Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco

II. 1600–1945

This period falls into two segments: 1600–1750, when the learned study of music shifted away from musica speculativa towards artistic or practical concerns; and 1750–1945, which brought the rise of studies in music history, professorial appointments and a growing role for universities within public musical life. One might see a dichotomy between a practical interest in music in Britain and a more scholarly one in Germany, but the two leading countries in this history differed less than might appear.

1. 1600–1750.

2. Towards the modern university.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Universities, §II: 1600–1945

1. 1600–1750.

Five areas need to be considered: curriculum, professional posts, ceremonies, musical life and intellectual life. Music played a small role in university curricula at least until the early 19th century. That was also true of other comparable subjects (art and literature, for example); the universities served basically law, medicine and the church, and to some extent mathematics, and attending it was not expected of a young man of means. Music was taught instead in the church, in the home and in the musician's studio; it had its own university, one might say, in the great cathedrals and courtly establishments.

Yet music played an important part in the ceremonies of many universities, either their religious rites or the acts where degrees were bestowed. The anniversary of a university's founding was usually honoured with an imposing musical performance. The heads of university choirs tended to be high-level musicians who linked academic and civic, religious and musical institutions. Performers came and went from other areas of a university; a choirboy would go on to a professional school but came back to sing in the collegium musicum. Law or jurisprudence seems to have a particularly close relationship to music: Handel and Forkel are two of many musicians who spent their early years in that discipline, and the directing board of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts always had at least one faculty member from it.

A rich world of private and public activities played a central part in the social life of most university communities. As Thomas Mace put it (Musick's Monument, 1676), ‘our University of Cambridge … [is] the home of eminent Performances upon the lute by divers very worthy Persons’, and the subscription list for his book included 150 names from the university. In most places there existed a private music society; Franz Uffenbach said of his visit to Cambridge in 1710, at the one meeting weekly in Christ's College, ‘there are no professional musicians there but simply bachelors, masters and doctors of music who perform … till 11 at night’. Social and intellectual tendencies flowed together: Milton, the son of a musician who studied at Cambridge, 1625–32, wrote his first essay on the music of the spheres.

Differences between the two major confessions brought about major differences in the roles that music played in universities. In Catholic areas those responsible for teaching music could not presume to determine what sort of music was appropriate for the church. University chapels therefore remained limited to a devotional function; in France and Italy particularly the universities played limited roles in musical life after the middle of the 17th century. In Protestant areas, however, the study of practical music entered the university out of the need to understand how cantus ecclesiasticus, the music of the divine service, should properly be accomplished. The Lutheran and Anglican churches allowed the greatest latitude to the highly learned musicians found in university institutions, giving them special opportunities for leadership and innovation. A.H. Francke (d 1727), for example, Rektor of the influential Friedrichs-Universität in Halle, became the spokesman for the new pietistic role of sacred music that harnessed expressive power to serve an ascetic, pious religious life.

The most important early establishment of a university post for a practising musician occurred through the gift of William Heyther to Oxford University shortly before he died in 1627. A lay vicar of Westminster Abbey and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, he brought the position about through the agency of William Camden, headmaster of Westminster School, who himself endowed what came to be the Camden Chair of Ancient History. Initially, Heyther dictated that there be a master and a lecturer of music. Whereas the former became a permanent post in Oxford musical life called the Music Professor, the latter became a single annual presentation by a succession of speakers. The outcome indicates how practical rather than theoretical music became recognized the more firmly.

Oxford served as the principal centre from which interest in earlier (or ‘ancient’) music developed. While this activity was not considered in very theoretical terms until the late 18th century, the musical life surrounding the university can be credited for helping establish the first set of notions and practices definably ‘canonic’. Henry Aldrich (1648–1710), dean of Christ Church and a major figure in religious disputes, held regular meetings of musicians and interested people in his rooms to perform such music. Similarly, Thomas Tudway wrote an early example of music history – prefaces to a collection of sacred works he made for Robert Harley – while resident in Cambridge. Moreover, the professors of music tended to be men of some learning who took a close interest in the development of a music library and, it would seem, informally educated students in the historical progress of music as they saw it. The most prominent such professor in the 18th century, the elder William Hayes, demonstrated an unusually wide historical knowledge in his Remarks on Mr. Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (1753). William Crotch gave formal lectures, both in Oxford and London, and published his Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music in 1831.

