MUSIC

By 1870 practices transplanted by European colonists had taken root across the spectrum of American culture—whether it be the concert music of the elite and the aspiring middle class or the entertainment music of both urban and rural citizens. By that time, moreover, traditions identified as distinctively American in origin—ones typically percolating up from the least prestigious sectors of society—were already well seasoned. The fruits of the Industrial Revolution—notably cheap paper, mass production of instruments, and ultimately the preservation and dissemination of performances via sound recording and radio—transformed musical life in all spheres. Between 1870 and 1920 the United States experienced watershed developments in music making and music sociology that consolidated its past, gave expression to currents and crosscurrents of the time, and provided the foundation for the near future when American musicians and American musical institutions would exert great influence beyond national borders.

THE FINE ART TRADITION

With continued imitation of Continental models for composition, performance, and education, the entrenched East Coast establishment upheld European ideals—especially those of the German Romantics. The many immigrant teachers at work throughout the nation, the custom of sending young talents abroad for formal study, and a firmly held belief in the superiority of German art conditioned these practices. Symbolic of this orientation are John Knowles Paine (1839–1906), George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1941), and Edward MacDowell (1860–1908). Each was hailed for achievements in Germany before returning home to preach the transatlantic gospel in compositions and to take leading positions as educators—Paine at Harvard University, Chadwick at the New England Conservatory, and MacDowell at Columbia University. Paine, the first full professor of music at an American university in 1875, was particularly influential as a teacher. Less than a generation later, in the 1890s, MacDowell was revered according to European standards as the most accomplished composer the country had yet produced. Chadwick displayed the highest degree of originality of the three.

Associated with this loose confederation of like-minded professionals, often identified as the Second New England School or the Boston Classicists, was Mrs. H. H. A. [Amy Marcy Cheney] Beach. Although denied the desired European pedigree because of her gender and largely self-taught, she achieved genuine fame as a composer and pianist at home and abroad. Because of success in large forms especially, Beach's pioneering example as a woman composer is historic.

Such figures, the majority holding academic positions and turning out well-crafted works in preordained forms and genres, benefited from an ingrained national inferiority complex with respect to European culture and by the propagation of professional institutions.

A CHRONOLOGY OF AMERICAN MUSIC, 1870–1920

1871: First tour of the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University (Nashville, Tenn.)

First reported written use of the term "vaudeville" in the context of American variety entertainment (Louisville, Ky.)

1873: Publication of Sacred Songs and Solos, first collection of gospel songs by the partners Ira David Sankey (singer/composer) and Dwight C. Moody (evangelist)

1875: Appointment of John Knowles Paine to first full professorship in music (Harvard University)

1876: First publication in Germany of a symphony written by an American composer: Symphony No. 1 in C Minor by John Knowles Paine

1877: Development by Thomas A. Edison of first commercially viable sound recording mechanism

1879: Performance in America of as many as one hundred productions of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore (including one all-black, one all-children, and one Yiddish)

Affiliation of James A. Bland, composer of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (1878), with Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels, an early all-black troupe

1881: Founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra

The demise of the influential, Boston-based Dwight's Journal of Music after espousing "good music" based on German principles for twenty-nine years

Opening in New York City of the first vaudeville house conceived for men and women by Tony Pastor

Establishment in New York City of T. B. Harms, the publishing firm that revolutionized the popular song industry

1883: Opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City

Most geographically extensive tour of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, led by Theodore Thomas—from Baltimore to San Francisco and then back across the Upper Midwest

1884: First issue of the Etude, monthly periodical directed to piano teachers and their students (Theodore Presser, Lynchburg, Va.)

1886: Founding of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City by Jeanette Thurber

1891: Founding of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

1892: Arrival in New York City of Antonín Dvo?ák to direct the National Conservatory of Music

First public concert of the Sousa Band (in Plainfield, N.J.)

1896: Composition of Symphony No. 1 in E Minor ("Gaelic") by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, the first symphony written by an American woman and the first symphony by an American to quote folk tunes as thematic material

Composition by Edward MacDowell of the suite of character pieces for piano Woodland Sketches, containing "To a Wild Rose"

Formation of the American Federation of Musicians, trade union for professional musicians

1897: Publication of "On the Banks of the Wabash," best-known song of Paul Dresser

Premiere of "Stars and Stripes Forever" by John Philip Sousa (Philadelphia, Pa.)

