In
traditional North American Indian cultures music is a part
of everyday life. Chanting and singing accompany religious
rites and festivals, and an oral tradition provides a record
of history. The concept of music as a performance art is as
unusual among Indians as it was among the seventeenth-century
New England settlers who also placed music in the context
of their religious observances by chanting psalms in the meetinghouse
as an important communal activity.
By the close of the century, however, psalm
singing had become cacophonous, for worshipers could no longer
read the metrical patterns in such sources as the Bay Psalm
Book. Although the "correct" rendering of tunes
was less important than religious fervor, many ministers and
musical reformers supported the teaching of musical notation
to restore order in the meetinghouse. "Regular singing"
soon gave rise to the development of singing schools and the
creation of music for secular entertainment.
The revolutionary war saw a flowering of
musical creativity: supporters of the American cause often
changed the words of British songs, such as "Yankee Doodle,"
to taunt their adversaries. William Billings, a Boston tanner,
composed an anthem called "Chester" that expressed
his confidence in the ability of the new nation to shake off
the "iron rods" and "galling chains" of
tyranny. The immediate postrevolutionary cultural climate
was one of optimism that Americans could create their own
culture free of English influence. Just as Noah Webster called
for an American language that would serve the needs of an
American people, Billings called for individual American creative
voices.
Nevertheless, European influences dominated
concert music after the Revolution. Alexander Reinagle of
Philadelphia composed ballad operas on the English model;
Benjamin Carr of New York edited a journal and ran a successful
music business; and Johann Christian Gottlieb Graupner helped
found Boston's Philharmonic Society and the Handel and Haydn
Society. James Hewitt of New York composed a patriotic suite,
The Battle of Trenton, which quoted "Yankee Doodle."
Religious music, which had occasionally deviated
from European models with such American innovations as the
fuguing tune, reverted to a more familiar style. Composers
Andrew Law, Samuel Holyoke, and Oliver Holden advocated dignity
in religious music and used melodies by Handel, Haydn, and
Mozart for settings of religious texts. The emphasis on musical
propriety continued throughout the nineteenth century. John
Sullivan Dwight, a transcendentalist reformer and conservative
cultural critic, argued that Associationists and other transcendentalist
reformers should learn Handel's Messiah in order to comprehend
their mission. Dwight and other arbiters of good musical taste
believed that popular music, especially military music, was
a bad influence on citizens of the Republic. He felt that
the lessons of democracy had to be learned and that the "right"
music would have a salutary influence--good Beethoven would
create better Americans.
Outside of the formal concert realm, Americans
created their own music, sometimes for performance but often
as an everyday activity. Stephen Foster's sentimental art
songs were popular with audiences, and pianist and composer
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was idolized prior to the Civil War
for his good looks and astonishing technique. He used North
and South American popular tunes in such works as "Creole
Eyes," "Souvenir de Puerto Rico," "The
Union" (which quotes the "Star-Spangled Banner"),
"Hail Columbia," and "Yankee Doodle"--all
rendered in a pianistic style reminiscent of the music of
Franz Liszt; his "Le Banjo" imitates banjo strumming
and quotes "Camptown Races."
The antebellum period also saw the continued
development of African-American vocal music. Plantation slaves
used the call-and-response style to tell stories in work songs,
and individuals sang in the pre-blues style of the field holler.
Music was an integral part of the religious life of slaves,
and spirituals such as "My God Ain't No Lyin' Man"
articulated their relationship with their faith.
In the 1850s, the call for an independent
American music was heard again, this time from composer William
Henry Fry, whose New York lectures in the early fifties inspired
an interest in the development of an American musical language.
But the drive for cultural independence fell short.
With the coming of the Civil War, marches
and sentimental songs that spoke of home, sweethearts, and
mothers became popular. Many of these were printed by composer-entrepreneurs
such as George F. Root, whose Chicago publishing house was
among many that thrived on the middle-class market of households
with a piano in the parlor. By the second half of the century,
many successful American composers had studied in Europe and
saw no reason to abandon the romantic style despite the ongoing
arguments for an American music. Three men who earned their
livelihoods as professors--John Knowles Paine at Harvard,
Horatio Parker at Yale, and Edward MacDowell at Columbia--achieved
respectability with works that bore considerable resemblance
to similar pieces being composed in Europe at the time.
By the end of the century, there were major
orchestras in New York (the Philharmonic-Society was founded
in 1842), Boston (1881), and Chicago (1891). In smaller communities,
performances by local bands reflected the popular taste for
dances, marches, and symphonic excerpts--a repertoire popularized
by John Philip Sousa. In troupes throughout the country, vaudeville
performers combined comedic episodes, scenes from Shakespeare's
plays, dancing, and minstrel songs performed in black face.
In a racially divided society, black vaudeville entertainers
like Bert Williams could command high fees on the stage but
could not enter restaurants near the theaters where they performed.
Concert music and opera were still the province
of European, mainly German, conductors, performers, and managers.
But a small group of composers--Henry F. Gilbert, Arthur Farwell,
Charles Wakefield Cadman, and their colleagues--thought that
the tools with which to compose American music lay in African-American
culture, backwoods mountain or hill communities, and Indian
tribal villages.
As these "Americanists by quotation"
looked for materials to develop, new currents were stirring
among black musicians. The cakewalk dance and the pianistic
style known as ragtime emerged, with highly syncopated rhythms
attractive to composers who thought these varieties of black
music could be the material for a new American concert music.
The stage was set for the emergence of jazz out of the marching-band
traditions of New Orleans and its appearance in works for
the concert hall. Debate still raged about whether there was
an American music and what form it should take. But that debate
would soon be subsumed under discussions about the utility
of the many varieties of modern music for creating an American
musical expression.
Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present,
3rd ed. (1987); Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (1983);
H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical
Introduction (1969).
Barbara L. Tischler |