On the Continent, musical posts did not rank as high as they did in England; the designation of a professor musices in Basle, Samuel Mareschall, in the 1570s, was unusual. But many universities, especially those in Protestant areas, appointed a director of musical activities who became an important figure in the university and also the town. Such a person was appointed as director musices in Uppsala in 1687, and ordinaris musicant in Leiden in 1693, to supervise what were called the collegia musica. In Leipzig a special arrangement developed by which the Kantor of the Thomaskirche also took charge of university music, which formed a regular part of J.S. Bach's duties.

As was the case in the Middle Ages, universities were not discrete institutions but in reality a collection of different and separate academic units, some of an entrepreneurial nature. Thus music schools and humanistic academies developed where singing and playing might be studied and compositions performed. A notable academy of this sort, the Accademia de' Dissonanti, was established at Modena by Duke Francesco II d'Este about 1683, in close conjunction with the founding of the University of Modena. Among the compositions written for it were several cantatas by G.B. Vitali. Such musical activities generally flourished only in proximity to a university. By the same token, from the 16th century onwards, at many universities dancing-masters were appointed who in effect started small schools of their own. This was particularly common in Germany; the dancing-master would instruct students in the ars saltatoria in order to develop them as what was called ‘qualificierte Menschen’. Around 1700 there were six such masters at the University of Leipzig, who also gave instruction in French and Italian, acrobatics and manners.

Just as musical activities interpenetrated the universities' social life, so the intellectual dimensions of musical culture were interwoven within the learned disciplines discussed though not necessarily taught there. What is important is less what was supposedly taught – always a difficult matter to determine – but how members of a university and the many people who passed through these cosmopolitan towns mingled musical topics within other kinds of study in informal discussion and writing.

Between the early 16th century and the early 19th there was a fundamental transformation in the role that music played within Western musical life, and the result was to bring it much more closely into university teaching and writing. What limited the role of music within the universities' intellectual life before the mid-18th century was that few amateurs mastered the rigours of learned composition, the sacred and academic polyphony taught in the cathedrals. Music was further limited by the absence of a corpus of great works from antiquity, such as was regarded as the starting-point for a learned discipline and a pantheon of great works.

Indeed, the tradition of scientific and philosophical study of music in theoretical terms lasted in some respects to the end of the 18th century. While the writings of Boethius were no longer closely involved in musical thinking or pedagogy by the middle of the 16th century, they remained at least to be mentioned as pertinent to courses of study in many places. Scientific thinkers in 17th-century Cambridge (Isaac Newton among them) continued to apply astrological notions to musical tuning even though that subject was no longer closely linked to ideas about the harmony of the spheres. Rameau clung to some such ideas. But at the same time, by 1600 music took a prominent place within the newer areas of discourse in the universities. Even though Mersenne was not based in a university, his thinking on musica poetica was read and discussed there; by the end of the 18th century such ideas evolved into musical aesthetics. In such a fashion, musical learning became reorientated from metaphysical science to the humanistic arts.

In a concrete sense, the history of music in the university is the study of the history of music theory found in musical treatises. If the medieval musica speculativa, the glossing of texts by Boethius or Ptolemy, had only a slight connection to the study of psalmody or secular song, by the end of the Renaissance musica pratica meant theoretical discussion of harmony and counterpoint and their application to composition. Other treatises explained all areas of practical music, from music for dinner or dancing in the halls to the more refined sorts of song. The vast majority of treatises can be directly or indirectly linked to a university environment, where they were copied or read by succeeding generations of students and other transients. The challenge to the historian is to determine to what extent treatises actually constituted part of the learning process of the university: did they merely grow out of the university environment, or were they actual texts of lectures given in the Faculty of Arts? Since learning the Quadrivium had never taken deep root in the universities of eastern Europe, practical music was much more important within musical pedagogy there than further west. While treatises written in France or Italy rarely included examples of known, composed pieces, those east of the Elbe usually included many, in some cases works not found in western collections.

