Since humans are innately biological, and since most sf concerns human beings or other biological life forms, sf writers inevitably make biological assumptions - if only the default assumptions that the planets their fictional space travellers visit will have adequate gravity, air and exotic natives with the right number of chromosomes to interbreed. Such crude assumptions are commonly taken for granted in so-called 'hard science' stories that focus on the physics of space travel or interstellar warfare. Over the past decade, however, writers more often have turned to biology as the 'hard science' frontier of the future. The quest for outer space has given way to the quest for the genome. The great adversary is no longer an alien superpower, but the enemies within - cancer, AIDS, and bio-weapons - as well as the accidental results of genetic manipulation, and our own lifestyle destroying our biosphere. The engineering challenge of the future is less a matter of machines replacing living organisms than of machines imitating life's complexity.

The history of conducting in America is at once bound to the profession's European fortunes and characterized by various attempts to break free from those bonds. And if the separation of New World from Old World may never be complete, that is no argument against that struggle's centrality in American musical life. Set against the privileged role of the symphony orchestra in America, the relationship to commercial enterprise, transformations in technology, and the continually growing power of celebrity, is the tale of a young nation both drawn to the artistic traditions of the cultures that spawned it and increasingly determined to forge its own path.

The religious traditions on which American society was largely formed did not encourage the growth of a new musical culture. In addition to the practical problems, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia had religious objections that contributed to the slow start of concert life. But with growing urbanization, a burgeoning sense of nationhood, and the discovery that music could be morally edifying, the seeds of formal concert life took root. Founded in 1815, Boston's Handel and Haydn Society was primarily devoted to the performance of sacred choral works, while a Philharmonic Orchestra founded by Gottlieb Graupner in 1810 lasted for fifteen years, performing the first complete American Messiah in 1818. The multipurpose band, however, remained the most common musical ensemble in nineteenth-century America, and like the rest of American musical concert life at mid-century, variety was its hallmark.

'Alternate history' - or, as grammatical purists call it, 'alternative history' - is an inaccurate but common label for a small but intriguing body of literature. An alternate history is not a history at all, but a work of fiction in which history as we know it is changed for dramatic and often ironic effect. Often an alternate history dramatizes the moment of divergence from the historical record, as well as the consequences of that divergence. Such a story or novel might seem at first to be a work of traditional historical fiction, in which invented characters and events are woven into the known tapestry of history, but the alteration announces itself quickly, usually in the first few pages.

An example is ‘The Lucky Strike’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (1984), which begins:

For several pages, the fictional adventures of Captain January seem to have a nonfictional backdrop, for the setting meshes with the reader’s knowledge, however vague, of the closing months of the Second World War, as US forces in the Pacific ready atom bombs to drop on Japan. Then comes a spectacular moment of divergence, as the horrified January watches a plane in trouble:

As a soloist, conductor, orchestra member, and conductor/soloist, I have had a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between the soloist and the conductor. During a long career, I have experienced collaborations between soloist and conductor that ranged from performances of great ensemble sensitivity and finesse to some that bordered on musical sabotage.

Conducting with a soloist differs in many ways from the norm, the most obvious difference being the expectations of the soloist and the orchestra. The soloist expects the conductor to embrace his or her interpretation without question. Discussions of differences should take place only in the privacy of the pre-rehearsal, as any evidence of disapproval by the conductor is very upsetting to the orchestra. The orchestra expects the conductor to be familiar with the soloist's interpretation and be technically prepared to indicate clearly any tempo changes or dynamic adjustments required. Any suggestions from the soloist should be given to the orchestra by the conductor! On one occasion a soloist chose to communicate directly with a wind player in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and this breach of etiquette caused an angry confrontation that required public apologies before we could resume the rehearsal. Vocal soloists expect the conductor to balance dynamics carefully so that they will not have to strain the voice. Singing full voice on the day of a concert is not to be expected of a vocal soloist.

