Music for Museums?

Music for Museums? by Carl Van Vechten

In "Music for Museums?," Carl Van Vechten argues that America's concert institutions have calcified into museums, preserving a narrow canon of past masters while resisting the living, contemporary music that most needs performance and advocacy. He opens with an anecdote about a piano recital where audiences reacted with genuine, unruly enthusiasm and dissent to unfamiliar modern works by Debussy, Albéniz, Ravel, Scriabin, and Leo Ornstein—contrasting this lively engagement with the passive reverence typically shown toward warhorses by Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. Van Vechten contends that the modern symphony orchestra was itself invented by innovators such as Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Stravinsky, and Scriabin, and that it is best suited to performing their music, not that of Haydn or Mozart, whose works are routinely distorted by anachronistic instrumental balances and swollen string sections. He acknowledges the tension between historical fidelity and contemporary taste, comparing it to staging Shakespeare without Elizabethan conventions, and concedes that some early music retains value for education and occasional pleasure. Still, he insists that repetition of a fixed repertoire—Beethoven's symphonies played every season, familiar overtures endlessly recycled—produces "fossilization" rather than vital art. He is scathing about the mass instruction of children in piano technique despite most people lacking real musical discernment, noting that over half of symphony audiences "cannot carry a tune," yet these same listeners tolerate ceaseless repetition of masterworks in a way they would never tolerate with a repeatedly restaged play. He proposes that no orchestra should play more than one Beethoven symphony per season, favoring instead programming that channels a living composer's inspiration. Surveying the contemporary scene, Van Vechten laments how slowly New York and America absorb new music: Stravinsky's early Fireworks has only just appeared locally while his ballets (The Firebird, Petrouchka, The Rite of Spring) and opera The Nightingale remain unheard, despite European familiarity; Schoenberg remains barely known outside a few chamber performances by the Kneisel and Flonzaley quartets and orchestral pieces done in Boston and Chicago; Scriabin's Prometheus received an inadequate performance. Meanwhile audiences overindulge in Strauss and suddenly embrace the previously feared Max Reger now that his novelty has faded. He extends the "museum" metaphor to describe symphony and string-quartet audiences as snobbish curators of antique "musical armor," and to critics as the museum's cataloguers, who reflexively reject "new dolls" unless they resemble old ones—citing Montemezzi's acceptance versus resistance to figures like Zandonai or Pratella. He questions the standards critics use to label new music "discordant," suggesting the term merely signals difference from Weber and Puccini rather than any objective flaw, and proposes that unprejudiced ears (invoking the Hottentot and the Chinese as comparative examples) might find such music no more dissonant than the ordinary noise of modern life. He calls for critics to describe musical effects more scientifically or evocatively, citing Alfred Hertz's candid admission of bewilderment before the harmonic novelty of Stravinsky's The Nightingale as preferable to empty dismissiveness. Van Vechten also turns to chamber music, wryly noting that "chamber music" was originally meant to be played at home for private enjoyment, not enshrined in public recital as the "highest and noblest" art form; he suggests the string-quartet cult has become an insular, almost religious fandom resistant to unconventional instrumental combinations. He closes by praising a rare instance—a Boston Symphony concert under Dr. Karl Muck that dared include three unfamiliar works—as evidence that even modest novelty can provoke real interest and controversy, in contrast to the deadening comfort of standard programming. Ultimately, the essay is a polemic urging that orchestras, critics, and audiences abandon their veneration of a fixed past and instead treat concert halls as spaces for living art, arguing that an orchestra "occupies the same place in the world's affairs that the museum does" whenever it merely ambles through old masters rather than serving as a vehicle for new musical expression.

By Carl Van Vechten · First published 1915 · Genre: Music Criticism, Essay, Cultural Criticism · 3,501 words

First lines

I saw people actually enjoying themselves at a recent piano recital. During the performance of some of the numbers they laughed; at other times they nudged one another and made comments. The conclusion of each piece was punctuated by a certain amount of vociferous applause, and an almost equal amount of disapprobation. One group of pieces on the programme, Claude Debussy's _Children's Corner_, was familiar; as a result, it aroused less interest than some of the other music played. Albeniz, one of the new men who is making the list of Spanish compositions extend beyond the folk-song, was represented by his _El Albaicin_; Maurice Ravel by _Gaspard de la Nuit_, a very successful attempt to paint atmosphere and character in the very limited tonal medium of the pianoforte; Scriabine by four preludes and a sonata; and Leo Ornstein, the pianist, by _Seven Sketches_ and _Two Shadow Pieces_. Mr. Ornstein's compositions have no truck with majors and minors, thirds and fifths, pentatonic and diatonic scales. His descending fingers strike masses of keys; some auditors seemed to think there is no plan in these assaults on the board. Personally, I am willing to wager that the last piano sonatas of the deaf Beethoven meant just as little to their first hearers. We have become accustomed to the sweet and unsubtle way of the tonic and dominant. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Strawinsky are yet discordant to our melody-soaked and harmony-demanding ears.

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music-criticism · museum-curation · cultural-institutions · musical-aesthetics · performance-art · classical-music · modern-music · jazz · music-history · american-culture · modernism · art-collections

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