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B
y the late 1800s, musical institutions in the United States—professional
orchestras, music conservatories, college music departments, and concert-
promoting musical clubs—were providing the infrastructure for a new
generation of composers and performers to develop their art in unprecedented
ways. Beginning with the most infl uential American conductor of the nine-
teenth century, this chapter surveys the composers active in Boston and New
York at the turn of the century and concludes with one of the most idiosyncratic
of all American musicians: Charles Ives.THEODORE THOMAS
The premier American conductor of the nineteenth century was Theodore
Thomas, whose family immigrated from Germany in 1845. Thomas was
recruited in 1853, at age thirteen, to play in Louis Jullien’s orchestra, which was
then taking New York by storm (see chapter 5). The following year he joined the
fi rst violin section of the New York Philharmonic Society. Within a few years he
also was serving as concertmaster of the opera orchestra at New York’s Academy
of Music. Although Thomas played violin in public into his fourth decade, it was
as a conductor that he made his mark. His musical outlook was also distinctive.
Thomas took it as his mission to help raise musical standards so that the sym-
phony orchestra’s place in the United States would be secured. “Throughout my
life,” he wrote in 1874, “my aim has been to make good music popular.”
Thomas mastered not only the artistic but also the business side of his trade.
As conductor of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra (1865–90) he accomplished one
of the more complex balancing acts in the history of American music, by con-
trolling both its artistic and economic arms. In fact, Thomas’s career challenges
the notion that art and economics are separate things, for without a musical
marketplace the Thomas Orchestra could never have survived. His great achieve-
ment was to discover within that marketplace an audience for the symphony
orchestra.CHAPTER
8
“TO STRETCH OUR EARS”
Classical Music Comes of Age
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