It is, to begin with, a problem in perception. The nature of sf during the last two decades of the twentieth century can be seen as a classic figure-ground puzzle. One angle of perspective on the era gives us a vision of the triumph of sf as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to our gaze the significant futures that, during those years, began to come to pass. But under a second angle of perspective, the high profile of sf as a shaping vision becomes indecipherable from the world during these years: in this perspective, sf gradually burned through the categories that gave it the defining potency of genre, and became fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify: which is a way of saying, to differ from. Both perspectives, after the nature of figure-ground puzzles, co-exist.

This chapter can be understood to adhere to both perspectives.

Much happened in the two decades between 1980 and 2000. The sf readership broadened and diffused; no longer could it be claimed (a claim only made in any case with any plausibility about some forms of American sf before 1980) that sf was primarily read, or could be profitably written for, adolescent males. Written sf was increasingly presented in the form of books, while magazines declined. Written sf itself lost its unquestioned status as the default form of the genre; indeed, many consumers of sf ideas and iconography now accessed that material solely through film, television and computer gaming, without in fact actually reading sf at all.

To trace anything as definite as a tradition, even in one country, with an activity as egoistic as conducting, is a delicate and hazardous task. Realistically considered, perhaps, the French tradition boils down to a list of conductors, from Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) to Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) – the former keeping time by thumping the ground with the long stick which was to cause his death from gangrene when he inadvertently jammed the point into his toe, the latter shaping complex meters with batonless hands, and still, happily, very much with us.

True, conductors tend in practice to be conservative people (though the opposite is the case with two of the greatest, Berlioz and Boulez). They can often be shown to have reproduced quite closely what they grew up learning to do: making the same cuts and the same ritardandos and accelerandos as their mentors did, omitting the same exposition repeats, and so on. Even then, however, the reproduction, colored by the mind and temperament of the individual concerned, is likely to take on a new character and become something different. Tradition, as Stravinsky's dictum has it, is made, not inherited.

The word “culture” is a contested term. It hesitates between “nature” and “nurture,” an insoluble conundrum. It can, for instance, mean a corporation's management structures or the medium in which people come to discover their existence. Mary Shelley engaged with varied forms of what we might call “culture.” She worked on the journal The Liberal, a collaboration amongst the Shelley-Godwin-Hunt circle in England and Italy (J II 431). She published at least a dozen essays of the genre that we now call “review essays” and dozens more stories and sketches for the annuals. Shelley also edited and wrote the prefaces and notes to two editions of her late husband's poetry and edited his essays, letters, and translations. In addition to her novels and novella, she wrote poems and plays and translated works from Italian and German. A scholarly edition of her biographies is now available and her travelogues are at last back in print. In all these works, Shelley demonstrated her special awareness and intelligence concerning culture, both specifically as the literary productions and values of her era, and generally as notions of culture as a whole way of life (as the critic Raymond Williams, author of Culture and Society, would have phrased it).

The fascination of sf with faith and with ritual can be located in the geography of two strands of genre development. The first, scientific romance, bestowed upon sf a sense of grandeur and wonder at the cosmos and its works. From the scientific romance were drawn the great space operas of E. E. 'Doc' Smith, the spiritual journeys of David Lindsay (A Voyage to Arcturus, 1920) and the eschatological futurism of Olaf Stapledon. While the scientific romance did not support a religious interpretation of the world, it revelled in the immaterial and imparted to genre sf a desire for the transcendent; this vision of the future represented an attempt to peer into the heavens. The second, sf as it developed in the pulp magazines, leaned towards a much more material and ritualistic understanding of religion and, on the surface at least, this became the dominant mode of the sf encounter with religion.

Genre publishing began in the USA in the 1920s and much of what I describe in this chapter is consequent upon this specific cultural milieu. Most superficial accounts of the USA in this period adopt a particularist, northeastern approach in which America emerges into scientific and political rationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet most Americans remained deeply religious. From 1926 onwards, while court cases appeared to be ruling for ever greater secularization, legislation restricting the teaching of scientific knowledge and method quietly sneaked on to local statute books (this did not come to light until the curriculum reforms of the late 1950s, prompted by the Russian launch of Sputnik). By 1960, secularism, or at least a liberal interpretation of most faiths, provided an apparently hegemonic intellectual tradition in the USA.

