The unprecedented development of university degree courses in music and growth in conservatories of music throughout the nineteenth century led to institutionalized music education becoming a significant promoter and gatekeeper of nineteenth-century musical culture. Ideas central to our later constructions of classical and popular music, such as the “ideological and institutional accoutrements of the work-concept: the autonomy aesthetic, the ‘serious’ listener, the canon, music academies, [and] ‘great man’ music history” (Middleton 2000, 61), were buttressed by these “formidable institutional developments” (Sassoon 2006, 246). In turn, their growth can be traced to wider political, economic, and social changes being wrought across continental Europe, changes which quickly spread—whether as a result of colonial conquest or more benignly through expanding networks of trade and immigration—across the Americas, Asia, and the British Dominions.
Chief among them was a growing desire among both musicians and those who used their service to be recognized as a professional class. At the start of the nineteenth century in Britain, as Cyril Ehrlich notes, there were no “generally acknowledged forms of training, technical accomplishment, promotion, and hierarchy” for musicians (Ehrlich 1985, 31). Training was based principally on a guild or master–apprentice model. As demand for musical services grew (particularly outside the homes and salons of the aristocracy), so did demand for professional accreditation and for the associated social status that it would provide. At a public meeting in London on March 12, 1864, to form a College of Organists there, for example, the chair noted:
It will be readily admitted, that as a body we do not hold the same position in the eyes of the world as the medical and legal professions. Yet mankind generally, I believe, prefers Music to either physic or law. (Laughter.) Nor do Musicians even share worldly honours with painters; —and why not? Music, unlike painting, is not only an art—it is a science as well. (quoted in McCrea 2015, 42)
Similarly, an editorial by the London Standard observed that “professional association and fellowship were clearly desirable and manageable amongst church musicians so that the conditions enjoyed in other arts and professions might be replicated and lead beneficially to higher status and material reward” (quoted in McCrea 2015, 44).
The professionalization of music education is arguably one of the more significant facts of nineteenth-century music history. For the first time it was possible for a musician to be considered a composer or a conductor, not just a performer or a teacher who also composed and conducted. Musicians “were no longer mere entertainers just a notch above the servants, but rich professionals now deemed to be artists of genius” (Sassoon 2006, 530). The rise of formal teaching positions in conservatories also provided one of the early routes for women to have an independent career in music outside the opera house (Nash 2013a).
The growing demand for music teachers encouraged a parallel growth of systems of training and accreditation that could provide credibility, surety, and currency to the qualifications of both music teacher and music pupil. This in turn was supported by the growth in music publishing and the development and mass production of the upright pianoforte for domestic use. Music thus became increasingly important in the day-to-day lives of a burgeoning and economically and politically empowered middle class. Access to and cultivation of music education became a signifier of middle-class aspiration, and the skills and interests it promoted only took on more significance as new forms of popular musical culture also emerged through the nineteenth century. As Derek B. Scott notes, “In the first half of the century, popular music was possible in the ‘best of homes,’” but later “the message of ‘high art’ was that there was a ‘better class of music’ and another kind that appealed to ‘the masses’” (Scott 2001, 565). The very rise of popular music as a separate category of music arguably “assumes a hierarchy of supposed (though not always real) levels of musical education” (Weber 2004, xxiii).
Many of the differences we find in the evolution of the institutions of musical learning that arose across the world in the nineteenth century can be associated with local differences in the character of this new middle class. In post-revolutionary Paris, according to William Weber, “the bourgeois elite had less stability but greater independence than its counterpart in London. The challenge to the aristocracy during the Revolution gave the class greater self-consciousness as an elite than was found among the group anywhere in Europe” (15). This was also true in Vienna, where “the recent development of the upper-middle class muddied the definition of class lines and instilled in its members an intense self-consciousness concerning status” (15). Weber argues, however, that in London the middle classes had found a more comfortable accommodation with the surviving old aristocratic elites and did not, at least at the beginning of the century, have quite the need for prominent forms of class self-assertion. Thus, despite its dominant size and economic importance in the nineteenth century, London was to be one of the later adopters of conservatoires and degrees in music.
A growing interest in music education in the nineteenth century also reflected music’s status in relation to some of the broader idealistic, political, and philosophical ideas of the time. A “project of autonomy” (Samson 2001, 9), for instance, argued that music should be valued in abstract, not utilitarian, terms—the chief aim of music education was to assist in the creation, propagation, and appreciation of good music as a thing in itself. One specific impact of this kind of thinking was that church music became increasingly understood in ways “distanced from its liturgical function and approached as an autonomous musical work” (Cole 2008, 3). Cultural polemics like Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy ([1869] 2011) argued that it was the cultivation of “higher” cultural values that separated society from barbarism. For Arnold, cultural education was the transmission of “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” a vision for arts education that has more recently become a byword for cultural elitism (2011, viii). His defense of high culture, however, arose ultimately because he saw it as:
the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. (viii)
Similarly, in the United States at this time “[p]rominent educators and social-minded leaders were confident that music could shore up humanity’s ethical and emotional being, teach democratic principles, and encourage allegiance to an undivided national society” (Tawa 1984, 21–22).
