and Pauer, continued his campaign against soloists, best to help me over my first difficulties’ (ibid.: 108). Yet despite the influx of abandoning the practice of including vocalists (practitioners of a form decreed Europeans, the BSO was not a mere carbon copy of European institutions. As beneath the purely orchestral by Dwight and his followers) almost entirely. Dr Mueller notes, the American orchestras enlarged the scope of their conductors’ Muck, conductor until his dismissal amid charges of disloyalty during World War I, authority well beyond that enjoyed by their European counterparts (Mueller, 1951: carried the classification of genres beyond the segregation of high and low to an even more rigorous level. Just as the art historians at the Museum reclassified their 317)' . Gericke initiated a level of classification that the Orchestra had not experienced collections in terms of historical and national genres, Muck segregated his concerts under Henschel. Just as the Museum’s aesthetes would cordon off the profane casts by genre, contending that ‘The classic and the frankly romantic should no more be to basement rooms, Gericke, with Higginson's support, purged the winter concerts thrown together in a single concert than they should in a single room of an Art of light music, consigning it to a series of summer ‘Pops’ programs. ‘My Museum’ (Johnson, 1950: 48*49).’ predecessor’, wrote Gericke, The classification of fine-arts and popular music, and the eventual subclassifica­ had always given some light music in the second part of every concert and the audience was used to tion, within classical music, of the romantic and the classical, were accompanied by this and liked it. But, as Mr. Higginson wanted to bring the concerts to a higher standard, and as the an effort, on the part of Higginson, to frame the concert experience, to purge it, as name of the Orchestra was “ The Boston Symphony Orchestra,” 1 did not see the reason why the far as possible, of commercial elements and to sacralize the concert as a ritual programme should not be put thoroughly on a classical basis . . . (Howe, 1914: 108). occasion. This effort was consonant with the Dwightian view of music as spiritual 312 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 313 and otherworldly. In his description of the first Beethoven concerts in Boston, In Chicago, where Thomas ultimately settled, the level of deportment was even Dwight established a model for aesthetic experience similar to that espoused by the worse. A reporter thought it remarkable that Thomas’s rendition of Beethoven’s Museum’s aesthetes: Eroica ‘was received and followed with the closest attention and there was Some may yet remember how young men and women of the most cultured circles, whom the new noticeably less conversation than on previous occasions. Perhaps’, he added, this intellectual dayspring had made thoughtful and . . . impressible to all appeals of art and beauty, was due to ‘the'fact that few beyond the truly musical were present. . . because of used to sit through the concert in the far-off upper gallery, or the skyparlor, secluded in the shade, bad weather’ (Mueller, 1951: 354). At the Metropolitan Opera, which, in New and give themselves up completely to the influence of the sublime harmonies that sank into their York, was far more popular than the Philharmonic, middle-class Germans battled souls . . . (Cooke, 1898: 65-68). for a decade with upper-class patrons who preened and conversed in their boxes Thus Charles Eliot wrote that ‘common enjoyment of immortal music’ was an during performances (Brenneise, n.d.). ‘exalting and binding influence . . . the best expression of public prosperity, social Even in Boston, the development of concert manners was an element of framing joy, and religious transport’ (Perry, 1921: 322). And Higginson’s friend William no less important than the separation of performer and patron to the ritual sanctity James urged the concert-goer of the occasion. The advent of concert notes in the mid-1880s was accompanied by their loud rustling by many audience members, to the detriment of the enjoyment never to suffer one’s self to have an emotion at a concert without expressing it afterward in some of others. The notes consistently implored the patrons, from 1884 on, to refrain active way. Let the expression be the last thing in the world—speaking genially to one’s aunt, or giving up one’s seat in the horsecar if nothing more heroic offers—but let it not fail to take place from early exits while music was being performed.6 (In 1900, an intermission was (Mueller, 1951: 293). added to permit attenders to promenade and chat.) By the late 1890s, the management was confident enough to print and enforce a public statute banning The identification of art and refinement, of the beautiful and the moral, came the wearing of large hats in places of public performance. Before long, even the naturally to the cultural capitalists: it applied both to the content and to the convention of applauding was called into question, as Philip Hale paraphrased reception of art. Higginson, an avid theatre-goer throughout his life, as a student with approval, in the concert notes, the contention of a Viennese critic who found in Paris, condemned the vulgarity of Mounet Sully's famous Hamlet as ‘brutal and applause appropriate only horrid. The French may like it, but it is absolutely out of character. . . . It is burlesque’ (Perry, 1921: 397). Similarly, he would try to purge the vulgar and the after vociferous endings, after pieces of a lively, festive warlike heroic character, but not after such a work as Beethoven’s Coriolanus’. He portrays the average hearer during the performance of the commercial from the halls of the Orchestra, to frame the concert as a spiritual and overture, who