1898: Founding of the National Federation of Musical Clubs, a network of women societies advocating the performance and study of fine-art music

1899: Publication of Scott Joplin's "Original Rags" and "Maple Leaf Rag" (John Stark, Sedalia, Mo.)

1900: Founding of the Philadelphia Orchestra

1901: Founding of the Wa-Wan Press by Arthur Farwell (Newton Center, Mass.)

1903: American debut of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso in Verdi's Rigoletto with the Metropolitan Opera Company

1904: Opening of Little Johnny Jones (with "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "Give My Regards to Broadway") written, composed, staged, and choreographed by its star George M. Cohan

1905: Founding of the Institute of Musical Art in New York City by Walter Damrosch (after 1924 the Juilliard School of Music)

1906: First American radio broadcast of both live and recorded music—both fine-art selections (Brant Rock, Mass.)

1907: First season of the Ziegfeld Follies produced by Florenz Ziegfeld (annual productions until 1925, with four more ending in 1931)

Publication in Germany of Early Concert-Life in America, 1731–1800 (Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig) by Oscar Sonneck, early landmark scholarship on the history of American music

1909: First printing of Songs of the Workers to Fan the Flames of Discontent: The Industrial Workers of the World Songbook ("The Little Red Songbook")

1910: Premiere of The Pipe of Desire (1906) by Frederick Shepherd Converse, first opera by an American composer to be mounted by the Metropolitan Opera Company

1911: Publication of the song "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which made Irving Berlin a household name

1912: First reported appearance of the blues in European notation: W. C. Handy's "The Memphis Blues"

1913: Opening of the Palace Theatre at Broadway and Forty-second Street in New York City, in its time the most prestigious booking for vaudeville performers (two shows a day until 1932)

First appearance of the word "jaz" in print (in the San Francisco Bulletin)

Release of the first recordings by black musicians: ragtime arrangements by James Reese Europe and His Society Orchestra (New York City)

1914: Formation of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP)

1915: Completion by Charles Ives of Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass., 1840–60") for piano with its tributes to Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau

Opening of Nobody's Home, first of a series of so-called "Princess Theatre musicals" created by Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton, later with P. G. Wodehouse

First issue of the Musical Quarterly (edited by Oscar Sonneck), a periodical devoted to musicological scholarship (G. Schirmer, New York City)

Distribution of silent film The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith with a "live" orchestral soundtrack of original music by Joseph Carl Breil and quotations of music by Grieg and Wagner and of patriotic tunes

Premiere performance of John Alden Carpenter's orchestral suite Adventures in a Perambulator by the Chicago Symphony

1916: Publication of Jubilee Songs of the United States of America, collection of folk song and spiritual arrangements by Harry T. Burleigh

1917: First recording of jazz, "The Dixie Jazz Band One-Step"/"Livery Stable Blues" by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band

Publication of English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians by Olive Campbell and Cecil Sharp (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York City)

Beginning of the diaspora of jazz musicians from New Orleans because of the closing of the notorious Storyville district

1918: Ballet performance to the symphonic poem Dance in the Place Congo (1908) by Henry F. B. Gilbert at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City

Premiere of Charles Wakefield Cadman's Shanewis, or the Robin Woman, the first opera with a contemporary American setting presented by the Metropolitan Opera Company (partly based on the life of a Creek Indian woman and including an onstage jazz band)

Composition of Poem for Flute and Orchestra by Charles Tomlinson Griffes

1919: Formation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) by General Electric

Widely heralded assessment of jazz musician Sidney Bechet as a "genius" by Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet (published in Revue Romande)

First "million-selling" recording: "Japanese Sandman"/"Whispering" by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra

1920: Emergence of earliest commercial radio stations (WWJ in Detroit, Mich., and KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pa.)

New orchestras in major cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (and many smaller cities as well) and the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City concentrated on European masterworks; the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1866 by the German-born conductor whose name it bore, crisscrossed the nation by rail between 1869 and 1888, showcasing a disciplined ensemble in the grand style and introducing exalted fare to neophyte concertgoers. Visiting European artists, such as the Polish pianist Ignace Paderewski and the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, drew appreciative audiences. Unprecedented were the acceptance of the high value and serious meaning assigned to music making of this kind and its cultivation beyond East Coast centers, often with the patronage of affluent, civic-minded men and women.

