The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern BritainFrom the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music have been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. The goal of these initiatives was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience but to teach a particular way of listening that would help the public "appreciate" music. This book examines for the first time how and why music appreciation has had such a defining and long-lasting impact—well beyond its roots in late-Victorian liberalism. It traces the networks of music educators, philanthropists, policy makers, critics, composers, and musicians who, rather than resisting new mass media, sought to harness their pedagogic potential. The book explores how listening became embroiled in a nexus of modern problems around citizenship, leisure, and education. In so doing, it ultimately reveals how a new cultural milieu—the middlebrow—emerged at the heart of Britain's experience of modernity. |
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The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain Kate Guthrie Limited preview - 2021 |
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Adult Education aesthetic agenda Aldous Huxley American art music artistic audience avant-garde BBC Proms BBC WAC Beethoven Benjamin Britten Birmingham Britain British musical broadcast broaden access Cadbury Research Library century chapter cinema classical composers Concerts for Children contemporary critique Damrosch Davies's emotional example Extra-Mural Faber Fugue Gabriel Prokofiev genres gramophone Hans Keller highbrow History ideal imagined initiatives Instruments intellectual interwar leisure liberal London lowbrow Magnum Mysterium Malcolm Sargent mass culture Mellers Mellers’s midcentury middlebrow middlebrow culture modern music modernist mural music appreciation music critic music education musical culture Orchestra Ordinary Listener Oxford University Press pedagogic performance Peter Maxwell Davies played political popular music postwar Proms Purcell radio reform repertoire Report Robert Mayer Robert Mayer Concerts Sargent Scholes School Music seemed social society Sonata sought suggest supposedly Symphony talks taste teaching theme tion twentieth University of Birmingham Victorian Walford Davies Wilfrid Mellers young