The 19th Century's 19th Century

As I gear up to start teaching a portion of the music history sequence at UC Santa Cruz, I've been thinking about the purpose of music history curricula, especially in serving college music majors. In a ten-week period, I'm covering a large portion of the Classical period, as well as Western music through the entire nineteenth century. As I designed my syllabus, I had to make some tough choices about which composers and pieces to cover and which to leave out. I based those decisions partially on personal preferences (which pieces I particularly like) and partially on practical concerns (which pieces are easy to access, covered in the textbook, possible to get through in a 70 minutes class session.) But another major factor is which works best represent musical trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And that's a tough one to address. Because the issue begs the question: whose 19th century?

As a twenty-first century musician, I value the works of the musical canon: that is, the pieces I grew up hearing on the radio and in concert halls, the works that people told me were really important. They were written by an "A-list" of Romantic composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, Wagner, Verdi, and Mahler. These are the bigwigs. But our A-list looks quite a bit different from the 19th century's. Meyerbeer, for instance, was one of the biggest musical celebrities in mid-nineteenth century Europe. His operas drew massive crowds. So did Weber's. And Donizetti's. And Bellini's. All of these composers are still performed in opera houses, but our century, for the most part, does not value their place in musical history as it does Beethoven's or Brahms's. Yet our 19th-century musical canon is a product of the culture from which it sprang. And in that culture, Meyerbeer was a lot more important than Schubert. So, as a teacher of music history, should I strive to tell history as it actually went down, or should I weave my tale through the lens of the twentieth century's musical canon?

The way I see it, I should aim to do both. My responsibility as a historian is to give the most accurate picture of the past as I can. But in training musicians, music educators, and future academics, I also have a responsibility to get them acquainted with the canon. These students need to know the works that their culture values, even if they aren't the ones that the 19th century cared about.