The Town Band and the Municipal Orchestra: music on the rates, 1879–1932

The short answer. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, which calls itself the oldest in Asia, began as a brass band of twenty-one Filipino musicians hired in Manila in 1881 to play in the Public Garden, and was paid for, from that year to the end of the Settlement, out of the rates. Its history in the Council’s reports is a history of a bill: 4,354 taels in 1881, 20,240 in 1904, 56,771 in 1913, 140,638 in 1925, 201,014 in 1931, with a German conductor in 1906 who turned the band into an orchestra, an Italian in 1919 who made it a good one, and ratepayers who were asked at least four times whether they wished to go on paying and said yes, narrowly in 1923 and 1927. The Chinese residents who paid half the rates were not admitted to the parks where it played until 1928; by 1932 they were a fifth of its audience. This is the orchestra as the Council counted it.

1879–1881: a band from Manila

Darwent’s handbook gives the origin. An Amateur Wind Instrument Society existed in the 1870s; “in 1879 the trustees of the Recreation Fund took over the effects of this society in trust for the public”, “musicians were engaged at Manila, and the band established”, and “the band continued under entirely private management until 1881”. The primary record begins at the ratepayers’ meeting of 18 February 1881, which resolved “that this meeting authorizes the Council to take over the management of the Town Band from the retiring Committee”. The Council’s sub-committee found that “the new Committee had therefore to start afresh”: it engaged a bandmaster, Melchior Vela, in May 1881 and sent him to Manila, where Spanish regimental bands had trained a supply of musicians who would work for less than Europeans, and by the autumn the band was “composed of 21 musicians in addition to the band-master”, on agreements to August 1882. “The net expenditure of the year” was “Taels 4,354.15”. The Council put 3,000 taels into it and the French Council a share, raised in 1885 to 1,500 taels on condition the band played in the Concession “at least two days a week”.

The ratepayers were asked almost at once whether they meant it. The musicians’ agreements lapsed on 30 September 1884 and were deliberately not renewed, “to take the sense of the community as to whether it was desired to continue the Band as a Municipal institution or not”; the sense was “amply demonstrated in the affirmative by an almost unanimous vote”. By 1883 the band was already two things, “the winter stringed orchestra” and the summer military band, and its committee reported that the community had “fairly well patronised the Band” and that “it supplies an actual want in the Settlement”. In 1887 the ratepayers paid the Recreation Fund 1,000 taels for the instruments, music and uniforms lent in 1879, “in fulfilment of the understanding come to in 1881”, which closed the account of the band’s private years.

1889: the iron bandstand

The band’s home was the Public Garden, where a wooden stand on the grass-plot was already in use in 1880. In 1887 the Council, “the wooden Band-Stand in the Public Garden having become rather dilapidated”, voted 2,500 taels for an iron one, which came from a Glasgow foundry in August 1888, “24 feet in diameter instead of 20” as ordered, with a chamber beneath, and went up in the spring of 1889 on a stone platform with a terrace. “The new Band Stand erected in the Spring has proved a great success,” the garden committee reported, and the band committee that it “fully realized the expectations formed of its acoustic properties”. The season that year ran from 7 May for afternoon concerts and 15 June for evening ones to 9 November, 124 performances in the garden and the French consulate’s grounds. The band had fallen in 1888 “by death, sickness and desertion” from 23 men to 19, and was “increased to 25 men by the arrival of 5 musicians from Manila”. The committee’s argument for renewing the agreements in 1890 is the Council’s standing case for the next half-century: “it would be a great pity after so much trouble and expense has been incurred in getting an efficient Band, not to continue it”, and “the Band may now be looked upon as one of the recognised institutions of the Settlement”. It cost 5,780 taels net in 1887, 6,438 in 1889 and 7,152 in 1893, against private-hire receipts of about 2,000 a year; twelve new men came from Manila in 1893. By 1902 it had “35 bandsmen, all from Manila”, gave 182 public performances and 272 private engagements, and cost 17,460 taels.

1906: Buck, and an orchestra

The Council took direct management in 1900, and in 1905, with the band at 35 and the bandmaster, M. A. Valenza, asking for 40, it told the ratepayers that the band’s appropriation of 27,300 taels “is in a measure provisional” because it intended “to re-establish a special Committee of gentlemen interested in music”. What the committee did was hire a conductor in Berlin. Rudolf Buck entered the Council’s service on 24 November 1906, with German musicians engaged a fortnight earlier, and his report of 1909 tells what he found. “According to the Memorandum handed to me in Berlin I considered it my first duty to bring these concerts to a higher standard.” His first promenade concert in the Town Hall, in the first week of 1907, drew a handful; chairs were added week by week “until it was no longer a promenade concert”; the Europeans played at continental pitch and the Filipinos at philharmonic, and the two had to be reconciled. By 1908 the Council could write that it aimed “to bring the band to an efficiency which should compare favourably with that of orchestras in Europe”: 34 Sunday concerts in the Town Hall averaged “over 900”, the Wednesday concerts drew “only a sparse audience” and were dropped, and on 14 August 1908 “for the first time, the performance was transferred to the Hongkew Recreation Ground”. The complement was fixed at “36 men, and this number is not to be exceeded”, ten of them European. Buck’s answer to the ratepayers who counted the cost was the one every conductor has given: “a good Band costs money here as well as at home”, and municipalities at home kept museums and picture galleries, “which Shanghai has none of”.

