Music

Music

Sources

Two Traditions. The United States in the mid nineteenth century was home to two separate and distinct traditions in music, which historian H. Wiley Hitchcock has labeled “cultivated” and “vernacular.” The cultivated tradition had its origins in European, especially German, classical music. Its concert-hall repertoire included Johann Sebastian Bach, Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and other standard European masters. Its famous conductors and popular virtuoso performers were almost invariably born and trained in Europe. Audiences attending a concert or an opera in nineteenth-century America expected to find a specimen of the best that European high culture had to offer, and they were rarely disappointed. The influx of immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy helped to assure a flourishing of the cultivated tradition. In addition to bolstering the numbers of discerning listeners and talented performers in large urban areas along the Eastern Seaboard, they provided a large number of music instructors to smaller towns in the interior. The main goal of the cultivated tradition was aesthetic enlightenment and moral uplift.

A Developing American Idiom. The vernacular tradition, as its name implies, drew on native materials for inspiration. New England psalmody, African American work songs, country fiddling based on traditional folk dancing tunes, patriotic songs on military themes, and the sentimental songs of talented songwriters such as Stephen Foster entered a mainstream of popular music whose worth was judged largely by its entertainment value and rarely, if ever, as high artistry. Yet the practitioners of this vernacular music were beginning to establish an American musical vocabulary that later defined an indigenous American musical tradition in blues, jazz, country and western, and rock and roll. By the turn of the twentieth century composers such as Aaron Copland and Charles Ives were mining American vernacular music in search of a modern cultivated tradition that was both sophisticated and accessible to wide audiences. Though the cultivated and vernacular traditions seemed like divergent streams in the nineteenth century, they were marked for a merger by the start of the twentieth.

Common Ground. One place where the high and the low met in the nineteenth century was in the American musical theater. At establishments such as Niblo’s Garden and the Olympic Theatre in New York City, audiences were treated to a variety of acts that ranged from plays and operas to sentimental or satirical songs, comic dancing of hornpipes and jigs, and pantomimes and burlesques, often all on the same bill. Prominent producers in the musical theater typically lightened the high tone of featured operas or melodramas with interludes of comic song and dance. Carrying over the miscellaneous comic spectacle of the minstrel show, which had been firmly entrenched in American popular entertainment since the 1820s, and combining these lighter touches with some attempt at serious virtuoso performance, the founders of American musical theater created a form of entertainment at once old and new, cultivated and vernacular. The origin of the American musical is usually located in The Black Crook, a musical extravaganza mounted at Niblo’s by William Wheatley, Henry Jarrett, and Harry Palmer on 12 September of 1866. The trio combined elements of a melodrama by Charles M. Barras with the dancing of Jarrett and Palmer’s French ballet troupe and some of the sentimental ballad-opera songs of the day to produce a five-and-one-half-hour-long spectacle, which became an immediate sensation in post-Civil War New York. The Black Crook set the stage for dozens of similar performances in the ensuing decades, and it established one of the most universally recognized American genres—the musical. Some other successful “musicals” of the period include J. C. Foster’s The Twelve Temptations (1870), Dan Emmett’s Fritz, Our Cousin German (1870), Augustin Daly’s Round the Clock, or New York by Dark (1872), and Ned Harrigan’s Old Lavender (1877).

