Seeking the Roots of The Music Man

While Meredith Willson is best remembered for his first musical The Music Man, he was fifty-five years old when it opened on Broadway in 1957. It is not generally known that he had already enjoyed a highly successful career before then, nor is the impact of his previous career on The Music Man fully understood. This chapter explores his activities as a performer in the John Sousa band and New York Philharmonic, as a radio conductor and host, as a Hollywood arranger and composer, as a pop song writer, as a novelist, music educator, and writer of memoirs, to show how the eclecticism of his musical taste and expertise led to his greatest work.

Horizons

The downtown marathons of Bang on a Can might seem worlds away from the American symphony orchestra, but in the mid-1980s they shared a common context: David Lang worked for the New York Philharmonic in this period as an assistant to composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman. His assistantship was part of the granting organization Meet the Composer’s Orchestra Residencies Program, which placed American composers in residencies with symphony orchestras and fundamentally reshaped the relationship between new music and the marketplace. The program’s most high-profile success, the Philharmonic’s 1983 Horizons festival, captured an unprecedented audience for new music via its heavily publicized theme of “A New Romanticism?” And Lang’s subsequent work with the Philharmonic provided him with experience and connections, as well as a growing ambivalence toward the orchestral sphere that shaped the maverick mindset of Bang on a Can.

Sucker

Today, the performance of film music is a staple of symphony concert programming. In 1943, it was an anomaly. That year, Steiner was invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic for a potential audience of twenty thousand at Lewisohn Stadium. But for Max, the concert proved a humiliating disaster, due to the orchestra’s open hostility toward a “Hollywood” composer, and the addition to the program of 27-year-old Frank Sinatra. More teen idol than respected singer at the time, Sinatra inspired Beatles-like screaming from his fans throughout the concert, upstaging Steiner. A series of personal calamities followed: the death of Max’s beloved father, a health crisis of his own, and seemingly insurmountable debt. Again, music was Steiner’s salvation. The 1944 film Since You Went Away—his last collaboration with Selznick—earned Max a third Oscar. But shortly after its release, Steiner was devastated by news that Louise wanted a divorce.

Conductor Willem Mengelberg, 1871-1951

Willem Mengelberg is undeniably the greatest conductor in Dutch music history. In his biography, Frits Zwart carefully examines a musical life lived. Mengelberg was not only one of the world’s greatest, he had an excellent reputation as a trainer of orchestral ensembles, responsible for the international reputation of his own Concertgebouw as well as many others including the New York Philharmonic. A champion of numerous composers, including Mahler and Strauss, Mengelberg was the founder of the renowned tradition of annual performances of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. As Chief Conductor of Amsterdam’s (now Royal) Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mengelberg developed it into one of the world’s most illustrious, simultaneously forging a music life of international eminence for its city of residence. His recordings bear witness to a singular musical interpreter. In 1920, Mengelberg was even more popular than his own Queen, yet a mere thirty years later he died in exile, banned to his remote Swiss chalet. Willem Mengelberg fell from grace, becoming a despised, disputed target of gossip, jealousy and rebuke. His dubious role during World War II has since overshadowed his extraordinary career. Zwart contests that few have ever surpassed Mengelberg‘s international musical legend.

Modernist Music for Children

On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück (Children’s Piece) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.