Faculty Research Spotlight: Joan Shelley Rubin

March 2025

                Many of the works of cultural history that I most admire explore features of our daily lives that we ordinarily fail to notice because they are so familiar.  One source of my current research project, “Setting Music to Words:  Print Culture and the Popularization of the Classical Canon in Modern America,” was a question that occurred to me some years ago after encountering what was, until recently, one of those commonplace phenomena:  the presence of both books and musical recordings in the collections of public libraries and among the wares of stores like Barnes and Noble.  How, when, and why was that alliance between print and music forged?

  When I asked myself that question, I had already written The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), which explored institutions and individuals invested in creating a wider audience for the arts and the humanities in the United States between 1900 and 1950.  After that book appeared, I became focused not only on the mediators of print I had studied, but also on the readers they were addressing.  I was lured into the growing subdiscipline called “the history of the book,” which was attracting other scholars working on reading, and became a co-editor of a large collaborative project, A History of the Book in America.  I also produced my own study of consumers of print, Songs of Ourselves:  The Uses of Poetry in America (2007). It was a short step from thinking about the recitation of verse to wondering about what difference it made if a composer set a poetic text to music.

Around the same time, musicologists were starting to apply the idea of the middlebrow to accessible (as opposed to avant-garde) pieces and performances.  The other major source of my current project was an invitation to deliver a keynote at a conference in London on “Music and the Middlebrow” in 2017.  The invitation was too good to turn down, so I decided to speak about the numerous volumes explaining classical music to non-specialist audiences that came out in the United States before about 1960.  Although, at first, I planned a short monograph based on an expansion of my talk, I quickly realized that the relationship between print culture and the growth of musical knowledge in modern America involved more than book publication.  It was about this time that I walked past the CDs available to borrowers at the Brighton Library and recognized the role of libraries and bookstores as sites for the dissemination of the classical canon.  Later, I went through Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence with his readers at the Library of Congress, as well as the Aaron Copland Papers at LC.  I became fascinated by the archive of the press agents who publicized (and attached ideological meanings to) the massive classical concerts held at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City from the end of World War I to the early 1960s.  I also investigated the papers of Olin Downes, longtime New York Times music critic, at the University of Georgia.  All those subjects—books about how to listen, methods of distributing recordings, the bond between critic or composer and reader, classical music and democracy—are now part of my project.

As Setting Music to Words has evolved, it is enabling me to bring together the interests that have governed most of my scholarly career: the middle space between high and low culture and the values and practices associated with the production, mediation, and consumption of print.  It is also leading me to the overarching argument that, despite the undeniable importance of technological innovations like the phonograph and the radio, print culture set the terms for the reception of classical music in its newly available forms.  I am not sure when I will finish what I expect to be my last book—soon, I hope—but you will find me in Rush Rhees working on it in the fall.

Joan Shelley Rubin

Dexter Perkins Professor of History