Universities, §II: 1600–1945

2. Towards the modern university.

The rapid growth of public musical life during the 18th century gave a strong stimulus to university musical activities and eventually its curriculum. After about 1750, concerts and ceremonies at many universities came to form part of the larger musical world. In Cambridge the Installation of the Vice-Chancellor had always been a major musical event, but by 1749 the one for the Duke of Newcastle was described as ‘a great musical crash … which was greatly admired’. By 1811 the one for the Duke of Gloucester involved diverse concerts and audiences of 2000 people.

Oxford had participated centrally in the rise of public concerts, since events of that nature were held in public houses during the Commonwealth. But after the erection, under Hayes's direction, of the Holywell Music Room, which opened in 1748, the city became second only to London in concert life, partly because the new toll roads made it easy for major performers to go there from London. All authority over public events was vested in the Vice-Chancellor of the University, and the Musical Society was ultimately a creature of university life, its directing committee consisting of representatives from each college, usually a ‘Fellow, Scholar, Exhibitioner, or Chaplain’ (the Articles of 1757). The society provided music and associated concerts for Commemoration, the Acts and the openings of new buildings.

The awarding of the MusB and the MusD changed fundamentally in meaning in the middle of the 19th century. This formed part of the formalization of teaching and expansion of research activities within universities throughout the Western world. During the 17th and 18th centuries the music degrees at the two long-established English universities had served as honorary degrees for musicians thought of particular distinction, with the requirement only that they compose a work for the occasion. In Oxford, Frederick Ouseley, professor from 1855 to 1889, began a long process of designing taught degrees in music, instituting residence requirements and examinations not only in music but also in mathematics, Latin and Greek. Examining boards led to a more formal structure of a music department. Students from other institutions, including conservatories, received degrees under the aegis of the university. At Cambridge, William Sterndale Bennett played a similar role in reforming degree requirements while serving as professor of music between 1856 and 1875. The number of awards of the MusB there grew from 12 in 1800–40 to 44 in 1875–1900. It is also clear that the undergraduate often had much to do with musical life. The letters of John Addington Symonds during his years in Oxford (1857–64) show an intense fascination with works by Beethoven, Mozart and Rossini that was to play an important part in his later writings within the Decadent movement.

The universities contributed significantly to new movements in musical life. The Musical Antiquarian Society was set up in Cambridge in 1840, bringing concerts and the reconstruction of old instruments. The Folk Music Society was founded there in 1898. Charles Villiers Stanford brought Cambridge into close touch with new tendencies in both foreign music and British music as conductor of the Cambridge University Music Society and professor from 1887 to 1924. The dawning of the special role that universities played in new music during the 20th century can be seen in the fact that the distinguished pianist Harold Bauer offered an unusual number of recent works, chiefly by Debussy and Ravel, when he visited Cambridge or Oxford.

The entrance of music into university curricula formed part of a much wider integration of musical thinking into intellectual life as a whole. The neo-classicism of the 18th century permitted a new variety of principles, by which music of the 16th century was now termed ‘ancient’ music, such as would have seemed foolish a century before. Public musical events and periodicals for general readership stimulated each other: columns of news on concerts and the opera became standard by 1800. In Britain and German-speaking countries members of universities were closely involved in the new musical press, from William Hayes in Oxford to J.N. Forkel in Leipzig.

Almost all the newer British universities made appointments in music by the early 20th century. One had been made in 1764 at Trinity College, Dublin (the Earl of Mornington); there followed Edinburgh in 1839, Aberystwyth in 1872, Durham in 1890, London in 1902, Birmingham a few years later and Glasgow in 1930.

