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The Boston Pops: An American Institution and Its European Roots

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01411896.2023.2222877

1547-7304

A. Adler,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

ABSTRACTThis article traces the historical origins and influences that led the early leaders of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) to offer both “symphony concerts” and “popular concerts” on the same stage. Although scholars of nineteenth-century orchestral music align the end of “mixed” repertory with the rise of non-touring orchestral institutions based in urban centers, that tradition continued far into the twentieth century. Exploring the history of the BSO affords a deeper understanding into the division of the so-called “classical” orchestral repertory from the “popular,” and the emergence of orchestral pops series in cities across the United States. AcknowledgmentsI am deeply grateful to those whose ideas and suggestions have helped me write this essay, particularly my colleagues and mentors at the Eastman School of Music, especially Kim Kowalke and Ralph Locke, the editorial staff of this Journal, and the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable commentary. I would also like to thank Bridget Carr at the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives for her indefatigable assistance, Jared Rex and the special collections staff at the Boston Public Library and Boston University’s Gottlieb Archival Research Center, David Peter Coppen at the Sibley Library at the Eastman School of Music, and the staff at the W.I. Dykes Library at the University of Houston-Downtown.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 This preoccupation filled the pages of respected academic music journals of the time. In Modern Music, music critic Alexander Fried warned of the “danger in the vast campaign for the popularization of music,” arguing that popular and financial successes were indications of artistic failure. See Alexander Fried, “For the People,” Modern Music 4 (1927): 33–37, at 35. In the Musical Quarterly, Carl Engel complained about the outsized influence of popularity in the American concert hall and the proclivity of American audiences to appreciate mediocrity over originality, against the better judgment of the elite. See Carl Engel, “The Miraculous Appeal of Mediocrity,” Musical Quarterly 5 (1919): 453–62.2 Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Marek, 1984), 51.3 For these authors, the idea of the autonomous individual composer, or “great master,” who composes “masterworks” is set against the idea of the composer who composes “occasional” music, (i.e., a symphony versus incidental music). Autonomous, unchanging artworks, “sacred” texts which require no particular social context or meaning outside of themselves, are contrasted with works that have utility and a specific purpose within a specific historical context. Value is placed on the composers who are superior to mass audiences, ahead of their time, and who write for posterity, compared to those composers who write in their time and for their contemporary audiences.4 Quoted in Greg Sandow, “Pop Fiction,” Symphony (1998): 24–27, 53–55, at 53. This is undoubtedly a reference to the busts of Bach and Beethoven that perch on either side of the Eastman Theater at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where Rouse taught in the composition department.5 Perhaps understandably, pops concerts are never mentioned in surveys of twentieth-century music that reflect the common bias toward “progress” narratives. More surprisingly, pops concerts rarely receive more than a mention (if that) in the most significant histories of American symphony orchestras, histories of American music, histories of popular music, and American cultural histories. A detailed analysis of the historiography of pops concerts can be found in Ayden Adler, “‘Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music’: Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, 1930–1950” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, 2007), 9–15.6 For a discussion of these sources, see Adler, “Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music,” 9–15. Recent publications have similarly not addressed this lacuna. Both Bill F. Faucett and Jon Ceander Mitchell provide historical insight into the BSO’s early years, but fail to mention the Pops more than in passing. See Bill F. Faucett, Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); and Jon Ceander Mitchell, Trans-Atlantic Passages: Philip Hale on the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1889–1933 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Joseph Horowitz’s biographical sketch of Henry Higginson provides insights into the history of the BSO but is relatively silent on the subject of the Pops. See Horowitz, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). In 2018, Kenneth H. Marcus’s article on the early Pops concerts includes some important new archival sources, particularly regarding the early Pops audiences. Much of this article, otherwise, summarizes sources I treated in more detail in my own dissertation. See Marcus, “‘Every Evening at 8’: The Rise of the Promenade Concerts in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston,” American Music 36, no. 2 (2018): 194–221; and