The conductor, in any form recognizable today, emerged later in Italy than in other European countries. Italy had no Habeneck or Berlioz, no Spohr or Mendelssohn – and later, as the role of the professional conductor developed, No Bülow or Richter or Nikisch. It was not until the first years of the twentieth century that a real Italian star exploded on the international scene, and if the blaze of Toscanini's fame has tended to obscure the activities of his predecessors, that is chiefly because they had been obliged to struggle for so long with the last vestiges of a ubiquitous native tradition that would not easily relax its grip.

The dominating feature of that tradition was opera. The Italians invented opera, and they remained faithful to it as their main form of musical expression and social enjoyment for the best part of three centuries; in spite of the jigsaw of political frontiers it spread remorselessly over the whole peninsula, and was accompanied by a parallel decline in other forms of music. Church music (much of it on operatic lines) remained in constant production, but the history of Italian instrumental music, after the great days of the Baroque concerto, is one of gradual attenuation; the few interested Italians tended to go abroad – Boccherini to Spain, Clementi to England, Cherubini and Spontini to Paris. Italy was “the land of song,” and symphonic developments in other parts of Europe were regarded at best as irrelevant to the melodic invention that was the real purpose of music, at worst as a serious threat to it; orchestral complication was viewed with mistrust.

In the months that followed the death of Joseph Haydn in May 1809 the Leipzig journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published a biography of the composer in eight instalments. Written by Georg August Griesinger and subsequently published as a single volume, it had been prepared in Vienna over a period of some ten years during which Griesinger had won the confidence of the composer. Its factual content and its tonewere to play a significant part indetermining the posthumous image of the composer. Both Griesinger and Haydn were conscious of the international esteem in which the composer was held and the biography sought to explore, through an attractive mixture of direct quotation, anecdote and reverential comment, how he had achieved this pre-eminence. Since the genre of the quartet was central to this fame Griesinger attempted to shed light on how Haydn had first come to compose such works:

With the publication of Haydn's Op. 33 (1782) and Mozart's ensuing ‘Haydn’ Quartets (1785), the influence of the Austro-Germanic string quartet spread throughout Europe concurrently with the gradual emergence of professional quartet ensembles. Like nineteenth-century symphonists, quartet composers faced a formidable heritage, especially after Beethoven. Brahms summed it up famously: ‘You have no idea how it feels to the likes of us always to hear such a giant (Beethoven) marching behind one.’ In the context of current musical discourse, it might seem naive to accept Brahms' observation as the starting point for an historical overview of quartet literature. Yet careful study of works by both famous and lesser-known composers points one repeatedly to the problem of the Viennese inheritance, and not only in German-speaking lands. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on the quartets of four acknowledged nineteenth-century masters of the genre and one whose works, although all but forgotten today, were widely acclaimed during his lifetime.

Schubert

Among the first to sense the giant marching behind him was Franz Schubert (1797–1828), who was born in Vienna just as the twenty-six-year-old Beethoven was becoming securely established in the Austrian capital; he would survive Beethoven by only twenty months. Although he is best known today for his Lieder, chamber music occupied Schubert more consistently than any other type throughout his regrettably short career: string quartets dating from 1810 or early 1811 (D. 18–19a) are among his earliest known pieces, and his last completed instrumental work is the extraordinary C major String Quintet with two cellos (D. 956) composed just weeks before he died.

We are ‘living in a bad time for practising the intimate, introspective art of the string quartet’. So writes a UK broadsheet journalist at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He is talking, be it said at once, about the difficulties of making a living solely as a professional chamber ensemble that plays the classical repertoire and, though despairing of dwindling public interest, and of string quartets selling out to razzmatazz and pop, he ends with an optimistic assessment of fresh ideas for drawing in new audiences. Be that as it may, his initial, nostalgic message is clear: it was not always thus. Indeed, times have changed as far as the string quartet's relationship with society is concerned: and like other types of music, the string quartet has a social and cultural history, well worth exploring.