Friedrich Schiller had already argued in his Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) (1795) that an attention to aesthetic matters should be of fundamental concern for modern educators. He believed that societal progress was at risk of being achieved at the expense of individual integrity, and that there was a gulf opening up between imagination and intuition, on the one hand, and rationality and science, on the other (Schiller 1795). His arguments were to echo throughout the nineteenth century in debates about whether music was an intrinsic good in itself or whether it was, or needed to be, justified in terms of its social usefulness. This desire to influence public thinking about the nature and importance of music in society became both a significant cause and effect of the rise of institutions of musical learning. By 1884, the London Times observed that music was
no longer the “idle pleasure of an empty day” reserved as a privilege for the few; it is the universal language known to all the nations of the earth, and to all classes of each nation, and its highest forms should be made accessible to even the lowest strata of society, so as to accomplish its mission of social refinement and moral elevation. (Anon. 1884, 12)
Such expressions of social and aesthetic idealism, however, also reflected widely held prejudices and fears about industrialization, incipient globalization, and mass culture. Thus, the Times editorial continued: “[a]s regards the lower classes they have long since forsaken their beautiful old melodies for the commonplace trash which music-halls, street organs, and negro minstrels have brought within their reach” (12). In response there were those who saw widening access to quality music education as one practical means open to governments and philanthropically disposed private citizens alike to advance social cohesion or social mobility. Their initiatives were not always universally welcomed, however. In the German-speaking states, for example, educational responses to the upheavals of the 1848–49 revolutions were divided between those who supported pathways for the elevation of the working classes to the middle classes and those who lamented the rise of a working class “emasculated by liberal doctrines and enfeebled by middle-class pursuits” (Garratt 2010, 202).
Within the bounds of their local circumstances, both universities and conservatories of music developed educational responses in an attempt to meet such pressures and needs, and appear to have done so with some success. By the century’s close, the norm across the Western world (fast being adopted globally) of musical instruction and accreditation being divided between the conservatory for practical performance and the university for theory and analysis, composition, and history was (with a few notable exceptions) firmly established.
Broadly speaking, the evolution of university education in the nineteenth century is characterized by increasing secularization and specialization. Two principal models emerged. The first, based in France, concentrated on organizing universities around specialist disciplinary colleges that offered strictly controlled curricula, an approach that had emerged out of the tabula rasa of the Revolution and its associated social and administrative reforms. The second, based in the German States, was in part a reaction to Napoleon’s rise to military and political dominance and the French occupation of Prussia after the Battle of Jena in October 1806. It argued that universities should be concerned above all with the pursuit of knowledge through research (Rüegg 2004, 5) and was developed and promoted chiefly by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Both models ensured that the university was to play a central role in the propagation of the modern nation-state; university qualifications became a passport for entry into the higher ranks of state bureaucracies. The dominance of particular languages of instruction in these universities also had the effect of making speakers of more local or minority languages more self-conscious about their own cultural differences within these states and helped embolden nationalist movements to explore what the political consequences of such differences might be.
Of particular significance for music’s ongoing place within the university was Humboldt’s belief that the pursuit of empirical forms of knowledge should be balanced by more subjective and idealistic forms of inquiry. In a letter to Schiller of February 13, 1796, he argued that all knowledge dealt with either “real objects or ideas, either with the conditional or unconditional,” and set out to devise an organization of educational departments around this division:
[1] Technical sciences and arts which deal with the real objects of experience for a definite and conditional purpose
[2] Speculative sciences which deal with all ideas situated outside experience. …
However the conditional should be dealt with according to the rules of the unconditional, that is, according to an ideal. This ideal is either an ideal of intuitive knowledge or phantasy, or of perception or reason. And thus two new departments are formed:
[3] Aesthetic sciences, arts, that is dealing with real objects according to phantasy, intuition
[4] Teleological sciences, which deal with real objects according to the ideal of reason, of perfection. (Roberts 2009, 38–39)
Underlying such an inclusive vision was his belief that such a fully rounded educational system would lead not only to an increase in knowledge but also to a better society.
The university that Humboldt founded in Berlin in 1810 soon became a world-leading center for research across the sciences and humanities. In 1830, Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795–1866) was appointed professor of music there—the first such appointment in any German university—giving lectures not only on the theory of musical composition but also on the purpose and method of musical education. “The primary object of musical education and musical instruction,” he later argued, “is to promote the cultivation of the art. …But the artist and the teacher of art, as well as the amateur, belong to the people … the effects of musical art are, without restriction, directed upon the people itself and cannot fail to affect its intellectual and social condition” (Marx 1855, 117). A belief in the nation-building potential of music education can also be found in the nascent music scholarship of Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818), who was director of music at the University of Göttingen. The full title of his seminal biography of Bach (Leipzig, 1802) betrays the broader ambitions he held for his scholarship: Über Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke. Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst (On Johann Sebastian Bach’s Life, Art, and Artworks. For Patriotic Admirers of Genuine Musical Art).
The promotion of scholarly research in music by Marx and later holders of the Berlin Chair of Music, such as Philipp Spitta (1841–1894), heralded the establishment by Guido Adler (1855–1941) of codified subdisciplines of historical and comparative Musikwissenschaft toward the end of the century. Adler had himself received a doctoral degree in music history in 1861 supervised by the Viennese critic and music aesthetician Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), who held a chair in aesthetics and music history at the University of Vienna. The growing separation of the study of compositions from the study of composing is reflected in the emergence of musical analysis as a distinct area of music research and resulted “in a more intense awareness of the past and of the value of masterpieces as durable objects to be revered, enjoyed, and studied, even when the relevance of such study to the study of composition remained unclear” (Dunsby and Whittall 1988, 16). By this time music theory, music psychology, and acoustics had also begun to emerge as distinct research interests, and these are codified in Adler’s 1885 essay “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (“The Scope, Method and Aim of Musicology”). Adler later founded the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut at the University of Vienna. His disciplinary ideas have continued to be influential in guiding the organization of university music departments across the globe.
Another Berlin appointment—that of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) to the chair of physics at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University—also had consequences for the study of music in universities. His groundbreaking study On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863) aimed to “connect the boundaries of the two sciences, which, although drawn toward each other by many natural affinities, have hitherto remained practically distinct—I mean the boundaries of physical and physiological acoustics on the one side, and of musical science and esthetics on the other” (quoted in Kursell 2015, 353). While the idea that the study of music could be both a science and an art would prove instrumental in helping to convince newer universities across the globe to include music in their areas of research, in reality acoustics in particular remained something more likely to be explored by professors of physics than professors of music; and more likely to be taught in a conservatoire rather than a university music department. Similarly, organology and early music performance practice developed first in conservatoires: Paris (1864), Brussels (1877), and Berlin (1888) all established historic instrument collections.1 Instead, philology became the principal scholarly tool for the nineteenth-century musicologist. The Belgian François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), although principally associated with the Paris Conservatory and then the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, did much to establish the pre-eminence of such music scholarship, as did the American music journalist Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817–1897), whose greatest achievement was a scholarly biography of Ludwig van Beethoven. The early dominance and widespread influence of German musicology helped to entrench the Austro-Germanic canon as the presumptive singular achievement and exemplar of Western musical thought.
While the medieval foundations of Oxford and Cambridge had long had music on their statutes, by contrast they had little internal motivation to develop music degree programs at the start of the nineteenth century. There, the foundational idea that music was both a form of natural philosophy and a kind of applied theology had lost favor under the scrutiny of Enlightenment reason. Furthermore, the practical need to train musicians to serve the needs of the liturgy of the English Church had ebbed in the face of both social and denominational pressures. For the first half of the nineteenth century, therefore, actual taught courses in music were at best sporadic and, more often than not, nonexistent. When appointed, professors of music rarely resided locally, let alone offered structured courses of lectures.
By the middle of the century, both a growing awareness of and competition from other universities across Europe and growing demand locally for music degrees encouraged this situation to change.2 The appointment of the Reverend Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley (1825–1889)—a man who brought with him both aristocratic rank and considerable personal conviction—to the chair of music at Oxford in 1855 precipitated the development of a formal curriculum there. His appointment also gave an immediate and lasting fillip to the wider effort to secure a higher social standing for music and a professional standing for musicians across the British Empire. Similar extensive curriculum reforms followed the appointments of Sir William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875) to the chair in music at Cambridge in 1856 and Sir Robert Prescott Stewart (1825–1894) to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1861. As the first president of the Musical Association and as the publisher of several important theoretical treatises, Ouseley also helped to promote the standing of musical scholarship both within and without the university. However, as a religious and aesthetic traditionalist, he also secured a commitment to conservative musical values, particularly in music composition. Rosemary Golding suggests that this, combined with the high social standing of the Oxford and Cambridge degrees, “perhaps contributed towards an early sense of distinction between ‘art’ and popular music” (Golding 2013, 209). Ultimately, it was not to be Oxford or Cambridge but, rather, a conservatoire, the Royal College of Music, which would become the center of the “English Musical Renaissance” toward the close of the nineteenth century (Hughes and Stradling 2001).
But there was another, more fundamental problem concerning the degrees at Oxford and Cambridge (and those to be instituted later at the new University of Durham): the continued existence of religious barriers to matriculation or graduation (Twaddle 1966). A challenge to this state of affairs in 1834 failed, and one result was the UK government’s granting of a charter to establish University College, London, and King’s College, London—and ultimately, the University of London. The appointment of John Pyke Hullah (1812–1884) as the inaugural professor of voice at King’s College, London, reflected the college’s “origins in utilitarian and nonconformist philosophy, its adoption of many of the roles taken on elsewhere by Mechanics and Literary Institutes, and its intention to provide an education for the ‘masses’ (or, at least the new bourgeois and aspirant middle classes)” (Golding 2013, 206). The inclusion of overtly academic subjects such as acoustics and an insistence that music students also met more general arts requirements helped to ensure that music formed a subject suitable to the university’s understanding of itself as the arbiter of academic education and academic standards.
The University of London began awarding degrees in music in 1879; Edinburgh (1893), Manchester (1894), and Durham (1897) followed thereafter. William Pole, writing in The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular in 1886, noted that those lobbying the university a decade earlier were convinced that:
the institution of Degrees in Music by the University of London would, in forming an additional recognition of the status of the musical profession, sensibly tend to the advancement of musical learning, and, therefore, to the wider culture and refinement of the community. (Pole 1886, 461)
Music thus came to take its place in the pantheon of general scientific education that was being promoted both within British universities and which formed part of the wider push to broaden access to technical and aesthetic education across British society.