The presence of Antonín Dvo?ák in New York City during the mid-1890s as director of the newly founded National Conservatory of Music kindled a nationalistic impulse, a powerful manifestation of the Romantic attitude in Europe and yet one that had remained largely dormant among Americans. With his example and encouragement, a number of composers attempted to create an identifiably American concert music based on indigenous idioms that the Czech master himself had identified: the music of socially marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. This gave rise to the Indianist movement, the borrowing of exotic elements from Amerindian peoples. Operas with Indian subjects and harmonized native melodies enjoyed a vogue. Taking leadership was the midwesterner Arthur Farwell, who founded the Wa-Wan Press in 1891 to promote "American" compositions by Americans and whose own appreciation of his materials enabled him to move beyond Romantic conventions. Others, like Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert, introduced plantation melodies and slave songs into pieces in many genres and for various media. These self-conscious endeavors represent the foundation for later, better-known efforts to synthesize Old World constructs and New World details. In retrospect, these works—while many deserve to be heard—suffer from the same burden as those whose creators adopted German practices: imitation is rarely as powerful as authentic expression. The absence of Native Americans and African Americans from the ranks of educated composers reflected the greater society. The arrangements of spirituals by Harry T. Burleigh, an African American disciple of Dvo?ák, stand as elegant exceptions.

Ironically, the composer whose music continues to grow in critical appreciation crafted a body of work between 1898 and 1920 that remained largely unpublished and unheard and, thus, of no immediate influence. Charles Ives (1874–1954) divided his energies between an impressive career in the insurance business and his own self-indulgent need to create with little accountability to the powers of the day or their audience. With a Yale music education (from Horatio Parker and Dudley Buck), he embraced the broadest possible range of resources—European and American, popular and fine art, sacred and secular—and conceived a challenging, pluralistic style, one that not only took advantage of his heritage but simultaneously demonstrated a progressive rethinking of its fundamental conventions. A true Yankee eccentric, Ives experimented in the same spirit as those Europeans who were rejecting the tenets of Romanticism and creating a modern musical language. Philosophically he endorsed the ideals of New England transcendentalism and paid tribute to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Alcotts. Only after World War II did Ives's music reach a larger audience and begin to inspire successors. Another businessman-composer with an eclectic style, albeit less drastic, the Chicago-born John Alden Carpenter, achieved recognition during the first two decades of the century. His music, acclaimed in its own time, has failed to hold a place in the repertoire despite merits. By the time of his death in 1920 Charles Tomlinson Griffes had also fashioned an imaginative personal style.

Women participated in greater numbers in public music making during the decades surrounding 1900. The social construction of gender and ingrained attitudes regarding the education of girls had restricted professional opportunities beyond those sanctioned by the church and Victorian notions of gentility. A debate unfolded in the press concerning women's ability to create high art and to compose in privileged forms, for example. Dedicated women persevered: the works of Margaret Ruthven Lang, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, Clara Kathleen Rogers, and Amy Marcy Cheney Beach disproved such sexist politics. Julie Rivé-King became the first American-born woman to command the stage as a concert pianist; Maud Powell joined the ranks of virtuoso violinists; sopranos such as Clara Louise Kellogg, Lillian Nordica, and Emma Eames were celebrated as divas in the opera house. Enthusiastic reception of American females abroad only added luster to hardwon reputations as musicians of the first order. Frances Densmore and Alice C. Fletcher conducted trailblazing ethnomusicological fieldwork to document the Native Indian repertoire. The women's music club movement, reportedly begun in 1871 in Portland, Maine, had dramatically improved the nature of patronage by 1900, and Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston stands as a memorable example of the good works of an individual patron.