Minstrel Days. As early as the 1820s Americans had attended performances of comic songs and dances by entertainers such as George Washington Dixon (1808-1861) and Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-1860), white men who blacked their faces with burnt cork and pretended to be reenacting authentic scenes from southern plantation life. Such performances, known as minstrel shows, remained popular throughout the country for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Troupes of performers, including the famous E. P. Christy’s Minstrels (organized in 1842), performed an increasingly standardized repertoire of jokes, songs, dances, and comic sketches to audiences in large cities and small towns. They accompanied their performances with instruments such as castanets, tambourines, banjos, and fiddles. The two most famous composers of minstrel songs were Dan Emmett (1815-1904) and Stephen Foster (1826-1864). The grand finale of most minstrel shows was something called the “Walk Around,” an ensemble piece involving singing, dancing, and a parade of the performers around the stage. The most famous walk-around song before the Civil War was Dan Emmett’s “Dixie,” first performed in 1859 and destined to become the anthem of the Confederacy. After the war black minstrel troupes, such as Brooker and Clayton’s Georgia Minstrels, also toured the northern states and found some success and popularity with white audiences. Although the comic routines of blackface minstrels going by the stage names of “Mr. Bones” and “Mr. Tambo” were perhaps intended mostly for laughs, they were travesties of the culture they pretended to represent, and they perpetuated hurtful stereotypes of African Americans. William Francis Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison made a more sympathetic attempt to collect and preserve the so-called Negro spiritual songs as evidence of a people’s sorrows and its struggles, publishing the songs they had gathered in 1867 as Slave Songs of the United States.

An American Original. In the course of his short life Stephen Foster (1826-1864) had probably as great an influence on American popular music as any songwriter who has ever lived. Unlike his contemporary Dan Emmett, Foster never took the stage as a performer. In fact, even his first successful minstrel songs, such as “Oh, Susannah!” and “Uncle Ned,” were published without attribution in a collection called Songs of the Sable Harmonists (1848). Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Foster moved to Cincinnati in 1846 and took a job as a bookkeeper in his brother Dunning’s office, while beginning to churn out songs in the sentimental genteel tradition in which he was immersed. His catchy tunes became almost immediately popular with minstrel performers and managers such as Thomas D. Rice and G. N. Christy. In his lifetime Foster wrote more than two hundred songs, some of the best known of which are “Lou’siana Belle,” “Camptown Races,” “Away Down South,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Nelly Bly,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “Old Folks at Home” (also known as “Swanee River”). Although his songs have often been taken as representative of a distinctly southern way of life, Foster did not travel to the South until 1852, when he took a brief trip to New Orleans. In that same year his best-known work, “Old Folks at Home,” was published (with Foster’s knowledge and agreement) with Christy’s name on the title page. The song eventually sold more than forty thousand copies, a

phenomenal success for a piece of sheet music in the 1850s. Foster’s last years were darkened by poverty, loneliness, and alcohol, but his songs have continued to resonate down the years for generations of Americans.

Operatic Heights. The American poet Walt Whitman once claimed that, “But for Opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass.” Whitman’s particular favorites were the Italian operas of Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, and Giuseppe Verdi. In Manhattan during the 1840s and 1850s, an aficionado of good opera had ample opportunity to hear the standard repertoire of European opera, sung by some of the best opera singers of the day. In the years before the Civil War Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, and Whitman’s favorite, Marietta Alboni, were among the divas who toured the United States and remained for extended periods in New York City, where they performed on local stages. The famous showman Phineas T. Barnum sponsored and directed Jenny Lind’s tour, which began in September 1850 and lasted until the spring of 1852. The Swedish-born soprano took the country by storm, earning an enormous amount of money for herself and for Barnum and endearing herself to the American public along the way. In 1859 a young Italian diva and professed admirer of Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, had a similar triumph with her debut performance in Doniüetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. She made a brilliant success in New York during the 1860-1861 season, but soon thereafter she chose to pursue her career in the capitals of Europe. From the summer of 1852 through the spring of 1853, Whitman went to hear each one of Marietta Alboni’s celebrated performances in Manhattan. Whitman’s greatest tribute to Alboni’s magnificent voice may be seen in the opening line of one of his best-known “chants” in Song of Myself (1S55): “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft.” In the catalogue of laborers in Whitman’s democratic vineyard, the great diva finds herself side by side with the carpenters, slaves, omnibus drivers, and rivermen of Whitman’s America, underscoring the attempt by the great American poet to bridge the gap between the cultivated and the vernacular in the American tradition.

Sources

Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);

Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, third edition, revised (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987);

John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993);

H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974).