Orchestras play too much Beethoven, cater to the rich, shun popular culture, and exude pretentiousness. It takes little reflection to note that these hackneyed complaints about today's symphony orchestras echo many of the criticisms leveled at the discipline of musicology during the 1980s and 1990s. The connection is simple to pinpoint. Beginning largely in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, both institutions matured across a lengthy era that increasingly favored ideologies of canon formation and a brand of musical idealism privileging the inviolate, transcendent notion of “the music itself,” a work of art standing entirely outside the context in which it is produced. Although the efforts to disentangle musicology from these intellectual roots are ongoing, they have undeniably increased the discipline's vitality. The precarious financial position of greater numbers of symphony orchestras indicates that a similarly fundamental re-assessment of values might be useful for their continued solvency, and indeed for their very existence.

Intentionally or not, this new collection of essays on orchestras in the nineteenth century, written by scholars from a variety of disciplines and career stages, provides just such an opportunity for re-assessment. In its own way, each essay removes the mask of idealism by exploring the very pre-conditions that make “the music itself” possible at all: musicians, venues, and, of course, money. As the historian Ronald Walters suggests in his afterword, these doses of historical realism challenge us repeatedly to consider that orchestras today might look and sound very different, or even occupy a different social milieu, had particular economic, social, and intellectual forces not converged in the precise manner they did and had individuals simply made other choices when facing critical decisions. Although readers may delight in historical contingencies and alternate possibilities, they will also encounter many surprisingly familiar images that connect past and present: egotistical celebrity conductors, union turf wars, botched financial management, frustratingly fickle audiences, clever marketing schemes, and protracted struggles to maintain solvency (or a living wage).

The volume's unity of design is noteworthy from the outset. It contains seventeen primary essays divided among five thematic sections. They were originally presented at a conference with only the one overarching theme, but Spitzer has done an outstanding job integrating them into a unified whole by contributing several short but penetrating pieces that introduce each section and by carefully incorporating generous cross-references to other essays within the set. His detail-oriented approach should be taken as a model, as these small additions greatly enhance the book's utility and value. The framing essays by Walters and musicologist Deane Root also present thoughtful holistic interpretations of the entire collection without being heavy-handed or overbearing.

Contemporary orchestra culture is by no means monolithic, but most professional orchestras in the United States are governed by corporate boards and sustain themselves largely through charitable donations. This model became dominant around the turn of the twentieth century. Mark Clague's opening essay argues that such dominance was not inevitable, however, because at least six different models characterized the institutional organization of most nineteenth-century orchestras: club, co-op, entrepreneurial, conservatory, society, and corporate. Each model varied in its leadership, musician makeup, financial base, and ownership; each also had unique strengths and weaknesses that affected the ensemble's viability. Patrick Warfield's essay on orchestras in the District of Columbia helps explain why the corporate model became standard. Concert patrons increasingly came to privilege both professionalism and permanence—two characteristics that were not intrinsic to the orchestral enterprise but were intellectual preferences rooted deeply in beliefs about music's capacity as an agent of moral and cultural uplift. The corporate model aligns most closely with these preferences because the perpetual philanthropic support provided by a city's moneyed elite would protect an orchestra from the whims of the marketplace, or “popular taste”—a euphemism for the lack of refinement and probity.

Several authors (Clague, Warfield, Karen Ahlquist, James Deaville, Mary Wallace Davidson) narrate stories concluding with the establishment of permanent professional corporate orchestras and thus expose how widespread these preferences truly were, a subject also treated in great detail by Joseph Horowitz in his recent Moral Fire (University of California Press, 2012). Turning away from institutional inner workings, Deaville's essay on the Chicago critic George Upton borrows concepts from Pierre Bourdieu in order to interpret the crucial role music critics can play in a city's musical life. He suggests that they serve as “symbolic bankers” (Bourdieu's concept) who accumulate cultural capital by earning readers’ trust. They later invest this capital in, or divest it from, causes of their own choosing—in this case, a conductor's career. If applied in other contexts, Deaville's provocative theoretical model would shed much-needed light on the writings of prolific critics such as John Sullivan Dwight and Henry Krehbiel.

The professionalization of orchestras coincided with programming trends that also seemed to reflect a maturing idealism. Building on the comparative approach to program analysis adopted by William Weber here and elsewhere, Davidson and Adrienne Fried Block interpret archival records that shed new light on the underlying motivations driving the programming of the Harvard Musical Association and the Philharmonic Society of New York. Both of these organizations were known for their promotion of canonical symphonic works—a concrete manifestation of idealism, as Weber argues. The HMA's programming decisions were made primarily by Dwight, whose unwavering devotion to idealistic principles trumped financial considerations and led directly to the orchestra's downfall. The Philharmonic Society, by contrast, was constructed using the co-op model described in Clague's essay, and its musicians played meatier roles in its everyday management. With such a vested interest in the orchestra's success, they implemented a plan that gradually moved toward their idealistic concert programs; as Block explains, it succeeded. Davidson and Block remind us that programs appearing similar on the surface might have been devised through differing unseen processes.

