Music History and Cosmopolitanism

Anastasia Belina, Kaarina Kilpiö, Derek B. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351060936
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This collection of essays is the first book-length study of music history and cosmopolitanism, and is informed by arguments that culture and identity do not have to be viewed as primarily located in the context of nationalist narratives. Rather than trying to distinguish between a true cosmopolitanism and a false cosmopolitanism, the book presents studies that deepen understanding of the heritage of this concept – the various ways in which the term has been used to describe a wide range of activity and social outlooks. It ranges over a two hundred-year period, and more than a dozen countries, revealing how musicians and audiences have responded to a common humanity by embracing culture beyond regional or national boundaries. Among the various topics investigated are: musical cosmopolitanism among composers in Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarian Empire; cosmopolitan popular music historiography; cosmopolitan musical entrepreneurs; and musical cosmopolitanism in the metropolises of New York and Shanghai.

Part I

Music and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century

1 Cosmopolitanism and music for the theatre

Europe and beyond, 1800–1870

Mark Everist

Teutonic Universalism and the Franco-Italian

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities – despite its age – and derivative texts have bequeathed more than just a suspicion of the concept of nationalism to the early twenty-first century. The study of music has been perhaps all the more receptive to its contribution because of the nature of music historiography itself (Anderson, 1983), ¹ and of its dominant trope, which has been called ‘Teutonic Universalism’. Observation of Teutonic Universalism suggests that claims made about music in general are often predicated on evidence and values germane exclusively to the ‘Bach to Schönberg’ Austro-German canon: in other words, Austro-German – or ‘Teutonic’ – values masquerade as universal ones. Music of other cultures – Czech, Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Iberian, French – is somehow viewed as the product of some sort of ‘national tradition’, with the consequent historiographical and axiological consequences that are all too easy to imagine. ²

The most cursory studies of nineteenth-century musical cultures betray an enormous mismatch between this view of ‘Teutonic Universalism’ and the reality of the cosmopolitan basis for almost everything that underpinned quotidian musical life. This disparity is most revealing in the study of music in the theatre. ‘National opera’, as it is called, is frequently characterised as creative response, political criticism or linguistic rebellion: some sort of counterweight to a pre-existent – usually foreign – culture that is supposed to mark a decisive break with the repertorial status quo. The disadvantage is that such a historiography downplays, deplores or even ignores the largely cosmopolitan musical cultures in the theatre against which ‘national opera’ apparently sets itself. As William Weber puts it, speaking of a slightly earlier period, ‘Little has been done to analyse what nationalistic movements opposed within musical culture’ (Weber, 2011, 209). When this question has been asked, the answers have tended to be couched in terms either of a response to the ‘invasion’ of or ‘craze’ for Italian opera, most often Rossini, or of the tacit assumption of ‘Teutonic Universalism’, without ever trying to reconstruct what the underlying musical culture might in fact have been. ³ The preoccupations in recent work by Christophe Charle and Philippe Ther with such larger questions of repertorial architecture are striking in that neither of these scholars would self-identify as a musicologist; it might well be thought that this makes them just slightly more immune to the ‘Teutonic Universalism’ that risks paralysing not only the study of cosmopolitanism in music but the examination of musical cultures tout court (Charle, 2008; Ther, 2014). The challenge, then, is to recover the underpinning cosmopolitan culture of music in the theatre against which ‘national opera’ might be thought to be a creative response.

What is this quotidian cosmopolitanism against which ‘national opera’ is supposed to be struggling? Teutonic music in the theatre has little role beyond German-speaking environments – and even there, much less of a position than has always been assumed. More importantly, the idea of a mix of the local with the Italian needs to be reoriented to encompass a mix of the local with the Franco-Italian. The exclusion of the French dimension to the analysis of this underpinning culture in favour of an Italian one may well be a consequence of the imperatives of ‘Teutonic Universalism’. A dispassionate appraisal of the daily musical repertories in the theatre reveals that both French and Italian musical traditions in the theatre underpinned practice across Europe and well beyond. These traditions are complex, multifaceted and interwoven, and their analysis involves understanding the lives and actions of a large number and wide variety of agents and actors. ⁴ Sitting behind this analysis then is the question: how extensive was the international circulation of Italian and French music for the theatre? Questions of reception are central: what was the significance of, say, Boieldieu’s opéra comique or Donizetti’s serious opera in locations as familiar as Hamburg or Hanover or as remote as Shanghai or Sydney, and what sort of company did they keep? In other words, what was the balance between French, Italian and other music in Europe’s theatres and in institutions further afield? Such questions entail others: what can be known about the institutions, personnel, audiences and civic and commercial structures that supported these cultures? These questions, their methodological implications and their answers might be less than congenial to those who trade in the currency of major composers and canonic works from the beginning of the twenty-first century; the issues are, however, central to a reimagining of the history of music in nineteenth-century European theatre.

Cosmopolitanism, ‘globalism’ and the macro-region

‘Cosmopolitanism’ has been a term at the centre of much thought in the social sciences for a quarter of a century, and has recently taken on the same mystique in music as a number of concepts and authors that have characterised the subject during the last half-century: sources, Schenker, interdisciplinarity, gender, Adorno, the post-colonial and so on. Recent colloquies on cosmopolitanism are found in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and in a special issue of the Musical Quarterly; and collections of essays and individual studies abound (Gooley et al. 2013, 523–50; Gooley and Collins, 2016, 139–279). ⁵ Theorising the subject is contingent on questions of territoriality, globalism, macro-regionalism, cultural transfer, cultural exchange, transnationalism and other ways of explaining the world. Making sense of music in this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Music and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century
• PART II Music and cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century
• PART III Music and urban cosmopolitanism
• Index