Media, Culture a n d Society 1982 4 , 33 50
Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century
Boston: the creation o f an organizational base
for high culture in America
PAUL D IM A G G IO -
Sociological and political discussions o f culture have been predicated on a strong
dichotomy between high culture— w hat goes on in m useum s, opera houses,
symphony halls and theatres— and popular culture, o f both the folk and com m er­
cial varieties. Such culture critics as Dwight McDonald (1957) and T heodor Adorno
(1941) have based on this dichotom y thorough-going critiques o f popular culture
and the mass m edia. D efenders o f popular culture (Lowenthal, 1961; G ans, 1974)
have questioned the norm ative aspect o f the critique o f popular culture, b ut have,
for the most part, accepted the basic categories. T he distinction between high and
popular culture has been im plicit, as well, in the discussion o f public policy
towards culture in both the U nited States and G reat Britain (DiM aggio 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 o f
their publics. T he distinction between high and popular culture, in its American
version, em erged in the period between 1850 and 1900 our o f the efforts o f urban
elites to build organizational forms that, first, isolated high culture an d , second,
differentiated it from popular culture. Americans did not merely ad o p t available
European models. Instead they groped their way to a workable distinction. N ot
until two distinct organizational forms— the private or sem i-private, non-profit
cultural institution and the commercial popular-culture industry— took shape did
the high/popular-culture dichotom y em erge in its m odern form. Once these
organizational models developed, the first in the bosom o f elite urban status com ­
munities, the second in the relative impersonality o f em erging regional and
national markets, they shaped the role that cultural institutions would play, the
careers o f artists, the nature o f the works created and perform ed, and the purposes
and publics that cultural organizations would serve.
In this paper I will address only one side o f this process o f classification, the
institutionalization o f high culture and the creation o f distinctly high-cultural
organizations. W hile 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 ab o u t the high arts that will engage us here. In order to grasp
the extent to which the creation o f m odern high-cultural institutions was a task
that involved elites as an organic group, we will focus on th at process in one
American city. Boston in the nineteenth century was the most active center of
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C U L T U R A L E N T R F.l’ RI i N E U R M 1 1 1 ’
DIMAGCilO
decisively from the commercial and co-operative ensem bles with which it first
competed. T he Museum o f Fine Arts, founded in 1873, was at the center o f the
city’s artistic life, its exhibitions com plem ented by those o f Harvard and the
eccentric Mrs G ardner. Music and art critics m ight disagree on the merits o f indivi­
dual conductors or painters; but they were united in an aesthetic ideology that dis- ■
tinguished sharply between the nobility of art and the vulgarity of mere entertainment. The distinction between true art, distributed by not-for-profit corporations I
managed by artistic professionals and governed closely by prosperous and influen­
tial trustees, and popular en tertain m en t, sponsored by entrepreneurs and d istri­
buted via the m arket to whomever would buy it. had taken a form th a t has
persisted to the present. So, too, had the social distinctions that would d iffe ren -(
tiate the publics for high and popular culture.
The sacralization o f art, the definition o f high culture and its opposite, popular 1
culture and the institutionalization o f this classification, was the work o f men and i
women whom I refer to as cultural capitalists. I use the term in two senses to des­
cribe the capitalists (and the professionals whose wealth came from t h e .
participation o f their families in the industrial ventures— textiles, railroads and
mining— o f the day) who founded the m useum s and the symphony orchestras that
embodied and elaborated the high-cultural ideal. They were capitalists in th e sense ■
that their wealth came from the m anagem ent o f industrial enterprises from which 1
they extracted a profit, and cultural capitalists in th at they invested some of these |
profits in the foundation and m aintenance o f distinctly cultural enterprises. T hey j
also—and this is the second sense in which I use the term — were collectors o f w hat
Bourdicu has called ‘cultural capital', knowledge an d familiarity w ith styles an d •
genres th at are socially valued and th at confer prestige upon those w ho have
mastered them (Bourdicu and Passeron, 1977. 1979). It was the vision o f th e '
founders o f the institutions th a t have becom e, in effect, the treasuries o f cultural
capital upon which their descendants have draw n th a t defined the nature o f
cultural capital in American society.1
To create an institutional high culture, Boston's upper class had to accomplish
three concurrent, but analytically distinct, projects; entrepreneurship, classification
and framing. By entrepreneurship, I mean the creation o f an organizational form
that members o f the elite could control and govern. By classification, I refer to the
erection o f strong and clearly defined boundaries between art and entertainment,
the definition o f a high a n that elites and segments o f the middle class could
appropriate as their own cultural propeny; and the acknowledgment o f that classi­
fication's legitimacy by other classes and the state. Finally, I use the term framing ,
to refer to the developm ent o f a new etiquette o f appropriation, a new relationship j
between the audience and the work o f art.* The focus o f this paper will be on t h e •
first o f these three processes.
American culture; and its elite— the Boston Brahm ins—constituted the most well
defined status group o f any o f the urhan u pper classes o f this period. For this
reason the processes with which I am concerned appear here in particularly dear
relief.'
W hen wc look at Boston before 1850 we sec a culture defined by the p u lp it, the
lectern and a collection o f artistic efforts, am ateurish by m odern standards, in
which effort rarely was m ade to distinguish between art and en tertain m en t, or
between culture and com merce. T he arts in Boston were not self-conscious; they
drew few boundaries. W hile intellectuals and m inisters distinguished culture that
elevated the spirit from that which debased it, there was relatively little agreem ent
on w hat works or genres constituted which (see H atch, 1962; Harris, 1966).
H arvard's Pierian Sodality mixed popular songs with stu d en t com positions and
works by European fine-arts composers, T he Philharm onic Society played classical
concerts, b u t also backed visiting popular vocalists. T hroughout this period, most
o f Boston music was in the hands o f com mercial entrep ren eu rs. G ottlieb
G raupner, the city’s leading impressario in the 1830s, sold sheet music and
instrum ents, published songs and prom oted concerts at which religious, classical
and popular tunes m ingled freely. (O ne typical perform ance included a bit of
Italian opera, a devotional song by Mrs G raupner, a piece by Verdi. 'Bluebell of
S cotland' and 'T h e O rigin o f C om m on N ails’, recited by Mr Bernard, a
com edian.) T he two exceptions, the H andel and H aydn Society and the Harvard
Musical Association, founded in the 1840s and 1850s respectively, were associations
o f am ateurs and professionals that appealed only to a relatively narrow segm ent of
the elite.
T he visual arts were also organized on a largely commercial basis in this era. In
the 1840s, the American Art U nion sold paintings by national lottery (Lynnes,
1933). These lotteries were succeeded, in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, by
private galleries. Museums were m odelled on B arnum 's (B arnum , 1879; Harris,
1973): fine art was interspersed am ong such curiosities as bearded w omen and
m u ta n t anim als, and popular entertainm ents were offered for th e price o f
adm ission to a clientele th at included working people as well as th e u p p er m iddle
cjass. Founded as a commercial venture in 1841, Moses K em ball's Boston Museum
exhibited works by such painters as Sully and Peale alongside Chinese curiosities,
stuffed anim als, m erm aids and dwarves. For th e entrance fee visitors could also
atten d the Boston M useum T heatre, which presented works by Dickens and
Shakespeare as well as perform ances by gym nasts and contortionists, and brought
to Boston th e leading players o f the American and British stage (McGlinchee,
1940). T he prom iscuous com bination o f genres th a t later would be considered
incom patible was not uncom m on. As late as the 1880s. American circuses
em ployed Shakespearian clowns who recited the b ard's lines in full clown m ake-up
(Fellows and Freem an, 1936).
By 1910, high and popular culture were encountered far less frequently in the
same settings. T he distinction towards which B oston’s clerics an d critics had groped
30 years before had em erged in institutional form. T he Boston Symphony
O rchestra was a p erm anent aggregation, w resting th e favor o f Boston's u p p er class
By the close o f th e Civil W ar, Boston was in m any ways the h u b o f A m erica's
cultural life. B ut, as M attin G reen (1966) has illustrated, the unity o f th e city's
1 The prtHtn. in other American ciries. war 10 a large eaieni influenced by the Boston model. A final, more
mundane, cnnsideraiion recommends Boston as the focus for this study. The work in this paper is still in an
exploratory stage, at which I am plundering history rather than writing it; the prolixity o f nineteenth-century
Boston's men and women o f letters and the dedkation and quality o f her local historians makes Boston an ideal
site for sin It an enterprise
1 In a third sense, 'cultural capital' might refer to the entrepreneurs o f popular culture— the Rarnurm , the
Keiths, the Shuberts and others— who turned culture into profits. W h ile w c w ill not consider this group at any
length, we m ust rem em ber that it was in opposition to their activities that the former defined their ow n.
My debt to Bernstein (1971*.
and to Mary Douglas (1966) is evident here. My use o f the term s 'classifica*
lion' and 'fram ing' is sim ilar to flrm ttein*s
The predecessors: organizational models before the Gilded Age
b)
t
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DIM AG GIO
economic and cultural elite, the relative vibrancy o f Harvard and the vitality o f the
com m unal cultural associations o f the elite— the H andel and H aydn Society, the
A thenaeum , th e D ante Circle, the singing clubs— m ade Boston uniq u e am ong
A m erica's cities, G odkin called Boston 'th e one place in America where wealth and
the know ledge o f how to use it are apt to coincide' (ibid .: 41),
Y et at the close o f the Civil W ar, Boston lacked the organizational arrangem ents
th a t could sustain a public 'h ig h culture' distinct and insulated from more popular
forms. As we have seen, the boundaries between high art and mass art were poorly
draw n; artists and perform ers had not yet segm ented elite and popular markets. It
is not that the wealthy were uninterested in art. H enry Lee Higginson, later head o f
th e Lee, Higginson brokerage house and founder o f th e Boston Symphony
O rchestra, could reminisce o f his not atypical stu d en t days in C am bridge in the
mid-1850s:
we had been to th e Italian opera, gettin g there seats for tw enty-five cents in the upper gallery
enjoying it high ly. I had an inborn taste for m usic, which was nourished by a few concerts in Boston
and by the opera (Perry. 1921: 29),
His wife recollected
There were private theatricals, som etim es in G erm an, there was a G erm an class, and there were
readings which finished w ith a deligh tful social gathering in the even in g. He IH igginsonl belonged to
a private singing club in B oston, and o ften w ent to Jam es Savage's room in H olw orthy, where there
was m uch inform al singing and music (ib id .: 81).
Marty young Brahm ins, like H igginson, spent tim e in Europe, studying art or
music (e.g. A dam s, 1928). And m any more learned and played music in or around
Boston (W hipple, n .d .), or attended public lectures on the arts.
Nor was there a lack o f theories ab o u t the nature o f good art. A lthough aesthetic
philosophies blossomed after the high-culrure institutions were established, even
the mid-1850s n u rtured aesthetic philosophers like Brook Farmer Jo h n S. D w ight,
editor o f Dwight's Journal o f Music. Some Bostonians were aware o f the latest
developm ents in European music and acquainted w ith classical standards in the
visual arts.
High culture (and by this I m ean a strongly classified, consensually defined body
o f art distinct from 'p o p u lar' fare) failed to develop in Boston prior to the 1870s
because the organizational models through which art was distributed were not
eq u ip p ed to define and sustain such a body and a view o f art. Each o f the three
m ajor m odels for organizing the distribution o f aesthetic experience before 1870—
the for-profit firm , the co-operative enterprise an d th e com m unal association— was
flawed in som e im p o rtan t way.
T hc problem s o f th e privately ow ned, for-profit firm are m ost obvious. As
W eber (1968, vol. 2, sec. 9: 937) has argued, the m arket declassifies culture: pre­
senters o f cultural events mix genres and cross boundaries to reach o u t to larger
audiences. T he Boston M useum , founded in th e 1840s, mixed fine art and side­
show oddities, Shakespeare and theatrical ephem erata. For-profit galleries
exhibited art as spectacle: when Jam es Jackson Jarves showed his fine collection o f
Italian prim itives at D erby's Institute o f Fine Arts in N ew York, ‘the decor o f
th is . . . dazzlingly o rn a te com m ercial em p o riu m . . . caused m uch more
favorable com m ent than Jarves' queer old pictures' (B urt, 1977: 57).
If anything, com m erce was even less favorable to the insulation o f high art in the
perform ance m edia. Fine-art theatre in Boston never seems to have got o ff the
37
ground. And the num erous commercial orchestras that either resided in or roured
Boston during this period mixed fine-arts and light music indiscriminately, A
memoir o f the period recalls a concert o f the G erm ania Society (one o f the b etter
orchestras o f this type):
One o f ihe numbers was the "Railway G a llo p ." — com poser forgotten— during the playing o f which
a little mock steam -engin e kept scooting about the floor o f the hall, with black cotton w ool sm oke
com ing out o f the funnel.
The same writer describes the m em orable
evening when a fantasia on them es from W allace's "M aritana" was played as a du et for mourh
harmonica and the Great Organ: a com bin ation, as the program inform ed us, "never before
attem pted in the history o f m u sic!” (W illiam F. A pthorp, quoted in H ow e, 1914).
As with the visual arts, the commercial treatm ent o f serious music tended to the
extravagant rather than to the sacred. In 1869, an entrepreneur organized a Peace
Jubilee to celebrate the end o f the Civil W ar. A structure large enough to
accommodate 30,000 people was built (at w hat would later be the first site o f the
Museum o f Fine Arts) and ‘star’ instrum entalists and vocalists were contracted to
perform along with an orchestra o f 1000 and a chorus o f 10,000. As a finale, the
orchestra (which included 330 strings, 75 drum s and 83 tubas) played the anvil
chorus with accom panim ent from a squadron o f firem en beating anvils, and the
firing o f live canon (Fisher, 1918: 45 46).
