The Music Uptown

The Symphonic Scene.

Classical music in 1910s America was still strongly influenced by European traditions. An increasing number of Americans had access to symphonic music, thanks to the proliferation of symphony orchestras in cities and towns across the United States and the growing recording industry. (Both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony were recording regularly by 1918.) Most major orchestras had been founded in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and the New York Philharmonic was three-quarters of a century old in 1917. Nevertheless, most American musicians and conductors went abroad for their training, and concerts given by American orchestras were dominated by works of European masters and new European composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Prokofiev. Even the orchestral accompaniment (played live) for early feature films was European music: at the 1915 premiere of D. W. Griffith's The...

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