sees with staring eyes, as in a magic looking-glass, the mighty shade of Coriolanus pass ritual event. slowly by him; tears fall from the hearer’s eyes, his heart thuds, his breath stops, he is as one in a Part of this effort involved the strengthening of boundaries between the cataleptic trance; but as soon as the last note is sounded, he is again jovially disposed, and he chatters performer and the audience, the former transported, the latter receptive and and criticizes and applauds (BSO Concert Notes, 18 May 1914). subdued. In part, this was achieved by such devices as the darkening of the Throughout the early years, Higginson tried repeatedly to eliminate elements of audience during performances, which was initiated in 1908 (Johnson, 1950: commercialism in the Orchestra’s affairs. The expectations for such an assemblage 48-49). In part, this was achieved, as we have seen, through the introduction of were far from clear. (The Orchestra’s manager recalled of their first tour that one strangers as the conveyors of music, and the purge of the locals. And in part, this local house manager expected the players to parade through town to drum up was accomplished through the provision of professional standards to which business [Howe, 1914: 134].) Higginson took great pains to eliminate the scalpers amateurs could not hope to aspire, an event that, as Mueller has written, who, in the early years, commonly sold tickets at twice their price, auctioning off many of the best seats himself to combat this practice. And he ended the tradition, drove a fatal wedge between the lay audience, which during the choral days had shuttled rather easily back and forth across the footlights and the highly trained orchestral body from which they were in concerts, of hanging an enormous gilt sign over the piano advertising its barred (Mueller, 1951: 28). manufacturer, antagonizing the dealer who had loaned the instrument free of charge (ibid.: 79). After 1885, there would be no more solicitations to ‘Ladies and Gentlemen desirous of singing in the chorus’ for special concerts printed in the concert bulletins. Classification, framing and social class Yet the early concerts did not meet entirely the standard that Dwight had set for them. In the first few years, crowds thronged the concert hall. Henschel recalled The movement towards a stronger classification of artistic contents and the times at which, ‘I myself, in the hall, had difficulty to reach the conductor’s desk, as development of ideological and normative frames for the experience of art led, in every available space, even on the platform, was occupied by the audience’ (Howe, both the Museum and the Orchestra, to an identification of those institutions with 1914: 53). In cities that lacked the example that the Musical Association concerts had the social classes that patronized them and to a narrowing of their audience base. provided Boston, profanations of the musical atmosphere were even more common. Initiated, to varying degrees, in the interests of popular education, each saw its Dwight wrote of Theodore Thomas’s tenure in New York in 1875 that educational mandate diluted as the artistic component of its mission was clarified and strengthened. Not a week passes without some scathing rebuke from him to those illbred and ignorant people who The Museum, despite its democratic beginnings, had never been a popular keep up a continued buzzing during the performance of the music to the annoyance of all decent folk. mstitution in the sense that Boston’s theatres or even the Lowell lectures, in earlier 314 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 315 years, were popular. Yet in its Copley Square building it did attract steady crowds, knowledge and cooperation of the trustees. Yet this transition, which occurred in many of them Italian immigrants according to contemporaries. The move to the other American museums at about the same time (see Zolberg, 1974, 1980), was a more exclusive Fens, if it was not calculated to cultivate a more exclusive clientele, critical one, essential for the creation of a high culture. was at least guaranteed to do so. Despite the enormous increase in Boston’s The Orchestra, from the beginning, had less of a commitment to education than population over this period, the Museum’s attendance figures show only a modest did the Museum. The framing of an aesthetic experience for members of ‘the most rise: 158,000 in the first year, a new high of 183,000 in 1882, another high of cultured circles’, as Dwight called them, had certain implications for the class 300,000 in 1895, during the first flush of spectacular acquisitions, down to 194,000 composition of the Orchestra’s audiences. A letter-writer to a Boston newspaper the next year. Despite a rise in attendance when the new building opened in 1910 complained, < (the first full year of operation), the 1895 figure was not soon reached again; 1914 I saw but few whom I should believe to be poor or even of moderate means. . . . Full dress was to be attendance was still at the level of the late 1880s. seen on every hand. I should be very glad to take my family to hear these educating and refining Indeed, the trustees were displeased by the press of visitors, who were concerts, but I have not the means to go in full dress; neither can I afford to pay a speculator double concentrated on free weekend days. ‘It is certain’, they warned in 1882, ‘that the price for tickets . . . (Howe, 1914: 76). nothing contributes so much to the real enjoyment of, and the good to be derived While Higginson’s defenders stressed the appearance of an occasional Italian from a work of art as freedom from oppressive interruption in the process of immigrant in the audience, others like a writer for the Transcript, noted the vogue examining it’ (Whitehill, 1970: 60). While their charter obliged them to let the of the concerts for the socially prominent: public in for free, in other respects the Museum seems to have become more Where have all these symphony-concert goers been during the last ten years, that they have hidden exclusive. I have noted (DiMaggio, 1982) the remarkable decline in the breadth of themselves so completely from the public view? . . . Cheap prices have had some effect, but not so its fund-raising base between 1873 and 1888. When the trustees needed support much as many persons suppose. ‘Fashion’ is an ugly word to use in connection with art matters, but for their new building a decade later, they did not even bother with a public all matters have their nether side (ibid.: 54). appeal. This insular quality is reflected as well in other fund-raising strategies, such A sense of the Orchestra’s role in Boston society can be gained from the report of as the expensive soirees at which male models presented tableaux vivants for the a correspondent for the Boston Traveller on the BSO’s second performance in New entertainment of patrons in the 1880s, or the membership campaigns of the 1890s York: and thereafter. May surprises marked the evening, not the least of which was the character of the audience; in place of The most serious indictment of the Museum’s exclusiveness came from Matthew the faces of foreign type which accompany one everywhere in cosmopolitan New York, here right Prichard, in a private letter to Mrs Isabella Stewart Gardner on the occasion of alongside was one o f the loveliest o f old New England grandmammas, with a bevy o f nephews and Samuel Warren’s death. When Warren took over the Museum’s presidency at the nieces; in the next row a group of fine fellows, New Yorkers, it may be, but Harvard men turn of the century, wrote Prichard, undoubtedly, while it was such a pleasure to see all about the faces with which one felt a kinship. This is written not in disparagement of those truly musical people, the Germans . . . but only to show, it the institution was despicable and despised. A few families had a special cult for it, regarded it as may be to others who, like the writer, have been really homesick for the sight of a family face when for their appanage, practiced their influence on it, discussed together their activity in its past, their any cause brought into promiscuous company in New York (ibid.: 124). aspirations for its future; on Sundays it was visited by loquacious Italians, but on week days the temple was closed to all save the initiated who appeared to bully the director and oversee their family The relative affluence of the BSO audience is reflected by the advertisements tombs. For it was recognized that one room belonged to this family and another to that. They had a that appeared in the concert notes throughout this period. The bulletins for 1889 prescriptive right to arrange and contribute what they would and exclude the rest, by right of birth and 1890, for example, advertised imported women’s gloves, fine art, Oriental they were experts in their corner or corridor and would hesitate to visit another lot in the cemetary carpets from India (‘the special attention of CONNOISSEURS Isic] is invited’), unaccompanied by the representative of its tribal chief. To understand the Museum . . . it would be necessary to study savage customs, for it was the last sanctuary (unless the Athenaeum was another) of imported furs, dresses, and Parisian corsets, imported coffee, carriages and pleasure the Boston aborigines, and totem and taboo, animism and magic, custom, rite, precedent, and vehicles, diamonds and gems, and pianos and organs, as well as musical supplies mystery were imprinted all over it. An unseen wall of sanctification defended it from the impure and and after-concert treats. (By contrast, Pops concert brochures mixed advertisements profane (Whitehill, 1970: 212-213). for such items as summer homes in the Berkshires, carriage rentals and Mason and This, to be sure, is the analysis of a bitter man. Yet it captures an irony essential Hamblin pianos with a larger number of advertisements for tobacco products, to an understanding of the role that art historians played in the development and beer, candy and suspenders.) evolution of high art. What Warren achieved was the transition from a In his initial plans, Higginson stressed the importance of low-priced tickets and the patrimonially to a professionally administered organization: Robinson’s successors hope that his concerts would educate a wide public. Indeed, inexpensive concerts of would have to put up with somewhat less close scrutiny and less intense meddling classical music had been offered in Boston as early as the 1830s, when the Handel and by trustees than he had to accomodate. Yet the professionals to whom these ‘popes Haydn Society had offered some free performances; and in 1868 the city of Boston and hierarchs’, as Prichard called them, delegated a portion of their power, were presented 14 free concerts of mixed programs for the city’s poor. In 1881, the Musical themselves distinctly upper class in their associations and their values. They Record, which had praised the Higginson plan, called on the city to achieved a level of classification and separation of high from popular art that the Wake use of the vast auditoriums which will soon be available, for another series of free in-door trustees themselves could not. The banishing of the casts and the ascension of concerts, limiting the privilege to the deserving poor, and making the distribution of tickets by means of the police, who are best qualified to judge as to the needs of applicants in their respective precincts aestheticism did not represent an art historians’ coup: it was achieved with the full (27 August 1881: 757). 