An alternative form o f organization, em braced by some musical societies, was
the workers’ co-operative, in which each m em ber had a vote, shared in th e profits
of the enterprise and elected a conductor from am ong their n u m b er.4 T he co­
operative was vulnerable to market incentives. Perhaps more im portant, however,
it was (also like its privately ow ned counterpart) unable to secure the com plete
allegiance o f its m em bers, who supported themselves by playing many different
kinds of music in a wide range o f settings. T he early New York Philharm onic, for
example, perform ed as a group only m onthly. Members anticipated th e concert
as a pleasant r elief from more rem unerative occupational du ties, and the rehearsal periods were
cluttered u p w ith routine business m atters, from w hich m em bers could absent them selves w ith
relative im punity (M ueller, 1951- 41).
The lines dividing non-profit, co-operative, for-profit and public enterprise were
not as strong in the n ineteenth century as they would become in the twentieth.Civic-minded guarantors m ight hold stock in commercial ventures w ith no hope o f ;
gaining a profit (e.g. Symphony H all at the en d o f the century). T he goals o f the
charitable corporation were usually defined into its charter, b u t otherwise it legally
resembled its for-profit counterpart. Even less clearly defined was w hat I call the
voluntary association: closed associations o f individuals (som etim es incorporated,
sometimes not) to further the aims o f the participating m em bers, rather th an o f
the com m unity as a whole. For associations like the H andel and H aydn Society,
which m ight give public concerts, or the A thenaeum , which took an active r6le in
public affairs, privateness was relative. B ut. ultim ately, each was a voluntary and
exclusive instrum ent o f its members.
W hy were these com m unal associations ill-suited to serve as the organizational(
bases for high culture in Boston? W hy could the A thenaeum , a private library, orj
the Boston A rt C lub, which sponsored contem porary art shows (Boston A rt C lu b ,/
4 S f f Couch ( I97fij. h) and Mueller (1 9 ) I J 7 f f ) for more derailed description' o f d m form.
38
p
niM ACicio
IH7H). not have developed continuous programs o f public exhibitions? Could not
/ the H andel and H aydn Society, the Harvard Musical Association (form ed by
| Harvard graduates who wished to pursue after graduation musical interests
' developed in the College's Pierian Sodality) or one o f the num erous singing circles
have developed into a perm anent orchestra? They faced no commercial tem ptations to study, exhibit or perform any b u t the highest art. (Indeed, the Harvard
Musical Association's perform ances were so austere as to give rise to the proverb
' 'd u ll as a sym phony concert' (How e, 1914: 8)).
N one o f them , however, could, by the late nineteenth century, claim to speak
for the com m unity as a whole, even if they chose to. Each represented only a
, fraction (although, in the case o f A thenaeum , a very large and p o ten t fraction) o f
I the elite; and, in the case o f the musical associations and the Art C lub, m em bers of
the m iddle class and artistic professionals were active as well. The culture o f an elite
sta tu sg ro u p m ust be m onopolized, it m ust be legitim ate and it m ust be sacralized.
Boston's cultural capitalists would have to find a form able to achieve all these
aims: a single organizational base for each art form; institutions that could claim to
serve the com m unity, even as they defined the com m unity to include only the elite
and the upper-m iddle classes; and enough social distance between artist and
audience, between perform er and public, to perm it the mystification necessary to
define a body o f artistic work as sacred.
This they did in the period between 1870 and 1900. By the end o f th e century,
in art and music (b u t not in theatre (sec T w entieth Century C lu b , 1919; Poggi,
1968)), the differences between high- and popular-culture artists and perform ers
were becom ing distinct, as were the physical settings in which high and popular art
were presented.
The form th a t the distribution o f high culture would take was th e non-profit
:corporation, governed by a self-perpetuating board o f trustees who, eventually,
; would delegate m ost artistic decisions to professional artists or art historians
‘(Zolberg, 1974; 1981). The charitable corporation was not designed to define a
high culture that elites could m onopolize; nor are non-profit organizations by their
nature exclusive. But the non-profit corporation had five virtues th at enabled it to
play a key role in this instance. First, the corporation was a fam iliar and successful
■ tool by which nineteenth-century elites organized their affairs (see Frederickson,
1963; Story, 1980; Hall, forthcom ing). In the economic realm it enabled them to
raise capital for such profitable ventures as the C alum et and Hecla Mines, the
western railroads and the telephone com pany. In the non-profit arena, it had been
a useful instrum ent for elite com m unal governance at Harvard, the Massachusetts
G eneral Hospital and a host o f charitable institutions (Story, 1980). Second, by
entrusting governance decisions to trustees who were com m itted either to pro­
viding financial support or to soliciting it from their peers, the non-profit form
effectively (if not com pletely) insulated m useum s and orchestras from the pressures
o f the m arket. T hird, by vesting control in a well integrated social and financial
elite, the charitable corporation enabled its governors to rule w ithout interference
from the state or from other social classes. F ourth, those organizations whose
trustees were able to enlist the support o f the greater part o f the elite could provide
th e stability needed for a necessarily lengthy process o f defining art and developing
ancillary institutions to insulate high-cultural from popular-cultural work, per­
formance and careers. Finally, and less obviously, the goals o f the charitable
corporation, unlike those o f the profit-seeking firm , are diffuse and am biguous
c.u i.T ti it a i. I'.n i it i- p k i -:n i -:i i h s i 11 r
39
enough to accom m odate a range o f conflicting purposes and changing ends. T he
broad charters o f Boston's major cultural organizations perm itted their missions to
be redefined with tim e, and enabled their governors to claim (and to believe) that
they pursued com m unitarian goals even as they institutionalized a view and vision
of art that m ade elite culture less and less accessible to the vast majority o f Boston’s
citizens.
The context o f cultural capitalism
'
1
In almost every literate society, dom inant status groups or classes eventually have
developed their own styles o f art and the institutional means o f supporting them .
It was predictable th at this would happen in the U nited States, despite the absence
of an hereditary aristocracy. It is more difficult, however, to explain the tim ing o f
this process. D w ight and others wished (b u t failed) to start a p erm anent profes­
sional sym phony orchestra from at least the late 1840s. T he A th en aeu m ’s
proprietors tried to raise a public subscription to purchase the Jarves collection in
the late 1850s, b ut they failed. W hat had changed?
Consider, first, the sim ple increase in scale an d w ealth betw een 1800 and 1870.
At the tim e o f the revolution, Boston's population was u nder 10,000. By 1800 it
had risen to 25,000; by 1846 it was 120,000. By 1870, over a quarter o f a million
people lived in Boston (Lane, 1975). T he increase in the size o f the local cultural
market facilitated a boom in theatre building in th e 1830s (Nye, I960; 264), a rise
in the n um ber and stability o f book and music stores (Fisher, 1918: 30) and the
growth o f m arkets for theatre, music, opera, dancing and equestrian shows (Nye.
I960: 143). T he growth o f population was accom panied by an increase in w ealth.
Boston's first fortunes were m ercantile, the fruits o f the C hina trade, large by local,
but small by national standards. In 1840, Boston had b u t a handful o f millionaires.
By 1890, after post-Civil W ar booms in railroads, m ining, banking and
com m unications, there were 400 (Jaher, 1968, 1972; Story, 1980). Even th e
physical scale o f the city changed during this period: beginning in 1856, developers
began filling in the waters o f the Back Bay, creating a huge track o f publicly owned
land, partially devoted to civic and cultural buildings. As wealthy outlanders from
Lawrence, Lynn and Lexington m igrated to Beacon Hill and Cam bridge, streetcars
reduced the cost an d the difficulty o f travel to Boston from its suburbs (W arner,
1970). In short, Boston was larger, wealthier and more com pact in 1870 than it had
been 50 years before.
W ith growth came challenges to the stability o f the com m unity and to the
cultural authority (Starr, forthcom ing) o f elites. Irish im m igrants flowed into
Boston from the 1840s to work in the city’s industrial enterprises (H andlin, 1972;
Thernstrom , 1972): industrial em ploym ent roles doubled between 1845 and 1855
(H andlin, 1972). W ith industry and im m igration came disease, pauperism ,
alcoholism, rising infant m ortality and vice. The Catholic Irish were, by provenance
and religion, outside the consensus that the Brahm ins had established. By 1900,
30% o f Boston's residents were foreign-born and 70% were o f foreign parentage
(Green, 1966: 102). By the close of the Civil W ar, Boston’s im m igrants were
organizing to challenge the native elite in the political arena (Solom on, 1956).
If im m igration and industrialization w rought traum atic changes in the city's social
fabric, the political assault on Brahmin institutions by native populists proved even
more frightening. T he Know -N othings who captured state governm ent in the 1850s
40
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D IM AG GIO
attacked the social exclusivity o f Harvard College frontally, amending its charter
and threatening state control over its governance, hiring and admissions policies
I (Story, 1980). Scalded by these attacks, Boston's leadership retreated from the
| public sector to found a system o f non-profit organizations that perm itted them to
I m aintain some control over the com m unity even as they lost their com m and o f its
political institutions.'
Story (1980) argues persuasively th at this political challenge, and the wave of
in stitution-building that followed it, transform ed the Brahmins from an elite into
a social class." As a social class, the Brahm ins bu ilt institutions (schools, almshouses
and charitable societies) aim ed at securing control over the city's social life
(H uggins, 1971; Vogel, 1981). As a status group, they constructed organizations
(clubs, prep schools and cultural institutions) to seal themselves off from their
increasingly unruly environm ent. T hus Vernon P arrin g to n 's only partially accurate
i observation th a t ‘T h e Brahm ins conceived the great business o f life to be the
) erection o f barriers against the intrusion o f the unpleasan t’ (q u o ted in Shiverick,
) 1970: 129). T he creation o f a network o f private institutions th at could define and
| m onopolize high art was an essential part o f this process of building cultural
boundaries.
T he B rahm in class, however, was neither large enough to constitute a public for
large-scale arts organizations, nor was it content to keep its cultural achievements
solely to itself. Alongside of, and com plicating, the Brahm ins' drive towards
exclusivity was a conflicting desire, as they saw it, to educate the com m unity. The
growth of the m iddle class during this period— a class th at was economically and
socially closer to the working class and thus in greater need of differentiating itself
from it culturally— provided a natural clientele for Boston's inchoate high culture.
W hile we have all too little inform ation about the nature o f the visitors to Boston's
M useum or o f the audiences for the Sym phony, it seems certain from contem porary
accounts (and sheer arithm etic) that many o f them were m iddle class. T he same
im pulse th a t created the markets for etiq u ette and instruction books in the m id ­
nin eteen th century helped populate the galleries and concert halls o f the century's
last q uarter (N ye, I960; Douglas, 1978).
C ultural entrepreneurship: the M useum o f Fine A rts an d th e Boston Sym phony
O rchestra
The first step in the creation o f a high culture was the centralization o f artistic acti­
vities w ithin institutions controlled by Boston's cultural capitalists. This was
accom plished w ith the foundings o f the M useum o f Fine Arts and the Boston
Sym phony O rchestra. These institutions were to provide a framework, in the visual
arts and music, respectively, for the definition o f high art, for its segregation from
p o p u lar forms and for th e elaboration o f an etiq u ette o f appropriation.
Bostonians had sought to found a m useum for som e tim e before 1870. In 1858,
the state legislature, dom inated by factions unfriendly to Boston's elite, refused to
provide Back Bay land for a similar venture (H arris, 1962: 548). T he im m ediate
im petus for th e M useum , however, was a bequest by Colonel Tim othy Bigelow
Lawrence o f an arm or collection too large for the A th en aeu m 's small gallery to
' Shivtfirk (1970) noiej the contrast between the founding o f the public library in the 1870s and that o f 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 o f economic interest, kinship and culture
(see Thompson. 1966: R; Story. 1980: xi)
C U LTU R A L E N TR E P R E N E U R SH IP
41
accommodate. Three years earlier the A th en aeu m 's Fine Arts C om m ittee had
suggested that the galleries be expanded, b u t nothing had been done. W ith the
Lawrence bequest, and his w idow ’s offer to contribute a wing to a new gallery, the
trustees voted that
the present is a proper tim e for m aking an appeal to the public and especially to the friends o f the
Fine Arts, to raise the sum required to make available Mrs. Lawrence's proposed d on ation , an d , if
possible, to provide even larger m eans to carry ou t so noble a design in the confid en t hope that it may
be attended with success . . . (W h iteh ill, 1970: 6 ■8).
A new m useum promised to solve problem s for several o f Boston’s elite institutions:
Harvard had a collection o f prints for which it sought a fire-safe depository, and MIT
and the American Social Science Association possessed collections o f architectural
casts too large for them to store conveniently. After a series o f m eetings betw een the
A thenaeum trustees and other public and private decision makers, it was decided to
raise m oney fo ra m useum on a tract o f land in the Back Bay. (The land, ow ned by the
Boston W ater Power Com pany, was m ade available through the intervention o f
Mathias D enm an Ross, a local developer w ho was keenly aware o f the effects o f public
and cultural buildings on the value o f nearby real estate.) In 1870 th e state legislature
chartered the enterprise an d , with the help o f the A thenaeum , which sponsored
exhibitions thro u g h o u t this period, fund-raising b eg an .’
The initial aspirations o f th e Museum founders were som ew hat m odest. T he key
figure in the fo unding was Charles Callahan Perkins, great-nephew o f a C hinatrade m agnate, kinsm an o f the chairm an o f the A th en aeu m 's Fine Arts C om m ittee
and him self President o f the Boston Art C lub. Perkins wrote two books on Italian
sculpture in th e 1860s, cham pioned arts education in Boston's public schools an d
served as head o f the American Social Science Association's arts-education panel in
1869. (H e had studied p ain tin g and sculpture in Europe for alm ost 10 years, before
concluding th a t he lacked the creativity to be a good artist.) Perkins, in a report to
the ASSA had asserted 'th e feasibility o f establishing a regular M useum o f Art at
moderate expense', with primarily educational aims. Since Boston’s collections had
few originals, he recom m ended that th e new collection consist o f reproductions,
primarily plaster casts o f sculpture and architecture.
The breadth o f response to th e first appeal for funds for the m useum is striking.
A lthough the economy was n o t robust, $261,425 was collected for th e building. O f
this am o u n t, the largest gift was $25,000, only two were larger than $5000 an d all
but $100,000 came from over 1000 gifts o f less than $2000 from such sources as
local newspapers, public-school teachers an d workers at a piano factory. (By
contrast, w hen the Museum sought to raise $400,000 for new galleries an d an e n ­
dowment 15 years later, $218,000 o f th e initial $240,000 in contributions came
from a m ere 58 donors (W hitehill, 1970: 42).)
O ne reason for the breadth o f early su p p o rt was th at th e M useum , although in
private hands, was tb be a professedly com m unitarian and educational venture.
The Board o f Trustees contained a large segm ent o f the Brahm in class: All b u t one
of the first 23 trustees were proprietors o f the A thenaeum ; 11 were m em bers o f th e
Saturday C lub, while many others were m em bers o f the Somerset and St B otolph’s
clubs; m ost were graduates o f Harvard and m any were active in its affairs. T he
public nature o f the Board was further em phasized by the inclusion on it o f perm a­
nent and ex-officio appointm ents: from H arvard, MIT and the A thenaeum ; the
7 This section relies heavily upon Walter Muir Whitehill's classic two-volume history of the Museum (1970)
and, to a lesser extent, on Neil Harris' fine paper (1962) for its facts, albeit not for their interpretation.
42
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DIMAGGIO
Mayor, th e C hairm an o f the Boston Public Library's board, th e trustee o f the
Lowell Institute, th e Secretary o f the S tate Board o f Education and the S uperinten­
d en t o f Boston's schools. T he trustees dedicated the institution to education; one
h oped th a t the breadth o f the b oard’s m em bership would ensure th at the
M useum 's managers would be ‘prevented from squandering their funds u p o n the
private fancies o f w ould-be connoisseurs'. Indeed, the articles o f incorporation
I required th a t the M useum be open free o f charge at least four times a m o n th . The
public responded by flooding the M useum on free weekend days in the early years
(H arris, 1962: 48 52).
T h e centralization o f the visual arts around a m useum required only the
provision o f a building and an institution controlled by a board o f civic-minded
m em bers o f the elite. The Museum functioned on a relatively small budget in its
early years, u nder the direction o f Charles Greely Loring, a Harvard graduate and
Civil W ar general, who had studied Egyptology when his physician sent him to the
banks o f the Nile. The M useum 's founders, facing the need to raise substantial
funds, organized both private and public supporc carefully, m obilizing a consensus
in favor o f their project from the onset.
By contrast, the Boston Sym phony O rchestra was, for its first years at least, a
one-m an operation, forced to wrest hegem ony over Boston's musical life from
several contenders, each with its own coterie o f elite support. T hat Henry Lee
H igginson, a partner in the brokerage firm o f Lee, Higginson, was able to do so was
a consequence o f the soundness o f his organizational vision, the firmness o f his
co m m itm ent, and, equally im portant, his centrality to Boston’s economic and
social elite.
In a sense, H igginson began as a relative outsider. A lthough his father, founder
o f the family firm , m ade a fortune in shipping, H enry was the first o f his line to
m atriculate at Harvard; and soon he dropped out (claim ing poor vision), visiting
E urope and returning to private tutelage in C am bridge. Upon com pleting his
education, he studied music in Europe for several years, ultim ately against the
wishes o f his father, as their tense and som etim es acrim onious correspondence sug­
gests (Perry, 1921: 121 135). A fter an accident lam ed his arm . he returned to the
U nited States for good, fought in th e Civil W ar, m arried a d au g h ter o f the Harvard
scientist Louis Agassiz an d , following a disastrous venture in southern farm ing and
a lucrative investm ent in the C alum et and Hecla copper m ines, finally joined his
fath er's State Street firm."
H igginson was a know ledgeable stu d en t o f m usic, and a follower o f the aesthetic
doctrines o f J o h n S. D w ight. As early as 1840, D w ight had called for the founding
o f a p erm an en t orchestra in Boston. 'This promises so m eth in g ’, he wrote o f an
am ateu r perform ance.
W e cou ld not hu t feel that the materials that ev en in g collected m ig h t, i f they could be kept together
through th e year, and induced to practice, form an orchestra worthy to execute the grand works o f
H aydn and M ozart. . . . T o secure these ends m ight not a plan o f this kind be realized? Let a few o f
ou t m ost accom plished and refined musicians institute a series o f cheap instrum ental concerts. . . .
Let th em engage to perform quartettes, e tc ., occasionally a sym phony, by the best masters and no
others. Let th em repeat the best and most characteristic pieces en ou gh to make them a study to the
audiences (H o w e , 1914: 4 5).
" In Henry Adams words. 'Higginson. after a desperate struggle, was forced into Stare Street' (A dam s. 1928:
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 c ry '(P e rry , 1921- U S )
C U L T U R A L I: N T R P. P R P. N F. U R S 111P
43
As we have seen, a n um ber o f ensem bles attem p ted to realize D w ight's
ambitions. But it was H igginson's organizational skills (and his money) that gave
Boston the n atio n 's first perm anent, philanthropically supported and governed,
full-season sym phony orchestra, In achieving the dream o f a large perm anent
orchestra devoted to fine-arts music, H igginson faced and overcame two
challenges: first, establishing control over fine-arts music in Boston as a whole;
and, second, enforcing internal discipline over the orchestra's m em bers. Against
him were arrayed the supporters o f Boston’s existing ensem bles, principally the
Philharmonia and the Harvard Musical Association, an d the city's musicians,
jealous o f their personal and professional autonom y.
Higginson published his plans for the orchestra in a colum n, headed ‘In the
Interest o f G ood Music', that appeared in several o f Boston’s newspapers:
N otw ithstanding the developm ent o f musical taste in B oston, 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
European cities. . . . The essential condition o f such orchestras is their stability, whereas ours are
necessarily shifting and uncertain, because we are d ep en d en t upon musicians whose work and tim e
are largely pledged elsew here. To obviate this difficulty the follow ing plan is offered. It is an effort
made sim ply in the interest o f good m usic, and though individual in as m uch as it is ind ep en d en t o f
societies or clubs, it is in n o way antagonistic to any previously existing musical organization (H ow e,
1914: 41).
In this last sentence, H igginson treads on delicate ground, He goes on to praise,
specifically, the H andel and H aydn Society and the Harvard Musical Association,
the two musical societies with the closest Brahm in connections, while indicating
implicitly that there will be no further need for th e services o f the latter. To launch
this new enterprise, H igginson proposes to spend, annually, $20,000 o f his own
money until the orchestra becomes self-supporting.
Despite a m easure o f public incredulity, and some resentm ent at H igginson's
choice o f European conductor, George Henschel, over local candidates, the BSO
opened in D ecem ber 1881 to the enthusiastic response o f th e musical public. (The
dem and for tickets was great; lines form ed outside the box office the evening
before they w ent on sale.) T he social com plexion o f the first n ig h t's audience is
indicated by a report in a Boston new spaper th a t ‘th e spirit o f the music so affected
the audience th a t when the English national air was recognized in W eb er's Festival
O verture, the people arose en masse and rem ained standing until the close’. By
employing local musicians and perm itting them to play with the Philharm onic
Society and the Harvard Musical Association (b o th o f w hich, like the BSO, offered
about 20 concerts th a t season), H igginson earned th e g ratitu d e o f the city's music
lovers.
The trouble began in February 1882, w hen the players received H igginson’s
terms for the following season. To continue to work for the Symphony, they would
be required to make themselves available for rehearsals and perform ances from
October through A pril, four days a week, and to play for no other conductor or
musical association. (The H andel and H aydn Society, which had strong ties to the
A thenaeum , was exem pted from this p ro h ib itio n .) T he implications o f the
contract, which the players resisted unsuccessfully, were clear: Boston's other
orchestras, lacking the salaries that H igginson's subsidies p erm itted , would be
unable to com pete for the services o f Boston’s musicians. (To make m atters worse,
a num ber o f the city's journeym en musicians received no offers from Higginson at
all.)
44
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DIMAGGIO
The response o f the press, particularly o f the Brahm in Transcript, suggests that
loyalists o f the other ensem bles responded to H igginson's actions w ith outrage.
T he Transcript editorialized o f Higginson
H r ihu s "m akes a corner" in orchestral players, and m on opolizes these Tor his ow n concerts and those
o f the H andel and H aydn Society. . . . Mr. H ig g in so n ’s gift becom es an im p osition, it is som ething
that we m ust receive, or else we look musical starvation in the face. It is as if a man should make a
poor friend a present o f several baskets o f cham pagne and, at the sam e tim e, cut o f f his w hole water
supply.
A m ore populist newspaper com plained that the 'm onopoly o f m usic' was ‘an idea
th at could scarcely have em anated from any association except th at o f deluded
w ealth w ith arrant charlatanism ’. Even Music, a New York publication originally
friendly to H igginson's efforts, called his contract
2 direct stab at the older organizations and rival conductors o f Boston. It m eans that one or two
organizations may m ake efforts to place their concerts on the o ff days which Mr. H enschel has been
pleased to allow th em , but som e m ust he left in the cold, orchestraless and forlorn. . . . T he manner
in which the proposal was m ade was also o n e that forebodes tyranny. Som e o f the oldest m em bers o f
the Orchestra, m en w hose services to m usic in Boston have en titled them to deference and respect,
v/ere om itted altogether, and will he left out o f the new organization. It was intim ated strongly that
in case the offer was rejected by the m en , their places w ould be filled from the ranks o f European
orchestras (H o w e. 1914: 6 7 ~ 6 9 ).
Higginson and his orchestra w eathered the storm . A ttendance stayed u p and,
w ithin a year, his was the only orchestral association in Boston, co-existing peace­
fully w ith the sm aller H andel and H aydn Society. In order to achieve the kind o f
ensem ble he desired, however, H igginson had to ensure th at his musicians would
com m it their tim e and their atten tio n to the BSO alone, and accept his (and his
ag en t's, the conductor's) authority as inviolate. Since, in the past, all musicians,
w hatever their affiliations, were freelancers upon whom no single obligation
w eighed suprem e, accom plishing these aspirations required a fu ndam ental change
in the relationship between musicians and their employers.
In p art, effecting this internal m onopolization o f atten tio n was simply a m atter
o f gaining an external m onopoly o f classical-music perform ance. W ith the
surrender o f the Philharm onic Society and the Harvard Musical Association, two
m ajor com petitors for the working tim e o f Boston’s musicians disappeared. N o n e­
theless, while his musicians were now more d e p e n d en t u p o n th e BSO for their
livelihoods, and thus m ore am enable to his dem ands, his control over th e work
force was still challenged by the availability o f light-m usic or dance engagem ents,
teaching com m itm ents and the tradition o f lax discipline to which the players were
accustom ed.
T h ro u g h o u t his life, Higginson fought to m aintain control over the O rchestra's
em ployees, and th e issue o f discipline was foremost in his m in d from the begin­
ning. In an early plan for th e O rchestra, he suggested engaging a conductor and
eig h t to ten exceptionally good younger musicians from outside Boston at a fixed
salary, ‘w ho w ould b e ready at my call to play anyw here', and th en to draw around
th e m th e best o f o u r Boston musicians, thus refreshing and renewing the present
orchestra, and getting m ore nearly possession o f it . . . (How e, 1914: 28). A t th at
tim e, exclusive em ploym ent contracts were so rare th a t th e m ore tim id H enschel,
after agreeing to serve as conductor, tried to convince H igginson to aban d o n his
insistence on total com m itm ent. ‘I assure y o u ', he w rote as th e first orchestra was
being assem bled.
45
thai is ih c best th ing w c can d o , and if you have any con fid en ce in my ju dgm ent, pray drop all
conditions in the contract except those relating to our ow n w elfare. I m ean now the conditions o f
discipline, etc. (Pfrry. 1921: 299).
Despite his frequent assertions th at he yielded in all cases to his conductors’ advice
on orchestral m atters, Higginson, as we have seen, insisted on exclusive contracts in
the orchestra's second year, threatening to break any strike with the im portation o f
European players. A lthough he won th at b attle, he nonetheless replaced the locals
gradually, over the course o f the next decade, w ith new m en w ith few Boston tics,
mostly European, o f greater technical accom plishm ent, upon whose loyalty he
could count (Howe, 1914: 121 123).
In this, Higginson was not merely following a European m odel. ‘My contracts’,
he wrote an associate in 1888, 'are very strong, indeed m uch stronger than
European contracts usually are . . .' (Perry. 1921: 398). Characteristic o f the
orchestra contract was section 12:
Tf said musician fails to play to the satisfaction o f said H iggin son , said H igginson may dism iss said
musician from the Orchestra, paying his salary to the tim e o f dism issal, and shall not be liable to pay
him any com pensation or dam ages for such dismissal (Perry, 1921: 398).
Higginson was undeniably an autocrat. In later years he rejected the suggestions
of friends to place the Orchestra u nder a board o f trustees; and h e used the threat
of discontinuing his annual subventions as a bludgeon to forestall the unionization
of the players. Y et Higginson accom plished w hat all orchestras would have to
achieve if orchestral work was to be separated perm anently from the playing o f
popular music an d D w ight's dream o f a p erm an en t orchestra devoted to high-art
music achieved: th e creation o f a perm anent musical work force, u nder exclusive
contract, willing to accept w ithout question the authority o f the conductor.
The Brahm ins as an organization-form ing class
The M useum o f Fine Arts and the Boston Sym phony O rchestra were both organiza- /
tions em bedded in a social class, formal organizations whose official structure was ,
draped around the ongoing life o f the group th a t governed, patronized, and
staffed them.'* They were not separate products o f different segm ents o f an elite; or •
of artists and critics w ho m obilized wealthy m en to bankroll their causes. Rather
they were the creations o f a densely connected self-conscious social group intensely
unified by m ultiple ties am ong its m em bers based in kinship, com merce, club life
and participation in a wide range o f philanthropic associations. Indeed, if, as
Stinchcombe (1965) has argued, there arc ‘organization-form ing organizations'— ;
organizations th a t spawn o ff other organizations in profusion— there are also |
organization-form ing status groups, and the Brahm ins were one o f these. This they I
could be n o t just because o f their cultural or religious convictions (to which G reen
(1966), Baltzell (1979) and Hall (forthcom ing) have called attention), b u t because
they were integrated by their families' marriages, their Harvard educations, their
joint business ventures, their m em berships in a w eb o f social clubs and their trus­
teeships o f charitable and cultural organizations. This integration is exemplified
11 In Jam es Thom pson'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
'functionally interdependent and interactlcdl regularly with respect to religions, economic, recreational, and
governmental matters' (Thom pson, l% 7 * 27)
I
:
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C U I . T I I R A I . I!N'I K l i l ’ R I i N F . U K . S I I I P
n iM A C C IO
in ihc associations o f H igginson, and in the ties betw een the Museum and the
Orchestra d uring the last 20 years of the n ineteenth century.
It is likely that H igginson's keen instinct for brokerage— and the obligations he
accrued as principal in one o f Boston's two major houses— served him well in his
efforts to establish the O rchestra. At first glance, H igginson's achievem ent in
creating A m erica's first elite-governed perm anent sym phony orchestra in Boston
appears to be the work o f a rugged individualist. O n closer inspection, we see that
it was precisely H igginson’s centrality to the Brahm in social structure th at enabled
him to succeed. O nly a lone, centrally located entrepren eu r could have done w hat
H igginson d id , because to do so ruffled so many feathers: a com m ittee would have
com prom ised with the supporters o f other musical associations and with the
patrons o f the more established local musicians. N onetheless, if H igginson's
youthful marginality perm itted the attem p t, it was his eventual centrality that
enabled him to succeed. His career illustrates the im portance o f kinship,
com merce, clubs and philanthropy in Boston elite life. Ties in each o f these areas
reinforced those in the others; each facilitated the success o f the O rchestra, and
each brought him into close connection with the cultural capitalists active in the
MFA and led, eventually, to his selection as a M useum trustee.
H igginson was born a cousin to some o f the leading families in Boston: the
C abots, the Lowells, the Perkins, the Morses, the Jacksons, the Channings and the
Paines, am ong others (Perry, 1921: 14). (The first four o f these families produced
trustees o f the M useum o f Fine Arts during H igginson's lifetim e. His kinsman
Frances W . H igginson was also a M useum trustee.) In C am bridge, he was close to
Charles Lowell an d , after his first European adventure, he studied with Samuel
Eliot, a cousin o f Harvard President Charles W . Eliot, and later a trustee o f the
M useum. D uring this period, he spent a great deal o f tim e in the salon-like house­
hold o f Louis Agassiz, befriending the scientist’s son and m arrying his daughter.
So close did Henry rem ain to his Harvard classmates th a t, despite his withdrawal
after freshman year, they perm itted him to take part in their class’s Com m ence­
m ent exercises.
W hen Henry w ent into business, he brought his family and college ties with
him . A contem porary said o f the Lee, Higginson firm , it ‘owed in some measure to
family alliances its well-advised connections with the best financial enterprises o f
the day' (Perry, 1921: 272). Indeed, H igginson's first successful speculation was his
investm ent in the C alum et and Hecla m ines, at th e behest o f his in-laws Agassiz
and Shaw (the latter an early donor o f paintings to the M useum). The family firm
was instrum ental in the developm ent o f th e western railroads, through the efforts
o f cousin C harlesjackson Paine. In this enterprise, H igginson associated with Jo h n
M. Forbes and with Charles H. Perkins (kinsm an o f the MFA founder). Higginson
was so intim ate w ith the latter that he invested Perkins’ money w ithout
consultation. Lee, Higginson m ade a fortune in th e telephone com pany, and
H igginson, in later years, was a director o f G eneral Electric. In some o f these
ventures, the firm co-operated with other Boston financiers. Higginson was on
close term s w ith his com petitors K idder o f K idder, Peabody (th e M useum ’s first
treasurer) and Endicott, President o f the New England Trust and Suffolk Savings
(and th e M useum 's second Treasurer). G ardiner M artin Lane was a partner in Lee,
Higginson w hen he resigned his position to assum e the M useum ’s presidency in
1907.
H ig g in so n was also an active c lu b m a n , a m e m b e r o f th e T avern C lu b , (a n d its
-17
President for twenty years), the W ednesday Evening C lub, the W im crsnighi,
Friday N ight and Officers Clubs, New Y ork’s Knickerbocker Club an d , from 1893,
the Saturday C lub. Among his Tavern C lub colleagues were H arvard's Charles
Eliot N orton (spiritual godfather o f the M useum ’s aesthetes), W illiam D ean
Howells and Henry Lee. At the Friday Club he consorted with Howells, W illiam
James and Henry Adams. At the Saturday C lub, his clubm ates included the MFA’s
Thomas G old A ppleton and Martin Brimmer.
In the 1890s, H igginson’s career in Boston philanthropy blossomed. (By now he
was on the MFA's Board. Earlier, when the M useum 's first President, M artin
Brimmer, asked Charles Eliot N orton if H igginson should be invited, N orton wrote
back that 'H igginson would be excellent, b u t he never attends m eetings' (Harris,
1962: 551).) H e lavished most o f his atten tio n (beyond that devoted to the
Orchestra) on H arvard, which elected him a Fellow in 1893. He gave Harvard
Soldiers Field and a new stu d en t union, was Treasurer o f Radcliffe College, played
a key role in the founding o f the G raduate School o f Business, patronized the
medical school and gave anonym ous gifts to deserving faculties.'" H igginson's
position as Fellow o f Harvard placed him at the sum m it o f Boston's institutional
life and undoubtedly reinforced his contacts with the M useum ’s trustees and
friends. His personal art collection, which included Turners. Corots an d Rodins,
encouraged such interactions as well. (In 1893, he donated a valuable D utch
master to the MFA.)
Thus was the O rchestra’s founder em bedded in the Brahmin com m unity. W hen
Lee, Higginson furnished an emergency loan o f $17,000 to the M useum o f Fine
Arts in 1889, with little prospect o f repaym ent, was this because he was on the
Board; was it a consequence o f H igginson's kinship ties with the Cabots, Perkinses
or Lowells; his business alliances with K idder or Endicott; his club friendship with
Norton; Harvard ties to the Eliots? T he range o f possibilities renders the question
trivial and illustrates how closely knit was H igginson's world.
In 1893, when Higginson dem anded th at Boston build him a new and suitable
Symphony H all, lest he abandon the Orchestra to bankruptcy and dissolution, the
initial appeal for funds was signed by a broad cross section o f the city's elite: his
friends and kinsm en Agassiz, Lodge, Lowell, Lee and Jo h n Lowell G ardner;
Harvard’s Eliot, N orton, Longfellow, Shattuck and Parkman; Peabody o f K idder
Peabody, to nam e a few. Present on the list were at least four o f H igginson's fellow
MFA trustees: the President (M artin Brimm er), the Treasurer (by now, Jo h n L.
G ardner), Eliot and N o rto n ." T he group raised over $400,000, a substantial stake
in that financially troubled year.
C onclusions
The Museum o f Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were creations o f
the Brahmins, and the Brahmins alone. As such, their origins are easier to
HiRRmson, whose visioh extended beyond Bosmn. also Rave Renerously 10 Princeion, W illiam s, ihc
University o f Virginia and Middlesex, and sent the Orchestra to play, at his expense, at W illiam s, Princeton and
Yale.
11 Higginson's relationship with Gardner and his m ildly scandalous wife Isabella Stewart G ardner, is revealing.
When Isabella, a New Yorker, entered Boston society in the ISROs, she was accorded a frosty reception. According
to Morris Carter, her biographer and the first Director of her collection, she won social acceptance by employing
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
compiled by her admirers (G reen, I9f»(r 112)
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understand than were British or C ontinental efforts in which aristocrats and
bourgeoisie played complex and interrelated r&les (W olff, 1982). The Brahmins
were a status group, and as such they strove towards exclusivity, towards the d efin i­
tion o f a prestigious culture that they could m onopolize as their own. Yet they
were also a social class, and they were concerned, as is any dom inant social class,
w ith establishing hegem ony over those they dom inated. Some Marxist students of
culture have m isinterpreted the cultural institutions as efforts to dictate taste or to
inculcate the masses with the ideas o f elites. Certainly, th e cultural capitalists,
consum m ate organizers and intelligent m en and w om en, were wise enough to
u nderstand the impossibility o f socializing the masses in institutions from which
they effectively were barred. T heir concern w ith education, however, was not
simply w indow-dressing or an effort at public relations. H igginson, for exam ple,
devoted m uch o f his fortune to American universities and secondary schools. He
once wrote a kinsm an, from whom he sought a donation o f $100,000 for H arvard,
‘Educate, and save ourselves and our families and our money from the m obs!’
(Perry, 1921: 329). Moreover, a secret or thoroughly esoteric culture could not have
served to legitim ate the status o f American elites; it would be necessary to share it,
at least partially. T he tension between m onopolization and hegem ony, between
exclusivity and legitim ation, was a constant counterpoint to th e efforts at
classification o f A merican urban elites.
This explains, in part, the initial em phasis on education at the Museum o f Fine
Arts. Y et, from the first, the Museum managers sought to educate through d istin ­
guishing true from vulgar art— at first, cautiously, later with more confidence. In
the years that followed they would place increased em phasis on the original art that
becam e available to th em , until they abandoned reproductions altogether and with
them their em phasis on education. In a less dram atic way, the O rchestra, which
began with an artistic m andate, would fu rther classify the contents o f its programs
and frame the aesthetic experience in the years to come.
In structure, however, the M useum and the O rchestra were similar innovations.
Each was private, controlled by m em bers o f the B rahm in class, and established on
the corporate m odel, dep en d en t on private philanthropy and relatively long-range
financial planning; each was sparely staffed and relied for much o f its m anagem ent
on elite volunteers; and each counted am ong its founders wealthy men with
considerable scholarly or artistic credentials who were centrally located in Boston's
elite social structure. T he Museum was established u n d er broad auspices for the
education o f the com m unity as a whole; th e O rchestra was created by one m an in
the service o f art and o f those in the com m unity with the sophistication or m otiva­
tion to appreciate it. W ithin 40 years, the logic o f cultural capitalism would
m oderate sharply, if not elim inate, these historically grounded differences. The
Sym phony would com e to resemble the M useum in charter and governance, and
the Museum w ould abandon its broad social mission in favor o f aestheticism and an
elite clientele.
The creation o f the MFA, the BSO and sim ilar organizations throughout the
U nited States created a base through which the ideal o f high culture could be given
institutional flesh. T he alliance between class and culture th a t em erged was
defined by, and thus inseparable from , its organizational m ediation. As a conse­
quence, the classification 'h ig h cu ltu re/p o p u la r cu ltu re' is com prehensible only in
its dual sense as characterizing both a ritual classification and th e organizational
systems th a t give th at classification m eaning.
49
Acknowledgments
For advice and encouragem ent I am indebted to Randall Collins, O avid Karen,
Michael Schudson, Ann Swidler and to the m em bers o f Professor Mary D ouglas's
'Mass Media and M ythology’ sem inar at the New York University Institute for the
Humanities, o f T heda Skocpol’s graduate research sem inar at Harvard University
and of Paul H irsch's production-of-culture session at the 1980 Sociology and the
Arts conference in Chicago. Research and institutional support from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation and from Yale University’s Program on N on-Profit
Organizations is gratefully acknowledged.
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Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century
Boston, part II: the classification and framing of
American art
PAUL D IM A G G IO *
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 o f 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’.1Every
status group needs elements of a culture that it can call its own. A shared culture
plays an important role in the ritual life o f 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 dom inant 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.
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304
P. D I M A G G I O
out of the temples of art, and the ideological and ritual framing of the relationship
between the work of art and its public were the necessary sequel. In accomplishing
this, Boston’s cultural capitalists, and the artists and art historians who assisted
them, altered the initial missions of the organizations that they founded and
established a partial monopolization (with educated members of the middle class
as junior partners) of high culture that has persisted to the present.
During the period between the founding of the Museum of Fine Arts and the
Boston Symphony Orchestra and World War I, both institutions followed similar
paths of development, albeit with emphases differing as a consequence of their
origins and technologies. Each experienced two stages o f classification: first, the
purification of their programming through the elimination o f residual elements of
popular genres; second, the further subclassification, within the realm of high art,
of specific genres. Individuals active in each also worked to frame the artistic
experience by strengthening boundaries between professional and amateur art,
and between artist and audience; and by delineating an etiquette of appropriation,
a normatively defined attitude towards artistic experience. Ideologically, this
process involved the evolution and eventual supremacy of aestheticism and
connoisseurship. Organizationally, it entailed a limited but crucial transfer of
authority from laymen to professionals (see Zolberg, 1980). In both institutions the
processes of classification and framing led to a shift in goals—subtle in the case of
the BSO, dramatic and contested at the Museum—away from education. And in
both cases, the processes made art less accessible to immigrants and members of the
working class.
The revolution of the aesthetes
The efforts of segments of the elite and of professionals to classify high culture
more carefully in the Museum of Fine Arts were more dramatic than similar efforts
at the Orchestra because they required a more striking alteration o f its original
mission as a fundamentally educational institution. The founders drew inspiration
from Ruskin and Jarves, his American disciple, looking towards the industrial
museums of England as their models (Harris, 1962: 557). The public was admitted
free on one, and later two, days each week; and the collections were used for the
instruction o f public-school children almost from the beginning.
Yet the record suggests ambivalence on the part of at least some of the trustees
towards a strictly educational conception of the museum’s purpose. Founder and
President Charles Perkins wrote, ‘We aim at collecting materials for the education
of the nation in art, not at making collections of objects of art.’ But he added,
‘That must be done at a later stage’ (ibid.: 553). The museum founders were
pragmatists: They recognized that, lacking original art, they must put something
in their museum, and they were optimistic about the educational value of casts and
reproductions.2 But some, at least, hoped that originals would one day come to
form an important part of the collection.
The early museum, however, had much besides what is now defined as high cul­
ture to exhibit. The bulk of the holdings consisted of reproductions. Charles Sumner
had given a set of curiosities, another donor had provided seven Egyptian mummies,
and others had loaned such objects as a Philippine chain cutlass, a buffalo horn, an
old sled from Friesland and Zulu weapons (Whitehill, 1970: 9). While the casts
remained central, the more Barnumesque items were soon discarded.
CULTURAL EN T R E P R E N E U R SH I P
305
The implications of this were not lost on contemporaries: When part of the
Sumner collection was deaccessioned,^one newspaper writer warned the trustees
that ‘The common people will turn to [the items] gladly, if they are not
appreciated by those of artistic and travel-improved tastes . . . ’ (ibid.: 558). The
early trustees were not doctrinaire in their efforts to purge the popular, in part
because they recognized their own limitations. Thus trustee Martin Brimmer sagely
cautioned,
Judgements o f intrinsic merit are nowhere infallible. They vary somewhat with individual tastes; they
vary more with the shifting tendencies o f the time. . . . What we need is a collection o f permanent
value, and in forming it, it will be well to avoid too strict an adherence to the theories o f the day. The
function o f the managers of a museum is not criticism, but the collection of materials for the criticism
of others. (Harris, 1962: 554).
Nonetheless, Brimmer noted, those managers ‘should carefully guard against the
inroad of pictorial rubbish’.
Part of the framing of artistic experience involved a strengthening of the
boundaries between artist and amateur. In the visual arts, as in music, one way to
create distance between the profane audience and sacred art would be to avoid the
work of living American artists, particularly those of a commercial stamp. In the
early days, the Museum was open to a range of American artists: Stuart and
Boston’s Dr William Rimmer exhibited there; and, in 1881, there were exhibitions
of the work of Washington Alston, American wood engravings, Christmas cards,
and colored glass. Annual contemporary-art exhibitions enabled local artists to
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
and price tags from the contemporary exhibitions. The A rt Amateur condemned
the MFA as ‘the latest born pet of our aristocracy of culture’, criticizing its
expenditures on foreign textiles, furniture, and pottery (ibid.: 558).
‘High art’ began to become more strongly classified almost as soon as the
Museum gained the wherewithal to develop its own collections. As early as 1881,
Charles Perkins, in his annual report, complained about the lack of money for
acquiring art. A committee of the trustees, reporting two years later, reasserted the
emphasis on reproductions, but on pragmatic grounds. Given the Museum’s
limited resources, the committee noted, it seems ‘too plain for argument that we
must rely principally upon the liberality of others for original works of art’
(Whitehill, 1970: 82). Originals would be purchased only when prices were
extremely low for the quality of the work, or when private subventions were
available to finance the acquisitions. The committee frankly viewed reproductions
as a pragmatic expedient, not an ideal. Even Curator Edward Robinson, who as
Director 15 years later was the champion of the casts, devoted his first annual
report to original objects of art.
By the late 1880s, then, a change in emphasis from reproductions to originals
awaited only the emergence of the means for obtaining the latter. The Museum’s
managers would not have to wait long. After almost two decades of financial
instability, several major bequests afforded the Museum the opportunity to build
Upon the gifts of art already received. In 1894, the trustees began to permit the
purchase of original art. In just one decade, the Museum, which had spent only
$7500 for original art in its first seven years, expended $1,324,000 on new
acquisitions (ibid.: 180-214; Carter, 1925: 195“96).
306
P. D I M A G G I O
Although the original Museum had expanded in 1890, the sheer volume of the
new art had begun to crowd the casts, which had originally inhabited the entirety
of the Museum’s first floor. The acquisition of land for a new and larger building
in Boston’s fashionable Fenway district might have allayed the competition for
space that was emerging. Instead, the planning process for the new Museum
became the occasion for a scarring battle between the supporters of education—the
Museum’s Director, Edward Robinson (who succeeded General Loring in 1902)
and allies among the trustees—and the champions of aestheticism, led by the
professional art historians who had entered the Museum as it expanded in the
1890s, and supported by Board President Samuel Warren and several of his
colleagues.
To understand the battle lines that formed around the issue of the r61e that casts
and reproductions would play in the new building, it is necessary to understand
changes in both personnel and ideology that occurred in the 30 years that followed
the Museum’s founding. The original Museum was sparely staffed. As the
collections began to grow, new departments were established and curators hired.
W ith the ascendency of Robinson, a Harvard art historian, to the directorship, the
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
Walter Mason Cabot) or outsiders, men with somewhat exotic backgrounds. A few
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
daughter of a Salem China trader, had close Boston connections. Others, like
Matthew Prichard, an intimate of Board President W arren’s expatriate brother
Ned in England, or librarian Almy Morrill Carter, who had gone to Harvard then
worked at Princeton for several years, had few Boston ties. These outsiders, whom
Prichard later referred to as ‘people that chance rained into the place,—German
blood, Japanese blood, Jewish blood, English blood as well as Yankee—with no
ties to the community’ (ibid.: 215), served an important role. The cultural
capitalists were, in Lewis Coser’s terms (1974), a ‘greedy’ elite. They distrusted
individuals not of their class; and when they had to employ them, they sought men
who were classless, who belonged to no other party in Boston. Thus Carter recalled
of his interview with President Warren,
I can remember only one question that he asked me: Whom did I know in Boston? 1 feared that 1
would lose the job because I had to admit that I knew absolutely no one in the city; but perhaps that
was my best recommendation to him and I did receive the appointment . . . (Whitehill, 1970: 181).
The new professionals were, for the most part, aesthetes, raised on the
philosophies of Matthew Arnold and Charles Eliot Norton but, as Martin Green
(1966) points out, more interested in finding perfection outside this world than in
making the world more perfect. Art, for them, was ineffable and exquisite; the
Museum was a temple for the appreciation of art, not an engine of education. Joy,
not improvement, was to be its raison d'etre. As Prichard put it, in an early sally in
what Whitehill calls ‘the battle of the casts’,
A museum of art, ultimately and in its widest possible activity, illustrates one attitude toward life. I*
contains only objects which reflect, clearly or dimly, the beauty and magnificence to which life ha*
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 o f art offers
for acceptance by its visitors . . . the Museum’s equipment is designed particularly to further the
enjoyment of the public, and not to prepare artists for their calling (quoted in Whitehill, 1970: 183)-
CULTURAL E N T R E P R E N E U R S H I P
307
First of all, the casts had to go, for they profaned the art with which they dwelt.
Robinson wished to keep the casts as the museum’s centerpiece, as a model
educational resource that could be copied throughout the United States. Prichard
and his supporters sought to exile them to basement rooms under collections of
originals or to another building altogether. Casts, he wrote, are
engines of education and should not be shown near objects of inspiration. They are data mechanically
produced; . . . [They] even destroy that contemplation which Mr. Gilman [Benjamin Ives Gilman,
the Museum Secretary] calls the ‘consummation o f a work o f art’ (ibid.: 202).
Casts, wrote Prichard, are
the Pianola o f the Arts . . . The exhibition halls o f our Museum have the same right to be free of
mechanical sculpture as the programmes of the Symphony Concerts, which set the standard of
musical taste in Boston, have o f exemption from mechanical music (ibid.: 202).
f
The reformers also sought to purge the Museum of lesser originals. Curator Paul
Chalfin urged that the Museum deaccession 371 of its 1101 original paintings, and
store another 230, exhibiting 250 to the general public and displaying the rest in
special study collections. Prichard advocated this plan more generally:
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
nearer you reach the summit o f the mountain (ibid.: 184).
The art that did remain in view would be reorganized. According to the South
Kensington philosophy, separate rooms had been devoted to different kinds of
artifacts, in order to facilitate their inspection by craftspersons. By contrast,
Prichard advocated the historical classification of objects by period and nationality.
The implications of this new framing of aesthetic experience were unfriendly to
the goal of education. The ideology of connoisseurship—the view that nothing
should interfere with the direct unmediated communion between the viewer and
the work of art—was hostile to interpretation. Benjamin Ives Gilman argued with
Robinson that ‘in an exhibition of fine art, instruction becomes a means, the end
being appreciation’ and that ‘the knowledge of art history is not the same as the
comprehension of art history, but a very different and immeasurably less important
thing’. The Museum, wrote Prichard,
i
is dedicated chiefly to those who come, not to be educated, but to make its treasures their friends for
life and their standards o f beauty. Joy, not knowledge, is the aim o f contemplating a painting by
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 o f exercising our faculties of perception. . . . (T]he direct aim o f art is the pleasure
derived from a contemplation of the perfect (ibid.: 201).
Thus Gilman, when he created the docent program in 1907 urged the instructors to
avoid instruction: ‘The essential office of the docent is to get the object thoroughly
perceived by the disciple. Hence draw attention to the object first; talk about it
,
afterwards, and only if the occasion offers’ (ibid.: 295).
Supported by President Warren, Prichard, Gilman and their allies were
victorious. Although both Robinson and Prichard resigned from the Museum as a
I consequence o f the struggle, the new Museum embodied the latter’s philosophy
| when it opened in 1909. The casts, which were to have occupied another building
i (never built) were consigned to the basement, from which they ultimately entered
I oblivion. Gilman stayed on and Robinson’s successor as Director embraced
I Prichard’s views.
30 8
P. D I M A G G I O
The purification of Boston music
If the MFA was born in harmony and experienced a traumatic youth, the BSO’s
difficult infancy was followed by a robust, happy childhood and adolescence. Elite
ideas about music were more firmly set than those about visual art in mid-century,
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
which Higginson became a trustee in 1882).3 W hat is more, Higginson promised
less in the way of education and community service than the Museum’s
incorporators; that the BSO would have an elite constituency was clear from the
beginning. Yet the Orchestra’s development in the 30 years after its founding
resembles that of the Museum’s in several important ways: the programs became
more highly classified, the boundaries between popular and high-art music and
between artist and audience were more firmly drawn, and the musical experience
was framed in terms of an ideology similar to the ethic of connoisseurship. These
changes, in the aggregate, sealed the Orchestra off from the community as a whole
and ensured that it would become more fully a part of the culture of the elite and
of middle-class aspirants to elite status.
The form, the repertoire, and the style of the Orchestra were presaged in the
writings of Edward Dwight, editor of Boston’s Journal o f Music, to which
Higginson contributed while studying music in Vienna. Dwight and Higginson
were close, as their correspondence indicates, and Dwight was an active supporter
of Higginson’s efforts. He himself had lamented, just six months before Higginson
announced his project: ‘We have a hall, an organ, and an art museum. Now we
want an orchestra . . . We are falling behind New York. We will become
provincial without it’ (Mueller, 1951: 80).
Dwight, influenced by Hegel, believed that music represented a higher-order
truth than words or logic. As early as 1852, he had a keen sense of the need for an
orchestra to define what, in fact, the best music would be, writing
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
public. It needs a faithful, severe, friendly voice to point out, steadfastly, the models of the True, the
Beautiful, the Divine (McCusker, 1937: 19-20).
Dwight and the early promoters of fine-arts music were quick to devalue the
popular, as well. Theodore Thomas wrote, ‘light music, “ popular” , so-called, is
the sensual side of the art and has more or less the devil in it’ (Mueller, 1951: 30).
High and popular culture must be separated. When the managers of the Music
Hall, which held the Harvard Musical Association’s concerts, permitted Barnum to
hold a baby show there in 1865, Charles Perkins threatened to withdraw his offered
gift of a statue of Beethoven, lest it ‘be subjected to the indignity of presiding over
a Baby Show’.
We would think Boston sufficiently disgraced by having such an Exhibition held in any low building
within its limits—but to have it held in our Music Hall, a place consecrated to the endeavor to elevate
the taste of the community, is really intolerable (McCusker, 1937: 23).
Dwight himself printed Perkins’s protest in his journal, adding, ‘Let not the
master works of the great composers be heard in a building which will ever after
merit the name of Barnum’s Nursery’ (ibid.).
Dwight, perhaps more than his peers, had a keen understanding of the
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organizational requirements for the institutionalization of his philosophy. Early
on, he credited the success, such as it was, of the Harvard concerts to the
association’s freedom from commercial constraints and interests, and of the
susceptability of musicians to guarantees of regular work. In his appraisal of those
concerts, he stressed'two other features that were to be bulwarks of the BSO:
2. The guarantee of a nucleus o f a fit audience,—persons o f taste and culture, subscribing beforehand
to make the concerts financially safe, and likely to increase the number by attraction of their own
example.
3. Pute programmes, above all need of catering to low tastes; here should be at least one set of
concerts in which one might hear only composers of unquestioned excellence, and into which should
enter nothing vulgar, coarse, ‘sensational,’ but only such as outlives fashion (Howe, 1914: 10—11).
These ‘persons of taste and culture’ were, in most cases, those of the highest
status. It was clear to Dwight, as it was to Higginson, that this group would
necessarily represent the core of any audience for ‘pure programmes, above all need
of catering to low tastes . . . ’. The identification, here, of taste and nobility of
spirit and, implicitly, of taste and social standing, is a crucial syllogism that would
legitimate the dominant status culture then being consolidated. But as Dwight
understood, even with the founding of the Orchestra, the process of the
sacralization, beyond a narrow group of afficianados, of symphonic music was not
yet complete. It remained for Higginson and the conductors to whom he entrusted
the orchestra, to complete the process.
Higginson had high aspirations for his orchestra, particularly for the winter
concerts: ‘anything unworthy’ was to be ‘shut out’. Like Brimmer at the Museum,
Higginson in his plans sought to exclude the clearly popular without being narrow­
minded:
. . . all the catholicity possible seems to me good. I do not like W agner’s music, and take little
interest in much of the newer composers, but I should not like to bar them out o f our programmes.
People of education equally objected to the later compositions of Beethoven as those o f a lunatic.
Possibly they are right (Howe, 1914: 30—31).
In the Orchestra’s first year, Henschel, an advocate of mixed programs,
attempted to keep the concert’s second half decidedly light. Each concert would
include a Beethoven symphony, but also a solo and a second part to be ‘short and
of considerable lighter popular character’ (Henschel in ibid.: 39). The first concert
included a solo by vocalist Miss Annie Louise Cary, as well as some ballet music by
Schubert. In a benefit concert for a deceased musician’s family, later that year,
Henschel himself joined his wife in a vocal duet, ‘Oh, that we two were maying’.
As Mueller writes, Henschel
was not averse to musical titbits, which could be instantly enjoyed by the audience, and generally
designed his program with appetizing deserts at the end (Mueller, 1951: 99).
But if Henschel did not purify his concerts of vocal and popular songs to the degree
that later conductors would, he did make some strides in that direction. Indeed, he
was frequently criticized for his inclusion of Wagner and Brahms in the repertoire.
A New York critic called him ‘a veritable Brahmin in his passion for Brahms’, and a
Bostonian remarked, on the occasion of an all-Wagner memorial that marked
Wagner’s demise, ‘The programme was gloomy enough in all conscience, and the
necessity for its performance gave one more cause for regret at the composer’s
death’ (Howe, 1914: 80). Higginson did not commence popular summer concerts
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under Henschel (although he would under the stricter Gericke). Indeed, he
forbade his players from playing dance music on days that they were committed to
the Orchestra—effectively forbidding such employment, since this prohibition
included weekends.
To Henschel fell the difficult responsibility of enforcing discipline upon his
restive minions. He enforced punctual appearance at rehearsals and concerts, and
banned private discussions during rehearsals. It was left to Henschel’s successor,
the stem Gericke, to finish what he had begun.
Gericke arrived from Austria to replace Henschel in 1884. He quickly clashed
with some of the established players, and recalled, many years later
I was not popular in the Orchestra, especially as they did not yet understand why I should ask for
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).
After the first season, Higginson sent him to Europe to find replacements for some
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
recalled that ‘The remaining old members took the part of the dismissed ones, and
opposed me where they could’ (ibid.). There was criticism in the press as well. One
critic wrote, in the Thanksgiving edition of his newspaper,
We are thankful that Mr. Gericke, in his sweeping discharges, did not discharge Mr. Higginson. We
are thankful that one or two Americans are still left in our Symphony Orchestra, so that the United
States language may be reserved from oblivion (ibid.: 124).
As the Museum of Fine Arts would turn to outsiders—both of nationality and of
temperament—for professional staff, so the Orchestra turned to Europe for its
conductors and musicians. The work of framing an aesthetic experience—of
separating the artistic and the mundane—required the strengthening of
boundaries between audience and performer. It would not do for Bostonians to see
their kinsman or acquaintances on stage: professionalism was vital not just for the
quality of the performance but for the strength of its frame, as well. Only outsiders
with few ties to Boston could be trusted to implement the strict changes that were
in store. Gericke played the role of eunuch, serving the Orchestra without
distraction. Desperately homesick on his arrival, the conductor was grasped quickly
to the bosom of Higginson and his comrades at the Tavern Club, where, he
recalled, ‘I found kindred spirits and some good and staunch friends, who did their
best to help me over my first difficulties’ (ibid.: 108). Yet despite the influx of
Europeans, the BSO was not a mere carbon copy of European institutions. As
Mueller notes, the American orchestras enlarged the scope of their conductors’
authority well beyond that enjoyed by their European counterparts (Mueller, 1951:
317)' .
Gericke initiated a level of classification that the Orchestra had not experienced
under Henschel. Just as the Museum’s aesthetes would cordon off the profane casts
to basement rooms, Gericke, with Higginson's support, purged the winter concerts
of light music, consigning it to a series of summer ‘Pops’ programs. ‘My
predecessor’, wrote Gericke,
had always given some light music in the second part o f every concert and the audience was used to
this and liked it. But, as Mr. Higginson wanted to bring the concerts to a higher standard, and as the
name o f the Orchestra was “ The Boston Symphony Orchestra,” 1 did not see the reason why the
programme should not be put thoroughly on a classical basis . . . (Howe, 1914: 108).
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In addition to curtailing light music, Gericke occasionally broke with precedent to
omit solo performers, particularly vocalists, from the program.4
The Orchestra/as Higginson conceived it, was classical in orientation. But
Higginson was a practical man, and he hoped that his offspring would some day
become self-supporting. In his initial plan, he included the provision of lightmusic concerts, including dance music, in the summer. This was not surprising,
given the popularity in this period of band music, which combined marches, arias,
classical numbers and dance tunes. Yet Higginson showed some ambivalence
towards his plan during the first few years. As early as 1883, Higginson was urged
by the manager of the Music Hall to institute a summer series. The BSO’s
manager, Charles Ellis, wrote Higginson of a proposition
to decorate Music Hall with plants, etc., making a kind of garden o f 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,
1921: 301).
Higginson was unconvinced. In his original memorandum he had written
I do not know whether a first-rate orchestra will choose to play light music ot whether it can do so
well. I do not believe that the great opeta-orchestra in Vienna can play waltzes as Strauss’s men play
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
judgm ent would be that a good orchestra would need, during the winter season, to keep its hand in
by playing only the better music, and could relax in summer, playing a different kind of thing. But I
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
music, of a gayer nature.
The emergence of the Pops as a profane and profitable summer supplement to
the austere winter programs represented a kind of watershed in the classification of
high and popular genres. These light concerts were not only less strongly classified
than the winter series, but also consciously less strongly framed: consumption of
alcohol and tobacco was permitted (indeed, the one year that a liquor license was
not forthcoming the series was cancelled), and quiet and decorum were not
demanded. (Their repertoire, similar to Henschel’s light programs in the 1880s,
diverged more markedly from the regular concerts in later years.)
By now, the format and style of the Orchestra were set. Gericke’s romantic
successors, Nikisch and Pauer, continued his campaign against soloists,
abandoning the practice of including vocalists (practitioners of a form decreed
beneath the purely orchestral by Dwight and his followers) almost entirely. Dr
Muck, conductor until his dismissal amid charges of disloyalty during World War I,
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
collections in terms of historical and national genres, Muck segregated his concerts
by genre, contending that ‘The classic and the frankly romantic should no more be
thrown together in a single concert than they should in a single room of an Art
Museum’ (Johnson, 1950: 48*49).’
The classification of fine-arts and popular music, and the eventual subclassifica­
tion, within classical music, of the romantic and the classical, were accompanied by
an effort, on the part of Higginson, to frame the concert experience, to purge it, as
far as possible, of commercial elements and to sacralize the concert as a ritual
occasion. This effort was consonant with the Dwightian view of music as spiritual
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and otherworldly. In his description of the first Beethoven concerts in Boston,
Dwight established a model for aesthetic experience similar to that espoused by the
Museum’s aesthetes:
Some may yet remember how young men and women o f the most cultured circles, whom the new
intellectual dayspring had made thoughtful and . . . impressible to all appeals of art and beauty,
used to sit through the concert in the far-off upper gallery, or the skyparlor, secluded in the shade,
and give themselves up completely to the influence of the sublime harmonies that sank into their
souls . . . (Cooke, 1898: 65-68).
Thus Charles Eliot wrote that ‘common enjoyment of immortal music’ was an
‘exalting and binding influence . . . the best expression of public prosperity, social
joy, and religious transport’ (Perry, 1921: 322). And Higginson’s friend William
James urged the concert-goer
never to suffer one’s self to have an emotion at a concert without expressing it afterward in some
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
(Mueller, 1951: 293).
The identification of art and refinement, of the beautiful and the moral, came
naturally to the cultural capitalists: it applied both to the content and to the
reception of art. Higginson, an avid theatre-goer throughout his life, as a student
in Paris, condemned the vulgarity of Mounet Sully's famous Hamlet as ‘brutal and
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
commercial from the halls of the Orchestra, to frame the concert as a spiritual and
ritual event.
Part of this effort involved the strengthening of boundaries between the
performer and the audience, the former transported, the latter receptive and
subdued. In part, this was achieved by such devices as the darkening of the
audience during performances, which was initiated in 1908 (Johnson, 1950:
48-49). In part, this was achieved, as we have seen, through the introduction of
strangers as the conveyors of music, and the purge of the locals. And in part, this
was accomplished through the provision of professional standards to which
amateurs could not hope to aspire, an event that, as Mueller has written,
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
barred (Mueller, 1951: 28).
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.
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
times at which, ‘I myself, in the hall, had difficulty to reach the conductor’s desk, as
every available space, even on the platform, was occupied by the audience’ (Howe,
1914: 53). In cities that lacked the example that the Musical Association concerts had
provided Boston, profanations of the musical atmosphere were even more common.
Dwight wrote of Theodore Thomas’s tenure in New York in 1875 that
Not a week passes without some scathing rebuke from him to those illbred and ignorant people who
keep up a continued buzzing during the performance o f the music to the annoyance o f all decent folk.
CULTURAL E N TR EP R EN EU R SH IP
313
In Chicago, where Thomas ultimately settled, the level of deportment was even
worse. A reporter thought it remarkable that Thomas’s rendition of Beethoven’s
Eroica ‘was received and followed with the closest attention and there was
noticeably less conversation than on previous occasions. Perhaps’, he added, this
was due to ‘the'fact that few beyond the truly musical were presen t. . . because of
bad weather’ (Mueller, 1951: 354). At the Metropolitan Opera, which, in New
York, was far more popular than the Philharmonic, middle-class Germans battled
for a decade with upper-class patrons who preened and conversed in their boxes
during performances (Brenneise, n.d.).
Even in Boston, the development of concert manners was an element of framing
no less important than the separation of performer and patron to the ritual sanctity
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
of others. The notes consistently implored the patrons, from 1884 on, to refrain
from early exits while music was being performed.6 (In 1900, an intermission was
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 wearing of large hats in places of public performance. Before long, even the
convention o f applauding was called into question, as Philip Hale paraphrased
with approval, in the concert notes, the contention of a Viennese critic who found
applause appropriate only
after vociferous endings, after pieces o f 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
overture, who sees with staring eyes, as in a magic looking-glass, the mighty shade of Coriolanus pass
slowly by him ; tears fall from the hearer’s eyes, his heart thuds, his breath stops, he is as one in a
cataleptic trance; but as soon as the last note is sounded, he is again jovially disposed, and he chatters
and criticizes and applauds (BSO Concert Notes, 18 May 1914).
Throughout the early years, Higginson tried repeatedly to eliminate elements of
commercialism in the Orchestra’s affairs. The expectations for such an assemblage
were far from clear. (The Orchestra’s manager recalled of their first tour that one
local house manager expected the players to parade through town to drum up
business [Howe, 1914: 134].) Higginson took great pains to eliminate the scalpers
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,
in concerts, of hanging an enormous gilt sign over the piano advertising its
manufacturer, antagonizing the dealer who had loaned the instrument free of
charge (ibid.: 79).
Classification, framing and social class
The movement towards a stronger classification of artistic contents and the
development of ideological and normative frames for the experience of art led, in
both the Museum and the Orchestra, to an identification of those institutions with
the social classes that patronized them and to a narrowing of their audience base.
Initiated, to varying degrees, in the interests of popular education, each saw its
educational mandate diluted as the artistic component of its mission was clarified
and strengthened.
The Museum, despite its democratic beginnings, had never been a popular
mstitution in the sense that Boston’s theatres or even the Lowell lectures, in earlier
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P. D I M A G G I O
years, were popular. Yet in its Copley Square building it did attract steady crowds,
many of them Italian immigrants according to contemporaries. The move to the
more exclusive Fens, if it was not calculated to cultivate a more exclusive clientele,
was at least guaranteed to do so. Despite the enormous increase in Boston’s
population over this period, the Museum’s attendance figures show only a modest
rise: 158,000 in the first year, a new high of 183,000 in 1882, another high of
300,000 in 1895, during the first flush of spectacular acquisitions, down to 194,000
the next year. Despite a rise in attendance when the new building opened in 1910
(the first full year of operation), the 1895 figure was not soon reached again; 1914
attendance was still at the level of the late 1880s.
Indeed, the trustees were displeased by the press of visitors, who were
concentrated on free weekend days. ‘It is certain’, they warned in 1882, ‘that
nothing contributes so much to the real enjoyment of, and the good to be derived
from a work of art as freedom from oppressive interruption in the process of
examining it ’ (Whitehill, 1970: 60). While their charter obliged them to let the
public in for free, in other respects the Museum seems to have become more
exclusive. I have noted (DiMaggio, 1982) the remarkable decline in the breadth of
its fund-raising base between 1873 and 1888. When the trustees needed support
for their new building a decade later, they did not even bother with a public
appeal. This insular quality is reflected as well in other fund-raising strategies, such
as the expensive soirees at which male models presented tableaux vivants for the
entertainment of patrons in the 1880s, or the membership campaigns of the 1890s
and thereafter.
The most serious indictment of the Museum’s exclusiveness came from Matthew
Prichard, in a private letter to Mrs Isabella Stewart Gardner on the occasion of
Samuel W arren’s death. When Warren took over the Museum’s presidency at the
turn of the century, wrote Prichard,
the institution was despicable and despised. A few families had a special cult for it, regarded it as
their appanage, practiced their influence on it, discussed together their activity in its past, their
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
tombs. For it was recognized that one room belonged to this family and another to that. They had a
prescriptive right to arrange and contribute what they would and exclude the rest, by right of birth
they were experts in their corner or corridor and would hesitate to visit another lot in the cemetary
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
the Boston aborigines, and totem and taboo, animism and magic, custom, rite, precedent, and
mystery were imprinted all over it. An unseen wall of sanctification defended it from the impure and
profane (Whitehill, 1970: 212-213).
This, to be sure, is the analysis of a bitter man. Yet it captures an irony essential
to an understanding of the role that art historians played in the development and
evolution of high art. W hat Warren achieved was the transition from a
patrimonially to a professionally administered organization: Robinson’s successors
would have to put up with somewhat less close scrutiny and less intense meddling
by trustees than he had to accomodate. Yet the professionals to whom these ‘popes
and hierarchs’, as Prichard called them, delegated a portion of their power, were
themselves distinctly upper class in their associations and their values. They
achieved a level of classification and separation of high from popular art that the
trustees themselves could not. The banishing of the casts and the ascension of
aestheticism did not represent an art historians’ coup: it was achieved with the full
CULTURAL E N T R E P R E N E U R S H I P
315
knowledge and cooperation of the trustees. Yet this transition, which occurred in
other American museums at about the same time (see Zolberg, 1974, 1980), was a
critical one, essential for the creation of a high culture.
The Orchestra, from the beginning, had less of a commitment to education than
did the Museum. The framing of an aesthetic experience for members of ‘the most
cultured circles’, as Dwight called them, had certain implications for the class
composition of the Orchestra’s audiences. A letter-writer to a Boston newspaper
complained,
<
I saw but few whom I should believe to be poor or even o f moderate means. . . . Full dress was to be
seen on every hand. I should be very glad to take my family to hear these educating and refining
concerts, but I have not the means to go in full dress; neither can I afford to pay a speculator double
the price for tickets . . . (Howe, 1914: 76).
While Higginson’s defenders stressed the appearance of an occasional Italian
immigrant in the audience, others like a writer for the Transcript, noted the vogue
of the concerts for the socially prominent:
Where have all these symphony-concert goers been during the last ten years, that they have hidden
themselves so completely from the public view? . . . Cheap prices have had some effect, but not so
much as many persons suppose. ‘Fashion’ is an ugly word to use in connection with art matters, but
all matters have their nether side (ibid.: 54).
A sense of the Orchestra’s role in Boston society can be gained from the report of
a correspondent for the Boston Traveller on the BSO’s second performance in New
York:
May surprises marked the evening, not the least o f which was the character o f the audience; in place of
the faces o f foreign type which accompany one everywhere in cosmopolitan New York, here right
alongside was one o f the loveliest o f old New England grandmammas, with a bevy o f nephews and
nieces; in the next row a group of fine fellows, New Yorkers, it may be, but Harvard men
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
may be to others who, like the writer, have been really homesick for the sight o f a family face when for
any cause brought into promiscuous company in New York (ibid.: 124).
The relative affluence of the BSO audience is reflected by the advertisements
that appeared in the concert notes throughout this period. The bulletins for 1889
and 1890, for example, advertised imported women’s gloves, fine art, Oriental
carpets from India (‘the special attention o f CONNOISSEURS Isic] is invited’),
imported furs, dresses, and Parisian corsets, imported coffee, carriages and pleasure
vehicles, diamonds and gems, and pianos and organs, as well as musical supplies
and after-concert treats. (By contrast, Pops concert brochures mixed advertisements
for such items as summer homes in the Berkshires, carriage rentals and Mason and
Hamblin pianos with a larger number of advertisements for tobacco products,
beer, candy and suspenders.)
In his initial plans, Higginson stressed the importance of low-priced tickets and the
hope that his concerts would educate a wide public. Indeed, inexpensive concerts of
classical music had been offered in Boston as early as the 1830s, when the Handel and
Haydn Society had offered some free performances; and in 1868 the city of Boston
presented 14 free concerts of mixed programs for the city’s poor. In 1881, the Musical
Record, which had praised the Higginson plan, called on the city to
Wake use of the vast auditoriums which will soon be available, for another series o f free in-door
concerts, limiting the privilege to the deserving poor, and making the distribution o f tickets by means
of the police, who are best qualified to judge as to the needs of applicants in their respective precincts
(27 August 1881: 757).
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Faith in the power of music was strong in Boston, and there was some expectation
that it should be shared with the public at large. A newspaper writer attacked the
Handel and Haydn Society in the 1880s for neglecting ‘to make a single attempt to
cultivate a wider appreciation of oratorio music by affording the general public an
opportunity of hearing repetitions of their performances at popular prices’
(Johnson, 1965: 149). Thus Higginson’s plan for low-priced concerts was one
consistent both with Boston’s musical history and with the temper of the time.
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
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
Orchestra’s reputation grew, auction prices rose alongside it. By 1900, the most
expensive seats averaged almost $25.00 per concert (Johnson, 1950: 25). Lowpriced tickets became so scarce that at a critic wrote that ‘the hoi polloi, for whom
Mr. Higginson has been ostentatiously posed as a patron, will have to put up with
the leavings’ (Howe, 1914: 83).
An inspection of handbills from the period reveals that BSO prices were about
half those of other classical organizations when tickets could be obtained outside of
the auction. Seats at the most expensive operatic performances ranged from $1.50
to $3.00. Chamber concerts generally cost from 50 cents to $1.50. The New York
Symphony Orchestra charged from 50 cents to $2.00 for tickets when it played in
Boston. Comic and English-language opera seats ran from 25 to 75 cents; and John
Philip Sousa’s band concerts brought from 25 cents to $1.00 per seat. Tickets to
purely popular performances (for example, those at the ‘Museums’ and vaudeville
theatres) could cost as little as a dime. Thus the BSO’s ticket policies, for all the
claims that were made for them, represented, at best, a reform, not a revolution.
In fact, Higginson became notably less concerned with education as his project
became a success. At first, he sought to entice ‘the poorer people’ with low prices;
in the rancorous early years, his supporters defended the concerts as ‘an educational
institution’. Yet, by 1889, Higginson had narrowed his ambitions so far as
education was concerned. Addressing those who had criticized his concerts because
they were attended only by the rich and had urged him to make an effort to
accommodate the poor, Higginson said
If a series of concerts was offered at low prices only to the ‘truly poor,’ do you suppose that any one
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
poor or to the young or to the old. Even so with music . . . (ibid.: 146).
Thus in the Orchestra, as in the Museum, the classification of high culture and
the framing of aesthetic experience were accompanied by an insulation of the
institution not just from popular art but from the masses themselves. In this
process, Higginson, like the trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, was a principal.
Higginson never tired of calling attention to the freedom that he permitted his
conductors. In 1888 he wrote to a German friend helping him recruit a successor to
Gericke
I have never exercised any supervision; I have never urged him , and I am not in a position to do soYou know very well that I am a busy man, and have many cares on my mind; that I must keep this
orchestra matter before me, but I cannot give it much daily care or thought: I cannot go and see th*1
the conductor is busy with his work day after day, week after week. . . . He is free and unfettered to
all these matters . . . He is as free as a man can well be in this world . . . (ibid.: 155).
CULTURAL EN T R E P R E N E U R SH I P
317
Higginson did permit his conductors considerable autonomy; he probably
meddled far less than others of the early pioneers. Yet it is equally clear that he was
the architect of all but the musical programs, and that, even over these, he kept a
watchful eye. As he lectured his men in 1914,
I watch the musicians'almost too m uch, for it often interferes with my pleasure, thinking about whether
they are playing their best, and listening for the various points instead o f listening for the whole.
Whenever I go to a concert, there is always a sense of responsibility on my mind (Perry, 1921: 295).
The classification and framing of high culture in America
I have argued that Boston’s cultural capitalists—the men who founded and
nurtured the Museum of Fine Art and the Boston Symphony Orchestra—were
creating a high culture in the interest of their class. In pointing out the extent to
which this high culture was created systematically and formally through
organizations that served to separate it and its public from popular culture and
from the populous itself, I do not mean to claim that a conscious conspiracy
occurred, nor that there were no tensions between the drive for exclusivity and
other values that Boston’s elites held dear. Nor should the recognition that high
culture, as we know it, was the creation of a status group lessen our appreciation of
the accomplishments of those who have worked, in high-culture genres.
At the institutional level, the struggle to create a high culture was a fumbling
and contentious one. Yet it was one that the Brahmins and elite status groups in
other American cities had to undertake if they were to become a true upper class.
To understand the attraction of a high culture, defined as it was, to an upper class
like Boston’s, and to the middle class that embraced culture even more fervently
than they, consider the affinities between the ideology of aestheticism that shaped
both the Orchestra and the Museum during this period and the cultural needs of
America’s urban elites.
The key to aestheticism, to the ideology of connoisseurship, is its essential
ambiguity. Visual art and music, the aesthetes taught, were not susceptible to mere
words. The symphony, wrote one critic, ‘does not depend for its force on its
definability’ (Philip Goep, quoted in Mussulman, 1971: 47). To see art as
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
interpretation, is to make art ultimately the property of those with the status to
claim that their experience is the purest, the most authentic. The aesthetes, from
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
transcendant, the aesthetes placed the experience of art beyond verification or
reason. As Martin Green has observed, culture in Boston became ‘etherialized.
. . . [TJhe idea of culture swelled as it became emptier . . . ’ (Green, 1966: 108).
Whatever the merits of aestheticism as a philosophy, in practice it placed the
mantle of art upon those with the leisure to become familiar with it, the ties to
professional critics and art historians to be instructed in it, to learn an attitude
towards it, to adopt it as their own. The experience of Culture—high
Culture—became an exercise in the implicit. And Boston’s dominant status group,
with its multiplicity of interconnections and its rich symbolic life, was uniquely
situated to capture the implicit, to make it its own, to stitch art into the fabric of its
communal life, as no other group could. Even the middle-class worshippers at the
31 8
P. D I M A G G I O
shrine of art could only hope to grasp a shred of culture to differentiate themselves
from the masses beneath them .7 They could not hope to challenge the elite on its
own ground. The professionals, the critics, the art historians, the musicians and the
rest were crucial, in part for providing a vocabulary for the understanding of art,
but, even more important, for legitimizing the stature of the elites who
monopolized their attentions and their services. As Dwight’s writings illustrate, in
the aesthete’s view, the identification of taste with moral stature, and of morality
with class position, is all too easy. In high culture, the upper classes of lateriineteenth-century America found both a common currency and a refuge from the
slings and arrows of the troubled world around them.8
Yet the creation of high culture was attended by tensions, some internal and some
external. The institutions that the cultural capitalists created required resources to
survive and to grow. In the case of the Museum, the need for resources drew it, once
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
the kind that the Metropolitan Museum had received from New York. They were
rebuffed, but in the process they developed programs to bring children from the
tenements to the museums, and to bus immigrants from the North and West Ends,
and they expanded their attention to education (albeit with a view of education that
could only serve the already educated). These reforms were not pivotal ones—the
trips from the slums were abandoned after two months for want of funds—but they
serve to illustrate the sensitivity of the Museum’s managers to their formal mandate,
even after the educational mission of the seventies effectively had been discarded.
Similarly, the Orchestra could never free itself entirely from the force of the
market. Throughout his tenure as its patron, Higginson was driven repeatedly to
commercial considerations, no matter how much he abhorred them. The Pops
concerts were initiated in order to provide additional income and year-round support
for the players who, in the first years, had often defected to other cities during the
summer months. And he embraced the flamboyant Nikisch, whose romanticism
appalled the more dignified followers of Dwigbt. When Gericke returned for a
second term , Boston found him too cold, and attendance fell off. Higginson induced
him to yield, on occasion, to guest conductors and, Howe suggests, was not entirely
sorry to see him depart. Just as American museums have, throughout their histories,
been pressed towards public service by their need for the cooperation, if not the
subventions, of government, so symphony orchestras are urged continually towards
the market as the solution to their financial difficulties.
The effort to create a high culture was an imperfect one, yet one that set out a
potent ideological and a potent organizational model. We have seen that managers
of the Orchestra and the Museum were citing one another’s institutions as standards
for their own by 1910. Even the theatre, which, commercially successful, could not
easily be fitted into a high culture frame, was subject to criticism according to the elite
m odel. Thus the middle-class Twentieth-Century Club, reporting on its
investigation of Boston theatre in 1910, focused its criticisms on the promiscuous
mingling of high and popular culture on the Boston stage. ‘It is notable’, they say,
that the different theatre managements, exclusive of those giving burlesque and vaudeville, make no
attem pt to establish a permanent clientele, a fundamental need in the conduct of any other business.
It is difficult, for instance, to understand what prompted the Shuberts, after opening their new
theatre with two weeks of Shakespeare . . . to put on for their second attraction as commonplace a
musical comedy as “ The Midnight Sons’’ (Twentieth Century Club, 1910: 3).
CUL TURAL E N T R E P R E N E U R S H I P
319
Equally vexing to them was the tendency, in vaudeville houses, towards ‘further
breaking down . . . those barriers that separate the audience from the performer
upon the stage’. In this regard, they sought to prevent the appearance of a barefoot
dancer in Boston.
Equally undesirable, and evidencing the same tendency in a form perhaps still more to be deprecated,
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
sensational illusions has been the sending o f a balloon or aeroplane out over the heads o f the
audience, carrying ond or two girls singing . . . (ibid.: 30).
The need for strong classifications to preserve the purity of art, and for the need of
boundaries between performer and public, was by this time evident to these
middle-class reformers.
Conclusions
In providing an historical sketch of the processes of classification and framing as
they occurred at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I
have been able to do little more than scratch the surface of the cultural changes
that were occurring in Boston and other American cities of that period. The
undergrowth of amateur art associations and singing societies, the other, less
successful ventures in institution building (like the Boston Opera), the serious
stage, and, perhaps most important, the world of literature all deserve detailed
treatment that they have not received here. A fortiori, the commercial cultural
organizations that grew up everywhere during this period—the fairs, the vaudeville
and burlesque houses, eventually the movie houses—and the less formal settings
where the folk cultures of Boston’s immigrants and Yankees alike were expressed.
In looking closely at two institutions in which high culture was differentiated and
sealed from other genres, we must not forget that this occurred within a rich and
changing cultural context. In this respect, Boston’s theatres, caught as they were
between culture and commerce, between the aspirations of middle-class reformers
and the desires for entertainment of working people and the less progressive
members of the middle class, may be a particularly rich field for study.
This treatment, as well, has only suggested the link between elite social structure
and the development of high culture in Boston. A closer look at the multiple elite
networks—those of kinship, commerce, clubs and stewardship—might enable us
better to understand why some efforts succeeded while others failed, and better to
fathom the intra-class division of labor between the cultural and hegemonic
institutions that Ronald Story (1981) has described.
The value of the explanation advanced herein may be tested in comparative work
on other American cities of this period. Research on Chicago, with its newer, more
commercial, less socially integrated, less cultured elite, shows similarities and
differences to the Boston case (see Horowitz, 1976; Zolberg, 1980; see also Couch,
1976, on New York). I do not expect that the institutionalization of high culture
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.
Finally, it will be important to compare the American experience to that of the
European countries, with their differing class structures and richer cultural histories.
Certainly, culture in England was in flux in the nineteenth century, as Williams
(1965), Thorhpson (1966) and Wolff (1982)have documented. In a fascinating essay,
32 0
P. D I M A G G I O
Gayc Tuchman (1982) has argued that, in the literary arena at least, the British
sought consciously to define the high-art novelistic genre at about the same time that
Perkins, Brimmer and Higginson were organizing their cultural ventures in New
England. Sennett (1978: 205-208) notes the consolidation of concert and theatre
manners throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. And
William Weber (1976) has argued that Europe’s nineteenth-century aristocracy
embraced the rising bourgeoisie in a musical coalition with the symphony as its focus.
Thus class and culture seem as closely associated in Europe as in America at this time,
even if the particulars of that association differed.
As is usually the case, then, more research is needed. But, I believe, there are
already some lessons that sociologists and historians with an interest in culture can
draw from the story told here. The first is that we must stop viewing, once and for
all, ‘high culture’ as a distinctive kind of cultural product, and recognize that high
and popular culture are, at one level, historically evolved systems of classification
whose strength, substance and significance vary constantly; and, at another,
separate systems of production and distribution with systematically different
consequences for the art that passes through them. The illusory search for genres
that are somehow more ‘high-cultural’ than others renders the sociologist the
victim o f ideologies that he or she should be studying. Recognizing that ideas
about high and popular culture are ideological classifications embodied in
organizational forms that give them flesh permits us to study the causes of variation
in the classifications themselves and, perhaps, to begin to understand taste, not
simply as an aspect of demand, but as something which, over a longer term and less
through conscious design, is as much a social production as is a work of art itself.
Acknowledgements
For advice and encouragement I am indebted to Randall Collins, David Karen,
Michael Schudson, Ann Swidler and to the members of Professor Mary Douglas’s
‘Mass Media Mythology’ seminar at the New York University Institute for the
Humanities, o f Theda Skocpol’s graduate research seminar at Harvard University,
and of Paul Hirsch’s production-of-culture session at the 1980 Sociology and the
Arts conference in Chicago. Research and institutional support from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation and from Yale University’s Program on Non-Profit
Organizations is gratefully acknowledged.
N otes
1. I draw here, and throughout, on Basil Bernstein’s work on the classification and framing of
educational knowledge (1975^).
2. Indeed, enthusiasm for reproductions extended to wood-engraving and photography, which
Charles Eliot Norton felt could elevate popular taste to unprecedented heights (Vanderbilt,
1959: 145).
3. The Musical Association’s programs were notable for their emphasis on symphonies and
overtures. They were not, however, austere by the standards o f later years. Eleven o f 53 selections
in their repertoire for the year 1881 were songs, for example ‘Faithful Johnny’. By contrast, the
Handel and Haydn Society emphasized serious vocal works, if occasionally straying with modern
composers like Gounod. The Philharmonic Club, at least in the late 1870s, played exclusively
instrumental selections, but many o f these were on the light side. The Theodore Thomas
concerts, which most observers credit with raising Boston’s musical standards, were, in 1871, also
instrumental: but Thomas leavened the overtures and concertos (there were few symphonies)
with a generous selection o f marches and waltzes. The critic William Apthorp, writing in The
CUL TURAL EN T R E P R E N E U R S H I P
321
Atlantic in 1873, complained of Thomas that ‘His chief object seems to be to present as many
novelties as possible’ (Mussulman, 1971: 88). Commercial programs, like those o f the Redpath
Boston Lyceum, were even more mixed. (From pamphlets and handbills in the Yale Music
Library’s Boston pamphlet collection.)
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
Washington Street advertise, in 1885, Grand Sacred Concerts, wherein Handel, Wagner and
Strauss occasionally appeared amidst a profusion of light vocal numbers. Concert attenders could
also take in such exhibits as the Wonder Hall, Punch (a baby bear), a Transparent Turk ('who
can be seen through’), performing birds, a monkey that whistled, a talking skull, a ‘congress of
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
10AM to 10PM’. (Yale Music Library Boston pamphlet collection)
5. A similar effort at purification was conducted by the leaders o f the Handel and Haydn Society at
this time. In 1888, President Geotge Chickering called, in his annual report, for a ‘purification
o f the chorus’, a purge, for the first time, of members whose voices were not up to standard. The
‘purification’ occurred, although it left the Society badly divided. After several years o f turmoil,
harmony was restored by a new set o f officers, who continued the weeding out o f the chorus and
vowed ‘not at present [to] give any more works o f new composers . . . ’ (Perkins and Dwight,
1882-93: 496 f f ; Johnson, 1965: 154-185).
6. Several tones were deployed in attempting to chasten early leavers. In January 1884, audience
members who were ‘obliged to leave’ before the end were simply requested to ‘please do so
during the last intermission’. Nine months later, they were told that they ‘will confer a favor by
leaving the Hall’ before the beginning o f the next piece. In December, 1885 ‘Management’
more pointedly requested ‘that no one will disturb both audience and orchestra by leaving the
hall during the performance of the . . . Music’. At times in the 1890s such notices were omitted,
but backsliding must have occurred: In 1901-02, notes to Gericke’s concerts ‘urgently requested
. . . patrons unable to remain until the close o f the concert. . . to leave the hall during a pause
in the program’ (BSO Concert Notes, various numbers).
7. As one student o f this period puts it, ‘The majority o f the growing middle class . . . constituted
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 . . . ’
(Mussulman, 1971: 29).
8. The other side o f the apotheosis o f art that occurred during this period, to which I have given
little attention, was the devaluation o f popular forms. Critic Philip Hale, in the BSO Concert
Bulletin o f 8 February 1908, wrote o f popular songs o f the previous century: ‘The pleasure in
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
provoked laughter are now foolish and depressing.’
As late as 1915, President Courtenay Guild o f the Handel and Haydn Society predicted that
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 o f barbarous sequence o f sounds more worthy o f savages than o f civilization.
. . . It is hardly conceivable that the depraved musical taste can be more than an ephemeral
lapse . . . ’ (Johnson, 1965: 197).
The leaders o f the Handel and Haydn Society seemed particularly sensitive to the social
implications of their choice o f music. In the 1880s, Dwight decried ‘the proverbial restlessness o f
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;
for if Gounod’s ‘Redemption’ drew the largest audience, did it not in the same ratio shake the
confidence o f the more cultivated and exacting music-lovers in the soundness of the old and
honored institution?’ (Perkins and Dwight, 1883-93: 450). A quarter o f a century later, the
Society’s Secretary again noted the danger o f impure music to the purity o f the audience, since it
attracted ‘an audience far different in aspect and mood from that o f the usual course o f concerts
. . . ’. Having learned its lesson, ‘The Society eschews ultra-modern choral music. It has little
liking for contemporary pieces in any vein. It cultivates the ancient classics or oratorio and a few
o f the moderns, and with them its officers, conductor, chorus and audiences are content. When
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 a n d Society 1982 4, 323—337
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BERNSTEIN,
BERNSTEIN, B.
‘The invisible censor’: civil law and the state
delegation of press control, 1890-1952
PAT O ’MALLEY*
Sociological concern with legal control of the press has focused very largely on
criminal law. One of the principal effects of this focus has been to direct attention to
instances of contemporary state intervention, such as those involving D notices and
the Official Secrets Act (e.g. Lovelace, 1978; Curran, 1981). Yet the infrequency of
such interventions coupled with the vociferous reactions of the press serve only to
underline the relative unimportance and exceptional status of such measures for con­
trolling the mass media. A second and more widespread effect of the crim in al Jaw
conception of press control has been to take for granted the autonomy of the media
from state intervention and to explain this in terms of the rise of a specifically
capitalist press industry (Curran, 1977, 1978; O ’Malley, 198la). In this view,
‘market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed in establishing the press as
an instrument of social control’ (Curran, 1977: 198). While this position is substan­
tially correct, it makes assumptions which, if not unwarranted, are certainly over­
simplified. In particular it may be asked whether market forces do unproblematically
produce the effects attributed to them. The demands of marketing strategies, for
example, may well bring newspaper content into collision with prevailing ideologies.
As Hall (1981: 230) suggests, the rise of the popular, commercial press in the early
part of this century created precisely such tensions for it was
organised by capital ‘for’ the working classes; with, nevertheless, deep and influential roots in the
culture and language of the ‘underdog’ o f ‘Us’: with the power to represent the class to itself in its most
traditionalist form.
Consequently, where such cultural collisions or ideological contradictions occur,
market forces cannot necessarily be relied upon for regulation o f the press. It is of
course true that few democratic states could legitimately intervene directly to this
effect by invocation of criminal law, but the view of state intervention as being
restricted to such direct and draconian methods reflects a rudimentary conception of
the heterogeneity of the relations between state and civil society. It takes for granted
the legalistic conception of civil law as ‘private law’, that is, as an arena for restitutive
resolution to conflicts between individuals. However, it must be considered that the
inflicting of monetary damages and/or legal costs on a party to a civil action constitutes
a penalty for the transgression of a rule which the state legitimates and will ultimately
enforce. This observation is by no means unknown to bourgeois jurisprudence:
Although the proximate end o f the civil sanction is, generally speaking, redress to the injured party, its
remote and paramount end, like that o f the criminal sanction, is the prevention o f offences generally
(Austin, 1885:504n).'
8
*
D epartm ent o f A nthropology and Sociology, Monash University.
0163-4437/82/040323 + 15 $ 0 3 .0 0 /0
© 1982 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited