B. H. Haggin's Book of the Symphony (1937) came packaged with a rule to measure the distance from the outer groove of a record, ex. "the development section of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth start[s] at 2 7/16 inches as recorded by Koussevitzky and the London Philharmonic." (407)

Horowitz says, "In fact, the symphony exists in score - every recording is precisely an interpretation, and as such privileges the culture of performance." (408) 

Victor produced The Victor Book of the Symphony, The Victor Book of Concertos, The Victor Book of the Opera, What We Hear in Music, Music and Romance, Form in Music, and Music Appreiciation for Children. Curriculum favored symphony, short list of German, French, Italian and Russian composers. Exclusion of contemporary music, American composers, jazz.  Spotlight on RCA performers. (405)

Excellent chapter 4 (pp. 63-88) Derek Vaillant, "Your Voice Cam in Last Night....but I thought it Sounded a Little Scared": Rural Radio Listening and "Talking Back" during the Progressive Era in Wisconisn, 1920-1932.  University-run radio station wanted to program classical music, farmers (for whom the station was largely for) wanted to hear their (fiddler) music.

The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

This is the first and only book-length musicological treatment of cartoon music.  In the chapter "Classical Music and Cartoons" Goldmark argues that the pieces of classical music that are used in cartoons are characterisized by "gestural immediacy," which makes them suitable for illustration.  Goldmark credits Freleng with mastering the techniques of fitting classical music to cartoons.  Goldmark discusses the construction of high art vs. folk/popular music in bugs bunny shorts, and these cartoons playing out of class struggles. Goldmark observes the impossibility of taking Fantasia seriously as high art when cartoons were seen only as a form of popular entertainment.  Fantasia is excpetional in the world of animated shorts as a cartoon which seeks to glorify classical music rather than tare it down.  Goldmark outlins the contrast between the original Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, the latter reflecting radically different notions of the musical canon and the propriety of including popular celebrities.  This is a discussion I wish Goldmark had pursued more in depth for I think the comparison is a fruitful one on which further analysis and an investigation of the making of Fantasia 2000 would shed more light.  While cultural notions had changed, clearly Fantasia 2000 demonstrates some kind of commitment to classical music.

Goldmark is kind of out on a limb here with cartoon studies which has no established precedent in musicology and no body of literature to build off of or respond to.  I think he opens a productive path in both musicology and film studies - and their potential union - with this book.  At an absolute minimum, he provides a very useful bibliography.

Cited in Daniel Goldmark's Tunes for Toons (128) for observing that "suave or tempestuous embodiments of charismatic longhairs" were common in early to mid-20th century American and English cinema (215).

Provides insight into the vagaries of the classical music world in the first half of the 20th century.  A cultural history as much as it is the story of Toscanini. 

Sklar argues that the development of the movies during critical years of change (industrialization, urbanization, modernization) in the social structure of America is responsible for their success in becoming the most popular and influential media of the first half of the 20th century; I would say that there is no doubt some truth to this but that it fails to recognize the role of movies in actually bringing about changes in the modern, urban social structure. The older American city, according to Sklar, juxtaposed and intermingled different income levels and occupations, while the new city segregated them.  When Sklar calls the discovery of storefront movie theaters “a shocking revelation to the middle class” he paints the middle class with too broad a brushstroke; he does, however, vividly report the reaction of social reformers to the specter of entertainment and information sources unsupervised by by churches and schools.  Sklar suggests that the middle-class saw censorship as a way to control the movies and to realize a desire to return to a society (a la Elizabethan) in which high culture was popular culture accessible to and enjoyed by alls social groups.  This dream failed to materialize because demonopolization (the busting of the Edison Trust) of the movie industry thwarted efforts at exert complete control over movie content through censorship.  The desire to make high culture popular culture factors significantly in my research interests, and while it is not Sklar’s main concern his history usefully details the movie situation within which such desire was expressed. His history covers the period from the birth of the movies to “Hollywood’s collapse” as he puts it, which coincided with the rise of television, art films and hard-core porn films. 

This history of the American audience is fascinating; the historical specificity with which it treats transformations in audience behavior and conceptions I have encountered no where else. For example, the segregation of audiences by class can be pinpointed in the 1830-40s when elites became concerned about working-class sovereignty and moved to contain its en masse expression by condemning “rowdy” audience behavior. With the advent of movies, public concerns shifted from audience behavior to the entertainment’s content, from what audiences were doing to what was being done to them. The book traces audiences for drama theater, minstrelsy, vaudeville, movies, radio and television because there is continuity between these entertainments; concerts do not participate in this lineage. As a result, mentions of music are few and far between. The Nickelodeon chapter, which discusses extensively the economic class and geographical variation of audience demographics, mentions live musical accompaniment, claiming that it was provided primarily by female pianists – a gender typing I’ve not come across in other readings – who resisted cue sheets distributed by producers after 1910. Also interesting is the practice of sing-alongs while the projector was being loaded. The chapter “Storefronts to Theaters: Seeking the Middle Class” cites the coming of sound for its effective silencing of audiences. The debate between disparagers of “canned music” and optimists about new possibilities for the dissemination of music is tantalizingly mentioned but unsatisfactorily footnoted. The chapters on radio are fascinating though only tangentially related to my concerns. They confirm that highbrow vs. lowbrow, moral uplift vs. commercialism, classical music vs. jazz were the operative binaries in the discourses around radio in the 1920-30s, and cite an interesting result from audience surveys between 1928-32 that radio programming preferences in descending order were: popular music (jazz, Tin Pan Alley and old-time [an unfortunately broad category]), comedy, drama, sports, classical music, general talk, religious, news, educational. This history demonstrates how class anxiety has constantly factored into entertainment practices and discourse across media since the mid-19th century.