Department of Music
Orchestrating Whiteness: Arthur Fiedler, Serge Koussevitzky, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Professor Ayden Adler
DePauw University
Date: Wednesday, 6 November 2019, 5:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 11.01, 11/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Abstract:
In 1881, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was not only the first orchestra in America to present a regular series of concerts by a stable, full-time roster of musicians; it was also the first American orchestra to complement its winter concerts, which were perceived by audiences and critics at the time as “serious” and “edifying,” with a series of Popular Concerts, known after 1900 as the Pops, which were considered “lighter” and “entertaining.” After a succession of conductors who presided over the Pops for no more than a few years each, in 1930 the BSO awarded the post to Arthur Fiedler, with whom the Pops became identified over the course of his nearly fifty-year tenure. Fiedler began conducting the Pops during the era of Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the BSO’s winter concerts from 1924 until his retirement in 1949. For nearly twenty years, the two Jewish-born, European-trained conductors simultaneously negotiated from the same podium numerous socio-political trends: rampant anti-Semitism, rapid changes in American demographics, changing attitudes toward America’s emerging consumer economy, and the reformulation of American identity after World War II. This talk shares how, while managing the various artistic, social, and cultural expectations of the BSO’s entirely white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Board of Trustees, Fiedler and Koussevitzky charted their divergent professional courses in cultural waters fraught with conflicting assumptions about how to define “good” music.
About the Speaker:
Ayden Adler serves as Professor of Music and History at DePauw University where she teaches courses in arts patronage, audience engagement, and nonprofit management. With degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), the Juilliard School (M.M.), and the Eastman School of Music (M.A., D.M.A., Ph.D.), her professional background and experience encompasses music performance, scholarship, teaching, and administration. Highlights of her career include performing for ten years as a tenured member of the Rochester (NY) Philharmonic Orchestra while teaching at the Eastman School of Music, serving as Executive Director of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra after stints in senior management at the Atlanta and Philadelphia Orchestras, serving as Dean of Michael Tilson Thomas’ New World Symphony, and, most recently, as Dean of the DePauw University School of Music. Her academic research focuses on the history and current role of arts and culture in society, with emphases on economics, labor, critical race theory, gender, and whiteness studies. Her current book project, Orchestrating Whiteness: Serge Koussevitzky, Arthur Fiedler, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is under contract with the University of Illinois Press.
All welcome.
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