New degree courses in music were also inspired by the influence of nonconformist religious movements. Scottish Presbyterianism in particular had made its influence felt globally as a consequence of the dramatic expansion of the British Empire and the prominent role of Scottish colonists within it. An associated educational philosophy focused on personal morality; alongside music’s role in the promotion of a revitalized hymnody, missionaries came to appreciate its value “not as a moral force in its own right but as a satellite to the religious ‘cleansing’ of the new urban poor” (Fletcher 1987, 18). Class was to remain a defining influence. An anonymous correspondent to the Scottish Musical Monthly in July 1894 suggested that:
The Durham degree will continue to be sought by those who are good musicians, but have not got the advantage of an all-round education; the Oxford degree will still have attractions for the man who swears by Stainer and has £2 to spare; while the London degree, caviar to the general, will, unless an unexpected change in the regulations occurs, have charms only for the man who, besides being a musician, has points of contact with the larger circles of literature and science (as quoted in Golding 2013, 207).
University courses in music in the United States date from 1862, with the establishment of a faculty at Harvard University, and in particular with the appointment of John Knowles Paine (1839–1906) to the first chair of music in 1873. Musicology as it is generally understood today, however, only emerged gradually; most of the courses offered were initially introductory surveys of music history and music appreciation. As had been the case in the United Kingdom and Germany, the advent of high-level academic study in music only came with the appointment of prominent musician-scholars to academic positions—in particular, Horatio Parker (1863–1919) at Yale University in 1894, Leo Rich Lewis (1865–1945) at Tufts University in 1895, and Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) at Columbia University in 1896 (Colwell et al. 2013). The first university chair in musicology was not established in America until 1930, with the appointment of Professor Otto Kinkeldey (1878–1966) at Cornell University.
In Japan, the recommendations of the Ministry of Education’s Ongaku Torishirabegakari (Music Investigation Committee, 1879–1887) led to the establishment of the Tokyo Music School in 1887, which adopted the German model and actively pursued research and instruction in both Western music and traditional Japanese music. Toward the end of the century, technological advances were also aiding this process. Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 made it possible for those wishing to study music outside the Western notated tradition to make fieldwork recordings for transcription and analysis. From then onward, as Bob van der Linden notes, “besides collections of instruments, photographs, and notations by the ear, two-to-four-minute samples of music on wax cylinders became part of the musicologist’s stock-in-trade” (van der Linden 2013, 6). Furthermore, and partly as a result, the centrality of the Western tradition came under challenge, just as it was also being bolstered by ideas drawn from Social Darwinism. Alexander John Ellis (1814–1890), a mathematician and philologist at Cambridge who also translated Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von der Tomempfindungen, published an article in the Journal of the Society of Arts entitled “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations” (1885), which “challenged Western assumptions of natural tonal and harmonic laws, and indeed of cultural superiority, by arguing that musical scales were the product of cultural invention” (van der Linden 2013, 6). However, the study of music was now also becoming part of cultural anthropology. Charles Samuel Myers was the first Briton to record non-Western music as part of an anthropological expedition organized by Cambridge University to the Torres Strait in 1898–99, and in The Evolution of the Art of Music (1893) Hubert Parry declared that the maturity of a particular musical culture depended “on the stage of each race’s ‘mental development’” (quoted in Clayton 2007, 76). “According to this evolutionist scheme,” van der Linden notes, “contemporary Western classical music had developed from ‘primitive’ music and of course was the highest stage to be reached” (van der Linden 2013, 5). Thus, the kinds of music studied in universities and how it was studied also helped to cement ideas about the centrality, if not the supremacy, of Western classical music and Western moral and political perspectives more generally.
The desire to promote the moralizing potential of music in society also informed and encouraged the parallel growth of conservatories in the nineteenth century. In the UK, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the provision of access to a general music education, let alone specialist performance education, had not been a national priority. However, in the face of the social distress that emerged in and around the new industrialized urban centers, educational philosophers (assuming the almost total effect of environment in shaping the mind and character of an individual) began lobbying in earnest for all children to be able to access comprehensive schooling that included tuition in practical music. John Turner’s Manual of Instruction in Vocal Music (1833), for example, believed that enabling the general population to be able to read and sing vocal music would “contribute largely to the rooting out of dissolute and debasing habits” (Rainbow 1967, 157). Similarly, James Phillips Kay (later Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), in his book The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class in Manchester (1832), called for the teaching of a love for “rational amusement” because the “[p]oor man will not be made a much better member of society by being only taught to read and write.” Rather, education should include such branches of general knowledge that would “elevate … tastes above a companionship in licentious pleasures” (Kay-Shuttleworth [1832] 1970, 61, 97). These writers believed that practical music education could be used as a safeguard against social evils such as revolutionary violence, licentiousness, and drunkenness, and could promote behaviors to support business efficiency on the factory floor (Barnard 1961, 103). By the late nineteenth century, such ideas were also being promoted in countries moving toward modern democratic political systems in response to fears about the possible impact of universal (male) suffrage upon civil society.