316 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 317 Faith in the power of music was strong in Boston, and there was some expectation Higginson did permit his conductors considerable autonomy; he probably that it should be shared with the public at large. A newspaper writer attacked the meddled far less than others of the early pioneers. Yet it is equally clear that he was Handel and Haydn Society in the 1880s for neglecting ‘to make a single attempt to the architect of all but the musical programs, and that, even over these, he kept a cultivate a wider appreciation of oratorio music by affording the general public an watchful eye. As he lectured his men in 1914, opportunity of hearing repetitions of their performances at popular prices’ I watch the musicians'almost too much, for it often interferes with my pleasure, thinking about whether (Johnson, 1965: 149). Thus Higginson’s plan for low-priced concerts was one they are playing their best, and listening for the various points instead of listening for the whole. consistent both with Boston’s musical history and with the temper of the time. Whenever I go to a concert, there is always a sense of responsibility on my mind (Perry, 1921: 295). Yet between his initial description of the Orchestra and its debut nine months later, the top-priced tickets had been increased from 50 to 75 cents (while the less The classification and framing of high culture in America expensive remained an affordable 25 cents). And with the institution of the auction for tickets in 1884, even these prices effectively were raised. As the I have argued that Boston’s cultural capitalists—the men who founded and Orchestra’s reputation grew, auction prices rose alongside it. By 1900, the most nurtured the Museum of Fine Art and the Boston Symphony Orchestra—were expensive seats averaged almost $25.00 per concert (Johnson, 1950: 25). Low- creating a high culture in the interest of their class. In pointing out the extent to priced tickets became so scarce that at a critic wrote that ‘the hoi polloi, for whom which this high culture was created systematically and formally through Mr. Higginson has been ostentatiously posed as a patron, will have to put up with organizations that served to separate it and its public from popular culture and the leavings’ (Howe, 1914: 83). from the populous itself, I do not mean to claim that a conscious conspiracy An inspection of handbills from the period reveals that BSO prices were about occurred, nor that there were no tensions between the drive for exclusivity and half those of other classical organizations when tickets could be obtained outside of other values that Boston’s elites held dear. Nor should the recognition that high the auction. Seats at the most expensive operatic performances ranged from $1.50 culture, as we know it, was the creation of a status group lessen our appreciation of to $3.00. Chamber concerts generally cost from 50 cents to $1.50. The New York the accomplishments of those who have worked, in high-culture genres. Symphony Orchestra charged from 50 cents to $2.00 for tickets when it played in At the institutional level, the struggle to create a high culture was a fumbling Boston. Comic and English-language opera seats ran from 25 to 75 cents; and John and contentious one. Yet it was one that the Brahmins and elite status groups in Philip Sousa’s band concerts brought from 25 cents to $1.00 per seat. Tickets to other American cities had to undertake if they were to become a true upper class. purely popular performances (for example, those at the ‘Museums’ and vaudeville To understand the attraction of a high culture, defined as it was, to an upper class theatres) could cost as little as a dime. Thus the BSO’s ticket policies, for all the like Boston’s, and to the middle class that embraced culture even more fervently claims that were made for them, represented, at best, a reform, not a revolution. than they, consider the affinities between the ideology of aestheticism that shaped In fact, Higginson became notably less concerned with education as his project both the Orchestra and the Museum during this period and the cultural needs of became a success. At first, he sought to entice ‘the poorer people’ with low prices; America’s urban elites. in the rancorous early years, his supporters defended the concerts as ‘an educational The key to aestheticism, to the ideology of connoisseurship, is its essential institution’. Yet, by 1889, Higginson had narrowed his ambitions so far as ambiguity. Visual art and music, the aesthetes taught, were not susceptible to mere education was concerned. Addressing those who had criticized his concerts because words. The symphony, wrote one critic, ‘does not depend for its force on its they were attended only by the rich and had urged him to make an effort to definability’ (Philip Goep, quoted in Mussulman, 1971: 47). To see art as accommodate the poor, Higginson said expressing the ineffable, as beyond words, to define the relationship of the viewer or listener to the work of art as a transcendant one, sullied by description or If a series of concerts was offered at low prices only to the ‘truly poor,’ do you suppose that any one interpretation, is to make art ultimately the property of those with the status to but the truly rich would frequent them? . . . And why should I pick out one kind of an audience.? The sunshine and green fields and all beautiful things are given to all men, and not alone to the truly claim that their experience is the purest, the most authentic. The aesthetes, from poor or to the young or to the old. Even so with music . . . (ibid.: 146). Dwight to Prichard and Gilman, spoke for a culture beyond that of politics or science, where merit was visible or decided by popular vote. In