Art Music
The years following the Civil War saw the emergence of a national identity in the United States. One aspect of this was the gradual emergence of an American artistic identity. In the case of art music, there was a sense that America should develop a musical life of a quality equal to that of the European nations. William Mason (1829-1908)—pianist, composer, and the son of Lowell Mason—spoke for many of his generation and class when he encouraged the cultivation of refined musical taste in America. The 19th century saw the establishment of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia as the primary American cultural centers, but the arts were gaining a foothold in growing cities throughout the country. Symphony orchestras, choral societies, and other musical organizations were founded in many American cities.
In the first half of the century, organizations such as the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston (1815) and the
New York Philharmonic Society (1842) were semiprofessional, offering individual concerts or a short season. The late 19th century saw the founding of professional organizations in many cities, including the New York Symphony Orchestra (1878), the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1881), the Chicago Symphony (1891), the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1895), and the Philadelphia Orchestra (1900). Theodore Thomas (1835-1905), a German-born violinist, was the most influential conductor and promoter of symphonic music. In 1865 he founded the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, a New York-based organization that set a standard of excellence in orchestral music and was rivaled only by the finest European orchestras. Thomas also brought distinction to other orchestras he served as director, including the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and from 1891 until his death, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Art music in the second half of the 19th century was dominated by a group of composers known as the “Boston classicists,” or the second New England school (the first being William Billings and the “singing school” composers of the 18th and early 19th centuries). Most of the representatives of this school studied in Germany and considered the music of Haydn, Beethoven, and other German masters as models. Their approach to composition was academic and, indeed, as it was not possible to earn a living as a composer, many of them held appointments at recently founded conservatories and universities that were establishing music departments.
John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) could be considered the “father” of the New England school. Paine was born in Portland, Maine, studied organ and composition in Berlin, and was the first professor of music at Harvard. His orchestral works were highly regarded in his lifetime and received frequent performances. George W. Chadwick (1854-1931) was a composer whose orchestral music marked the beginning of an American style. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he studied at the New England Conservatory and in Germany with Josef Rheinberger. He taught at the New England Conservatory from 1882 until shortly before his death. Chadwick’s orchestral style was firmly rooted in German romanticism and demonstrated colorful orchestration, yet was also marked by a distinctly American “tunefulness” and accessibility. It could be said that American orchestral composers of the 20th century, from Hollywood composers working in the 1930s to composers such as Aaron Copland, were his artistic descendants.
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) was the first important American woman composer and one of the finest composers of the second New England school. Born in Henniker, New Hampshire, Beach was mostly self-taught as a composer, in part because opportunities for formal study were not available to women. Beach was an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, and her compositions included chamber music, songs, many works for piano, and a small number of significant orchestral works.
Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) was the most celebrated composer of this generation. Although he was born in New York and lived much of his life there, he lived and worked in Boston from 1888 to 1896 and shared many characteristics with his New England contemporaries. His formative years of study were spent in Germany, and his work is within the German romantic tradition. He was professor of music at Columbia University from 1896 to 1904, and he was hailed in his lifetime, both in the United States and Europe, as the first great American composer. Other important members of the second New England school included Arthur Foote (1853-1937), organist at the First Unitarian Church of Boston, and Horatio Parker (1863-1919), professor of music at Yale University. Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935), assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for more than 20 years, was born in Alsace but lived most of his life in Medfield, near Boston. He studied in Paris and was the first American composer whose music exhibited the influence of French impressionism more than German romanticism. Dudley Buck (1839-1909), a contemporary of Paine, was one of the leading organists, choral directors, and composers of sacred music. He held positions in Hartford, New York, Chicago, and Boston.
In 1892 Antonin Dvorak came to the United States to serve as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He encouraged American composers to make use of American folk music as source material for their compositions, as he had done with Bohemian folk music in his own compositions. He especially encouraged the use of American Indian music, as he felt this was the true indigenous music of America, and African-American music, which he found very beautiful and thoroughly American. His Symphony No. 9 (From the New World) employs themes inspired by African-American melodies. Many leading composers, including Chadwick, MacDowell, and Beach, did use folk melodies in their compositions. Arthur Farwell (1872-1952) was a leader of the “Indianist” movement. He made extensive use of Native American themes in his compositions and in 1901 founded the Wa-Wan Press, which published arrangements and compositions by some 37 composers based on Native American music.
Folk Music
One result of the growing appreciation of American culture was the first serious studies of Native American music. In 1882 Theodore Baker (1851-1934), an American music historian, published the first scholarly study of Native American music, Uber die Musik der Nordameri-kanischen Wilden (On the Music of the North American
Indians), as his doctoral dissertation at Leipzig University. It was from this work that MacDowell drew his themes for his Indian Suite, op. 48. The works of Alice Fletcher (1838-1923) and, later, Frances Densmore (1867-1957) were not only of great importance in the field of Indian studies but were pioneering in the field of ethnomusicol-ogy. Fletcher, an anthropologist and ethnologist, published A Study of Omaha Indian Music (1893), Indian Story and Songs (1900), and Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs (1915). Densmore, who studied composition and piano at Oberlin Conservatory and was strongly influenced by Fletcher, did landmark studies of the music of the Chippewa and tribes of the Plains and the Southwest.