This chapter attempts to draw out some of the central threads in that history, by presenting an outline of the changing social function of the string quartet, along with fluctuations in cultural attitudes towards it, from mid-eighteenth-century central-European beginnings right up to the present. The main theme is the relationship between performers and repertoire on the one hand and audiences or ‘society’ on the other – at root demonstrating a shift from participation to listening. But there is counterpoint, too, not least in the intimacy of the quartet genre and in how, as the very epitome of the chamber music ideal, it has responded to the problems and challenges that external factors have brought.

The composition and publication of Beethoven's first six quartets, Op. 18, are intertwined with those of Haydn's Op. 76 and Op. 77. Haydn had completed the six quartets of Op. 76 in 1797 but they were not published until the July and December of 1799, dedicated to Prince Joseph Erdödy who had commissioned them. Meanwhile Haydn had embarked on a new set commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz, completing two works in 1799; progress on a third work was painfully slow and eventually the two completed quartets only were issued, as Op. 77 in September 1802. The dedicatee, Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, was one of Vienna's leading patrons of music, devoting large amounts of money to the commissioning, purchasing and performing of all kinds of music, from songs to oratorios, and sonatas to symphonies. Over the next decade he was to become one of Beethoven's most ardent supporters, a process that began in 1798 in a deliberately significant manner with the commissioning of six quartets. Beethoven began work on them in the summer of 1798, and handed over copies of the first three in autumn 1799 and the final three in autumn 1800. They were not published, however, until 1801. In the case of both Haydn and Beethoven these contemporaneous quartets – Op. 76, Op. 77 and Op. 18 – initially remained in the private possession of the two aristocrats who had commissioned them, Erdödy and Lobkowitz, until their publication when they were released to the public with formal dedications. While it is possible that Beethoven may have seen manuscript copies of Haydn's Op. 76 and Op. 77 (particularly the latter because they were commissioned by Lobkowitz) before completing his set, it is likely that only with the publication of Op. 76 in the period July–December 1799 was Beethoven able to study any of Haydn's latest quartets. Having already completed three of the quartets of Op. 18 (nos. 1, 2 and 3), Beethoven revised them in the summer of 1800, and it is tempting to speculate that the revision was in part prompted by the publication of Op. 76.

Introduction

Ensemble combinations based on the string quartet have inspired some of the most expressive and intense pieces of all chamber music. The various genres examined in this survey attracted a remarkable array of composers, so their vast field of work can only be given a brief overview here. There is no space for detailed musical analysis or even a listing of every work of notable significance. Such enduring masterpieces as Mozart's G minor Quintet and Schubert's C major Quintet are illustrations of the inspiration afforded by the addition to the quartet of just one stringed instrument. However, the necessity to integrate extra players within an established quartet means that such works have tended to find their way into the concert hall only on an occasional basis. Long before these pieces were familiar through recordings, Walter Cobbett in 1929 went so far as to advocate the formation of string quintets specifically for touring purposes, as a way of doing justice to both the quality and the quantity of the repertory. The age of recording has consolidated the reputation of many of the pieces discussed below, including larger-scale string pieces such as Brahms' sextets and Mendelssohn's Octet, whose live performance has continued to be inhibited by practical and economic considerations.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century the medium of the piano quintet has become established as an important element in the repertories of both pianists and string quartets, with masterly contributions from such front-rank composers as Borodin, Brahms, Dvořák, Elgar, Fauré, Schumann, Shostakovich and Schnittke. Their various solutions to the balance of form, content and texture illustrate the distinctive versatility of the medium. Many of these composers also wrote for the closely related piano quartet, representative of a large body of chamber music which dispenses with a second violin and thus strictly lies outside the scope of this chapter.