Adler, “Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music.”7 These ideas are explored further in Ayden Adler, Orchestrating Whiteness: Arthur Fiedler, Serge Koussevitzky, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).8 “A Typical Season of the BSO: 1942–1943.” Printed Matter, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://bso.netx.net/app/#share/request/b609e514-d21d-4c71-988a-64e7d71ff02b.9 Until the 1940s, the approximately one-hundred-person roster of musicians for the BSO and the Pops was identical. Even today they share their personnel, save for various principal players. From 1964 to the present day, the BSO management has excused a number of first-chair musicians from Pops services during May and June to tour as the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. Currently, the BSO management requires all BSO musicians perform a minimum number of rehearsals and concerts each season (during the winter and Pops series, and at Tanglewood) to meet their employment obligations. Musicians may request the opportunity to perform in additional concerts, such as Pops Holiday concerts, to earn additional compensation. Extra players are hired on a per-service basis by the BSO and Pops to fill in for various reasons: for positions that have not been filled via audition, to supplement sections when there are extra instruments required, and for week-to-week fluctuations in schedules due to illness or other absences. In the earliest seasons of the 1880s, the orchestra performed Pops concerts almost nightly from May through September, but by the late 1890s, the Pops series was relegated to May and June, with the season sometimes extending into July. Fiedler continued this abridged schedule throughout his tenure. My thanks to Robert Kirzinger for his assistance with this footnote.10 Gaynor O’Gorman, “B.S.O. Deficit Cleared, ‘Pops’ Biz Velvety,” Playhouse, May 12, 1934. See also “Beer and Beethoven,” Herald-Tribune, May 7, 1933; and John Koegel and Jonas Westover, “Beethoven and Beer: Orchestra Music in German Beer Gardens in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 130–55.11 Isaac Goldberg, “In This Way A Conductor May Be Made,” Boston Evening Transcript, May 6, 1933.12 Smith, “Season of Pops Opened With Capacity Throng.”13 Cyrus Durgin, DISconcerto, May 27, 1948, Arthur Fiedler Collection, Boston Public Library. Box 19.14 Maureen Baker, written communication with author, Cambridge, MA, May 15, 2006. Baker was a regular audience member at Pops concerts in the 1950s and 1960s.15 For more on Higginson, see Bliss Perry, The Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921); Steven Ledbetter, “Higginson and Chadwick: Non-Brahmins in Boston,” American Music 19, no. 1 (2001): 51–63; and Horowitz, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siècle.16 Quoted in Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe and John N. Burk, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1881–1931 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931), 27.17 “Recent Concerts,” Dwight’s Journal of Music (March 12, 1881). Quoted in Faucett, Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918, 87.18 “Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History,” The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, accessed May 9, 2023.19 For a complete listing of the Music Directors of the BSO, in chronological order from 1881 to 2006, see Adler, “Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music,” 230.20 Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra: An Historical Sketch (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914), 125.21 Even into the 1940s, the additional Pops weeks served as an economic aid to the musicians of the BSO. Charles O’Connell, recording executive for RCA Victor, attested, “The Boston [Symphony] job was a desirable one because of the longer season and greater stability of tenure.” Charles O’Connell, The Other Side of the Record (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947), 177.22 Quoted in Howe and Burk, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, 16.23 Robin Moore, Fiedler: The Colorful Mr. Pops, the Man and His Music (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), x.24 Since 1998, the history of the Pops on the Boston Pops website has been drastically abridged and leaves out any assertion about the initial models for the Pops concerts. See “History of the Boston Pops,” The Boston Symphony Orchestra, https://www.bso.org/pops/about/history (accessed May 15, 2023).25 “Notice for the BSO’s Popular Concerts, 1885.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1885bost/Pub_1885_POPS/mode/1up?view=theater.26 Gerhardt Hauptmann, “Das Abentuer meiner Jugend,” in Das Gesammelte Werk (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1942), 707–8. Cited in John Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 5, no. 1 (2008): 3–24, at 6.27 Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras.” See also William Weber, The Musician As Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).28 Other scholars refer to these ensembles as “private orchestras,” since they operated outside of patronage systems as a form of private enterprise. See Christoph Helmut Mahling, “Berlin: ‘Music in the Air,’” in The Early Romantic Era: Between Revolutions, 1789 and 1848, ed. Alexander L. Ringer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 109–40. Also, Nancy Newman, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010), 124.29 Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras,” 3–4.30 These early examples preceded other ensembles that performed through the end of the century led by Henri Valentino, Alfred Musard (son of Philippe), and cornet virtuoso Joseph Jean-Baptiste Larent Arban in Paris; Jullien in Paris and London; Hans Christian Lumbye in Copenhagen; Benjamin Bilse and Béla Kéler in Berlin, Liegnitz, and Wiesbaden; and Johann Strauss Jr., Josef Strauss, Eduard Strauss, and Josephine Amann-Weinlich (the only known woman conductor in this entrepreneurial tradition) in Vienna. Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras,” 23. For more on the Strauss family, see Joseph Wechsberg, The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family (New York: Putnam, 1973). And for more on the London concert scene, see Michael Musgrave, Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).31 Eileen Southern, “Frank Johnson of Philadelphia and His Promenade Concerts,” The Black Perspective in Music 5, no. 1 (1977); Dorothy T. Potter, “Food for Apollo”: Cultivated Music in Antebellum Philadelphia (Bethlehem, PA and Lanham, MD: Lehigh University Press and The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2011), 76–77.32 For extensive research on the Germania orchestra and its predecessors, see Newman, Good Music for a Free People.33 See Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975), 116–18; Katherine K. Preston, “American Orchestral Music at the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: Louis Antoine Jullien and George Bristow’s Jullien Symphony,” in Music of the United States of America, ed. Katherine K. Preston, vol. 23 (Middleton, WI: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, 2011), lvii; and Katherine K. Preston, “‘A Concentration of Talent on Our Musical Horizon’: The 1853–54 American Tour by Jullien’s Extraordinary Orchestra,” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 319–47.34 For more on Thomas, see George P. Upton, ed., Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1905); Charles Edward Russell, The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (New York: Doubleday Page & Company, 1927); David Ewen, The Man with the Baton: The Story of Conductors and Their Orchestras (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1936); Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Michael Saffle, Music and Culture in America, 1861–1918 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998); Patrick Warfield, “Making the Band: The Formation of John Philip Sousa’s Ensemble,” American Music 24, no. 1 (2006): 30–66; and Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras.”35 See Adam Carse, The Life of Jullien: Adventurer, Showman-Conductor and Establisher of the Promenade Concerts in England, Together With a History of Those Concerts Up to 1895 (Cambridge, England: Heffer, 1951), 5; Newman, Good Music for a Free People, 136; Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 307–8; and Katherine K. Preston, “A Rarefied Art? Opera and Operatic Music as Popular Entertainment in Late Nineteenth-Century Washington City,” in Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano, ed. John Koegel (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2011), 3–46.36 Newman asserts that at least “forty percent of the concerts between autumn 1848 and spring 1850 included a potpourri” and acknowledges that the percentage was probably even higher as detailed information on many of the programs is not available. Newman, Good Music for a Free People, 128–30.37 John Sullivan Dwight, Harbinger 6, no. 8 (December 25, 1847). Quoted in Newman, Good Music for a Free People, 281.38 Illustrated London News, November 9, 1850, quoted in Carse, The Life of Jullien, 66. For details of Jullien’s tour and repertory, see Preston, “American Orchestral Music at the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: Louis Antoine Jullien and George Bristow’s Jullien Symphony,” lvi–lxxi.39 Newman, Good Music for a Free People, 127.40 “Advertisement,” New York Times, May 25, 1868. See also Schabas, Theodore Thomas, 38; Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras,” 3–24, at 11; and Edwin T. Rice, “Thomas and Central Park Garden,” The Musical Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1940): 143–52. For additional examples of mixed programming in nineteenth-century London and Leipzig, see William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.41 Perry, Life and Letters, 29.42 See also Mary Wallace Davidson, “John Sullivan Dwight and the Harvard Musical Association Orchestra: A Help or a Hindrance?” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 247–68.43 Perry, Life and Letters, 47.44 Perry, The Life and Letters, 48.45 Perry, The Life and Letters, 58, 105–23.46 For more on concerts in London, see also Robert Beale, Charles Hallé: A Musical Life, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007); and Simon McVeigh, “‘An Audience for High-Class Music’: Concert Promoters and Entrepreneurs in Late-Nineteenth-Century London,” in The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists, ed. William Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 162–82.47 Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 48. For further biographical information about Neuendorff, see John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840–1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 67–70; and Shanet, Philharmonic, 160.48 “BSO Popular Concert Program, May 15, 1885.