The conservatory could in any case trace its origins to welfare institutions in northern Italy, most famously in Naples. There, starting in the mid-sixteenth century, music instruction among other trade skills and general religious studies had been offered to orphaned and abandoned children. This explicit charitable purpose, however, had gradually ebbed during the eighteenth century as music instruction became more systematically organized in response to demand for skilled musicians from both church and private institutions (especially opera houses). Economic and political transformations in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century, not least the impact of French military occupation and the short-lived Parthenopaean Republic, prompted further reorganization and professionalization of the emerging conservatoire system (Daolmi 2005).
France had already adopted and adapted the Neapolitan model with the establishment of the Paris Conservatoire in August 1795, an act that soon “transformed musical training in France and indeed Europe in general” (Rink 2001, 82). There was a growing recognition “especially during the revolutionary period … that the training of professional musicians could consolidate the production of music useful to the state,” and the Parisian model now become the exemplar (Daolmi 2005, 105). The Paris Conservatoire came to dictate “the substance of French musical culture—the élite sort, anyway—from the Revolution to the Belle Époque and beyond,” a position of dominance further supported by the fact that it also hosted the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire (1795), the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (1828), and the Musée Instrumental (1861) (Holoman 2015, sec. 1, par. 2).
Napoleon’s younger brother, Joseph Bonaparte, merged the conservatories in Naples to form the Royal Conservatory there in 1806. Other cities to emulate the Parisian model include Bologna (1804), Milan (1807), Florence and Prague (1811), Vienna (1817), Warsaw (1821), London (1822), The Hague (1826), and Liege (1827), Brussels (1832), Geneva (1835), Leipzig (1843), Munich (1846), Rio de Janeiro (1847), Boston (1853), Dublin (1856), St. Petersburg (1862), Moscow (1866), Havana (1885), Birmingham (1885), Glasgow (1890), Melbourne (1891), Manchester (1893), Buenos Aires (1893), and Tunis (1896). The origins of the Vienna Conservatorium also reflect the direct influence of Napoleon, albeit as a political reaction to his occupation of the city in 1805 and 1809. Established in 1817 (but unlike the Parisian model, lacking any state assistance), the Vienna Conservatorium was initially only able to offer singing tuition under the directorship of Antonio Salieri. By 1827 it had expanded to offer courses of tuition across most orchestral instruments. Its precarious financial situation, however, continued until after the political upheavals of 1848, when a lasting state grant to support its work was secured. That the Conservatoire was established and later sustained in part to support an essentially conservative political outlook can be gleaned from Wilhelm Hebenstreit’s definition of a conservatoire in his Aesthetic Encyclopaedia of 1843 as “a vocal and musical institution for the promotion of art and the preservation of its purity in order to escape the decay of musical taste even if that means no public productions are organised by them” (Hebenstreit [1843] 1978, 155).
The major growth of conservatories in the United States also can be traced to a response to military conflict—in this case, the American Civil War. Oberlin Conservatory (1865), the New England Conservatory (1867), Cincinnati Conservatory (1867), Chicago Music College (1867), Peabody Institute (1868), Philadelphia Music Academy (1869), New York College of Music (1878), and the American Conservatory in Chicago (1886) were all established as part of a national effort to rebuild confidence in American civil society and shore up norms of civilized behavior. Similarly, the oldest extant music school in South Africa, the Conservatoire of Music, Stellenbosch, was founded in 1905 in the wake of the Boer War.
For many of the old and emerging nation-states of the nineteenth century therefore, especially those with close geographical or cultural ties to Western Europe, the establishment of conservatories also came to be considered part of the journey to modern statehood.3 They not only served to provide a skilled labor force for orchestras, opera houses, and military bands but also acted as signifiers and projectors of national self-confidence. The relationship of the nineteenth-century conservatory to nationalism, however, defies the application of simple narratives in part because of the supra-national idea of classical music itself—especially its claim to be above politics. As Richard Taruskin has argued in the case of Russia, much of what we have taken to be nationalist schools of music arose from “facing and matching, not retreating” from what we might term the dominant European (and principally Germanic) musical traditions of the nineteenth century (Taruskin 1997, 43). Furthermore, economic forces—in particular the need to attract audiences for the cultural products that conservatories supported—were now encouraging both teachers and pupils to travel the globe (something which became both significantly cheaper and safer through the nineteenth century), “and though the trend never proceeds uniformly, it is a force towards standardisation” (Sassoon 2006, xxv). A case in point would be the appointment of Antonin Dvořák to direct the newly established National Conservatory of Music of America in New York in 1892.
That being so, there are also examples, such as in Argentina, where conservatory music education unquestionably arose as part of a conscious nation-building effort. The Escuela de Música y Canto was established in 1822 in the wake of the country’s declaration of independence from Spanish rule (1816) and was to receive considerable public as well as private support. Equally, however, one can find resistance to such forms of European cultural cosmopolitanism from within nationalist movements; the founding of the Gaelic League in Ireland in 1893, for example, reflected a wider move in Irish society to revive Irish culture in which the “inheritance of native music traditions was considered central to the formation of Irish cultural identity” (McCarthy 2010, 67).