Africans brought to the New World as slaves between the 17th and 19th centuries brought with them music and dance traditions that were an integral part of their lives. In the isolation of the plantations, many elements of these traditions were preserved for generations. Yet as the slaves were exposed to Anglo-Saxon Protestant society and its music, they gradually incorporated elements of that music into their own. By the beginning of the 19th century, a distinctive African-American music had formed. The music was communal and functional, and it included religious songs, work songs, and various types of recreational or play songs. Slave Songs of the United States (1867) was the first published collection of African-American folk songs. It was the work of three Northern antislavery activists, William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, and contained mostly sacred music. The compilers describe different varieties of sacred songs, including the “shout,” a type of ring dance accompanied by largely improvisational singing, and the “spirituals,” which were more closely related to Protestant hymns. In the late 1860s, George L. White organized a small choir at Fisk University, a school for African Americans in Nashville, Tennessee. The repertoire of this choir consisted mostly of arrangements of African-American spirituals. In 1871 White took the choir on tour to raise money for the school. After attracting the support of Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, New York, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers became an international sensation, concertizing widely in the United States and Europe. After severing connection with the university in 1878 and becoming an independent organization, the Jubilee Singers spent more than six years touring the world, including India, China, Japan, and Australia. The choir can be credited with introducing the world to African-American sacred music.
Following the end of the Civil War, substantial African-American communities were established in the South, and in these communities there evolved forms of African-American secular music that would have a profound influence on American music of the 20th century. The “blues,” a form that probably originated in the Mississippi Delta,
A man plays the fiddle while a family dances in this lithograph by James Queen, 1872. (Library of Congress)
Traces its ancestry to the work songs and “hollers” of the slaves. But where that music was communal, the blues was personal. Each singer expressed his or her own personal sorrow, pain, and joy in song. The blues was characterized by use of a “blues scale,” which included a flattened third and seventh degree. Blues often involved an exchange between voice and instruments, typically banjo and guitar. Gradually, a strophic form evolved, which typically employed a 12-bar chord progression (tonic: four bars, subdominant: two bars, tonic: two bars, dominant: one bar, subdominant: one bar, tonic: two bars). The verse often consisted of a line of text that was repeated and then followed by a third line that answered and rhymed with the first two lines. New Orleans has been considered the birthplace of jazz. It is thought that the style had its origins in the music played by dance bands and marching bands formed for parades and funeral processions. Although the term jazz was not used until after 1910, these ensembles were developing a new
Style of music that featured syncopation and improvisation by the 1890s.
The predominant culture in the eastern United States was of British origin, and much “American” folk music has British roots. The 19th century saw the arrival of millions of European immigrants who brought with them the music of their homelands. European musical traditions were preserved in many immigrant communities. Irish communities in Chicago and Boston, Jewish and Italian communities in the Middle Atlantic states, German and Scandinavian in the Midwest, Slavic and Polish in Pennsylvania, all preserved music of their homelands and contributed elements to American popular music.
Popular Music
American popular music between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century traces its inspiration and origins to a variety of sources. British broadside ballads and folk songs, Irish and Scottish songs, melodies from Italian opera, and the hybrid music of the immensely popular blackface minstrel shows were all parts of antebellum popular song style. This style found its culmination in the songs written by Stephen Foster between 1844 and 1864, and the style of Foster was to profoundly influence all future American popular songs. Postwar popular music saw the increasing influence of German musicians and music, from the songs of Franz Schubert to melodies from the musical dramas of Richard Wagner. Yet in many ways, postwar popular songs seemed to try to recapture a perceived naivete and innocence of prewar society, and many of the most popular were simple, sentimental songs that expressed a longing for the past.
“Silver Threads among the Gold” (1873) by Hart Pease Danks, “Grandfather’s Clock” (1876) by Henry Clay Work, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” (1876) by Thomas Paine Westendorf, and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (1878) by James Bland were typical of their day and reveal a stylistic debt to Foster. One new trend in American popular music was the publication of songs of the American West, such as “Home on the Range” (1876). The evangelical revivalist movement of the 1860s and 1870s produced a new style of “gospel” hymnody. Ira Sankey, Philip P. Bliss, Robert Lowry, and others wrote hymns that shared much in style with the popular music of the day. Lowry’s “Beautiful River” and Joseph P. Webster and S. Fillmore Bennett’s “Sweet By and By” are well-known examples of this genre.