THE POPULAR SONG AND THE POPULAR MUSICAL THEATER

Thanks largely to urbanization, prosperity, and waves of immigration and internal migration, the popular musical theater captured the imaginations of other artists, businesspeople, and far larger audiences. Building on the immense popularity of the minstrel show, four distinct but related theatrical genres challenged the primacy of such racist fare: vaudeville, the revue, the operetta, and the musical. As the old century waned, variety entertainment of a populist nature—nonbook shows featuring music, dance, humor, novelty acts, and star personalities—came into fashion. Perversely perhaps, the last significant contributor to the fading minstrel tradition was the African American musician James A. Bland. On far-reaching vaudeville circuits, entertainers cultivated forms of broad humor based on ethnic stereotypes (lampooning the Irish, Yiddish, Germans, and Italians alongside African Americans) but at the same time made the musical idioms of these targets familiar. The revue, featuring glamorous "chorus girls" and ultimately flourishing in yearlong productions with large casts and extravagant sets, reflected the more liberal mores of the new century. Representative and, perhaps, most celebrated were the spectacular Follies produced almost annually by impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, the first in 1906 and the last in 1931. The operetta, a modification of Continental opera, offered a lighthearted, sentimental narrative with the interpolation of songs and lush orchestrations of loftier pretensions. Not surprisingly, the champions of operetta—Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolf Friml—were European-born and trained. The format that proved enduring was the musical play, a drama with comic elements realized by a cast of singers and dancers. Milestones before 1920 were George M. Cohan's "modern" shows, which capitalized on an energetic pacing, a man-on-the-street approach to character and language, and an unapologetic jingoism, and the so-called Princess Theatre musicals of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse, in which the integration of plot, dialogue, and music was purposefully sought. These achievements laid the foundation for a golden age of American musical theater in subsequent decades. Their American provenance notwithstanding, these theatrical ventures shared common European influences: the British music hall, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, Viennese operetta, the Parisian revue (such as the Folies Bergère), and song traditions from Germany, Italy, and the British Isles. Such a flurry of activity not only presented creative opportunity to aspiring native and immigrant musicians but also proved enormously lucrative. New York City—its now-legendary Broadway—flourished as the unrivaled center of the American theatrical universe, with companies fanning out across the country.

These developments would have been unthinkable without the coming of age during these same years of the popular song industry. Once dominated by regional publishers, the creation, publication, and merchandising of popular songs became centralized in New York City in the 1880s, giving birth to "Tin Pan Alley" (although the nickname itself only became common after 1903). The novelties and showstoppers applauded on the Broadway stage were quickly transmitted to sheet music for amateurs at home (and for ubiquitous vaudeville houses) and were ultimately distributed via phonograph recordings and radio airwaves. Composers and performers who gave life to the multifaceted musical theater were naturally intertwined with the creative and commercial world of what became known as Tin Pan Alley. Songs conceived for the fantasy realm beneath the proscenium were welcomed as general entertainment. The flowering of Tin Pan Alley witnessed a variety of song types demonstrating the richness of the culture and the enterprise: those reflecting contemporary social dances (principally the waltz), those invoking African American customs (so-called coon songs in dialect, lingering in the wake of the minstrel tradition, and eventually ragtime-inspired songs), and the sentimental ballad (a mainstay from earlier decades). Prominent as composers were Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Jerome Kern, Harry von Tilzer, and Paul Dresser. The four-part, straight-toned, close-harmony approach to singing popular songs known as barbershop quartet—originally associated with midwestern traveling salesmen—is particularly evocative of this period.

Mirroring the vitality of secular song was widespread interest in sacred song, notably hymn tunes and revival songs for Protestant congregations. Still experiencing aftershocks of the Great Awakening, churches embraced song imbued with exhilarating emotion and Victorian sentimentality; numerous denominations published hymnals. Closely related are many anthologies of such songs and their imitations directed to activists in the temperance, labor, and suffragist movements and the custom of modifying or parodying texts to advocate a particular social crusade and inculcate its values in the newly converted.

THE WIND BAND AND ITS INTRODUCTION IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

Another legacy enjoying a "golden age" around the turn of the century concerns the wind band. Americans had inherited the military trappings of the band from the Old World; responses to the Civil War had elevated its prominence to an unprecedented level. In addition to delivering martial music, the ensemble's suitability for disseminating music in an out-of-door setting gained broad appreciation. Most communities constituted ensembles, primarily of amateurs, as sources of local pride; all manner of compositions were rescored for the medium; and attending regular concerts alfresco became common pastimes. The centrality of professional bands to the circus experience added another dynamic dimension to its social prominence.

