Appendixesized the older, more stable cultures and a striving for some kind of balance
marks the newer societies-especially such colonial extensions of older
cultures as those in the Americas.
Policy groups-of governments, religious sects and of commerce-have
often exerted definitive control of the fine and popular arts of music and
over the teaching of them. I am thinking especially of the early Christian
Churches, both eastern and western, the various sects of the Reformation,
and the Great Religious Revival or New Light Movement in the United
States of America from 1800 on, and, of course, of the disciplining of com-
posers behind the ‘iron curtain’ today. This control has been effective largely
because it is easy to assure unanimity of agreement among the members of
small, compact policy groups especially with respect to the larger considera-
tions of style and use. It has been exercised, however, only occasionally, in
times of great social tension, and has invariably relaxed after large objectives
have been gained.
Technical groups made up of practising musicians and teachers have
carried out the detail called for by directives of policy groups, when given,
but in the long run have normally controlled the large matters of style and
use as well as the detail. This control has been effective largely because of the
rather close feeling of brotherhood among musicians, where even differences
of language, customs, economic level and social status have been overridden
by a common devotion to the art. Even the heated disputes between con-
servatives and radicals invariably cool off, in the course of time, upon higher
levels of agreement.
During the nineteenth century, the external control of policy groups and
the internal control of technical groups began to turn toward the masses of
populations with a view to increasing the consumption of products of the
fine and popular arts. Until that time, the masses of populations had made
their own, or folk, music and had neither been offered nor sought much of
anything else. Their share of control of fine and popular arts was almost negli-
gible but of their own folk music it was virtually complete.
By 1900, professional musicians had nearly complete control of the fine
art; businessmen and semi-professionals, of the popular art. But external
controls of the living conditions of both rural and urban masses had led to
corruption and partial loss of folk music traditions.
The rather sudden development, soon after 1900, of the media of mass
communications, completely changed this picture. It accentuated the cor-
ruption and near abandonment of folk music in all industrialized countries.
Instead of exercising control only in a large way in emergencies of social
tension (as, for example, in Hitler’s Germany) the policy groups were by
then able to exercise it upon a day-to-day operational basis. Instead of
occupying themselves with production and consumption of their own folk
music, the masses tended to become consumers only of mass-produced
music, and hence, through their enormous purchasing power and preference
ratings, a potent factor in what was mass-produced.