Introduction: Bridging the Gap

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the middlebrow. Where previously it attracted downright hostility, scholars have begun to interrogate the middlebrow’s history. In addition to building a more nuanced historical picture, they have asked why it was such an uncomfortable category, and what its occlusion in scholarship has meant for historiography. This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to delve more deeply into these questions and to ask how reanimating the middlebrow might radically reshape our understanding of music history. Using the paradigmatic Leonard Bernstein as an entry point, this chapter introduces the values, practices, and debates that have shaped the middlebrow over the past 150 years. It explores why, from the late nineteenth century, commentators, creatives, and audiences began organizing culture into “highbrow” and “lowbrow”; and it traces how, from the outset, these categories were complicated by middlebrow institutions, artworks, and reception modes that fell “in between.” The chapter reveals how and why imagined distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were traditionally endorsed by the academy—notably, in the subdisciplinary separation of art from popular music studies. Viewing long-standing musicological antipathy toward the middlebrow as a further product of this polarized outlook, it begins to stake the ground for middlebrow studies within musicology. Ultimately, the middlebrow emerges as a vital critical apparatus in the pursuit of a more variegated and inclusive history of twentieth-century culture.