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1885bost/Pub_1885_POPS/mode/1up?view=theater.49 “Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History,” https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1885bost/Pub_1885_POPS/page/n74/mode/1up?view=theater.50 Cited in John William Riley, “Boston Pops Nation’s Most Successful Symphonic Enterprise,” Boston Sunday Globe, May 16, 1948.51 Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras,” 6.52 Cited in Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, 209. For more on the London Promenade Concerts from the perspective of architecture and environment, see Jonathan Hicks, “In Memoriam Indoor Fountains: Promenade Concerts and the Built Environment,” Nineteenth-Century Music 45, no. 1 (2021): 37–48.53 “First BSO Promenade Concert Program, July 1, 1885.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1885bost/Pub_1885_POPS/page/n78/mode/1up?view=theater.54 Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History.55 Hermann Erler, a German publisher, composer, and author, adopted the pseudonym Ernst Scherz for his musical parodies. Ernst Scherz, “Kommt ein vogel geflogen: paradistische humoreske im style von Mozart, Verdi, Weber, Wagner etc. als einlage für operetten und possen (soloscene) für eine singstimme und piano.” Musical Score, 1900, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, Previously published by Ries & Erler Musik-Verlagshandlung in Berlin, https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=22017&versionNumber=1.56 No strict definition of “promenade concerts” emerges from Christoph Mahling, Nancy Newman, John Spitzer, or William Weber’s work. See also Nicholas Kenyon et al., “Proms and London Concert Life” (paper presented at the British Library Saul Seminars, Studies in Recorded Music, British Library, April 20, 2004); and Jennifer R. Doctor, David C. H. Wright, and Nicholas Kenyon, The Proms: A New History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007).57 “BSO Promenade Concert Program, July 17, 1885.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1885bost/Pub_1885_POPS/page/n85/mode/1up?view=theater.58 Newman, Good Music for a Free People, 126.59 Newman, Good Music for a Free People, 135.60 Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, Illustration 17.61 Upton, Theodore Thomas, 55.62 For more on the planning and construction of Symphony Hall, see Richard Poate Stebbins, The Making of Symphony Hall Boston: A History with Documents (Boston: Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc., 2000). With the BSO having left Music Hall, and Symphony Hall under construction until the fall, during the 1900 season the newly dubbed “Pops” concert were performed in Boston’s Mechanic’s Hall.63 “First BSO Pops Concert Program, May 10, 1900.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1900bost/mode/1up?view=theater. William Weber makes the connection between promenade concerts and “pops” concerts in Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, 208.64 “Music Hall: The Promenade Concerts,” Boston Transcript, May 13, 1895.65 “Advertisements that Refer to the ‘Pops,’ May 13, 1895 and May 31, 1898.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1895bost/page/n8/mode/1up?view=theater and https://archive.org/details/bostonpopsorches1898bost/page/n136/mode/1up?view=theater.66 Steven Ledbetter, 100 Years of the Boston Pops (Boston: Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc., 1985), 19.67 Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur-Conductors and Their Orchestras,” 22. Also, Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, 208–31.68 Mark Clague, “Building the American Symphony Orchestra: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of a Twenty-First-Century Musical Institution,” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 25–52.69 Shanet, Philharmonic. For more on ensembles in nineteenth-century New York, see Matthew Reichert, “Carl Bergmann the Pioneer: The Introduction of Zukunftsmusik to the New York Concert Repertory,” in Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano, ed. John Koegel (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2011), 211–26. For more on the founding of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, see Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, 212.70 The transition from itinerant to permanent orchestras was not immediate. For example, The London Philharmonic gave just eight concerts annually through most of the nineteenth century and the Vienna Philharmonic gave no more than two concerts annually until after 1854, when the ensemble was revived after a five-year hiatus. In the United States, the BSO is considered the first orchestra that annually performed a full season of concerts with the same personnel returning year after year.71 Like William Weber and others, I follow the contemporaneous use of the words “classical,” “serious,” and “light” to distinguish the repertory that eventually formed the core of the orchestral canon from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the orchestral repertory that was excluded from that canon. See Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste. For more discussion on such problematic terms as “classical” and “serious music,” see Ralph P. Locke, “On Exoticism, Western Art Music, and the Words We Use,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 69, no. 4 (2012): 318–28.72 “BSO Winter Concert Programs, October 22, 1881 and October 29, 1881.