The case of Hungary is also instructive. As Lynn M. Hooker notes, while “national identity and culture were pressing issues in the arts in Hungary as elsewhere in Europe,” the “national discourse was also shaped by ambivalence about Hungary’s place in the world. Hungarians were proud of their nation’s distinctiveness, particularly its Asian heritage, but were also eager to join the mainstream of European civilisation” (Hooker 2013, 5–6). After the establishment of the dual monarchy in 1867, which granted substantial political autonomy to Hungary under the Habsburg dynasty, managing the national aspirations of an ethnically diverse population became a key political task. However, the newly-won legal equality for all Hungarian citizens sat uncomfortably with the majority Magyar population’s desire for a nation-state of their own. As Carl Dahlhaus notes, the very idea of a national school of music “implies, tacitly but unmistakably, that ‘national’ is an alternative to ‘universality,’” whereas in classical music in particular the greatest prize was to claim “universality.” Or, to put it another way “[t]he term ‘national school’ is a covert admission that the phenomenon it describes is peripheral” (Dahlhaus 1980, 89).
An aftereffect of France’s calamitous defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1871 was the founding of the Société Nationale de Musique by Romain Bussine and Camille Saint-Saëns; this served to promote the cause and careers of contemporary French composers, something that they felt that the Paris Conservatoire was not doing effectively. Other pressures bearing down on the notion of cultural universalism came from those who believed that the emerging systems of liberal democracy and free trade were antithetical to the idea of the people as a mystical community, or who were inspired by emergent racial theories grounded in forms of Social Darwinism (James 1989, 91). But supra-national justifications for practical musical education also retained their currency throughout the nineteenth century. Isawa Shūji (1851–1917), who came to be known as the “father” of music education in Japan, valued its particularly positive impact on moral development. Isawa sought to create an indigenous bourgeois musical culture, a desire that led him also to emphasize the relationship of music to morality and the relationship between good musicianship and good citizenship: “since music is, on the whole, a factor in cultivating moral character, the student too, for his part, should lay the foundation of this, leading a virtuous life and conducting himself properly” (Eppstein 1994, 63–65).
Partly because these “higher” musical values were almost always aligned with German ones (and those, in turn, with the very idea of “classical music”), German methods of teaching and German teaching repertoires thus dominated conservatory curricula. In Germany itself, the Berlin-based Königlich Preussische Akademie der Künste had been founded in 1696 (as the Kurfürstliche Academie der Mahler-, Bildhauer- und Architectur-Kunst) by the elector Frederick III (the later Prussian king Frederick I) after similar academies in Rome and Paris which had already established that practical artistic skills could be taught in ways similar to the natural sciences. By 1800, the Akademie had also become a central institution in the Prussian Enlightenment, part of the cultural and social renewal across the German-speaking lands in the wake of the French Revolution. However, the Königlich Akademischen Hochschule für ausübende Tonkunst (Royal Academy of Musical Performing Art)—a fully independent music school—was not established until 1869, by Joseph Joachim (1831–1907).
The most influential conservatorium in Germany was to be that founded by Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig in 1843, born substantially out of the same idealistic spirit that had guided the rise of music in German universities. Technical accomplishment in music was explicitly framed as a means to a higher end: “daß jede Gattung der Kunst sich erst dann über das Handwerk erhebt, wenn sie sich bei größtmöglicher technischer Vollendung einem rein geistigen Zwecke, dem Ausdruck einses höheren Gedankens widmet” (every genre of art is raised above the level of craft only when, with the greatest possible technical perfection, it devotes itself to a purely spiritual purpose, to the expression of a higher thought) (Schering 1918, 75). By the mid-nineteenth century, not only Austrian and German musicians but also Austrian and German institutions were considered the ultimate arbiters of classical music and thus what constituted universal musical value, notwithstanding the fact that they also remained contested ideas. When Hugo Riemann (1849–1919) “entered the Leipzig Conservatory in 1871,” for example:
not only was the musical community deeply divided in their choice of repertoire—to put it crudely: Wagner and Liszt versus Mendelssohn and Schumann—but the parties also used some essential terms, such as nature, musical logic and connectedness, comprehension, wilfulness, prejudice, for very different musical, aesthetic and cultural ends. (Fend 2005, 410)
By comparison, it was common for the British to regard their own musical culture as inferior (Macfarren 1870, 519). The lower status that music had in English society is reflected in the difficulties in establishing conservatoires there. Charles Burney, who had inspected the conservatories in Naples and Venice during his European Tour of 1770, had already noted the dearth of formal training institutions for music performance in London. The arguments that he subsequently published in his pamphlet Proposal for Making the Foundling Hospital a Music Conservatoire (1774), however, fell on deaf ears.
Growing concern over the continental dominance in music education, however, eventually helped to encourage the establishment of the Royal Academy of Music (RAM; 1823). “The cultivation of the elegant science of music,” one correspondent of the time noted, “is no less suited to the English than to any foreign soil” (Busby 1825, 2). The RAM received its Royal Charter in 1830, and was given an annual government grant from 1864. The founding set of rules and regulations for the academy stated as its principal object:
[T]o promote the cultivation of the science of music, and afford facilities for attaining perfection in it, by assisting with the general instruction the natives of this country, and thus enabling those who pursue this delightful branch of the fine arts to enter into competition with, and rival the natives of other countries, and to provide for themselves the means of an honorable and comfortable livelihood. (3)
It was telling, however, that at the same time “not a single name of a professional musician appeared upon the list of either Patrons, Directors or Trustees” (Corder 1922, 1). Also, lacking state imprimatur, the RAM’s early years were difficult. Speaking in 1859, Henry F. Chorley described the academy as “an institution which it would be pleasanter to pass by than to enter.” Chorley even suggested that the academy had failed to produce any noteworthy musical artists in the previous twenty years, and that talented students had been “driven abroad” by both the high cost and poor quality of tuition (Chorley 1859, 448). The situation was certainly bad enough for a Society of British Musicians to be founded in 1834 for “the advancement of native talent in composition and performance” (Sachs 1990, 218).
