Events of 1848, a year of revolutions in many German principalities, led directly to the departure for America of a group of some 25 orchestral musicians calling themselves the Germania Musical Society. They were dedicated to principles of communal support and democratic governance, ‘one for all and all for one’. Although not the first group of foreign musicians to immigrate to America in this period, they were probably the most influential. Within the six years of its existence in the United States, the GMS made a huge impact by exposing thousands of Americans in eastern and midwestern urban centres to programs containing the substantial works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber, Liszt and Wagner, as well as a variety of lighter fare by these and other composers. They were dissolved in 1854, but their legacy lived on. The Germanians performed at an impeccable level of artistry, and although their general history has been known for some time, Nancy Newman, one of the authors in this collection, has written the definitive account of their impact elsewhere.Footnote ¹ Newman's chapter, ‘Gender and the Germanians: “Art-Loving Ladies” in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life’, is just one especially attractive example from this diverse collection of hardcore archival musicology. Other chapters, including this one, add a rich transatlantic perspective. All the authors obviously are steeped in the details of their separate sub-topics; most write well. Many observations and conclusions reached here surely will prove to be of interest for European music specialists as well as Americanists. This is not a parochial volume, but it presents a number of carefully documented case studies. (Neither is it unconcerned with larger theoretical or cultural issues, although it is devoid of ‘music theory’ as that term is usually understood.)

Book-ended with a historiographic ‘Introduction’ by Deane L. Root and a contextual and demographic ‘Afterword’ by Ronald G. Walters, this set of essays, comprising the work of 20 authors altogether, is divided into five thematic sections, all addressing how American orchestras came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century. Each of the sections – named (1) ‘Ubiquity and Diversity’, (2) ‘The Orchestra and the American City’, (3) ‘Conductors, Promoter, Patrons’, (4) ‘America and Europe’ and (5) ‘Orchestral Repertory’ –is preceded by a five- or six-page mini-essay by editor John Spitzer.

The papers that served as the basis for the book were first presented at a conference at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, on the nineteenth-century American orchestra. The conference was associated with ‘Music in Gotham’, a comprehensive archival project headed by Adrienne Fried Block (d. 2009), to whose memory the book is dedicated. But owing to Spitzer's efforts this book avoids the unfocused character of many a Festschift and manages to offer much in the way of new material with a variety of perspectives, while not seeming wildly diffuse. The arguments made here deliver a subtle kind of analysis and present a chronologically sensible and intellectually coherent final product.

In particular, Spitzer and his co-authors take issue with several more or less standard but erroneous or un-nuanced assumptions that crop up in discussions of nineteenth-century American concert music: (1) that there is a clear and obvious difference between professional groups and amateur ones; (2) that the most permanent and long-lived ensembles are by reason of longevity alone the most important or influential ones; (3) that questions of taste and appeal, summarized in the ‘high brow/low brow’ binary, have been inadequately defined and settled by Lawrence Levine in his famous bookFootnote ² and (4) that American orchestras performed comparatively few new works by American composers in this period.

The authors also expand the discussion of American concert music in many directions, focusing on and comparing a large number of different ensembles, their tours, their economic impact, the changing contents of their repertories, their association with famous soloists, and so forth. Some of the authors investigate the roles of women in particular, and a few in the penultimate section explore more thoroughly the relationship between European musicians and patrons on both sides of the Atlantic with American audiences. Worthy of note in this respect are the chapters by Katherine K. Preston, focused on the background and tours of the extraordinary French conductor, Louis Antoine Jullien (1812–1860), and Barbara Haws, devoted to Ureli Corelli Hill (?1805–1875), ‘An American Musician's European Travels and the Creation of the New York Philharmonic’.

The varied institutional character and structure of orchestras in the United States over the last century and a half is the specific concern of the four essays in the section entitled ‘Ubiquity and Diversity’. Beginning with his work on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mark Clague looks backward to compare the city's Orchestral Association of 1891 with its present-day configuration to discuss the structural underpinnings of both. In so doing, he illuminates significant economic, corporate and entrepreneurial factors in order to flesh out the inner workings of its long-lived civic presence. Anna-Lise Santella's essay, ‘Modeling Music’, applies a similar approach to all-women orchestras, observing that the early efforts eventually led to a point where ‘the stage became a platform from which [orchestras] could advocate for more opportunities for women and actually get them’ (p. 77). How the economic effects of growing orchestras were shaped by the musicians who played in them is discussed by John Spitzer in his analysis of the scope and thrust of the musicians’ union movement, which sprang up at first from strictly local ‘protective associations’ and coalesced in 1896 when the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) joined up with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) (p. 79).

