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Making music in Los Angeles

University of California Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.......................................................................................................................ixPreface and Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................xi1. Music Making as Popular Practice.........................................................................................................1PART I. MUSIC FOR THE "PEOPLE"2. "The Largest and Most Enthusiastic Audience That Ever Has Assembled in the City": The National Opera Company of 1887.....................153. "A Precarious Means of Living": Early Working Musicians and Their Jobs...................................................................264. "Popular Prices Will Prevail": Competing and Cooperating Impresarios.....................................................................435. Amateurs, Professionals, and Symphonies: Harley Hamilton and Edna Foy....................................................................566. "Our Awe Struck Vision": A Prominent Impresario Reconsidered.............................................................................73PART II. PROGRESSIVE-ERA MUSICAL IDEALISM7. The "True Temple of Art": Philharmonic Auditorium and Progressive Ideology...............................................................958. "Something of Good for the Future": The People's Orchestra of 1912-1913..................................................................1069. Producing Fairyland, 1915................................................................................................................12410. Founding the Hollywood Bowl.............................................................................................................132PART III. FROM PROGRESSIVE TO ULTRAMODERN11. Old Competitors, New Opera Companies in 1925............................................................................................15712. The New Negro Movement in Los Angeles...................................................................................................16613. Welcoming the Ultramodern...............................................................................................................18714. Second Thoughts.........................................................................................................................20215. Calling the Tune: The Los Angeles Federal Music Project.................................................................................215Appendix A. Los Angeles Population Growth, with Racial and Ethnic Distribution..............................................................239Appendix B. Musicians and Teachers of Music in the United States and Los Angeles............................................................245Appendix C. A Music Chronology for Los Angeles, 1781-1941...................................................................................251Notes.......................................................................................................................................255Bibliography................................................................................................................................325Index.......................................................................................................................................345

Chapter One

Los Angeles is regularly reported as having had little to offer in the way of music-"culturally unfocused" in one recent, relatively tolerant formulation-until migrs from Hitler's Germany began to find their way there in the mid-1930s. Yet in 1910 more musicians and music teachers were working there, in proportion to its total population, than in any other city in the United States. In fact, almost half again as many professional music makers addressed the demand for music teachers, church soloists, bandsmen, theater musicians, and other paid music makers per capita than in New York City, then the center of the entertainment industry in America. Even if the U.S. Census figures (summarized in two appendices here) are less than precise, it is clear that, long before canned and digitized music of all descriptions could be had virtually anywhere for little more than the touch of a finger, a lot of music making took place, involving a lot of people. More than that, the presence of music was so fully taken for granted, so commonplace as a way of life, that later observers thought its abundance scarcely worth comment. Music making was truly popular.

This widespread practice of music as a popular activity changed over the three decades before and after that 1910 Census, just as other aspects of the culture changed, resulting in the "transformation" referred to in my title. By following that changing practice in this one city, over that half century and more, this book lays bare some unexpected elements bridging two style periods in music (late romantic versus modernist for concert music) that are often, for the United States, considered separate and almost independent of each other. On one hand, the book sketches a part of the essential background against which the musics of commercial mass culture blossomed in the twentieth century. On the other, it suggests some previously unexplored, even deliberately ignored, connections (and disconnections) between the practice ofAmerican musical romanticism (sometimes labeled the "genteel" tradition) and the seemingly abrupt emergence of musical modernism in the 1920s. Although these two periods have been described in terms of stylistic differences in the music,it turns out that the gaps between them reflect changing ideas and practices about class, gender, age, and ethnicity as well. Those gaps, as we also discover, were repeatedly contested in music as elsewhere, though in often fragmented and indirect ways.

As is already clear, I use popular here in its earlier sense of widely prevalent forms of engagement with music, rather than in the later sense of music's most commercially profitable (as well as widely prevalent) genres. At the start of my period, the term was appropriate to much music that we no longer consider popular. In fact, a lot of the music making (and music makers) traced in this book became less visible when the term popular music came to imply primarily the music of commercial mass culture. Some music of that older sense of popular has disappeared, and some of it came to be considered "elite," partly for its increasingly rigid class associations, partly because its survival depended on some form of special investment or some other cultural formation, as opposed to commercial mass culture. Because of this focus, the book might be thought of as describing a special case of the "antimodern." In music, though, the situation has its own complexities, for that now largely submerged earlier practice did much to shape the terms under which much later public music making took place. It becomes clearer than ever in these pages that apparently straightforward acts of music making carried wider social and political freight than the notes on the page might suggest and that the complexities of the process were far greater than music critics noted at the time or even than recent cultural critics have argued.

This, then, is a social...