This situation was slowly to change as the push towards the statutory provision of universal elementary education grew. Music was encouraged to resume the place that it once had in a broad curriculum because the ability to sing constituted an “important means of forming an industrious, brave, loyal, and religious people” (Rainbow 1967, 20). By 1841, large singing classes were operating in London to train the nation’s teachers to undertake their new musical duties, and one lasting legacy was the propagating of the Tonic Sol-fa system popularized by the Reverend John Curwen. By the end of the nineteenth century it was in use in most schools, church choirs, and choral societies across the country.
One of the key issues facing British conservatoires (as opposed to universities), in their challenge to meet the wider desire to secure professional standing for their graduates, was whether a solid general education foundation was also necessary as part of a good musical education. In Britain, the composer George Alexander Macfarren (1813–1887) argued that the specialist demands of high technical training meant that “a very wide course of literary and scientific study is incompatible with sound musicianship” (Golding 2017, 140). On the other hand, George Grove (1820–1900), the first director of the Royal College of Music, “exhorted students to extend their interests beyond their immediate studies to literature, painting, travel, and history” (Warrack 1977, 23). And John More Capes (1812–1889) “argued that not requiring higher qualifications in general education from performers failed to distinguish them from lower-class manual professions” (Golding 2017, 140).
The Guildhall School of Music was founded in 1880 by the City of London Corporation, aiming “to patronise the science of music in the City of London and for the public benefit.” The school opened in the evenings to suit City workers—it was open for amateurs as much as for the production of teachers and performers (Barty-King 1980, 23). The Royal College of Music, on the other hand, had emerged out of an earlier attempt to create a “national training school of music.” In a speech given at the laying of the foundation stone for the school on December 18, 1873, the Duke of Edinburgh made the case for a new school by noting that the Royal Academy of Music had “but few free Scholarships for those who have displayed a knowledge and aptitude, but have not means” (Warrack 1977, 5–6). Like the foundation of the Royal Academy before it, the college was given an expressly nationalistic purpose. The Prince of Wales explained at a meeting on February 28, 1882, at St. James Palace that “[i]t will be to England what the Berlin Conservatoire is to Germany, what the Paris Conservatoire is to France, or the Vienna Conservatoire is to Austria, the recognised centre and head of the musical world” (12). Nevertheless, its aims as expressed by its founding charter were more pragmatic:
The purposes for which the Corporation is founded are, first the advancement of the Art of Music by means of a central teaching and examining body charged with the duty of providing musical instruction of the highest class, and of rewarding with academical degrees and certificates of the proficiency and otherwise persons whether education or not at the College, who on examination may prove themselves worth of such distinctions and evidence of attainment … (25)
One conspicuous and lucrative outcome, where the college combined with the RAM, was the formation of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in 1889. Syllabi appeared in 1890 for piano, organ, violin, cello, and harp, with the rest of the common orchestral instruments following shortly thereafter. By this means, the two conservatoires were able to become the principal gatekeepers not only of wider standards of music teaching but also of the very music that would be taught and played (Wright 2005, 2013).
Outside London, nationalist pressures gave way to more parochial concerns. The German-born Charles Hallé (1819–1895), who had himself studied in Darmstadt and Paris, had first tried to establish a conservatoire in Manchester in 1854 (the Royal Manchester College of Music was eventually founded in 1893), arguing that it was both inefficient and unpatriotic for local musicians to be forced to travel to London or overseas for their training (Hallé 1895). Hallé explicitly linked his vision with the parallel growth of the Working Men’s Institutes and similar organizations when he noted in 1895 that “Even among audiences composed chiefly of artisans and miners I had again and again been struck with the keen discernment of good and bad and the unquestionable musical talent commonly revealed” (quoted in Kennedy 1971, 1). The push for a conservatoire in Manchester also reflects the fact that, outside the national capitals in particular, there was a strong nexus between the desire for a conservatoire and the existence (or desired existence) of a professional orchestra; it was from the latter that teaching staff could be drawn, and the success of the latter would inevitably help secure the future of the former, not only in terms of providing access to appropriately trained musicians but also in terms of delivering an overt benefit to the wider local community (8).
Music conservatories also became central to the development of specialized music teacher training. The emergence of formal systems of public education in the second half of the nineteenth century, within which music was frequently included, created a demand for specialist music teachers, and thus the training institutions which could produce them. Prosperous and populous new cities in North and South America and in the colonies and dominions of the British Empire also sought to meet the demand for skilled music teachers that had arisen with the growth of an international touring industry for performers, opera companies and the like, as steam-powered sea travel became both safer and more economical.