That the same was not true in France indicates how deeply and how long it remained divided over religious matters, and how much that limited the role of music in the universities. The Sorbonne had a relationship each with Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sainte-Chapelle for ceremonies, and during the 18th century there existed a music director for such events. But music did not play an important role in its rituals, nor within its intellectual life. Only at the end of the 19th century did musical writings begin to come out of that university. During the 1890s and early 1900s the doctorat ès lettres was awarded for theses on musical topics to Romain Rolland, Louis Laloy and Jules Comparieu, through the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, a professional school closely linked to the university. In 1896 Lionel Dauriac began lecturing on musical aesthetics, and some 15 years later André Pirro became chargé de cours for the history of music, offering two different certificates. But the scholarly study of music history remained almost entirely in the Conservatoire, in the Schola Cantorum and among private individuals until after World War II.

German universities led the world in the modernization of programmes: since most had maintained neutrality in confessional identity since the Reformation, they were unusually open to innovation and leadership. Music directors took on specially high status in the academic hierarchy, both conducting ensembles and lecturing on music theory and history. The two most important early figures were Forkel in Göttingen and D.G. Türk in Halle; after both were appointed in 1779, Forkel was honoured as Magister ohne Examen und umsonst in 1787 and Türk was named professor in 1808. A series of other German universities followed suit: F.J. Fröhlich in Würzburg (1811), F.S. Gassner in Giessen (1818), H.C. Breidenstein in Bonn (1826) and A.B. Marx in Berlin (1830). Many were active in musical life as writers and critics as well as performers; Forkel, for example, published a series of almanacs on musical events. Their salaries were nonetheless usually less than half that of a professor, requiring them to continue activity outside the university.

Careers devoted to music history emerged out of those followed by music directors, a process that took over 100 years. Forkel, regarded as the founder of music history as a scholarly discipline, mixed theoretical, practical and historical topics in his lectures; specialized historical study was not established until the end of the 19th century. Among the most important milestones were the bestowal of the first doctorate of philosophy for a musical topic (Über das Schöne in der Musik) to Briedenthal in Giessen in 1821, and the award of the Ordinariat to Eduard Hanslick in Vienna in 1870, Gustav Jacobsthal in Strasbourg in 1897 and Hermann Kretzschmar in Berlin in 1904. The grounds for legitimization of the profession changed from period to period, from a humanistic idea of the whole person made by Marx (who had to remain Professor Extraordinarius) to a scientific one by the end of the century. In the process, lines were drawn between preparation of scholars, performers and teachers: the purer kind of scholar emerged in the careers of Oesterley, Nohl, A.W. Ambros and Spitta. During the first half of the 20th century, music history dominated most schools of music in universities, and the study of performance increasingly shifted into the conservatories (now called ‘Hochschulen’).

The training of musicians and teachers entered the Scandinavian universities more centrally than was the case in Germany. The first professors were appointed in 1918 in Helsinki, in 1926 in Turku and Copenhagen and in 1947 in Uppsala. In the Netherlands and Belgium practices followed the German example more closely, with appointments in Brussels in 1931, Utrecht in 1934 and Amsterdam in 1953.

In the USA, the first university musical activities were performing societies of a convivial nature, usually not officially recognized by the institutions. At Harvard the Pierian Sodality (1808) and the Glee Club (1858) performed both vocal and instrumental music and gradually shifted to giving public concerts. The Glee Club grew out of the appointment of a choir director for the university chapel and obtained its own head, Archibald T. Davison, in 1912. John Knowles Paine built up the music department as the first professor of music between 1875 and 1906, and the first doctorate was granted in 1905.

