5 P AULINO P EREIRO
Ejemplo 5.12: Dinámica (cc 48-52) de “3”, en Catro pezas (2009), de Pereiro
According to Weber, the modern orchestral concert came to be one of “the most central civic and national rituals in the industrial age, grandiosely celebrating high art and the new social order.”1 The establishment of an
orchestra was a critical step towards the creation of a classical music culture in Sydney and was a key focus for many of the music lovers discussed in the
previous chapter. On 24 June 1908, a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald
proudly announced the formation of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as a
“permanent professional orchestra”.2This orchestra operated a regular series
of concerts from 1908 until 1917 and gave first Sydney performances of many of the great orchestral works of the classical repertoire. The official history of
the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Play On, published by the ABC in 1992,
passes over the original Sydney Symphony Orchestra in a short paragraph, claiming (incorrectly) that it existed from 1908 to 1914. It included a passing
comment about rehearsals being held “above a fish shop”,3 thereby implying
that the orchestra was of little account. This ignores the enormous
1 William Weber, "The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-Century Orchestral Concerts," in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. Joan Peyser (New York: Scribner, 1986), 8.
community energy that was channelled into the establishment of this orchestra documented in this chapter.
Almost all agents had a vested interest in creating an orchestra. These included musicians seeking to increase the status of their profession and expand job opportunities for themselves, civic-minded members of the middle class with ambitions to establish Sydney’s reputation as a cultured and harmonious city, music lovers who wished to hear more orchestral music, and theatrical entrepreneurs who wished to attract larger audiences for their concert artists with the added attraction of an orchestra. Their early endeavours to create an orchestra therefore provide an opportunity to gain insights about the ways the agents interacted.
This chapter will focus on the kaleidoscope of shifting relationships that brought all stakeholders together to create an orchestra, despite differing motivations. These alliances, with all their dramas, tensions, successes and failures, demonstrate the negotiated, almost haphazard way that cultural change occurred as well as many of the financial challenges involved in establishing an orchestra and a classical music culture.
Bands versus orchestras
In the nineteenth century, the terms “orchestra” and “band” were loosely applied to an ill-defined body of instrumentalists regardless of size4 and
4 Michael Broyles, Music of the Highest Class: elitism and populism in antebellum Boston (New Haven Yale University Press, 1992), 319.
there was often not a clear distinction between the two.5 Musicians routinely
belonged to both bands and orchestras, each with a similar repertoire which included overtures, operatic arias, waltzes, polkas, fantasies and marches.6
Spitzer has claimed that orchestras were a ubiquitous part of American urban life with literally hundreds of orchestras performing on a daily basis in theatres, restaurants, beer gardens, concert halls, circuses and amusement parks.7 Similarly, in Australia a band might consist of wind instruments for
outdoor entertainment or strings for inside entertainment, but almost any grouping of instruments might be called an orchestra.8 For instance, in
chapter two, I discussed an 1850 concert by an orchestra that was comprised mostly of woodwind and brass instruments and so would most likely be considered a band in today’s usage of the word.
During the course of the nineteenth century the term “orchestra” came to be used more exclusively to refer to a strictly defined group of instrumentalists which included players of strings, paired wind and brass
instruments and percussion9 coming together to perform the symphonic
repertoire of the classical music canon.10 In Europe, the Leipzig Gewandhaus
5 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), Kindle, Loc. 1175.
6 Levine, Loc 1188.
7 John Spitzer, "The Ubiquity and Diversity of Nineteenth-Century American Orchestras," in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 19.
8 John Whiteoak, "Popular Music, Militarism, Women, and the Early ‘Brass Band’ in Australia," Australasian Music Research 6 (2001): 30–31.
9 George B. Stauffer, "The Twentieth Century and the Orchestra as Museum," in The Modern Orchestra: A Creation of the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Joan Peyser (New York: Scribner, 1986), 41.
Orchestra was established as early as 1781 and London’s Philharmonic Society was established in 1813, along with the Orchestre de la Société des
Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris in 1828 and the Vienna Philharmonic in
1842. The establishment of orchestras accelerated in the latter part of the century when many of Europe’s major orchestras, Berlin Philharmonic (1882), the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1888) and the Munich
Philharmonic (1893) were established.11 The first permanent professional
orchestra in the United States was the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
established in 1881, followed by the Chicago Symphony in 1891. While the New York Philharmonic had been in continuous operation since 1842 it did not become a permanent professional orchestra until the first decade of the twentieth century.12 London did not have a full-time professional orchestra
until 192713 although including the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester was
established in 1857. This slow development reflected the struggle most orchestras faced in obtaining ongoing funding that would enable them to engage full-time professional musicians for regular orchestral performances
11 Spitzer, "Orchestras: American and European," in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 316; John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw. 2001 "Orchestra." Grove Music Online. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019.
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630. 001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000020402; and Peter Anthony Bloom, "The Public for Orchestral Music in the Nineteenth Century", in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, edited by Joan Peyser, (New York: Scribner, 1986.), 251-81.
12 Karen Ahlquist, "Performance to ‘Permanence’: Orchestra Building in Late Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati," in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 156.
13 Nicholas Kenyon, The BBC Symphony Orchestra: The First Fifty Years, 1930–1980 (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981), 11.
and rehearsals in the absence of court patronage.14 Sydney’s ambition to
establish symphony orchestras in its major cities was part of this world-wide trend.
The great musical centres of the world were part of a musical “mind map”. This is a term used by historian Desley Deacon to describe the way Australians located themselves in the world through various international connections.15 For most major cities in the Western world a professional full-
time orchestra was a potent symbol of a city’s cultural progress. Sydney’s musical community was keen to make its mark on the international map not just as the recipient of overseas talent but as a worthy actor. However, like other cities, Sydney struggled to find funding to make such an orchestra viable in the long run.
While many entrepreneurs became involved in organising orchestral concerts in both Europe and the United States, this was a financially risky venture and most failed to be sustainable over the long term, even when they included more popular music in an effort to attract a larger audience.16
A unique solution was found in Boston when a single, exceptionally wealthy individual, Henry Lee Higginson, a partner in a brokerage firm and music
14 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Pleasure Wars, vol. 5 (New York; London: WW Norton & Company, 1998), 178.
15 Desley Deacon, “Location! Location! Location! Mind maps and theatrical circuits in Australian transnational history”, History Australia 5 (3), 2008, 81.1–81.16.
16 Paul DiMaggio, "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America," in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of
enthusiast, established an orchestra governed by a not-for-profit body
established on a corporate model, dependent on private philanthropy.17
Higginson was a member of a urban elite known as the “Boston Brahmins” who, according to DiMaggio, “were able to build organisational forms that first, isolated high culture and second, differentiated it from popular culture.”18 Because this orchestra had independent financing, it was not
dependent on commercial success and could police a strict demarcation between entertainment and art music.
In Sydney, although there was certainly an emerging cultural and social elite,19 there was no equivalent to the “Boston Brahmins”. Other
strategies, of necessity, had to be found to address ongoing concerns that Sydney was lagging behind other cities because it did not have an orchestra. After initial individual efforts by entrepreneurs and then musicians to establish an orchestra, Sydney’s most successful strategy before the establishment of the Conservatorium was for all stakeholders to work together to establish an orchestra.
17 DiMaggio, 393.
18 DiMaggio, 374–5.
19 See for example Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005). Matthews found that by 1931 the upper echelons of Sydney Society (households earning more than £500 per annum) constituted about 10% or some 3 000 households.