Are Musicians “Ordinary Workers”? Labor Organization and the Question of “Artistic Value” in the First Years of the Portuguese Musicians’ Class Association: 1909–1913

Abstract

This article explores how unionized Portuguese musicians tried to address the paradoxes of their social position in a period marked by the development of the entertainment industries. While considering themselves as being part of the “great army of workers,” the members of the Portuguese Musicians’ Class Association (ACMP) remained strongly attached to the ideal of the symphony orchestra and the notion of musical art as a pure and non-market “spiritual activity.” I argue that the study of union debates can offer new perspectives on the ways musicians have historically, aesthetically, and politically constructed their own representations of what being a “professional musician” is.

Notes

1. Translations of extracts from works in languages other than English are by the author.

2. On the Lisbon Regicide and the Republican Revolution of 1910, see Wheeler.

3. Between 1864 and 1911, Lisbon’s population grew from 190,311 to 351,210 inhabitants. On the development of the musical entertainment market in Lisbon in the late nineteenth century, see Silva.

4. In the early twentieth century, industrial workers formed only 8–10% of the active Portuguese population. On the development of the Portuguese worker’s movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Rodrigues; Mónica; and Pereira.

5. The union’s archives congregate the documentation from the three institutions which represented the musical profession during the last century: the ACMP (1908–1933), the National Union of Musicians (1933–1974) – that succeeded the former when free unionism was suppressed by the dictatorship of the Estado Novo – and the Musician’s Union (1974–present), born with the democratization of unionism after the Carnation Revolution. The archives are composed of institutional correspondence, minutes, reports, contracts, and 15,000 individual files of union members. A research project is currently being prepared to study this vast collection of data.

6. In a manifesto published in November 1910, the ACMP claimed that the orchestra formed with foreign musicians represented an increasing cost of 4.000$000 réis for the Teatro de São Carlos, largely exceeding the 1.000$000 réis augmentation caused by the new wage scale, thus implying that the reasons behind Anahory’s decision not to negotiate with the class association were not economic, but ideological. Réis is the plural of real, the Portuguese currency before the 5 October Revolution. A thousand réis was called mil-réis (written 1$000) and fractions of mil-réis were written 0$500 or $500.

7. Carlos de Mello (1860–1913) was a geographer and republican supporter. In 1910 he also published a favorable account of the recent advances on women’s rights, O Escandalo do Feminismo (The Feminist Scandal).

8. Júlio Cardona (1879–1950) was a violinist, conductor, and professor at the National Conservatory. A Freemason, under the name “Richard Wagner” he composed the music of an important republican hymn, A Sementeira (The Sowing). He was elected president of the ACMP’s board in December 1912.

9. For an aesthetic and ideological analysis of the Sinfonia À Pátria and its reception in late nineteenth-century Portugal, see Toscano.

10. The Teatro de São Carlos reopened in 1919, but opera seasons continued to be irregular until the end of the republican period.

11. The International Confederation had his headquarters in Paris and was composed by unions from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland (Seitz). The formal admission of the ACMP in the International Federation was decided on 20 February 1911 (Echo Musical, 19 Feb. 1911, 6).

12. Rodrigues (134) identifies 91 unions that took part in the congress, representing over 35,000 workers.

13. José Relvas (1858–1929), a rich landowner in the Ribatejo region, was one of the most important Republicans leaders, becoming famous for proclaiming the new regime from Lisbon’s Town Hall balcony during the 5 October Revolution. Relvas was also an amateur musician: he played the violin and wrote about music in the A Arte Musical. In 1911 he joined the Freemasonry under the name “Beethoven” (Noras).

14. These measures were part of a larger tax reform conducted by the provisional government, aimed to reduce the public debt inherited from the previous regime. In the context of the reform, José Relvas introduced, for the first time, a progressive taxation of income in the Portuguese fiscal system (Rosas and Rollo).

15. In the first decade of the twentieth century, even though there was no industrial production of records in the country, regular recordings sessions were organized in Lisbon for international companies (Gramophone Company, Pathé) and national labels (Simplex, Ideal) (Losa).

16. For comparison, in 1909 a construction worker earned $450 réis daily, workers in tobacco and textile industries $500 réis (Cabral 431–32).

17. The orchestra section in question is not identified in the ACMP report. It is specified only that it was a section “indispensable to the organisation of orchestral ensembles” and that the board had already largely increased their fees on the official wage scale, because it was traditionally one of the less paid sections of the orchestra (ACMP, “Relatório” 8–9).

18. We only have scarce information about Laureano Forsini’s life and professional career. We know than he was a student at the Madrid Conservatory, finishing his classes in 1883, and that he was part of the violin section in the Orquestra Sinfónica de Madrid in 1904. We also have several references to Forsini’s career as director of a sextet, playing in several cities in the Iberian peninsula (Gibraltar in 1891, coffee shops and casinos in Múrcia). In 1902 he was the director of a “Spanish orchestra” that performed at the Jardins Foz, in Lisbon, being praised by the press as a “notable violinist” (Diario Illustrado, 22 Jun. 1902), and in 1910 he was directing the sextet of the Casino Estoril, near the Portuguese capital (Arte Musical, 30 Jun. 1910).

19. The salaries demanded by Forsini were above the wage scales published by the ACMP in 1911, which determined, for ensembles composed by string instruments and piano performing in movie theaters, 1$600 réis for category 1-A musicians (first violin, cello, piano) and 1$400 réis for category 1-B (second violin, viola, double bass) (ACMP, Regulamento, 1911, 24–25).