The respected pioneer was the Irish-born band-master Patrick Gilmore, who established a national reputation during the Civil War and whose "monster concerts" with thousands of instrumentalists and choristers at three World Peace Jubilees in Boston (1869, 1872, and 1873) achieved considerable notice. The Gilmore Band toured extensively and offered a model much imitated, both in terms of instrumentation and in matters of programming. Concentration on arrangements and transcriptions of well-known music, works by European masters as well as by local tune-smiths, set the standard. Riding the crest of Gilmore's triumphs was the onetime military musician John Philip Sousa, whose own band of professionals (after 1892) achieved international celebrity for virtuoso musicianship and whose compositions earned him the title "the March King." Along with marches of unquestionable quality, Sousa wrote operettas, abstract instrumental works, and genteel songs and dances. (The march is a genre of dance music, and Sousa's served that utilitarian role at public balls in the United States and Europe.) Interestingly, Sousa embraced ragtime (and is credited with its introduction to Europe) and radio broadcasts but actively resisted the rise of recorded music; he rarely led recording sessions of his own ensemble. The entertainment function of the turn-of-the-century wind ensemble and the quest for mass appeal, indicated by emphasis on accessible pieces and styles, discouraged the creation of original works of a progressive nature.

The saturation of society by wind band music spawned the most dramatic movement in music education the country has experienced. Teaching wind instruments in public schools and forming school bands resulted from the music's popularity, the aspirations of military musicians returning to civilian life, and the business acumen of instrument manufacturers who recognized an almost limitless market. Although this initiative was still in its infancy in 1920, the government documented the existence of eighty-eight high school bands in that year.

THE MAINSTREAM FOLK TRADITION

Since earliest times, those whites living in rural regions—notably the Appalachians, the South, and the Midwest—had enjoyed entertainment music of their own making, music woven into the daily lives of hardworking families and small struggling communities. At the core of their practices were folk songs (many now identified as "Anglo-American ballads") and folk dance accompaniments, both initially imported from the British Isles, transmitted orally, and later subjected to personal and local preferences. By 1920 this repertoire could boast of a hodgepodge of influences—from fiddling and Alpine yodeling to revival hymn tunes and rural blues. An unaffected, nasal sound ideal for both voices and instruments (reflecting speech), elemental formulas that served as departures in performance, a realism in terms of lyrics and subjects, and its propagation by amateurs distanced this music from its urban counterpart. By 1900 the power culture dismissed such homespun performances with the intentionally pejorative designation "hillbilly music." The honesty, ingenuity, artistry, and popularity (encompassing numerous citizens across a wide geographical area) made its commercialism after 1920 inevitable. Numerous songs in this category carried religious sentiments as well as themes of social purpose.

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN TRADITION: SPIRITUALS, BLUES, RAGTIME, AND JAZZ

Just as white settlers and their descendants had cultivated and modified the musical traditions of Europe, Africans and their descendants savored musical memories of their homelands under the burden of slavery. In hopeless servitude they synthesized a performance practice from African and European elements and created repertoires of unusual energy and emotional power passed in an oral tradition. Thus, from its beginnings the authentic music of the African American minority was generated to communicate two dynamic modes of expression: the misery of enslavement and institutionalized racism and the ecstasy of personal freedom and eternal salvation.

Because of the role of the black Protestant Church as a haven beyond the specter of mainstream dictates, sacred performances known as spirituals made up the first enduring repertoire of African American music. After emancipation, this characteristic body of song, marked by call and response patterns of African origin, qualified improvisation, encoded text, and religious fervor, was introduced into vocational schools for former slaves and was preserved in compromised European notation. Choral ensembles disseminated spirituals beyond their original matrix; the most celebrated of these, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, began touring throughout the United States and Europe in 1871.

Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, a parallel genre of secular song known as the blues was codified in the South. Evolving from work songs and field hollers and related to spirituals, the earliest blues—now designated as "rural" or "country"—were the province of a male vocalist who created the lyrics and his own accompaniment on homemade, portable stringed instruments (banjo, guitar, etc.). Melancholy lyrics addressing real experience—personal tribulations—were delivered in a realistic manner and, like spirituals, in distinctive metaphorical language. Because the performer was the creator, the early blues is a music of considerable individuality and, because of its oral context, subject to constant variation. This earthy folk expression, now recognized as the fundamental stream of African American music, has conditioned many later developments on the American landscape and ultimately music making around the world.

