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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: The Composer, the Work, and Its Audience by Adrienne Fried Block Jewish American Music:
Review by Evan Rapport More News from Nowhere: Review by David G. Pier Reviving the Folk: Review by Ray Allen |
The
Composer, the Work, and Its Audience
Lithograph poster of Sam Lucas Boston:
Chas. H. Crosby & Co, Lith., c1880 Courtesy of The Historical Society of
Pennsylvania (HSP) (HSP). V6-0494 Conservatory of Music,
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York The German airs of friendship, wine and
love, Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances,
English warbles, Chansons of France, Scotch tunes, and
o'er the rest, Italia's peerless compositions.1 In "Proud Music of the Storm"
(1868), Walt Whitman reports on a varied selection of music heard on the
streets of New York and Brooklyn. Whitman's last line refers to Italian
opera, his favorite of all music, heard not only in opera houses, but also
parodied in minstrel shows, ground out on street organs, and played and sung
in parlors as popular songs with English text. Regarding the other styles
Whitman heard, Charles Hamm notes that "the story of indigenous popular
song in the New World was the same shape as that of virtually every sort of
music... the importation of European music to America; the composition of
pieces in a similar style here; and the shaping of a native style from
elements of several different national or ethnic styles."2
Amateur and professional immigrant musicians who worked in all genres
contributed to this synthesis.3 The nineteenth century was the high tide of immigration
to America, with successive waves over the decades. Those waves resulted in a
substantial increase in the number of professional musicians residing in New
York; without them the establishment in 1842 of the Philharmonic Society of
New-York, for example, would not have been possible.4 Contemporary reactions to these waves of
newcomers in music were not always positive. In his diaries, George Templeton
Strong, an upper-class New Yorker, wrote the following: As to the orchestral Deutscher, I gave them
a good drink all round when their work was finished and then took them up to
the Library with a supply of cigars and left them there till I summoned them
downstairs to supper. They were not in ev'g [evening] dress, and this seemed
what suited them best. They would have been out of their element in the
parlors. People in their position cost one some thought and anxiety on
occasions like this. They ought to be, must be, treated with cordiality and
with rather special attention. They deserve it, as "artists," or
rather as interpreters of Art. But you can't quite comfortably present a
seedy Teutonic doublebass to Miss ___ or Mrs. ___.5 Opposition was focused by the Nativist
movement of the nineteenth century, whose members came from the middle and
working classes.6 Their exclusionist policies were finally
realized with the passage by Congress of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, thus
ending that century of unlimited immigration.7
During most of the nineteenth century,
audiences were virtually the sole source of support for the presenters of all
forms of musical entertainment. Even later in the century, when wealthy
boxholders contributed large sums to the Metropolitan Opera, they occupied
120 seats, comprising but three percent of the audience. We know who the
boxholders were, while the identity of the majority of the audience remains
unknown. What was the class, ethnic, and gender distribution of that
audience, whose support had to have been a substantial part not only of an
opera company's income but also of other kinds of musical presentations? Sam Lucas (1840-1916), a gifted African
American composer, singer, and actor, dealt with a fault line among audiences
segregated by race.22 Sandra Graham argues that Lucas's songs fall
into two distinct categories: those modeled after southern African American
folk spirituals and written in dialect, and those resembling European
American sentimental parlor songs composed in standard English. In writing
separate works for white and black audiences, he succeeded in bridging that
fault line—a reflection of W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of the double
consciousness of African American identity.23 And what of the music of theater composers?
Did they compose for a general or a special audience? Antebellum theater
audiences were predominantly male. After the war's end, Tony Pastor's variety
shows were presented as not only evenings but also matinees with an eye to
developing a new audience of women and children, for whom they cleaned up
their acts. They also set aside the front rows of evening performances for
women and their companions. The question of how changing audiences influenced
composers is a topic still to be addressed. The Philharmonic's audiences were probably
equally divided regarding gender according to the lists of subscribers
printed in their programs. There were a few who were wealthy, the rest
probably middle-class. Attendees at the Philharmonic's three open
rehearsals—single tickets fifty cents—were heavily female because
women could attend matinees without male escorts and for half price.24
The following comment reveals both musical literacy and class: "In the
roughest weather some of the [Philharmonic] subscribers may be seen
struggling through the streets, their togal garments projecting like vanes of
churches, with pianoforte scores under their arms."25 This
was not weather to walk in if you could afford a conveyance that protected
from the elements, thus suggesting that those intrepid attendees were
middle-class. That score under the arm suggests a level of musical literacy
sufficient to play piano reductions of symphonies. Diaries from the period,
by George Templeton Strong and John Ward, confirm that practice as does the
regular practice of publishers who issued piano Each new generation needs to rewrite the
history of nineteenth-century American music, reflecting current research and
