California Studies in 20th-Century Music-The Art of Appreciation Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain

“A lucid and richly documented study of cultural hierarchy and of the changing social, institutional, and ideological forces shaping music education in mid-twentieth-century Britain. A very fruitful cross-pollination of musical and cultural histories.”—Philip Rupprecht, author of British Musical Modernism

"A highly important corrective to the existing narrative of British cultural history. Beautifully researched, insightfully contributing to debates about the nature of cultural hierarchies, the periodization of artistic trends, and the relationships between modernity, modernism, and the status of British music. Guthrie’s keen ability as a close reader of both printed words and musical texts shines through."—Joan Shelley Rubin, author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture

"Thoroughly researched and lucidly argued, The Art of Appreciation effectively grounds big questions about art music and mass culture in a set of more specific historical debates—about how people should listen and how the new media of mass culture should be harnessed for pedagogical purposes. In showing us how experts sought to manage new forms of musical consumption, it reveals a great deal about the promise they held, as well as the anxieties they provoked.”—Heather Wiebe, author of Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction


From the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music have been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. The goal of these initiatives was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience but to teach a particular way of listening that would help the public "appreciate" music. This book examines for the first time how and why music appreciation has had such a defining and long-lasting impact—well beyond its roots in late-Victorian liberalism. It traces the networks of music educators, philanthropists, policy makers, critics, composers, and musicians who, rather than resisting new mass media, sought to harness their pedagogic potential. The book explores how listening became embroiled in a nexus of modern problems around citizenship, leisure, and education. In so doing, it ultimately reveals how a new cultural milieu—the middlebrow—emerged at the heart of Britain's experience of modernity.