During the 1890s yet another music of African American derivation achieved the status of a craze. An improvised dance music for piano, originally played in black nightspots by itinerant "professors," evolved in the Midwest and the South from the cakewalk, mainstream dance music, and Romantic keyboard pieces. Its transference to European notation, with the attending compromises of melodic and rhythmic nuances, and its availability as sheet music and as player piano rolls sparked a fascination for the still exotic idiom beyond its original precincts despite social connotations. The "classic rag"—the definitive, fully notated genre emphasizing syncopated melody, reflecting march structure, and conceived for the solo pianist—became a staple of public entertainment and mainstream parlor diversion. Details of these miniatures were easily adapted for other media, the nominal ragtime band as well as the traditional wind bands, dance orchestras, and theater orchestras. Composers of popular songs followed suit. The figure who towered over his many peers, both black and white, in popularity and originality and earned accolades from historians is Scott Joplin. In rags and extended compositions (e.g., his "ragtime opera" Treemonisha of 1911), Joplin aspired to transcend the banality of entertainment music with artistic substance.

Even more epoch making was the emergence around the year 1900 in New Orleans of a "hot" instrumental music later called jazz. Drawing on diverse practices flourishing in the Crescent City and with the advantage of its unique political, social, and geographical legacies, a wind band music steeped in the blues and assigned a dance function found a home in the freewheeling pleasure district of the southern seaport. Momentous for its development was the passing of Jim Crow laws that forced the mingling of black musicians and those belonging to the Free People of Color, the local community of black Creoles who for generations embraced the European culture of the city's educated white society, including its music. The first significant jazz musician was Buddy Bolden, a figure of mythical stature and the founder of a dynasty of trumpet players before the recorded era. From Bolden issued Joe "King" Oliver and the incomparable Louis Armstrong; among their illustrious colleagues were the clarinetist-saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the trombonist Edward "Kid" Ory, and the former onetime ragtime "professor" Jelly Roll Morton. The first jazz recording, by a quintet of white musicians from New Orleans, was released in 1917 and was followed by recordings of all-black ensembles that more faithfully communicated the original performance practice. With the availability of recordings and the diaspora of musicians caused by closing the notorious Storyville district in 1917, jazz attracted a far greater audience at home and abroad despite the lamentations of arbiters of the status quo.

MUSIC AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Numerous intersections between musical traditions and American literature of this period can be cited. Significant authors invoked details surrounding music making of various kinds as subject, symbol, or social context, the novel revealing a rich treatment in this regard. Mark Twain took obvious pleasure in burlesquing appreciation of German opera in A Tramp Abroad (1880), describing the Wagnerian approach as an "insurrection": he confessed to preferring a toothache to six hours spent at Wagner's temple at Bayreuth. In Kate Chopin's once-controversial novel The Awakening (1899), the protagonist's emotional journey is deeply sensitized by music, specifically by the pianists in her world; Chopin herself was an accomplished pianist. Piano playing by female characters serves as a telling metaphor for society's construction of gender and contemporary attitudes vis-à-vis women and music. Willa Cather's novel The Song of the Lark (1915), inspired in part by the Swedish American Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, testifies eloquently to the transfiguring power of art music on individual American lives; her short story "The Diamond Mine" (1916) is likewise patterned after the life of the American soprano Lillian Nordica. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) begins at the opera house, with a performance of Faust by the Swedish diva Christine Nilsson at New York City's Academy of Music, an apt cultural setting for the upper-class characters whose social sphere she exposed.

Popular music figures prominently in Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), and Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), in part because of the diverse social milieu of dance halls. References to the folk tradition are found in both Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) by Twain.

Nor is it gratuitous that W. E. B. Du Bois prefaced each chapter of Souls of Black Folk (1903) with a passage from the repertoire of Negro spirituals, so-called Sorrow Songs. In the final chapter of that plea for the rights of his people, he proclaimed, "And so by fateful chance, the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas" (p. 186). The unnamed narrator of James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) eventually "passes" from the black world into the white and, in doing so, sacrifices his cultural inheritance. At one time known as the most compelling ragtime professor in New York, this character—recalling Scott Joplin—seeks to transcribe his music into a purer form of notation. These fictionalized aspirations might not have been too far removed from Johnson's own; he was an accomplished songwriter and among the charter members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, a group that included Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, John Philip Sousa, and Irving Berlin. It seems clear that the examples of Du Bois and Johnson represent a foundation for figures of the postwar Harlem Renaissance, who self-consciously explored relationships between literary expression and African American music in both subject and manner.