The fundamental feature of most American music-making, distinguishing it from practically every other sort of music in the world (!) is the way it is supported financially, or to be more precise, in the utter lack of national or state patronage for either individuals or groups (Federal military bands being the principal exception here). This fact has special pertinence to civic orchestras. Government parsimony in the funding of public music coupled with the assumption that artistic culture, if it wants to exist at all, must pay for itself in a democratic society, was very much taken for granted in the United States during the nineteenth century, just as it is today. Notwithstanding the occasional flourish of supportive rhetoric from late twentieth-century American leaders, neither the salaries of artists nor the works they produce are deemed national priorities. It all comes down to money, and it is not surprising that American musicians have always been Jacks and Jills of all trades (or have possessed considerable independent means). Many questions – ranging from institutional stability to marketing to status to taste and class – flow directly out of this exceptional American perspective. Such concerns are also placed front and centre in this volume.

The second section, ‘The Orchestra and the American City’, gets down to cases, inquiring into how geographic locality and musical function can inform our understanding of orchestral growth. John Graziano writes about ‘Invisible Instruments: Theater Orchestras in New York, 1850–1900’, and he presents a considerable amount of statistical data about off-stage and unseen musicians (often used to accompany mostly spoken plays), which is further contextualized by Spitzer's later point that ‘the primary employment for orchestra musicians, both in Europe and the United States, was the theater …’ (p. 317). It is hardly surprising, then, to read in William Weber's fine piece (in section four), ‘Orchestral Programs in Boston, 1841–55, in European Prospective’, that during the period under discussion ‘almost every concert included voices as well as instruments’ (p. 374). Naturally, the programme contents were often derived from the very repertory theatrical singers had already mastered for their stage roles. John Koegel and Jonas Westover take up the function that music played in the ‘cultivation of sociability’ (p. 155) in German-American beer gardens, which employed hundreds of musicians who played not only popular dance tunes and salon-inspired background music, but more ambitious symphonic works of Beethoven and other classical composers. The gardens’ Sunday afternoon ‘sacred concerts’ attracted prodigious family crowds (pp. 131, 143). An analytical lens is also applied in this section to the development and fate of orchestras in Cincinnati, Chicago and Washington, DC.

Names that come up for examination in section three, besides those already mentioned, include Bernard Ullmann (?1817–1885), a dynamic impresario who managed New York's Academy of Music (predecessor of the Metropolitan Opera); John Sullivan Dwight (1813–1893), Bostonian editor/publisher of his eponymous journal and co-creator of the Harvard Musical Association; and Leopold Damrosch (1832–1885), a Prussian-born and -trained conductor, who, as a devotee of Liszt and other German moderns, brought Wagnerian opera to the Met, created his own orchestra (after a difficult year leading the New York Philharmonic), organized mass concerts unprecedented in New York during the 1880s, and fathered two sons whose impact would continue to be felt in American music well into the twentieth century. The decisive roles played by all of these men had as much to do with advocacy, business management and securing patronage as with musical sound production.

Clearly, issues of economic class and social prestige are very much on the minds of the authors of these essays. Pressures on entrepreneurs to draw ever-larger audiences vied with impulses by some leaders to ‘raise’ the cultural horizons of a wealthy elite. Sometimes these approaches could be complementary; sometimes not. American orchestras had to make their own way and they did so in a huge variety of institutional forms (p. 27 and ff).

When Laurence Levine opened up the discussion about the replacement of what he viewed as the ‘common culture’ of early Federal period America with a ‘cultural hierarchy’ that distinguished high from low (or ‘classical’ from ‘popular’, or ‘cultivated’ from ‘vernacular’) in the second half of the nineteenth century, he created a helpful but incomplete model that many of these essays explore. John Spitzer addresses Levine's dichotomy, noting that

The necessity for orchestra aficionados to adopt focused marketing strategies is summarized in Spitzer's third introductory mini-essay, ‘Marketing the American Orchestra’, in which he breaks out five dominant options: ‘selling spectacle’, ‘selling the soloist’, ‘selling novelty’, ‘selling quality’, and ‘selling culture’ (pp. 220–23). This bold outline also helps to clarify how conditions changed from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas an orchestra of the 1840s, especially an exotic foreign one, in and of itself might be enough to capture a sizable audience, in later decades the sales pitch – needing to appeal to a larger, more ethnically diverse and more musically educated public – had to be more sophisticated. This changing population coupled with successive waves of new immigrants from Europe between 1840 and 1890 meant that while American orchestras were inevitably tied to European ensembles and to some extent shared ‘the same transatlantic musical culture’ (p. 314), economic circumstances would continue to dominate the agenda for American orchestra managers more strongly than for Europeans.

While a few books in print treat single orchestras (or patrons or conductors or soloists) in one place or examine American concert music in general during narrow slices of time, there is no comparable book out on the market that covers such a large number of issues and perspectives during the nineteenth century and attempts to link the subtopics so carefully among themselves. There is much that is fresh and insightful to be found in this volume. John Spitzer deserves special commendation for pulling together what at first must have seemed like an impossibly divergent set of essays. Owing to its accessible style, lack of technical jargon and wealth of concrete detail, this book may even be of practical use for modern orchestra promoters. As a conscientiously executed piece of scholarly work, it deserves to have, and may well achieve, a broad, multi-disciplinary readership.