Democratization Revisited: The Piano and Its Discontents in Gilded Age America

During the Gilded Age, the emergence of a musical democracy has often been hailed as the triumph of commercial and educational institutionsm at the center of which stood the piano that was deemed to have fulfilled important social and moral functions. While the cultural utility of the piano is beyond doubt, its career was accompanied by critical commentary that deserves more attention than it has so far received. The paper ventures to disentangle the multiple layers of criticism leveled at the democratization of piano playing in the late nineteenth century. More specifically, three strands of perceptions need to be addressed. Misogynist voices targeted piano girls and their professional musical aspirations as the main culprit in the erosion of Victorian values and gender roles. Elite commentators and advocates of high art identified an excess of piano players among dilettantes and re-imagined how a musical amateur should be like. At the same time professional virtuosi were singled out as instigators of a technical cult in piano playing that was considered detrimental to the artistic ideals of true expression and touch. In the face of such varied criticism the piano emerges not so much an asset, but rather a cultural liability. The middle-class piano culture was therefore destabilized from within before sound recording and instruments of musical reproduction would deliver another blow to it in the twentieth century.