The essays described thus far point toward the emergence of the modern symphony orchestra, but others focus on what was lost along the way. Three chapters (Ora Frishberg Saloman, Katherine Preston, Brenda Nelson-Strauss) present valuable case studies of entrepreneurial orchestras, and it is remarkable that two of the three manager-conductors, Louis-Antoine Jullien and Theodore Thomas, deliberately incorporated music by U.S. composers into their business plans—a risky choice that nevertheless contributed to their overall success. Jullien's support of U.S. composers was part of a larger ploy to cater to Americans’ patriotism. Yet his pristine performances of their works revealed to the public that U.S. composers could write enjoyable, serious, and good music, which emboldened composers to criticize local organizations who had previously rebuffed them. Thomas, who served as a violinist in Jullien's orchestra, promoted the music of his compatriots even more prolifically. Nelson-Strauss's careful research reveals that Thomas programmed “at least four hundred individual works by more than 150 composers [including at least five women]” (412) over the course of three decades, a statistic that should dispel any illusions that Thomas was unfriendly toward U.S. composers or that the nation lacked a compositional voice.

Peering into another corner of a lamentably bygone musical culture, chapters on the “invisible” orchestras of New York's theaters (John Graziano) and the festive orchestras of the city's German beer gardens (John Koegel and Jonas Westover) paint a stunningly vivid, and at times quite humorous, portrait of orchestral music outside the concert hall. These authors call into question the commonly held notion that highbrow and lowbrow culture became increasingly distinct over the course of the century. “The history of [music at beer gardens],” Koegel and Westover argue, “demonstrates the fluid and complicated interethnic and interclass nature of theatrical and musical repertories and audience patronage” (155). They urge us to consider that “orchestral music” was a polyvalent concept, even at century's end. Both essays also masterfully capture the distinct local flavors of their subjects, and hopefully other scholars will pursue similar topics in new cities—the prominent Hassler family of theater musicians in Philadelphia, for example.

Three authors (Nancy Newman, Anna-Lise Santella, Ahlquist) deliver insightful commentary on the rapidly changing status of women and the varied musical roles women played throughout the century. Newman builds on Block's claim elsewhere that women's attendance at public concerts anticipated “other, more challenging claims of equity in public life” (290). Focusing specifically on the Germania Orchestra's relationships with women performers and female audiences, she argues that pathways to women's participation in the public sphere were tied intimately to a musical culture that frequently offered listeners a captivating image of feminine autonomy. Santella presents a concrete example of such autonomy in her chapter on women's orchestras, and her descriptions of female leadership provide interesting points of comparison with other ensembles appearing in the volume. Women's orchestras often creatively marketed their femininity, for example, while sharing the widespread belief in music's powers of uplift. Ahlquist's detailed examination of orchestra building in Cincinnati demonstrates that the city's first permanent orchestra came into being only after its erstwhile financial backers, a group of savvy society women, had thoroughly evaluated the successes and failures of other experimental models.

The remaining chapters draw the reader into several practical dimensions of orchestral music: union membership (Spitzer), venue management (Bethany Goldberg), and ensemble construction (Barbara Haws). Each one allows us to re-read all of the other essays with fresh eyes. Does “musical idealism” functionally describe musicians who set up a closed shop union? If, as Spitzer suggests, unionization created cliques and ethnic divisions, can we interpret programming choices and music criticism through the lens of cultural nationalism as well? What sacrifices did any of these orchestras make in order to appease concert hall owners interested only in the bottom line? Was anyone ever forced to compromise his or her ideals? Returning to “the music itself,” how did these orchestras really sound? Haws and others illustrate that we cannot take for granted even the most basic of decisions such as seating arrangements and instrument ratios. What Beethoven were listeners hearing, after all?

In a biting editorial written for the Society for American Music Bulletin (Fall 2005), Katherine Preston lamented the general neglect of nineteenth-century music taking hold of the Society.Footnote ¹ Because we know so little about the past, she insisted, our disciplinary models for understanding the present are built on shaky foundations at best. If this collection of essays is any indication, we can rest assured that scholarship on nineteenth-century American music has sprung to life and will remain relevant well into the future. From cover to cover, it draws a detailed blueprint of the complex world of orchestral music and musicians across the century and constructs a sturdy foundation upon which to build new understandings of orchestras then and now.