In the new immigrant communities that arose in southeastern Australia in the wake of the discovery of large deposits of gold in the second half of the nineteenth century, government authorities “perceived music in schooling as an antidote to larrikinism and roughness—vocal music could be a powerful agency for refining the individual” (Stevens 1981). In 1884, a wealthy Scottish immigrant grazier and colonial parliamentarian, Francis Ormond, announced a gift of £20,000 for the foundation of a conservatorium or college of music for the colony of Victoria, Australia. An intense public debate ensued as to which one of these options it should be, or indeed whether the money could be better spent elsewhere. One of the reasons for the ferocity of the debate was that the Centennial Exhibition of 1888, which occurred at the height of Melbourne’s global significance as a city, included as a major feature an astonishing (and extremely expensive) musical celebration on an hitherto unprecedented scale—more than 240 concerts in six months, averaging ten concerts a week (Radic 1996, 16). A conservatorium would have helped to secure a permanent professional orchestra for the colony.
One local musician, William Adolphus Laver (1866–1940), argued instead for the establishment of a National Academy of Music and Fine Arts for Australia, based on the German models that he had experienced as a student at Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium–Musikakademie in Frankfurt am Main, an institution similarly founded by private donation, although on an even larger scale (Joseph Hoch had bequeathed the conservatory 1 million German gold marks upon his death in 1874). In the end, practicalities favored Melbourne University’s proposal for a Chair of Music; the first incumbent in the chair, George W. L. Marshall-Hall (1862–1915), nevertheless quickly established a distinctive conservatorium that was “unique in the Universities of the British Empire” (Scott 1936, 148) for combining both scholarly and practical musical instruction. In Germany, where the musical tradition leaned more easily toward such a partnership, a close connection between the Hochschule or Konservatorium and university music departments could already be found; if the two did not always share the same building, they usually had many teachers in common. Marshall-Hall had experienced the latter model as a result of private tuition that he had received in Berlin in the 1880s. In any event, a diploma of music was now available to local students who were primarily performers, a concert recital taking the place of the usual final compositional exercise.
Marshall-Hall’s university-based conservatorium, however, eventually fell afoul of continuing discomfort within the university about the broader case he was making for music’s significance. Marshall-Hall believed foremost in art for art’s sake, a vision far removed from the religiously motivated moral improvement role for music expressed by the chair’s benefactor. Instead, he had been regularly complaining in the local press of the stultifying influence of the clergy and of the “pious but artificially poor stuff which has mostly been set to intolerably vulgar and maudlin music,” the “horrible namby-pambyism” to be “found in its most effeminate and sickly forms in our churches” (Tregear 1997, 15). In 1901, after a lengthy campaign by clerical interests, Marshall-Hall’s tenure as a professor was not renewed by Melbourne University.
Marshall-Hall’s downfall also owed something to the threat that his views on music and society were perceived to represent to the virtue of the young women who studied with him. Parental concern that their children (young girls in particular) were studying music in “respectable, bona fide surroundings and with good teachers” was indeed a widespread concern (Schaba 2005, 14). In his history of the Royal Academy of Music, Frederick Corder notes that of the original twenty students admitted to the RAM in 1823 (11 boys and 10 girls, aged between 10 and 14 years), “[n]early all the boys distinguished themselves in after life, but not one of the girls” (Corder 1922, 8). Instead, for them a conservatorium education served as a proxy finishing school, given that learning to play a few pieces on the piano or to paint a small landscape in oil “rendered elite women more feminine and reinscribed their high social status” (Nash 2013a, 47). Or, as William B. Lacey, rector of the Southern Institute for Young Ladies in Jackson, Louisiana, wrote in 1852, “No lady can be said to have finished her education without [such skills], if she is to elevate herself above the ‘vulgar’” (as quoted in Nash 2013a, 48).
However, as Margaret Nash has argued, demand for and access to such education “clearly also was linked to a young woman’s occupational future, not only to her position in an elite socioeconomic class” (48, 59); opera singers in particular could still attract star status, as well as high salaries. By far the most influential teacher that Grove was able to secure at the Royal College of Music was Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt (1820–1887), the “Swedish Nightingale.” Nevertheless Grove ultimately showed a marked preference for the instruction of instrumental students over singers. By the same token, men seeking an education and career in music had to fight against gender stereotypes. In his introductory lecture as professor of vocal music at King’s College, London, John Hullah was at pains to reassure his audience that the commonly held impression that music “is an effeminate study … by no means consistent with that manliness which is to be hoped is a characteristic of an English gentleman” was a false one, even if he did so by claiming that “there was not a single example of a woman producing an original composition” (Hullah 1844, 5).
While there is no simple narrative that can encapsulate or explain all the particular and peculiar forms of music education that developed in universities and conservatories in the nineteenth century, nevertheless some overarching themes are observable, such as an interest in engaging with both idealistic and pragmatic views about music’s value in society and with both normative and descriptive ideas about the value of culture more generally. What may initially appear to us to be pedagogical manifestations of an outwardly apolitical aesthetics of autonomy, for instance, can also reflect a genuinely held desire to democratize access to forms of aspirational culture, or be motivated ultimately by an interest in supporting broader social reform. It was ultimately this “plurality of social modes” of music education “that flourished at the same time” (Garratt 2010, 215) that shaped the evolution of an institutional landscape we can still recognize today.