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://cdm15982.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/PROG/id/189822 and https://cdm15982.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/PROG/id/189827.73 “BSO Winter Concert Programs, January 10, 1885 and February 20, 1886.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://cdm15982.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/PROG/id/190188 and https://cdm15982.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/PROG/id/190349.74 “BSO Winter Concert Program, November 28, 1885.” Program Booklet, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, https://cdm15982.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/PROG/id/190285.75 “Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections-HENRY Performance History.” Unfortunately the original program is missing from the BSO archive. The concert data has been entered from BSO Program Office index cards, which provide a record of what works were performed, but do not show the order of the performance. The index card for “Ballet Music” from Demon by Rubinstein indicates that unspecified “excerpts” from the larger work were performed.76 Photographer unknown, Photograph, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, http://collections.bso.org/digital/collection/images/id/571/rec/1.77 Biographical information about Arthur Fiedler can be found in a variety of sources, including Harry Ellis Dickson, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops: An Irreverent Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981); Johanna Fiedler, Arthur Fiedler: Papa, the Pops and Me (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Moore, Fiedler; and Carol Green Wilson, Arthur Fiedler: Music for the Millions (New York: Evans Publishing Company, 1968).78 Antonio Sotomayor, Printed Matter, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, http://collections.bso.org/digital/collection/images/id/546/rec/1.79 See George Whitney Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). For more on Herbert, see Joseph Kaye, Victor Herbert: The Biography of America’s Greatest Composer of Romantic Music (New York: G. H. Watt, 1931); Edward N. Waters, Victor Herbert: A Life in Music (New York: Macmillan, 1955); and Neil Gould, Victor Herbert: A Theatrical Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). For more on Sousa, see Paul E. Bierley, John Philip Sousa: American Phenomenon (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1973); Paul E. Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Patrick Warfield, Making the March King: John Philip Sousa’s Washington Years, 1854–1893 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); and “Making the Band: The Formation of John Philip Sousa’s Ensemble.”80 Wilson, Arthur Fiedler, 10–11.81 Arthur Fiedler Collection, Boston Public Library. Box 16.82 John Philip Sousa, “How to Make Programs,” Musical Record 383 (December 1893): 15.83 Bierley, John Philip Sousa, xi.84 Moses Smith, “Tarasova with Sinfonietta,” Boston Evening Transcript, January 31, 1927. See also clippings from the Musical Courier, February 17, 1927, and Musical America, February 12, 1927, found in Fiedler’s press scrapbooks. Arthur Fiedler Collection, Boston Public Library. Box 11.85 Moore, Fiedler, 99.86 See Alex Warburton, “Planned for Banks of Charles, Free Symphony Concerts,” Boston Advertiser, June 22, 1929; and Jacqueline Houton, “The History of the Hatch Shell: 79 Years of Summer Sounds,” bostonmagazine.com, May 16, 2019, https://www.bostonmagazine.com/property/2019/05/16/hatch-shell-history/. For the entirety of his career, Fiedler continued to be associated with patriotic celebrations, particularly the Fourth of July. In 1974, he and David Mugar, a prominent Boston entrepreneur and philanthropist, initiated the tradition of ending Fourth of July concerts on the Esplanade with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture accompanied by cannons and a fireworks display. Today, this tradition has become common at nearly every symphonic celebration of the holiday across the country.87 Between 1919 through 1931, Ravinia was known as the “summer opera capital of the world,” welcoming to its stage the most-celebrated singers from Europe who sailed to America to perform at the Metropolitan Opera and were in no hurry to make that arduous return voyage. Ravinia shuttered for four years during the Great Depression, reopening in 1936 with a heavier emphasis on symphonic music. See “History of Ravinia,” Ravinia Festival, https://www.ravinia.org/History.88 The first season at the Hollywood Bowl began on July 11, 1922, with conductor Alfred Hertz and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 1945, Leopold Stokowski formed the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, drawing its players from among members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and various film studios orchestras. See Kenneth H. Marcus, Musical Metropolis: Los Angeles and the Creation of a Music Culture, 