Music Hall And Modernity: The Late-victorian Discovery Of Popular Culture

Rating:
Summary: Rise of the professional critic
Review: Music Hall And Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery Of Popular Culture by Barry J. Faulk (Ohio University Press) The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. At the same time, these social arbiters were devotees of the spontaneous culture of "the people?'
In examining fiction by Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism by William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, Barry J. Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, while allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.
Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the burgeoning middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes a new perspective to a growing body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism.
Excerpt: At the turn of the last century, London music hall crossed class lines, drawing a substantial middle- and upper-class patronage along with its core working-class audience. When culture forms cross over in this way, they acquire a spate of interpreters, with a range of interpretations, for crossover elicits interpretive diversity, and the social work of interpretation further enhances cultural mobility. Observers disagreed over the significance of music hall's popular success; public debate exposed some core late-Victorian beliefs regarding class and gender identity. The movement of the music hall into the dominant culture unsettled the confidence of some middle-class observers that taste and class could serve as a natural divide between social groups.
It also enabled a new group of observers to speak on behalf of a different En-gland.
The greater diffusion of music-hall culture raised significant questions about the secure fit between class and taste. In his magisterial work Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu provides powerful evidence that taste claims are the indirect but inevitable expression of class status, and thus sustain class difference and hierarchy. Bourdieu provides a synchronic view of the relations between social rank and taste preferences that verges on positing direct causal links between an individual's taste and affect and his or her status. He de-scribes the habitus of culture as "a structuring structure" and "also a structured structure"-forceful efforts to overleap structure by compounding what structure means, and to consider the relation between taste and status as a process.' Nevertheless, these compound terms inevitably leave us with a stable notion of taste as it relates to class hierarchy: and when culture forms break out to larger audiences, the connections between taste claims and various forms of belonging, whether racial, classed, or gendered, shift in unpredictable ways. Like any elite, intellectuals can and do work to naturalize their class position through taste statements; they can also serve as sensitive registers of changing relations between cultural preferences and social position.
We can better map social relations between class and taste if we treat taste making as a dialogic process, diachronically as well as synchronically. In tracing the changes that late-Victorian music hall made to the dominant culture, I join a conversation in cultural studies with, among others, Stuart Hall, An-drew Ross, and Janice Radway. These scholars attend to the many ways in which the circulation of culture forms expands the very categories that enable cultural flow, so that, for example, Janice Radway, in A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, draws attention to how the production of the middlebrow unsettles the divide tastemakers established between high- and low-culture product. Andrew Ross, in No Respect, details how the reception of discourses like erotica or bebop depends on the mutual labor of both culture producers from various class strata and aspiring intellectual, predominantly bourgeois, tastemakers. Stuart Hall, in "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular;" forcefully argues that scholarly at-tempts to recover the popular as pure vernacular expression obscure the very processes by which the popular is constructed. The historicist attempt to re-cover the real vernacular, like the purist search for culture as authentic product, cannot register the subtle but pervasive changes that occur in producers, audiences, and conceptual categories when cultural forms travel.
My claim that fin-de-siècle language of the popular should be read as a professional discourse builds on Hall's argument. For example, in the process of packaging proletarian comedy and dance to middle-class spectators, music-hall theater owners and promoters often watered down the variety fare they packaged. This compromise, however, was not well received by some of music hall's middle-class critics. These bourgeois observers some-times interpreted the conscious effort to sanitize the music hall as an at-tempt to neutralize it, an appropriative gesture that revealed the greed and sterility-the worst qualities-of the culture of their class. These critics were angry that music hall's success situated it in the cultural middle; they were also upset with the apparent satisfaction of bourgeois audiences with this state of affairs. The middle-class patron of the halls insufficiently esteemed the low, according to critics like Max Beerbohm, a feature of whose "high-brow" taste discourse was hatred of the middle. The move of music-hall entertainment toward the middle of the road caused Max Beerbohm to treat conventional tastes more skeptically, rather than relinquish his positive response to the earlier, déclassé music hall. The inevitability of the bourgeois co-optation of vernacular culture spurred Beerbohm to imagine music hall as the culture of the opposition, even if that opposition included only him-self and an elite corps of observers.
The transformation of the music hall into middle-class culture had myriad consequences. For example, the diffusion of the form made it more difficult for middle-class observers to distinguish their own culture from that of the working class. The ambiguity of the music hall, the puzzling nature of its hold on a broad English public, made it an ideal talking point for intellectuals seeking to flex their muscles as culture definers and interpreters. In the process of becoming dominant, a subaltern culture form clarified the practice of its "other": a professional cultural criticism that often used music-hall analysis to address broader national and cultural concerns.
This new professional critic no longer worked according to the assumption of the critic's exclusive, privileged relation to culture. The very success of the music hall had made apparent the double-voiced, composite nature of English culture, and the stance of the aficionado shared this synergy. In this fashion, the accounts of the middle-class observer of the halls mirrored the form of the late-Victorian halls, which mingled bourgeois and working-class modes of thinking in an effort to hail the broadest possible audience.
When late-Victorian intellectuals assumed the mantle of culture legislators, articulating the music hall as the popular, they often produced a trope that alienated the people from the popular. But the growing social prominence of the music hall also provoked professional middleclass observers to assume complex spectator positions, like Arthur Symons's pose of the aficionado. He assumed a shifting, hybrid perspective on the entertainment that melded the disinterested view of the trained culture critic with the view of the passionate advocate.