seeking the Thus in the Orchestra, as in the Museum, the classification of high culture and transcendant, the aesthetes placed the experience of art beyond verification or the framing of aesthetic experience were accompanied by an insulation of the reason. As Martin Green has observed, culture in Boston became ‘etherialized. institution not just from popular art but from the masses themselves. In this . . . [TJhe idea of culture swelled as it became emptier . . . ’ (Green, 1966: 108). process, Higginson, like the trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, was a principal. Whatever the merits of aestheticism as a philosophy, in practice it placed the Higginson never tired of calling attention to the freedom that he permitted his mantle of art upon those with the leisure to become familiar with it, the ties to conductors. In 1888 he wrote to a German friend helping him recruit a successor to professional critics and art historians to be instructed in it, to learn an attitude Gericke towards it, to adopt it as their own. The experience of Culture—high I have never exercised any supervision; I have never urged him, and I am not in a position to do so- Culture—became an exercise in the implicit. And Boston’s dominant status group, You know very well that I am a busy man, and have many cares on my mind; that I must keep this with its multiplicity of interconnections and its rich symbolic life, was uniquely orchestra matter before me, but I cannot give it much daily care or thought: I cannot go and see th*1 situated to capture the implicit, to make it its own, to stitch art into the fabric of its the conductor is busy with his work day after day, week after week. . . . He is free and unfettered to communal life, as no other group could. Even the middle-class worshippers at the all these matters . . . He is as free as a man can well be in this world . . . (ibid.: 155). 318 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 319 shrine of art could only hope to grasp a shred of culture to differentiate themselves Equally vexing to them was the tendency, in vaudeville houses, towards ‘further from the masses beneath them.7 They could not hope to challenge the elite on its breaking down . . . those barriers that separate the audience from the performer own ground. The professionals, the critics, the art historians, the musicians and the upon the stage’. In this regard, they sought to prevent the appearance of a barefoot rest were crucial, in part for providing a vocabulary for the understanding of art, dancer in Boston. but, even more important, for legitimizing the stature of the elites who monopolized their attentions and their services. As Dwight’s writings illustrate, in Equally undesirable, and evidencing the same tendency in a form perhaps still more to be deprecated, the aesthete’s view, the identification of taste with moral stature, and of morality have been the attempts made by certain managers further to remove the barrier between performer and audience by sending members over the footlights at every performance . . . One of the most with class position, is all too easy. In high culture, the upper classes of late- sensational illusions has been the sending of a balloon or aeroplane out over the heads of the riineteenth-century America found both a common currency and a refuge from the audience, carrying ond or two girls singing . . . (ibid.: 30). slings and arrows of the troubled world around them.8 Yet the creation of high culture was attended by tensions, some internal and some The need for strong classifications to preserve the purity of art, and for the need of external. The institutions that the cultural capitalists created required resources to boundaries between performer and public, was by this time evident to these survive and to grow. In the case of the Museum, the need for resources drew it, once middle-class reformers. the great legacies of the eighties and nineties had inflated its budget and its needs, to the public purse. In 1912, the trustees sought support from Boston’s government of Conclusions the kind that the Metropolitan Museum had received from New York. They were In providing an historical sketch of the processes of classification and framing as rebuffed, but in the process they developed programs to bring children from the they occurred at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I tenements to the museums, and to bus immigrants from the North and West Ends, have been able to do little more than scratch the surface of the cultural changes and they expanded their attention to education (albeit with a view of education that that were occurring in Boston and other American cities of that period. The could only serve the already educated). These reforms were not pivotal ones—the undergrowth of amateur art associations and singing societies, the other, less trips from the slums were abandoned after two months for want of funds—but they successful ventures in institution building (like the Boston Opera), the serious serve to illustrate the sensitivity of the Museum’s managers to their formal mandate, stage, and, perhaps most important, the world of literature all deserve detailed even after the educational mission of the seventies effectively had been discarded. treatment that they have not received here. A fortiori, the commercial cultural Similarly, the Orchestra could never free itself entirely from the force of the organizations that grew up everywhere during this period—the fairs, the vaudeville market. Throughout his tenure as its patron, Higginson was driven repeatedly to and burlesque houses, eventually the movie houses—and the less formal settings commercial considerations, no matter how much he abhorred them. The Pops where the folk cultures of Boston’s immigrants and Yankees