The Council’s own answer, in the budget for 1910, was that “there are critics of this total charge on the rates for public music”, 45,277 taels, but “the unmistakable popularity of the concerts warrants the conclusion that the expenditure is approved by the majority of the Ratepayers”. The 1909 season had Sunday concerts in the Town Hall at nine in the evening drawing “between 600 and over 1,000”, the band on the Recreation Ground on Saturdays, at Hongkew on Tuesdays and Fridays and in the Public Garden the rest of the week; the French Council, asking for the band in its new Koukaza garden, was told a quarter share would cost “approximately Tls. 10,000” rather than its 1,500. In 1911 Buck explained why the bill rose while receipts fell: cinemas, hotels with bands of their own and “Manilamen” who had settled in Shanghai now competed for the private engagements that had once paid a third of the cost, and “two thirds of the musicians consist of Manilamen”. In 1913 the Council remembered, with some satisfaction at having outgrown it, that “it is but three years since it was scornfully said that the Community spent less on education than on its Band”. That year the band had “14 Foreign Musicians and 21 Manilamen” and cost 56,771 taels. The war took the Europeans: “12 Europeans and 21 Manilamen” in 1914, “four of whom are prisoners in Japan, while one was killed in Tsingtao”; “8 European musicians and 23 Manilamen” in 1917, with “no more European musicians” to be “engaged during the war”.

1919: Paci

The Italian pianist and conductor Mario Paci entered the Council’s service on 1 September 1919, by the staff list, and the reorganisation “undertaken at the end of 1919” was, by the end of 1921, at “very nearly its complete realization”. His agreement was confirmed from 1 April 1921 with five months’ leave to engage musicians in Europe, and the new orchestra, forty-two strong, gave “its debut concert which took place on November 6” 1921. From October 1921 the Sunday symphony concerts, free until then, charged 50 cents, and “at several of the concerts the attendance exceeded 1,500 persons”. The Public Band became “the Municipal Orchestra and Band” on 1 January 1922, with “Conductor; Assistant Conductor; 22 European musicians; 20 Filipino musicians; 1 Harp player”; seats from 1923 were $1, 50 cents and 20 cents. The open-air concerts moved up a scale too. In 1922 the orchestra played on a covered platform with a sounding board in Hongkew Park to “about 1,800” on the first night and “nearly 3,500” on the fourth, and the Council ordered a second platform for Jessfield Park. The bill had doubled: 48,904 taels in 1918, 74,490 in 1920, 98,149 in 1921.

1923 and 1927: the ratepayers vote

The bill brought the orchestra to the annual meeting twice. On 18 April 1923 Gilbert Peet, seconded by V. J. S. Rumble, moved a token cut of a thousand taels in the estimate of 133,790, to put the question. Rumble called the orchestra “an expensive luxury appreciated by a very small proportion of the Ratepayers”; its receipts never reached 40 per cent of the estimates, 2,214 taels against 10,000 in 1921 and 8,922 against 26,500 in 1922, and the French Council paid 1,500 of a net 110,290. Holliday pointed out that the estimate had gone from 51,880 taels in 1919 to 133,790, “an increase of 158 per cent” while all expenditure rose 79.5. Maitland, for the band committee, said there were “44 musicians on the pay-roll” and that “the war practically broke the Band up altogether”. The Council’s chairman, H. G. Simms, said what the Council would say again in 1927: “If you want an orchestra you must leave it to the Council to pay for it”; the Council had “an open mind” but thought abolition “a step in the wrong direction”. The amendment was lost on a show of hands, to applause. Pott noted that “for the first time the growing cost of the Municipal Orchestra was adversely criticized”.

On 13 April 1927, with the Settlement under a state of emergency and the rate going to 16 per cent, A. R. Hager, seconded by G. E. Marden, moved “that the appropriation in respect of the Orchestra and Band be excised”. Hager said the band had cost “over one hundred and eighty thousand dollars” net in 1926 and “about seven hundred thousand Shanghai Dollars” since 1923, more than the Council’s whole revenue from the gas, telephone, bus and tram companies; 45 Sunday concerts in 1926 had averaged 639 people, and by his count 72 ratepayers had attended three or more. Marden put it in a sentence the meeting remembered: in 1925 and 1926 “your music cost you more than your army”, the Volunteer Corps. O. M. Green answered that ending the contracts would cost “something like Tls. 79,000” to save “about Tls. 45,000”, that the orchestra was “the result of a continuous policy pursued for 20 years”, and that it cost “a trifle over 1 per cent. of our total income”. Fessenden, for the Council, said that “for many years the policy of the Council has been to leave the question of the orchestra entirely to the Ratepayers”, and admitted that some of his colleagues thought the money “not, under present conditions, entirely justifiable”. “There are 75 in favour,” the chairman counted, and more than 75 on the other side of the hall; the amendment was lost, and the budget carried with ten dissentients. The orchestra had cost 140,638 taels in 1925, 10,000 over estimate; in that year’s riots the open-air concerts were abandoned, and when Paci came back from leave his first concert, at the Lyceum on 4 October, turned “hundreds of persons” away.

1928–1932: a Chinese audience

The parks opened to Chinese residents on 1 June 1928, and the orchestra’s report for that year noticed at once: “now that the Parks are open to Chinese, a remarkably good number of Chinese (an average of 75 per concert) attended” the open-air concerts. Admission in 1928 was $1 for the Sunday concert and 60 cents in the gallery, 60 cents at Jessfield, 10 cents for a chair in the Public Garden and 20 at Hongkew, $3, $2 and $1 for the extra symphony concerts. By 1932 the orchestra had outgrown the Town Hall and moved to the Grand Theatre and then the Carlton, with four extra concerts at the Nanking Theatre; it gave 32 concerts at Jessfield Park, three a week in the season; it broadcast from 3 November 1932; the violinist Efrem Zimbalist played with it twice in the park. And “the average attendance of Chinese at the concerts was estimated at 22 per cent of the total attendance”, where “a few short years ago the concerts were almost entirely unattended by Chinese”. The first Chinese musician in the orchestra, by the accounts of the Shanghai conservatory, was the violinist Tan Shuzhen (谭抒真, Tán Shūzhēn) in 1927; the Council’s reports do not name him. The orchestra cost 201,014 taels in 1931 and 169,223 in 1932, against an estimate of 154,690, “about one per cent” of what the Council spent, which is what Green had said in 1927 and the figure the Council used to defend it.

The orchestra in numbers

Year	Musicians	Net cost (taels)	Conductor
1881	21 Filipinos and a bandmaster	4,354	Vela
1889	25	6,438	Vela
1902	35, all from Manila	17,460	Valenza
1908	36, 10 European	41,753	Buck
1913	35: 14 foreign, 21 Filipino	56,771	Buck
1917	31: 8 European, 23 Filipino	43,814
1922	42: 22 European, 20 Filipino, a harpist	96,214	Paci
1927	44: about 30 European, 14 Filipino	135,421	Paci
1932		169,223	Paci

The band’s cost rose fortyfold in fifty years and its share of the Council’s spending stayed near one or two per cent: 1.68 per cent in 1909, 1.99 in 1913, 1.07 in 1928. What changed was who played in it. The Filipino musicians who had been the whole band in 1881 and two-thirds of it in 1911 were a third by 1927, replaced by Europeans at European pay; the Filipinos, as a modern study puts it, were hired because they were cheaper, and the ratepayers’ objection was always to the Europeans’ price.

What the sources disagree on

The founding is 1879 in Darwent and the orchestra’s own tradition, 1881 in the Council’s first report, and 1878 in one modern account; the band was private until 1881, when the municipal series begins. Buck’s first audience reads “6” or “60” in the scan. Paci’s date is 1 September 1919 in the staff list and 1 April 1921 by agreement; the claim of a first symphonic concert on 23 November 1919 is from a secondary source and is not in the Council’s reports, whose debut concert is 6 November 1921. The 1905 cost is 26,355 or 26,855 taels depending on which table one reads. Vote counts for 1881, 1885 and 1923 were not recorded; the 1927 count of 75 was taken by the chairman’s eye. Tan Shuzhen’s 1927 debut is not in any Council paper used here. The reports for 1906 and 1907, which would record Buck’s engagement and the ratepayers’ decision of those years, are not on the Internet Archive.

What to look for

The bandstand of 1889 is gone from Huangpu Park. The Town Hall on Nanking Road, where the Sunday concerts drew a thousand, was demolished when the road was widened. Lu Xun Park and Zhongshan Park keep their lawns; the concert platforms of 1922 do not survive. The orchestra does: the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, whose hall on Fuxing Road Central opened in 2014, dates itself from the Manila band of 1879 and keeps Paci’s name on its history.