Music grew up within Yale University largely under the beneficence of graduates, chiefly from the Battell family, who gave funds for instruction and performing groups. In 1854 Gustave Stoeckel, an émigré from Kaiserlauten, was engaged to teach students without offering credit. The Bachelor of Music degree was introduced in 1893, ‘for the study of the Science by students already proficient in the elements of it’. The first faculty members were the prominent organist and composer Horatio Parker and Samuel Simons Sanford, an accomplished pianist from a wealthy Bridgeport family, who served without pay as Professor of Applied Music from 1894 to 1910. As was the case at the University of Michigan, American universities developed active music programmes but did not attempt to train performers in this period. Other early programmes included the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; the first chair of musicology in the USA came with the appointment of Otto Kinkeldey at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1930.

Universities, §II: 1600–1945

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ten Years of University Music in Oxford, being a Brief Record of the Proceedings of the Oxford University Musical Union during the Years 1884–1894 (Oxford, 1894)

M. Brenêt: ‘La musicologie’, Rapport sur la musique française contemporaine, ed. P.-M. Masson (Rome, 1913), 18–19

A. Schering: Musikgeschichte Leipzigs (Leipzig, 1926)

W.R. Spalding: Music at Harvard (Cambridge, MA, 1935–77)

N.C. Carpenter: Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (Norman, OK, 1957)

W.F. Kümmel: ‘Die Anfänge der Musikgeschichte an den deutschsprachigen Universitäten’, Mf, xx (1967), 262–80

J.A. Symonds: The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. H.M. Schueller and R.L. Peters (Detroit, 1967–9)

C.R. Nutter: 125 Years of the Harvard Musical Association (Cambridge, MA, 1968)

Bach-Dokumente, Bach-Archiv, Leipzig (Kassel, 1969)

K.W. Niemöller: ‘Zur Musiktheorie in enzyklopädischen Wissenschaftssystem des 16./17. Jahrhunderts’, Über Musiktheorie: Berlin 1970, 23–36

M. Crum: ‘An Oxford Music Club, 1690–1719’, Bodleian Library Record, ix (1974), 83–99

F. Knight: Cambridge Music from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Cambridge, 1980)

S. Wollenberg: ‘Music in 18th-Century Oxford’, PRMA, cviii (1981–2), 151–62

M. Delahaye and D. Pistone: Musique et musicologie dans les universités françaises (Paris, 1982)

K.W. Niemöller: ‘Zum Einfluss des Humanismus auf Position und Konzeption von Musik im deutschen Bildungssystem der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Musik in Humanismus und Renaissance, ed. W. Ruegg and A. Schmitt (Weinheim, 1983), 77–97

L. Noss: A History of the Yale School of Music, 1855–1970 (New Haven, CT, 1984)

J. Caldwell: ‘Music in the Faculty of Arts’, History of Oxford, iii, ed. J. McConica (Oxford, 1986), 201–12

K.W. Niemöller: ‘Musik als Lehrgegenstand an den deutschen Universitäten des 16./17. Jahrhunderts’, Mf, xl (1987), 303–19

M. Staehelin, ed.: Musikwissenschaft und Musikpflege an der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Göttingen, 1987)

C. Wright: ‘Music in the History of the Universities’, AcM, lix (1987), 8–10

D.J. Fisher: Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley, 1988)

‘Thomas Tudway and the Harleian Music Collection’, British Library Journal, xv (1989), 187–205

R. Szeskus: ‘Bach und die Leipziger Universitätsmusik’, BMw, xxxii (1990), 161–9

G. Engmann and B. Wiechert: ‘Tag voller Anmuth, voller Pracht: zur musikalische Gestaltung der Universitätsjubiläen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, Göttinger Jb, xl (1992), 253–79

W. Weber: Rise of Musical Classics in 18th-Century England (Oxford, 1992)

J. Burchell: Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1830–99 (New York, 1996)

G. Rothmund-Gaul: Zwischen Takstock und Hörsaal: das Amt des Universitätsmusikdirektors in Tübingen, 1817–1952 (Stuttgart, 1997)

J. Fulcher: French Cultural Politics and Music: from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York, 1999)

H. Irving: Ancients and Moderns: William Crotch and the Development of Classical Music (Aldershot, 1999)

Universities