alike were expressed. concerts were initiated in order to provide additional income and year-round support In looking closely at two institutions in which high culture was differentiated and for the players who, in the first years, had often defected to other cities during the sealed from other genres, we must not forget that this occurred within a rich and summer months. And he embraced the flamboyant Nikisch, whose romanticism changing cultural context. In this respect, Boston’s theatres, caught as they were appalled the more dignified followers of Dwigbt. When Gericke returned for a between culture and commerce, between the aspirations of middle-class reformers second term, Boston found him too cold, and attendance fell off. Higginson induced and the desires for entertainment of working people and the less progressive him to yield, on occasion, to guest conductors and, Howe suggests, was not entirely members of the middle class, may be a particularly rich field for study. sorry to see him depart. Just as American museums have, throughout their histories, This treatment, as well, has only suggested the link between elite social structure been pressed towards public service by their need for the cooperation, if not the and the development of high culture in Boston. A closer look at the multiple elite subventions, of government, so symphony orchestras are urged continually towards networks—those of kinship, commerce, clubs and stewardship—might enable us the market as the solution to their financial difficulties. better to understand why some efforts succeeded while others failed, and better to The effort to create a high culture was an imperfect one, yet one that set out a fathom the intra-class division of labor between the cultural and hegemonic potent ideological and a potent organizational model. We have seen that managers institutions that Ronald Story (1981) has described. of the Orchestra and the Museum were citing one another’s institutions as standards The value of the explanation advanced herein may be tested in comparative work for their own by 1910. Even the theatre, which, commercially successful, could not on other American cities of this period. Research on Chicago, with its newer, more easily be fitted into a high culture frame, was subject to criticism according to the elite commercial, less socially integrated, less cultured elite, shows similarities and model. Thus the middle-class Twentieth-Century Club, reporting on its differences to the Boston case (see Horowitz, 1976; Zolberg, 1980; see also Couch, investigation of Boston theatre in 1910, focused its criticisms on the promiscuous 1976, on New York). I do not expect that the institutionalization of high culture mingling of high and popular culture on the Boston stage. ‘It is notable’, they say, took the same course in all American cities; only that the variations among them are comprehensible in terms of the categories and scheme of analysis laid out here. that the different theatre managements, exclusive of those giving burlesque and vaudeville, make no attempt to establish a permanent clientele, a fundamental need in the conduct of any other business. Finally, it will be important to compare the American experience to that of the It is difficult, for instance, to understand what prompted the Shuberts, after opening their new European countries, with their differing class structures and richer cultural histories. theatre with two weeks of Shakespeare . . . to put on for their second attraction as commonplace a Certainly, culture in England was in flux in the nineteenth century, as Williams musical comedy as “The Midnight Sons’’ (Twentieth Century Club, 1910: 3). (1965), Thorhpson (1966) and Wolff (1982)have documented. In a fascinating essay, 320 P. DIMAGGIO CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 321

Gayc Tuchman (1982) has argued that, in the literary arena at least, the British Atlantic in 1873, complained of Thomas that ‘His chief object seems to be to present as many sought consciously to define the high-art novelistic genre at about the same time that novelties as possible’ (Mussulman, 1971: 88). Commercial programs, like those of the Redpath Perkins, Brimmer and Higginson were organizing their cultural ventures in New Boston Lyceum, were even more mixed. (From pamphlets and handbills in the Yale Music England. Sennett (1978: 205-208) notes the consolidation of concert and theatre Library’s Boston pamphlet collection.) manners throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. And 4. Boston’s purely popular institutions at this time still included a smattering o f fine-arts music in their own concert repertoires. For example, handbill’s for Keith and Batcheller’s Museum on William Weber (1976) has argued that Europe’s nineteenth-century aristocracy Washington Street advertise, in 1885, Grand Sacred Concerts, wherein Handel, Wagner and embraced the rising bourgeoisie in a musical coalition with the symphony as its focus. Strauss occasionally appeared amidst a profusion of light vocal numbers. Concert attenders could Thus class and culture seem as closely associated in Europe as in America at this time, also take in such exhibits as the Wonder Hall, Punch (a baby bear), a Transparent Turk ('who even if the particulars of that association differed. can be seen through’), performing birds, a monkey that whistled, a talking skull, a ‘congress of As is usually the case, then, more research is needed. But, I believe, there are kittens’, Mr. Ricketts (‘the jolly fun maker’) and ‘a troupe of . . . bewitching Asiatics’ that included Zola, ‘undisputedly the handsomest lady in the world . . . exhibited every hour from already some lessons that sociologists and historians with an interest in culture can 10AM to 10PM’. (Yale Music Library