1880–1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was relaunched by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association in 1991 under conductor John Mauceri, who concluded his tenure in 2006.89 Lewisohn Stadium, named after its principal benefactor, Adolph Lewisohn, was used for musical performances for nearly five decades starting in 1918, when the venue was built and programmed under the supervision of Minnie Guggenheimer. See Sara Rimer, “Commemorating Lewisohn Stadium,” The New York Times, May 15, 1985; Harold C. Schonberg, “Au Revoir: After Nearly Half a Century, Minnie Guggenheimer Leaves the Stadium,” New York Times, August 16, 1964; and Jonathan Stern, Music for the American People: The Lewisohn Stadium Concerts (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2019). The New York Philharmonic moved their outdoor summer series to Central Park in 1965, and their “Concerts in the Parks” continue to the present day.90 Spearheaded by local music organizations and civic leaders and coordinated by a new city agency, the Philadelphia Municipal Bureau of Music, Robin Hood Dell was designed to make symphonic music available to a wider audience than those who attended concerts at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s winter home, the Academy of Music. Twelve thousand people attended the inaugural concert, conducted by Alexander Smallens. See “About Us,” The Dell Music Center, https://thedellmusiccenter.com/venue/about-us/ (accessed May 9, 2023); and “From the Vault: Inaugural Robin Hood Dell Concert (1930),” Mann Center, updated September 4, 2020, https://manncenter.org/vault-7-8-30.91 In 1936, Serge Koussevitzky began to conduct the BSO in summer concerts in the Berkshires, on the estate that would come to be known Tanglewood. In contrast to the Esplanade concerts, which were ostensibly founded in the spirit of social democracy and intended to be popular, Koussevitzky explicitly announced that the concerts at Tanglewood “will serve those who seek the best in music and related arts, [those] who are anxious to refresh mind and personality through contact with the élite in art and culture.” Koussevitzky’s repertory and programming at Tanglewood thus mirrored the “classical” programs he conducted during the BSO’s winter season. See “The Trustees of the BSO, Serge Koussevitzky conductor, announce the opening term July 8–August 18, 1940 of the Berkshire Music Center at ‘Tanglewood’ Home of the Berkshire Symphonic Festival.” Robert Laning Humphrey Collection, Boston Public Library. Box 9.92 David Nilsson, photographer, Boston Symphony Orchestra Digital Collections, The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, http://collections.bso.org/digital/collection/images/id/557/rec/1.93 Music historian Donald Meyer wrote of Leopold Stokowski, “If ever there was a conductor who traversed the realms of high and low culture, Stokowski was he.” Donald C. Meyer, “Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra: High, Middle, and Low Culture, 1937–1954,” in Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York and London: Garland, 2000), 301–22, at 12.94 See Olin Downes, “Expanded Season at Stadium,” New York Times, June 11, 1939, “Music of Lighter Fare Fills the Air,” Pittsburgh, PA Post-Gazette, August 21, 1949, and Tim Page, “The NSO’s 75 Years: A Slowly Building Crescendo,” Washington Post, November 13, 2005. Programs support this claim, featuring works that overlapped with the repertoire of the Pops. See, for example, the programs of the Philadelphia Music Festival from 1945 to 1952, reprinted in Adler, “Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music,” 129–31.95 Meyer, “Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra,” 306.96 The canonization of the classical music repertory is a rich field of study. Some seminal texts include Peter J. Burkholder, “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years,” Journal of Musicology 2 (1983): 115–34 and “The Twentieth Century and the Orchestra as Museum,” in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. Joan Peyser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), 409–34; Christopher A. Williams, “Of Canons & Context: Toward a Historiography of Twentieth-Century Music,” Repercussions 2, no. 1 (1993): 31–74; and William Weber, “The History of Musical Canon,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 336–55.97 For the early history of the Cincinnati Symphony, see Karen Ahlquist, “Performances to ‘Permanence’: Orchestra Building in Late Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati,” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 156–74.98 Forthcoming research builds on the work in this article and reclaims symphonic pops as a legitimate object of study to open important conversations about race, national identity, commercialism, power, and privilege in classical music in the United States. See Adler, Orchestrating Whiteness.99 This slogan appeared notably on three 2-LP retrospective collections from RCA Victor in the 1950s–1960s (“60 Years of Music America Loves Best,” RCA Victor Red Seal, LM-6074).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by generous grants from the American Association of University Women, the Boston Public Library, DePauw University, the Music Library Association, the Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, and the University of Houston-Downtown.