American poetry found favor with composers of solo and choral song as well as cantata. Of the Americans from this era, composers have shown the greatest interest in the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Ironically perhaps, appreciation for Longfellow and Whitman was initially strongest abroad, notably in Great Britain. After 1920 an affinity for the works of Whitman and Dickinson by American "modernists" resulted in a remarkable number of compositions. In Musical Settings of American Literature: A Bibliography (1986), Michael Hovland documents the existence of as many as fifty-eight hundred compositions based on ninety-nine American authors by twenty-one hundred composers; this reference provides a wealth of detail for the period between 1870 and 1920.

Longfellow, a musician himself and probably the nineteenth-century American poet most frequently set to music, is represented by many songs for voice and piano; the majority of those that predate 1890 were published in London. Discussing late Victorian cantata and oratorio in The Oxford History of British Music (1999), John Caldwell identifies a "cult of Longfellow that seduced [Joseph] Barnett, [Arthur] Sullivan, the young [Charles Villiers] Stanford, and [Edward] Elgar" (p. 260). The frequency of performances by British singing societies of Sullivan's Longfellow cantata The Golden Legend (1887) was, for a time, second only to Handel's Messiah. Countryman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's (1875–1912) Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (1898), the first of a four-part cantata cycle titled Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha and adapted from the enduring poem Hiawatha (1855), achieved distinction as the most popular secular choral work of its time in both Great Britain and the United States; the same text inspired several orchestral works, notably a symphonic poem (1888) by Frederick Delius. American choral works from the period featuring Longfellow texts—rarely performed in the early twenty-first century—include secular cantatas by Dudley Buck: Scenes from the Golden Legend (1880), King Olaf's Christmas (1881), and Paul Revere's Ride (1898), the last two for male choirs.

The later works of Whitman began to draw attention in the years immediately following his death. Again prominent British composers, embracing his approach as liberating, led the way. Gustav Holst is thought to have established his mature voice in The Mystic Trumpeter (1904, rev. 1912) for solo voice and orchestra. Delius created Whitman settings of true originality in Sea Drift (1904) for baritone, chorus, and orchestra and Songs of Farewell (1920; rev. 1930) for chorus and orchestra; and Ralph Vaughan Williams turned to Whitman texts for three early works for choral or orchestral forces: Toward the Unknown Region (1907), considered his first major success by both audiences and critics; Three Nocturnes (1908); and the innovative A Sea Symphony (1909). Whitman's pacifist works recalling the Civil War engaged a variety of composers during both world wars; Holst's Dirge for Two Veterans (1914) for male chorus, brass, and percussion and his Ode to Death (1919) for chorus and orchestra are representative.

The earliest songs based on Dickinson's poetry are the creations of lesser American figures, "Have you got a brook in your little heart?" (1896) by Etta Parker and Six Songs Addressed to Mrs. Proctor Smith (1897) by Clarence Dickinson. Well schooled in Protestant hymn tunes and sentimental songs of the day, the poet herself reportedly possessed a gift for improvisation at the keyboard. Metric patterns derived from hymnody, idiosyncratic rhyme, lyrical passion, and references to music and its terminology, nevertheless, made her a favorite of illustrious American composers for much of the twentieth century. Arthur Farwell, for example, set to music forty of her poems later in his career and considered this "collaboration" central to his mission as a composer.

Among the texts appropriated for songs by Charles Ives, a seminal figure in modern American art song and an unapologetic champion of the New England transcendentalists, are writings by a handful of mid- and late-nineteenth-century luminaries: Longfellow, James Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vachel Lindsay, Henry David Thoreau, and a young Louis Untermeyer. Ives's "General William Booth Enters Heaven" (1914) for voice and piano, a treatment of the Lindsay poem, is a landmark. Edward MacDowell set for solo voice three poems by his contemporary associate William Dean Howells.

In the first two decades of the century a number of poems by James Weldon Johnson were set in popular idioms invoking the waning minstrel show, vaudeville, and early Tin Pan Alley musicals by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, Harry T. Burleigh, and Will Marion Cook. Still remembered is "Under the Bamboo Tree" (1902), a collaboration of the two brothers. During this same period, a notable body of texts and melodies sustained over time through an oral tradition—both African American and rural white—were notated, arranged, and disseminated in sheet music; arrangements of "plantation melodies," for example, became commonplace.

see alsoArt and Architecture; Dance; Realism

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Michael J. Budds