new contextual thinking. Among other issues, future histories will have the
task of integrating into the narrative a larger sampling of compositions by
immigrants of all backgrounds, and further exploring the relationship of
composers with their audiences, the former as an essential part of
performance history, the latter as an indispensable aspect of reception
history. —City University of New
York,Graduate Center Editors' note: Music in Gotham, an
NEH-funded project directed by Adrienne Fried Block and John Graziano, hosted
a conference at the CUNY Graduate Center on 17-19 November 2004 entitled A
Century of Composing in America, 1820-1920. The preceding article is
drawn from Dr. Block's introductory paper. Music in Gotham is chronicling musical
life in New York City from 1862 to 1875 to create a searchable database and a
narrative history by musical genre from opera and concert presentations to
theater and minstrel shows. Viewing the nineteenth century from this
historical vantage point, the project looks back over forty years to consider
the forces that helped shape musical life during the 1860s and 70s, and looks
ahead to discover incipient trends unleashed by the Civil War. Notes 1 Emory Holloway, ed., Leaves of Grass: The Collected Poems of
Walt Whitman, (Blue Ribbon Books, 1942), 339. The reference to
"Italia's peerless compositions" could refer to opera, to which
Whitman was devoted, to airs from opera turned into popular songs, or to
parodies of opera included in blackface minstrel shows. 2 Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (W.W. Norton, 1983), 173. 3 In our search through contemporary newspapers and journals, we have
discovered—or more correctly rediscovered—the names and music of
once celebrated but long neglected or forgotten male composers, and reference
to almost no women composers. Compositions by women finally began to be heard
in professional performance venues toward the end of the century. For a
history of nineteenth-century American women composers, see Judith Tick, American
Women Composers Before 1870 (University of Rochester Press, [1983] 1995).
For a list of works about and by three women composers included in this
conference, visit <web.gc.cuny.edu/brookcenter/gotham.htm>. 4 Howard Shanet, Philharmonic; A History of New York's Orchestra
(Doubleday & Company, 1975), 72, 81. 5 New-York Historical Society, from diary of George Templeton Strong,
29 May 1868. 6 Dale T. Knobel, "America for the Americans": The Nativist
Movement in the United States (Twayne Publishers, n.d.), 106-107.
17 Karen Ahlquist, Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and
Culture in New York City, 1815-60 (University of Illinois Press, 1997),
157. 18 Jill Van Nostrand, "From `Dixie' to `Striking Ile' : the
Walk-Arounds of Dan Emmett and Bryants' Minstrels, 1858-1868," paper
presented at the conference "A Century of Composing in America." 19Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York
City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 883. 20 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American
Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), 94. 21 John Koegel, "Latin Tinge or Mosaic?: Mexican and Cuban
Composers in New York, ca.1880-1920," paper presented at the conference
"A Century of Composing in America." 22 Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 2nd
ed. (W. W. Norton, 1983), 237 et passim. 23 Sandra Graham, "Composing in Black and White: The Songs of Sam
Lucas," paper presented at the conference "A Century of Composing
in America." 24 New-York Historical Society, diaries of Gertrude Kellogg. These
diaries contain multiple entries for attendance at Philharmonic rehearsals,
for example, 19 March, 13 April, 19 October, and 7 December 1864. 25 The New York Times (11 November 1862). 26 New-York Historical Society, diaries of Strong (1820-1875), 18
January, 16 December, and 31 December 1866; diaries of John Ward (1838-1896),
19 May, 22 May, and 30 May 1865. 27 Thomas Christensen, "Four-Hand Piano Transcription and
Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception," Journal of the
American Musicological Society 52/2 (Summer 1999): 286. 28 Weber, Music and the Middle Class. 7 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998), 78
ff. 8 Louis C. Elson, The History of American Music (Burt Franklin,
1925, repr. 1975), 225. 9 For a fuller treatment of the issue of German immigrant musicians,
see my unpublished paper, "New York's Orchestras and the `American'
Composer: A Nineteenth-Century View," in Importing Culture: European
Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840-1890, ed. John Graziano (under
review). 10 Nancy Newman, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical
Society and Transatlantic Musical Culture of the Mid-Nineteenth Century,
Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2002, 119-23; John Graziano, "Jullien and
His Music for the Million," in A Celebration of American
Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock, ed. Richard
Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja (University of Michigan
Press, 1990) 197-98. 11 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of
Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (Holmes and Meier, 1975); see
also Newman, Good Music, 101, for a sample program. 12 Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography, Vol. 1, ed. George
P. Upton, with a new introduction by Leon Stein (Da Capo Press, [1905] 1964),
front matter facing copyright page. 13 Michael V. Pisani, "Composing in the Theater: The Work of a Late
Nineteenth-Century New York Music Director," paper presented at the
conference "A Century of Composing in America." 14 s.v. Richard C. Lynch, "Edward Mollenhauer," The New
Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and
Stanley Sadie (Macmillan Press Limited, 1986). Mollenhauer wrote at least two
operas, one entitled Manhattan Beach, or Love Among the Breakers
(1878, probably lost). 15 Michael V. Pisani, "Longfellow, Robert Stoepel, and an Early Musical Setting of Hiawatha (1859)" American Music 16/1 (Spring 1998): 45-85. |