The postwar years saw the rise of musical theater and the emergence of New York City as its most important center. In 1866 The Black Crook was produced in New York. The show incorporated a troupe of 100 French female dancers in a melodrama about a man who made a pact with the devil. This musical extravaganza, which combined sex appeal, elaborate stage effects, and popular music, had a run of 16 months and enjoyed frequent revivals through the turn of the century. Its success encouraged other extravaganzas such as Hwmp-ty Dumpty (1868) and Evangeline (1874), a parody of Longfellow’s poem that was billed as a “musical comedy.”
In 1878 Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M.S. Pinafore received its first American performance in New York in a pirated edition, and in 1879 Gilbert came to America to direct the first authorized performances. The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were enormously successful, and soon comic operas and operettas were in vogue in New York. French and Viennese operettas were produced, and American composers tried to duplicate the success of Gilbert and Sullivan. Victor August Herbert, an Irish-born and Viennese-trained composer, arrived in the United States in 1886. His operettas, based on Viennese models but incorporating many American influences, were enormously popular from the 1890s through World War I. John Philip
Sousa composed and produced several operettas in the 1880s, but he had his greatest theatrical successes with El Capitan (1895), The Bride Elect (1897), and The Charlatan (1898).
The 1870s saw the beginnings of vaudeville, a new form of entertainment that would enjoy great popularity for the next 50 years. Vaudeville had its roots in the blackface minstrel shows, which had been a leading form of entertainment earlier in the century. However, the vaudeville of the 1870s was conceived as a more respectable form of entertainment, one that women could enjoy. Tony Pastor (1837-1908), a singer and comedian, opened his “New Fourteenth Street Theater” in the 1870s. His shows featured singers, dancers, instrumentalists, comedy, and skits, and his theater quickly became a great success. Ned Harrigan (1844-1911) and Tony Hart (1855-91) developed shows that interspersed spoken dialogue with songs and dances and that featured ethnic humor and satire. The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879) was their first major success, which was followed by a string of hits in the 1880s.
Harrigan and Hart worked with Dave Braham, an English songwriter who wrote their most popular songs. Harrigan and Hart hits such as “The Babies on Our Block,” “Paddy Duffy’s Cart,” and “The Widow Nolan” were among the most popular songs of the 1880s.
The last decade of the century witnessed the first attempts to establish African-American professional theater in New York. The first productions such as The Creole Show (1889) and Black America (1895) were linked to minstrelsy. Clorindy; or, the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) was the first successful African-American musical. The music was composed by Will Marion Cook (1869-1944), a gifted musician who attended Oberlin Conservatory, the National Conservatory in New York, and studied violin with Joseph Joachim in Berlin. Cook entered theater music because, as an African American, that was one of the few avenues open to him.
The success of musical theater in New York City led its establishment as the center of a new kind of music industry. Many music publishing houses, including Thomas B. Harms (1881), Willis Woodward (1883), and M. Witmark & Sons (1885), were founded in the 1880s and 1890s. Most of these companies had offices on 28th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and the street became known as “Tin Pan Alley,” a term that would later be applied to the industry in general. Publishers employed songwriters who concentrated their efforts on producing songs that would be commercially successful and earn money for the publisher. The publishers also employed song “pluggers” who would work to get new songs performed in vaudeville and musical theater. The songs of Tin Pan Alley were almost all in major keys, and many were in waltz time. They usually include a brief piano introduction followed by verses alternating with a chorus. Among the most popular were “After the Ball” (1892) by Charles K. Harris, “Daisy Bell” (1892) by Harry Dacre, “Sidewalks of New York” (1894) by Charles B. Lawlor and James W. Blake, “The Band Played On” (1895) by John E. Palmer and Charles B. Ward, “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” (1896) by Maude Nugent, and “When You Were Sweet Sixteen” (1898) by James Thornton. Each of these sold more than 1 million copies and remain popular and familiar today.
The 1890s saw the publication of the first songs in a new style known as “ragtime.” By 1898 ragtime songs were being performed on the New York musical stage, and a national ragtime craze had begun. The style evolved in the saloons and brothels of St. Louis, but in the music of its greatest artist, Scott Joplin, it attained a level of sophistication that has led to its being considered the first African-American art music. Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899) sold more than 1 million copies, a remarkable amount for a difficult piano solo.
Concert bands were popular throughout the 19th century, and the last decades of the century saw the rise of some very successful and popular professional bands.
Although John Philip Sousa achieved success as a composer of theater music, his greatest success was as a band leader. Sousa directed the United States Marine Band and in 1892 formed his own band, which achieved worldwide fame and had a great impact on American musical taste.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the 19th century to the history of music was an invention. In 1877 Thomas Edison produced the first sound recordings. While commercial recordings were not widely available until the turn of the century, this invention profoundly affected the way music was created and consumed, setting the stage for the musical world of the 20th century.
Further reading: Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From Pilgri-ms to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life: A History (New York: Norton, 2001); Ronald L. Davis, A History of Music in American Life: The Gilded Years, 1865-1920 (Huntington, N. Y.: Krieger, 1980); John Tasker Howard, Our American Music (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1954).
—William Peek
Nast, Thomas See Volume V
World History