Boston pamphlet collection) draw from the story told here. The first is that we must stop viewing, once and for 5. A similar effort at purification was conducted by the leaders of the Handel and Haydn Society at all, ‘high culture’ as a distinctive kind of cultural product, and recognize that high this time. In 1888, President Geotge Chickering called, in his annual report, for a ‘purification and popular culture are, at one level, historically evolved systems of classification of the chorus’, a purge, for the first time, of members whose voices were not up to standard. The whose strength, substance and significance vary constantly; and, at another, ‘purification’ occurred, although it left the Society badly divided. After several years of turmoil, harmony was restored by a new set of officers, who continued the weeding out of the chorus and separate systems of production and distribution with systematically different vowed ‘not at present [to] give any more works of new composers . . . ’ (Perkins and Dwight, consequences for the art that passes through them. The illusory search for genres 1882-93: 496 ff; Johnson, 1965: 154-185). that are somehow more ‘high-cultural’ than others renders the sociologist the 6. Several tones were deployed in attempting to chasten early leavers. In January 1884, audience victim of ideologies that he or she should be studying. Recognizing that ideas members who were ‘obliged to leave’ before the end were simply requested to ‘please do so about high and popular culture are ideological classifications embodied in during the last intermission’. Nine months later, they were told that they ‘will confer a favor by leaving the Hall’ before the beginning of the next piece. In December, 1885 ‘Management’ organizational forms that give them flesh permits us to study the causes of variation more pointedly requested ‘that no one will disturb both audience and orchestra by leaving the in the classifications themselves and, perhaps, to begin to understand taste, not hall during the performance of the . . . Music’. At times in the 1890s such notices were omitted, simply as an aspect of demand, but as something which, over a longer term and less but backsliding must have occurred: In 1901-02, notes to Gericke’s concerts ‘urgently requested through conscious design, is as much a social production as is a work of art itself. . . . patrons unable to remain until the close of the concert. . . to leave the hall during a pause in the program’ (BSO Concert Notes, various numbers). 7. As one student of this period puts it, ‘The majority o f the growing middle class . . . constituted Acknowledgements perhaps the most serious threat and the greatest challenge. Their motives seemed shallow and materialistic. They continually misappropriated the aims and methods o f Culture . . . ’ For advice and encouragement I am indebted to Randall Collins, David Karen, (Mussulman, 1971: 29). Michael Schudson, Ann Swidler and to the members of Professor Mary Douglas’s 8. The other side of the apotheosis of art that occurred during this period, to which I have given ‘Mass Media Mythology’ seminar at the New York University Institute for the little attention, was the devaluation of popular forms. Critic Philip Hale, in the BSO Concert Humanities, of Theda Skocpol’s graduate research seminar at Harvard University, Bulletin of 8 February 1908, wrote of popular songs o f the previous century: ‘The pleasure in and of Paul Hirsch’s production-of-culture session at the 1980 Sociology and the looking over the songs o f years ago is a melancholy one. . . . The sentimental ditties that once had the semblance o f pathos now provoke sneers and laughter. The comic songs that formerly Arts conference in Chicago. Research and institutional support from the Andrew provoked laughter are now foolish and depressing.’ W. Mellon Foundation and from Yale University’s Program on Non-Profit As late as 1915, President Courtenay Guild of the Handel and Haydn Society predicted that Organizations is gratefully acknowledged. the vogue for popular music would eventually pass: ‘Talking machines with the latest song hits are taken as a substitute for concerts, the mania for dancing and syncopated time has cultivated a taste for a sort of barbarous sequence of sounds more worthy o f savages than of civilization. N otes . . . It is hardly conceivable that the depraved musical taste can be more than an ephemeral 1. I draw here, and throughout, on Basil Bernstein’s work on the classification and framing of lapse . . . ’ (Johnson, 1965: 197). The leaders of the Handel and Haydn Society seemed particularly sensitive to the social educational knowledge (1975^). 2. Indeed, enthusiasm for reproductions extended to wood-engraving and photography, which implications of their choice of music. In the 1880s, Dwight decried ‘the proverbial restlessness of Charles Eliot Norton felt could elevate popular taste to unprecedented heights (Vanderbilt, our ‘modern Athenians’, like their old Greek namesakes, always running after ‘new things’. Moreover the very effort made to meet the cry for novelty perhaps only made the matter worse; 1959: 145). 3. The Musical Association’s programs were notable for their emphasis on symphonies and for if Gounod’s ‘Redemption’ drew the largest audience, did it not in the same ratio shake the overtures. They were not, however, austere by the standards of later years. Eleven of 53 selections confidence of the more cultivated and exacting music-lovers in the soundness of the old and in their repertoire for the year 1881 were songs, for example ‘Faithful Johnny’. By contrast, the honored institution?’ (Perkins and Dwight, 1883-93: 450). A quarter of a century later, the Handel and Haydn Society emphasized serious vocal works, if occasionally straying with modern Society’s Secretary again noted the danger of impure music to the purity of the audience, since it composers like Gounod. The Philharmonic Club, at least in the late 1870s, played exclusively attracted ‘an audience far different in aspect and mood from that of the usual course of concerts instrumental selections, but many o f these were on the light side. The Theodore Thomas . . . ’. Having learned its lesson, ‘The Society eschews ultra-modern choral music. It has little concerts, which most observers credit with raising Boston’s musical standards, were, in 1871, also liking for contemporary pieces in any vein. It cultivates the ancient classics or oratorio and a few instrumental: but Thomas leavened the overtures and concertos (there were few symphonies) of the moderns, and with them its officers, conductor, chorus and audiences are content. When with a generous selection of marches and waltzes. The critic William Apthorp, writing in The it forsakes [these works] it takes its chances with a public like no other concerts attract here’ (Johnson, 1965: 189-190). 322 P. DIMAGGIO Media, Culture and Society 1982 4, 323—337 Bibliography

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In this view, Mifflin ‘market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed in establishing the press as JOHNSON, H. E. (1950). Symphony Hall, Boston, Boston, Little Brown JOHNSON, H. E (1965). Hallelujah, Amen! The Story o f the Handel and Haydn Society o f Boston, an instrument of social control’ (Curran, 1977: 198). While this position is substan­ Boston, Bruce Humphries tially correct, it makes assumptions which, if not unwarranted, are certainly over­ MCCUSKER H. (1937). Fifty Years o f Music in Boston, Boston, Boston Public Library simplified. In particular it may be asked whether market forces do unproblematically MUELLER, J. H. (1951). The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History o f Musical Taste, produce the effects attributed to them. The demands of marketing strategies, for Bloomington, Indiana University Press Musical Record (1881-83). Various issues Boston, Oliver Ditson example, may well bring newspaper content into collision with prevailing ideologies. MUSSULMAN, J. A. (1971). Music in the Cultured Generation: A Social History o f Music in America, As Hall (1981: 230) suggests, the rise of the popular, commercial press in the early 1870-1900, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press part of this century created precisely such tensions for it was PERKINS, C. C. and DW IGHT, J. S. (1883-93). History o f the Handel and Haydn Society o f Boston, organised by capital ‘for’ the working classes; with, nevertheless, deep and influential roots in the Massachusetts, Vol. 1, Boston, Alfred Mudge & Son, Printers culture and language of the ‘underdog’ of ‘Us’: with the power to represent the class to itself in its most p e r r y , B. (1921). Life andLetters o f Henry Lee Higginson, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press traditionalist form. SENNETT, R. (1978). The Fall o f Public Man, New York, Vintage STORY, R. (1981). The Forging o f an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800—1870, Consequently, where such cultural collisions or ideological contradictions occur, Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press market forces cannot necessarily be relied upon for regulation of the press. It is of THOMPSON, e . p . (1966). The Making o f the English Working Class, New York, Random House course true that few democratic states could legitimately intervene directly to this TUCHMAN, G (1982). Culture as material resource, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 4, no. 1 effect by invocation of criminal law, but the view of state intervention as being TWENTIETH CENTURY CLUB (1910). The Amusement Situation in Boston, Boston restricted to such direct and draconian methods reflects a rudimentary conception of VANDERBILT, k . (1959). Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle o f Culture in a Democracy, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press the heterogeneity of the relations between state and civil society. It takes for granted WEBER, W . M. (1976). Music and the Middle Class in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York, Holmes the legalistic conception of civil law as ‘private law’, that is, as an arena for restitutive and Meier resolution to conflicts between individuals. However, it must be considered that the WHITEHILL. W. M. ( 1 9 7 0 ). Museum o f Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History, Cambridge, M ass., inflicting of monetary damages and/or legal costs on a party to a civil action constitutes Harvard University Press a penalty for the transgression of a rule which the state legitimates and will ultimately WILLIAMS. R (1965). The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth, Pelican WOLFF, J. (1982). The problem of ideology in the sociology of art: A case study of Manchester in the enforce. This observation is by no means unknown to bourgeois jurisprudence: nineteenth century. Media, Culture and Society, vol. 4, no. 1 Although the proximate end of the civil sanction is, generally speaking, redress to the injured party, its ZOLBERG, V. L. (1974). The Art Institute of Chicago: the sociology of a cultural institution. Ph D- remote and paramount end, like that of the criminal sanction, is the prevention of offences generally Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago (Austin, 1885:504n).' 8 * ZOLBERG. W. L. (1980). Conflicting visions in American art museums. Theory and Society, vol. 10’ January Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Monash University. 0163-4437/82/040323 + 15 $03.00/0 © 1982 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited