How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

Yet they do not of themselves constitute a public for music. As late as the Restoration there is still no sign of this enigmatic entity. Pepys in the 1660s was enormously fond of music and, in addition to singing and composing, played several instruments, but his public experience of the art was always in mixed contexts such as the church, the theater, and visits with friends to taverns, some of which specialized as music houses.

(20) Roger North classified the "intents" of music in The Musicall Grammarian as "1. solitary, 2. sociall, 3. ecclesiasticall, and 4. theatricall" but has no sense of its being the foundation of a self-subsistent public. (21) Concert-giving, which began in the humblest of forms during the 1670s, had achieved a degree of maturity by the time of the "Music meetings" held in the Great Room at York Buildings in the Strand during the 1690s. (Pepys was a permanent resident of the buildings.) Thomas Southerne made these meetings the subject of scenes in The Wives' Excuse (1692), which, if he could be taken seriously as a reporter, would suggest that they were no more than another gathering point for the town in its constant round of pleasures and flirtations; however, some characters are singled out as followers of the art, and the dramatist himself seems to have enjoyed and understood music. (22) Public concerts were mostly on a small scale and often given in the main room of a tavern. Dedicated concert rooms begin to appear in the 1720s. Yet the craft of concert-giving was by now thoroughly understood by professionals. A set of Machiavellian recommendations composed circa 1704 by one German virtuoso for another (possibly the young Handel) includes nailing shut the back door into the hall and being sure to "Praise the deceased Purcell to the skies." (23) Over time the entrepreneurial performer yielded to the specialist promoter; however, concert promotion was always an opportunistic, high-risk activity. The main profits generated from music performance went to a small number of privileged virtuosi; to the publishers of music, who fed off tastes nourished in the concert room; and to the manufacturers of German flutes, spinets, and square pianos for sale to amateurs. From the 1760s there were regular cycles of professional orchestral concerts, such as those organized on the model of the Parisian Concert spirituel by J. C. Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel and the well-known series held by Salamon during Haydn's two visits to London. Opera had to wait until the nineteenth century to become fully commercial in Britain: in Handel's time it was usually financed by committees of primary subscribers who shared in the managerial function. The commercial effort devoted to performances and the sale of instruments and musical publications helped considerably in consolidating a musical public. Piano warehouses would often contain recital halls. Publishers, as we have seen, would encourage the formation of amateur musical clubs which would then purchase music from them. Concert promoters worked in close alliance with tavernkeepers, caterers, and proprietors of pleasure gardens. It was in everyone's interest to consolidate the consumption of music into a specialized market with loyal consumers.