Forging an American Musical Identity in the Long 19th Century – Conference
ABSTRACTS
9:30-11:00
Session 1: Developing an American Cultural Identity
Molly Barnes: “A Great Revolution in the Musical Character of the American People”: Music as a Tool of Social Reform in the United States, 1830-1845
In April 1841, an anonymous writer for the North American Review declared that “a great revolution in the musical character of the American people has begun.” Invoking the past decade of developments in Boston, including the founding of the Academy of Music, the introduction of music instruction in the city’s public schools, and the establishment of new music periodicals, the author celebrated music’s salubrious influence on American society. In this telling, virtually nothing could affect greater improvement in the nation’s health than the cultivation of music among all classes.
Scholars of American musical life have long recognized that such claims reflected the growth of musical idealism during the first half of the nineteenth century. Michael Broyles and others have contended that the notion of music as an “ethical” force drove the work of musical reformers of the 1830s and 1840s, who endeavored to remake psalmody and transform music education. However, musical reform in this period has typically been framed as idealistic and elitist, a dim echo of the larger reforming impulse, which saw activists pursue practical and robust social change through such causes as anti-slavery, temperance, prison reform, and public education. My argument draws on music periodicals, general magazines and newspapers throughout the Eastern seaboard and Midwest to show that musical reform and the organizational initiatives it inspired were in fact widely regarded as tools of practical social reform in their own right.
Though in some ways similar to concurrent developments in Europe, these American musical efforts had a distinct national character. Fearing that their fragile young democratic experiment was under threat by numerous social ills, American musical writers and leaders conceived a program of social improvement that situated “good music” as a key moral, spiritual, and indeed practical dimension of life in a democratic society.
Marianne Betz: “Is it Not the Music Teachers and Composers that Govern the Music of the People?”: George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931), Composer, Educator, Cultural Manager
When summarizing his wishes for the twentieth century, Chadwick, then a renowned composer and conservatory director, ranked his hope for "A great composer born on American soil" the highest, followed by "A symphony orchestra of Americans with a born American conductor."
Chadwick, a New Englander to the core, entered the musical world in the 1870s, when the perception of music as an "unworthy profession" for American men and of musicians as "godless bummers" still dominated his environment. The choice of Washington Irving's "Rip van Winkle" as a subject for an overture at the end of his studies in Leipzig in 1878 exemplifies Chadwick's desire to find his voice as that of an American composer. His claim that the overture was "in no sense program music," despite the programmatic hints added to the published version in 1930, discloses more than the influence of the Mendelssohnian aesthetics predominant in Leipzig. It anticipates his life-long distance from music primarily sounding American by use of programs or citations. Chadwick's musical compass, outlined as early as 1876 when presented at the first MTNA conference, was to be an American-born composer of good music, conscious of the responsibility for "more education, more music" for the people.
This paper aims to investigate Chadwick's impact as a composer, as well as his role at the New England Conservatory from 1880 to 1930. Founded in 1867 to make studies in Europe, "the highroad to perdition," superfluous, the NEC advanced to a premiere institution for the professionalization of young American musicians during Chadwick's directorship. At a time when John Adams' 1780 verdict that the young United States needed expertise other than that of music was slowly fading away, Chadwick was a pioneer, who as composer, educator, and cultural manager developed and spread a vision of an American musical identity.
Matthew Reese: “We are not all of [Unmixed] English Blood”: Coleridge Taylor, Race, and American Self- Fashioning
Between 1904 and 1910, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor undertook three American concert tours. The first two were spurred by the eponymous S. Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, an all-Black ensemble organized by the Washington pianist and impresario, Mamie Hilyer. The third was at the behest of Carl and Ellen Battell Stoeckel of the Norfolk Festival. Circumstances differed, but in each, Hiawatha was the inescapable quantity.
As a critic for the Afro-American Ledger heard it, Coleridge-Taylor was “transforming the humble, mournful and lowly songs of his race […] to Maestoso movements of a greater day and a brighter future for those of us here and those in Africa.” But to Henry Edward Krehbiel, these were merely “melodies at second hand.” Coleridge-Taylor might have had an “inherited sympathy for them, but he approached them like an Englishman.”
Here was an extraordinary case study in Pan-Africanism and hyphenated identities: a Black Briton, setting African American melodies and giving “greater depth to the Indian nomadic life” through the poetry of Longfellow. At play in Coleridge-Taylor’s score––and indeed, the whole genre of the concert tour––were questions about American musical identity and the nature of the Transatlantic exchange. To whom did this music belong?
Drawing on the scholarship of Doris Evans McGinty (“That You Came so Far to See Us,” 2001), Nicholas Cook (“The Imaginary African: Race, Identity, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,” 2017), and Louis Epstein and Maeve Nagel-Frazel (“Beyond Exceptionalism,” JAMS, 2024), this paper explores how Coleridge-Taylor’s complicated, hyphenated identity was received––and utilized––by both the white musical establishment and the Black press, all in a project of American musical self-fashioning. Like so many touring Europeans of the period, Coleridge-Taylor “the man” became Coleridge-Taylor “the icon” ––a canvas upon which the rhetoric of both Pan-Africanism and racial uplift were liberally projected.
11:15- 12:15
Session 2: Music of Everyday Life
William Brooks: “Irene, Good Night”: Gussie Davis and Middlebrow Parlor Songs
No, not by Leadbelly. Nor, even, sung by him.
In 1865 Charles Hicks’ Georgia Minstrels opened in Chicago, and a new career path for newly freed African Americans was defined—as the country’s only “real” minstrels, by definition surpassing in authenticity the portrayals by all-White troupes. That story, proceeding though Billy Kersands and Sam Lucas, is well-known and culminated (some might say) in the giant baton wielded by Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather.
But in the nineteenth century African Americans were also building a path into highbrow music. That story, as first told by James M. Trotter, begins before the Civil War but strengthens in the postwar decades, with performers like “Blind Tom” Bethune and the Hyers Sisters. The outlines of this story are also well known, though its details—and its cross-relations with minstrelsy—are still emerging.
However, a third stream—middlebrow parlor music—has largely been ignored. It emerged somewhat later: arguably, the first African American to write middlebrow songs was Gussie L. Davis (1863–1899), whose very first publication, “We Met beneath the Cabin on the Hill” (1880), owes much in tone and content to Hart Pease Danks’ “Silver Threads among the Gold.” Davis’s middlebrow aspirations continued throughout his life: one of his greatest hits was “Irene, Good Night” (1886), and at his death he left behind an unfinished, Bradbury-like cantata on King Herod.
In this paper, I examine Davis’s middlebrow music, with particular attention to “Irene, Good Night,” and I will consider the relationships between middlebrow, race, gender, and genre. As for Leadbelly . . . that’s another story.
George Boziwick: Henry Chadwick: A Life with Music and Baseball
Most know Henry Chadwick (1824-1908) by his titular title "the Father of Baseball." Chadwick earned that honor by forging a lasting legacy in developing, promoting, and writing about the game of baseball. But who knew that before baseball, there was music in the life of Henry Chadwick? In his early years, Chadwick, the composer and music teacher, was a full participant in the bustling music scene of mid-nineteenth-century New York and Brooklyn. Little has been explored about Chadwick the musician, even though major libraries are teeming with his nearly eighty extant published compositions and arrangements, which were brought out by the major music publishers.
Chadwick was already musically active when the names Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Mozart were just being introduced to American audiences. Some in the music press argued that this was music of a "higher order" and that these European symphonists should be imitated by American composers. Others disagreed, calling for American composers to cultivate their own uniquely American voice, drawing on homegrown musical sources.
Concurrently, the call for extolling baseball’s roots as a uniquely American game separate and apart from European influences of rounders and other bat-and-ball games was growing louder. As far as the musician/journalist Henry Chadwick was concerned, baseball and music both shared a European hegemony, and the contentious national debates raging simultaneously about an American game and an American music did not affect his views on the origins of baseball, or his musical output. Chadwick continued to gravitate to the established European musical forms of the waltz, schottische, and polka. This presentation, with live music, offers a view of both baseball and music through the lens of Henry Chadwick's little-known compositions, as well as music celebrating the early game of ball.
1:15-2:00
EXHIBITION: “A Life on the Ocean Wave”: George Bristow (1825-1898) American Composer, Educator and Musician. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, third floor, Music and Recorded Sound Division Reading Room, Exhibit curator, George Boziwick, retired Chief of the Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Drawing from the unique music holdings of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, this exhibit brings to life what it was like to be a musician in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. For George Bristow and others of his generation, it was a time of new music in a New World, and the search for an American musical identity separate and apart from the towering European musical models of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Mozart. George Bristow’s works were themselves monuments to this cresting wave of American musical independence. His major works were of American subjects, that today still resonate across our musical landscape. Music manuscripts, concert programs, iconography, and original published accounts of Bristow and his contemporaries, along with Bristow’s handwritten diary, will tell the story of these early musical years when a young nation was just setting out, in search of a distinctly American musical voice.
Sidewalk Studio, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
2:15-3:45
Session 3: Music in the Political Arena
Ellen Sauer Tanyeri: Vive le son: Songs of the French Revolution in Nineteenth-Century America
From the very beginnings of unrest, the French Revolution was a musical one—important speeches and legislation were sung from street corners, while police were repeatedly summoned to the Opéra to break up musico-political pyrotechnics. So it is no surprise that, centuries before Le Misérables took Broadway by storm, music about the French Revolution was capturing the American imagination.
The cover of one early nineteenth-century American adaptation of La Marseillaise declares that the arrangement was “sung at the Washington Parade Ground,” while a caption at the bottom reads: “The following Ode was printed on a movable stage and distributed to the citizens during the procession”—evoking images of printing presses on parade floats amidst clambering throngs of singing onlookers. It was not just in public spectacles that revolutionary music was co-opted by Americans; from late eighteenth-century printings of La Carmagnole and Ça Ira with flute and guitar accompaniment to brilliant piano variations on La Marseillaise in nineteenth-century women’s binder’s volumes, the sounds of the French Revolution also permeated American parlors.
What beliefs were Americans signaling in printing, purchasing, and performing political music an ocean away from its origins? How did it help them form and perform identity? Drawing from Daniel Cavvicchi’s exploration of nineteenth-century American audience experiences, Mark M. Smith’s discussion of sectarian soundscapes approaching the Civil War, Candace Bailey’s study of music in the hands of southern women, and Mark Clague’s love letter to America’s most enduring patriotic song, this paper asks what Americans would have heard in the music of France’s conflict. Focusing on examples of commercial and manuscript sheet music preserved in personal collections, I argue that the strains of French independence on American shores underwent a transformation as Americans’ point of comparison shifted from overthrowing British rule to breaking away from the fracturing union.
Bonny Miller: “The Nation Calls!” Augusta Browne and the 1876 Presidential Election
The American composer Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–1882) could not vote, nor did she advocate for women’s suffrage in her published prose. Nevertheless, her vigorous participation in the 1876 presidential election heralded American women’s future political activity. Seventeen songs and contrafacta contributed by Browne Garrett and her younger brother, General William Henry Browne, appeared in the pocket-size Hayes & Wheeler Song Book as part of the 1876 campaign. The Republican National Committee distributed the Hayes & Wheeler Song Book from coast to coast during the contest between Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Governor Samuel Tilden of New York. Based on evidence of intimidation of newly-enfranchised Black votes in the South, the Republican Hayes and his running mate, Congressman William Wheeler, defeated Tilden by a single electoral vote. This Republican victory during the Centennial of the American Revolution was the most disputed presidential election of the nineteenth century.
Gen. W. H. Browne, a Patent Office attorney in Washington, DC, was active in Republican political clubs as early as 1856. The Browne siblings collaborated on five numbers in the Hayes & Wheeler Song Book, with her music joined to his words in “The Nation’s Best Hope” and “The Nation Calls!” Most campaign songsters consisted solely of lyrics for familiar tunes, but the Hayes & Wheeler anthology presented more than half of the songs in formal notation on one or two staves, likely through Browne Garrett’s influence. She was always quick to seize an opportunity to distribute her music to the public nationwide. Moral outrage at the corruption that had plagued the Grant administration, as well as Protestant evangelism, also motivated Browne Garrett. Following the election, the composer wrote to Mrs. Hayes that the new administration’s “righteous cause” was to affect “purification of society” through “prudence and godliness.”
Gabryel Smith: Whose Music? How World War I Transformed the Perception of German Music in the U.S.
This paper explores the development, crisis, and recovery of German symphonic and operatic music reception in New York and the United States, 1848-1917. The growth of major American musical institutions aligned with the major German immigration waves to the U.S., which included many trained musicians that filled the ranks of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras. The repertoire and leadership of these institutions remained majority German into the 1910s, when the onset of World War I and widespread anti-German sentiment caused popular classics from Wagner and Strauss, Beethoven and Brahms to become “enemy propaganda.” The crisis forced a politicization of the concert hall and opera house, ostracized personnel and attacked core musical offerings. After the War, the speed of recovery varied by genre and forced a rapid assimilation of the German immigrant community.
4:00-5:30
Session 4: Enterprising Women and the Musical Economy
Whitney Henderson: Composing in the “Wild and Woolly”: The Seattle Ladies Musical Club’s Support of Local Composers, 1900-1914
Although young and geographically remote, Washington State was home to thriving music communities during the long nineteenth century and that continue today. Much of this groundwork was done by women through volunteer organizations like the Ladies Musical Club of Seattle, founded in 1891 by classically trained musicians whose mission was to continue fostering their musical talents as well as the region’s musical landscape. Per the club’s bylaws, volunteer members were required to perform regularly for both the public and their peers, to support operations through committee work, and to pay dues (and fines for non-compliance). With active members accepted by audition only, Seattle’s Ladies Musical Club quickly became known as a leading musical force through lauded concerts and impressive business acumen.
An unofficial club function that emerged, however, was providing a platform for local composers, including several within its ranks. In 1900, the club elected president Lillian Miller, a notable composer who left her term early to study composition with Edward MacDowell – with the club’s blessing. Local composers’ works appeared regularly alongside those by other contemporary American composers on club concert programs in the early 1900s, and in 1905, the first annual “Seattle Composers’ Concert” cemented composing as a crucial avenue for cultivating Seattle’s classical music scene.
This paper explores the Ladies Musical Club’s support of local composers in the fruitful period from 1900 to World War I. Beyond supporting local composers, the Ladies Musical Club also fostered partnerships that engaged and developed the region’s broader artistic community; composers collaborated with performers, lyricists, designers, dancers, and visual artists to complete art songs, patriotic pieces, and operas, including Harry Girard’s The Alaskan (1907) and Mary Carr Moore’s Narcissa (1912). These works often celebrated regional and American themes and helped to cultivate the Pacific Northwest’s own musical identity within America’s musical landscape.
Christopher Reynolds: American Women Songwriters as Self-Publishers: Carrie Jacobs Bond and Her Entrepreneurial Predecessors
In 1901 Carrie Jacobs-Bond self-published her breakthrough set of songs which she modestly titled Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose. This extraordinarily successful publication remained in print for half a century and sold millions of copies. In this paper I will examine how Mrs. Bond, then a forty-year-old widowed single-mother, managed to gather her songs and – improbably – to launch a publishing company; but her ambition and success were not without several important precedents. Those precedents will be my beginning point.
The decade of the 1890s saw an explosion in the numbers of songs published by women. Rupert Hughes cited an unnamed Boston publisher as saying that he had seen compositions by women grow from “only one-tenth of his manuscripts a few years ago” to “more than two-thirds.” One force in favor of women beginning to publish their own songs was thus simply that women songwriters were producing more songs than established publishing houses such as Schirmer in New York, Presser in Philadelphia, and Ditson and Schmidt in Boston.
The 1890s was the decade that saw at least a dozen women songwriters decide to publish their own work. The majority of these women were from the Midwest: Emily Boyden and Anita Owen (both in Chicago), Hattie Nevada and M. Theo Frain (both in Kansas City), and Patty Stair (in Cleveland). They were contemporaries of men songwriter-publishers such as Charles K. Harris (in Milwaukee) and George Root (in Chicago).
Like Charles Harris a few years before her, Jacobs-Bond was savvy enough to realize that her songs were worth far more than the amount publishers were paying her for them. Unlike her female predecessors, Jacobs-Bond possessed the performance skills AND the social mobility needed to embark on years of self-promotion to market her musical-poetic creations.
Petra Meyer-Frazier: “Only Waiting”: Towards a Supply-Chain Model for Sheet Music and Bound Volumes in Mid 19th-Century America
“Only Waiting,” a George Root composition, was published by his brother’s company Root & Cady in Chicago, Illinois in 1859, the business’s inaugural year. Marketed with a lithograph engraved by Greene & Walker of Boston, the piece appears in, among others, Maria Beeson and Annie C. Hathaway’s carefully curated and bound volumes of music. The path from composer to publication and ultimately to bound volume is more complex than has been adequately studied. Root & Cady advertised as both a publishing house and retail store of sheet music, instruments, tuning, and repair. Exploring the industrial supply chain behind Root and Cady’s in-house publishing operation, we discovered only a thin veil separating the world of elite parlor rooms from local and global networks of manufacturing and jobs. Music publishers were connected to several industries: paper mills, ink distributors, printers, etc. The 1869 US Special Report on Immigration lists fifteen distinct jobs in paper mills in Illinois (with weekly pay from $4 to $15). According to the 1860 Manufactures of the United States, Illinois mills were part of a network of 555 paper mills. One of these Illinois mills sold paper for “Only Works” as a locally sourced, rag-trade product. Ink, on the other hand, was an iron-gall chemical product and linked to global trade. Information about the business of sheet music is found in part in the work of Lester Levy, Dena Epstein, Ernst Crohn, and bound-music scholars. This paper expands that work to look at the supply chain for sheet music publishing, including statistics of pay scale, raw materials, apprentice workers, and, eventually, the hand binding of music—all in the back rooms of a music store—furthering our understanding of the social and cultural reach and barriers in the music industry.
7:30-9:15
Lecture Recitals: Late-Century American Women Composers and Performers
Liane Curtis/Sarah Baer/Laurie Blumson: Uncovering Voices: The Songs of Margaret Ruthven Lang and Amy Beach in the Making of an American Art Song Tradition
This lecture-recital explores the vital yet underrecognized role of Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867–1972) and Amy Beach (1867–1944) in shaping an American musical identity through the art song genre during the late-nineteenth century. Both composers emerged at a pivotal moment in American cultural development, contributing richly to a repertoire that reflected transatlantic influences while forging a distinctly American voice.
The program situates Lang and Beach within the broader sociopolitical contexts of their time—particularly regarding gender and emerging cultural institutions. It also considers how their works engaged with contemporary American poetry, nature imagery, and European models, while simultaneously diverging from them. Drawing on archival research, concert programs, and critical responses, this presentation highlights the reception of their music and the ways it contributed to an evolving sense of American artistic self-definition.
The recital component features a curated selection of Lang’s and Beach’s songs, chosen for their thematic resonance and compositional significance. Through performance and commentary, the presentation demonstrates how each composer crafted a musical language that was both rooted in European tradition and expressive of American cultural values.
By foregrounding the work of two women who were once widely performed and now largely overlooked, this lecture-recital contributes to a broader reassessment of cultural contributions during the long nineteenth century and offers a timely reflection on whose voices have shaped—and continue to shape—the American musical canon.
Monika Herzig: The Hidden Figures of Ragtime: A Case Study of Culture and Society in Indianapolis,
1890-1920
Ragtime, as a form of syncopated piano composition, became popular in the 1890s and boosted the music economy with sales of sheet music and pianos until the 1920s. Ragtime is a uniquely American music style and its history runs parallel to early jazz history, incorporating highly syncopated melodies accompanied by steady left-hand patterns outlining the bass notes and chords. With the piano being a stationary instrument, it was initially not included in the early marching bands in New Orleans and mostly developed as a style for solo instrument. The piano was a status symbol for middle-class families, associated with femininity, class, and charm. The daughters of the house were encouraged to entertain, and learning the piano was even associated with regulating feminine moods. However, access to the study of performance and composition also allowed access to individual musical expression; with the increasing popularity of ragtime compositions, many women found voices as composers, which helped to shape early jazz history, a fact much underrepresented in history books. Indianapolis had a thriving scene of female ragtime composers, led by May Aufderheide (1888-1972) and Julia Niebergall (1886-1968). However, their career trajectories were very different. May Auderheide’s compositions, published through the publishing company of her father, John Aufderheide, became very popular between 1908-1913, even occasionally rising to the top of the sales charts beyond the works of Scott Joplin. She married in 1913 and due to her social status was forced to stop composing and publishing. Julia Niebergall was a music teacher and accompanist for the Indiana Athletic Club and Arsenal High School and after a brief marriage stayed single and independent from social duties. For this lecture-recital, I will introduce ragtime compositions by Aufderheide (“Thriller Rag,” “Richmond Rag,” and “Dusty Rag”) and Niebergall (“Hoosier Rag” and “Clothilda”) and discuss the role of ragtime as truly an American heritage, with a focus on the social and cultural dynamics of female contributions in shaping musical style and early jazz history.
Thursday, 29 January
Elebash Hall, Graduate Center, City University of New York
8:45-10:15
Session 5: New York Opera Houses and Reviving the Spirit of ’76: Operatic Settings of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy
William Hennessey: Building Valhalla: The Architecture of NY’s Early Opera Houses
The talk will trace the evolution of dedicated theaters for opera in Manhattan over a span of fifty years, from Lorenzo da Ponte’s 1833 Italian Opera House to the opening of the original Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. We will explore how economics, politics, immigration, and the increasing sophistication of America’s architects shaped the design and embellishment of theater buildings to meet the needs and tastes of a changing and evolving audience for grand opera during an era of exploding population and wealth.
Valeria Wenderoth: Villanis’ La Spia in Italy: American Patriotism tra il buffo e il serio
Douglas Bomberger: Arditi’s La Spia in New York: Grand Opera in the Service of Patriotism
The 1821 publication of the novel The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was a seminal event for at least three reasons. First, the novel was an international bestseller, establishing Cooper’s fame and inaugurating his long series of adventure novels beloved by nineteenth-century readers. Second, it established the genre of the spy novel, introducing plot devices that would be used by popular authors such as John Le Carré and Tom Clancy two centuries later. Third, it revived interest in the Revolutionary War era among a generation of Americans for whom the conflict was increasingly distant.
The compelling plot and characters were not lost on Italian opera composers, who produced two settings that will be discussed in this panel. The first opera, La spia, ovvero il merciaiuolo americano [The Spy, or the American Peddlar] by composer Angelo Villanis and librettist Felice Romani, was premiered in Turin in March 1850 and repeated in August/September 1851 in Pinerolo. The plot and timing of its premiere two years after the 1848 Italian revolutions placed it squarely in Risorgimento aesthetics. The second opera, La spia, a grand opera by composer Luigi Arditi and librettist Filippo Manetta, was produced in New York in March 1856. Each of these works struggled to fit the subtleties of Cooper’s sprawling plot into the frame of an opera, and both wrestled with issues of patriotism, a concept whose meaning was being transformed in the politically charged decade of the 1850s.
Paper 1: Villanis’ La Spia in Italy: American Patriotism tra il buffo e il serio
Patriotism and independence, central themes in Cooper’s novel The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), foreshadow the characteristic motifs of Risorgimento literature and operas of the period between the Italian revolutions (1848) and the unification of Italy (1861). Angelo Villanis’ (1821–1865) operatic melodramma La Spia, ovvero il merciaiuolo americano (1850), on a libretto by Felice Romani (1788–1865) adapted from Cooper’s novel, was performed in March 1850 at the Teatro Sutera of Turin, and from August to September 1851 at the Teatro Sociale in Pinerolo.
Ideally, La Spia would fit in the typical Risorgimento story’s structure. It unfolds in a heroic past and a remote place, and it furthers the themes of patriotism, war, and the quest for independence. However, several reviewers criticized La Spia for not conforming to that mold. Mostly, they found it did not fully align with the novel’s critical themes—nationalism and war—short of complying with the context of the admired American Revolution and the heroism of American patriots. Journalists also believed that Villanis and Romani failed to frame the topic of historical heroism into the expected conventional form of opera seria, stripping the work of all character, and remaining somewhere tra il buffo e il serio [between the comic and the serious].
This paper delves into the critics’ dissatisfaction with the Villanis/Romani La Spia by considering two key topics. First, how elements of serious and comic opera, blended in both score and productions, altered the Risorgimento opera’s frame, hence its patriotic potential. Second, how Italian censorship, much stricter in the early 1850s than ever before, might have affected productions and libretto, consequently tempering the significance of patriotism, central in the original literary source.
Paper 2: Arditi’s La Spia in New York: Grand Opera in the Service of Patriotism
The 24 March 1856 premiere of La Spia, with libretto by Filippo Manetta and music by Luigi Arditi (1822–1903), was an auspicious event in New York’s cultural life. Hailed as only the fourth original opera written in the United States, it appealed to patriotism by quoting “Hail, Columbia” in the grand finale. Though ostensibly based on Cooper’s 1821 novel The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, the opera was nonetheless a significant reshaping of the original plot. Gone are the numerous subplots and minor characters that gave richness to Cooper’s complex tale of divided loyalties during the Revolution. Cooper’s insights on internecine struggles and moral ambiguity are largely ignored in favor of rousing martial choruses for the Virginia dragoons, and the dramatic structure is reshaped to emphasize choral finales and visual spectacle.
The architect of this transformation was the librettist Filippo Manetta, a follower of revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini living as an exile in the United States at the time of the production. Just as Verdi’s Nabucco (1842) drew parallels between the Israelite captivity in ancient Babylon and the nineteenth-century movement to end Austrian oppression of the Italian peninsula, Manetta’s La Spia conceptualized the American Revolution as a struggle by indigenous Americans to throw off a foreign occupier. A critic for the New York Times was blunt in his assessment of the opera: “The principal defect that we observe is a certain restlessness of patriotism which insists on bursting out on every unfortunate opportunity.” This paper will assess the opera and its critical reaction, arguing that this reimagining of eighteenth-century America was deeply indebted to nineteenth-century aesthetics: the music followed Italian models, the staging was rooted in the principles of French grand opera, and the plot and characterization reflected the political ideals of the Italian Risorgimento.
10:30-11:45
Session 6: The Music of Moravian Life
Christopher Ogburn: Finding a Voice and a Place: The Americanization of the Moravian Church and Its Music in the 19th Century
In 1722, a small group of refugees and religious reformists settled on the estate of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) in Saxony, Germany. With the founding of Herrnhut, they also brought about the Renewed Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination with roots dating back to the Unitas Fratrum, a pre-Reformation church formed in 1457 by the followers of Jan Hus (1369–1415). Shortly after their founding, the Moravians embraced a call to missionary work, which eventually led to the establishment of Bethlehem in Pennsylvania (1741), their first permanent settlement in North America. This was soon followed by other towns, including Salem (1766) in North Carolina. From the beginning, the Moravians living in North America were discouraged from developing local ties. Instead, Zinzendorf called on them to be citizens of the world – at home wherever they settled. This dictate, however, did not last. By the nineteenth century, Moravians in the United States were increasingly embracing the identities and cultural practices of their neighbors. From the music copied into the manuscript books of the students attending Moravian schools to the hymns that were being sung on Sundays, Moravians in the nineteenth century were slowly becoming American. Owing to its significance in the community, the collegium musicum provides a useful lens to witness this process of assimilation. Found in the four primary American settlements (Bethlehem, Nazareth, Lititz, and Salem), the collegium carried on the tradition of community music-making in Europe, while serving as a vehicle to train musicians and improve musical standards. This paper will explore how the nineteenth century emerged as a critical juncture for the community. Through groups such as the collegium, Moravians struggled with the conflicting identities of their faith and nation, continually wrestling with the question of what it meant to be both “Moravian” and “American.”
Jewel Smith/Martha Schrempel (Lecture/Recital): The Kummer Sisters’ Binder’s Volumes and Manuscript Books: A Testament of Cultural Significance
A snapshot of mid-nineteenth century American Moravian culture and music education survives in manuscript books and bound volumes of sheet music belonging to three women educated at the Moravian Young Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Caroline Louisa, Sophia Elizabeth, and Sarah Agnes Kummer attended the school between 1833 and 1843 and attained a high level of piano proficiency in addition to pursuing academic instruction. The Seminary was well known for its superior music instruction, and the piano was the chief instrument appropriate for women to play at that time. The Kummer sisters’ surviving volumes include representative genres and works: compositions for piano solo and piano duet, pieces for voice with piano accompaniment, and some hymn accompaniments and theory exercises. Collectively the books comprise genres then popular—serenatas, sets of variations, fantasies, waltzes, marches, airs, bagatelles, and nocturnes by contemporary composers such as Carl Czerny, Henri Herz, Franz Hünten, and Sigismund Thalberg—the same literature performed in European salons and on the concert stage.
The books document the Moravians’ desire to keep pace with the latest developments in piano pedagogy and the popular repertoire and cultural standards upheld in nineteenth-century Bethlehem. In addition to exposure to fashionable genres, piano students could also receive instruction in Moravian hymn accompaniments, which incorporated writing and playing chorale interludes.
In this lecture recital, Martha Schrempel and I will perform piano duets from the Kummer books. Between the performances, I will discuss the significance of the repertoire as a cultural yardstick in Moravian society and piano instruction offered at the school. Furthermore, the audience will be invited to sing Caroline’s arrangement of “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stemme,” with the chorale interludes.
1:00-2:00
Session 7: Navigating the Racial Divide after the Civil War
Candace Bailey: A US-American Identity, But Not For All: Edmond Dédé Struggles To Become American
Edmond Dédé (1827-1903), a Black American composer, conductor, and violinist, left his native New Orleans in the mid1850s for France, seeking a place where his talents would be better appreciated and his skin color less a hindrance to opportunities for employment and recognition. After the Civil War, he sent scores back to Samuel Snaër for performances, including his Quasimodo Symphony. By this time, “Quasimodo” had a code word for the composer, a personal statement of his “courageous heart beneath a grotesque exterior” in terms of US-American codification, revealing his self-perception in the land of his birth.
Decades later, when Dédé wrote his only full-length opera, Morgiane (1886-87), he returned to his roots in New Orleans and symbolized orientalism in two extended dance numbers by employing the tresillo associated with Afro-Caribbeans. His adoption of something that was neither exclusively African nor European but relational (as defined by the Antillean social theorist Glissant) among people living in New Orleans and other cities in its vicinity would have reminded his audience of his native land. Moreover, his influence on his son’s earliest publications further connected his beliefs and desires for people of color in his homeland.
However, when Dédé journeyed back to the United States in the 1890s, he is quoted as sadly finding he did not belong here. His long-held hopes for equality, which he had anticipated would be forthcoming after the Civil War, were destroyed by his experiences performing and travelling under the thumb of Jim Crow laws and the attitudes that accompanied them. The American identity he had hoped to be a part of was not yet possible, despite his concertizing from New Orleans to Chicago to Washington, DC. His story reminds us that for many US-Americans, inclusion in this identity would have to wait.
Christopher Brellochs: Forging an American Musical Identity: Gilded Age Black Musicians William James Knapp (1843–1885) and Ulysses J. Alsdorf (1872–1952)
This presentation examines the careers and cultural contexts of two African American musicians active during the Gilded Age, William James Knapp and Ulysses J. Alsdorf, situating their work within broader narratives of Black musical life in 19th-century New York State.
William James Knapp, great-grandchild of Dinah Jackson—the last person enslaved by the Van Rensselaer family of Albany—entered the household of Richard Van Rensselaer as a ward and butler following his mother’s death in 1854. In addition to his domestic service, Knapp pursued music professionally and recreationally, playing violin, piano, flute, and other instruments. His sheet music collection, preserved at Historic Cherry Hill, encompasses parlor songs, minstrel repertoire, and European classical works, offering rare documentation of the musical tastes and agency of an African American musician during the Gilded Age.
Ulysses J. Alsdorf, grandson of formerly enslaved George and Caroline Alsdorf, was part of a prominent Newburgh-based musical family. His father, Dubois Alsdorf, founded the town’s first brass band and orchestra in 1849, performing in regional resort towns such as Saratoga Springs and Lake George. Ulysses and his brothers operated Alsdorf Hall, home to their School of Music and Dancing, and led orchestras for social and civic events. While not a prolific composer, Ulysses contributed to the popular music market, including works published in the Witmark catalog.
This research brings Knapp and Alsdorf into dialogue through the lens of sheet music—specifically, works purchased by Knapp and composed by Alsdorf—illuminating intersections of commerce, performance, and cultural identity. Newly recorded performances of these pieces will be presented, offering the audience a rare opportunity to hear music that reflected African American musical expression in the Gilded Age.
2:15-3:45
Session 8: Music Everywhere All at Once
Warren Kimball: Examining the Louisiana Creole Songs in Slave Songs of the United States
Slave Songs of the United States, a collection of 136 songs published in 1867 by Lucy McKim Garrison, William Francis Allen, and Charles Pickard Ware, remains the most extensive record of songs sung by enslaved people in the antebellum South. While most of the songs were collected in Port Royal, South Carolina, the last seven are unique: according to the editors, they were “obtained from a lady who heard them sung, before the war, on the ‘Good Hope’ plantation, St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.” These seven Louisiana songs are the earliest surviving notated songs in the Louisiana Creole language, and they offer one of the few firsthand accounts of the musical practices of enslaved people in antebellum Louisiana.
Despite the significance of Slave Songs of the United States to the historiography of nineteenth-century Southern music, the seven Louisiana songs have largely avoided critical examination. Several problems arise upon close inspection: first, unlike the other songs in the collection, these lack a specific contributor; second, the editorial notes that accompany them contain detailed accounts of how they were performed and the dancing that accompanied them, which are given without citation; and finally, they are often cited in Louisiana music scholarship without critical examination. In this paper, I offer critical analysis of these songs vis-à-vis earlier known variants of texts and melodies, suggesting they were not derived from earlier print sources but instead reflect a firsthand, eyewitness account. Additionally, I draw on newly uncovered published accounts of music and dance by formerly enslaved people in St. Charles Parish, as well as Louisiana Creole-language publications from the 1860s that corroborate the editorial notes in Slave Songs. I also present new archival evidence on life at Good Hope Plantation and offer preliminary suggestions on the identification of the unnamed woman who contributed these songs.
Matt Marble: Strange Music: The Influence of Andrew Jackson Davis’s Harmonial Philosophy on 19th-Century American Music Culture (and Why It Matters Today)
American musicians and composers have drawn inspiration from metaphysical philosophy for centuries. In the 19th century, no figure bridged metaphysics and popular culture more influentially than Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer.” When the Fox Sisters ignited the spiritualist movement in 1848 with their infamous spirit raps, Davis’ “Harmonial” philosophy became its guiding doctrine. Though Davis is often noted in spiritualist and Civil War-era scholarship, his broader impact on American music culture remains overlooked.
This talk explores how Davis’ ideas about sound, music, and listening impacted 19th-century American musical culture. Among his most prominent followers were members of America’s first pop band, The Hutchinson Family Singers, who hosted Davis’ trance sessions at their High Rock home. His influence extended to painter and fiddle designer William Sidney Mount, séance song composer Chalmers Longley, and music educators like John Stowell Adams and Carlyle Petersilea, and his ideas anticipate the work of 20th- century avant-garde artists
From childhood, Davis claimed to hear “strange music” in a New York cornfield. He studied the Pythagorean “music of the spheres,” the vibratory metaphysics of Mesmer and Swedenborg, and the clairaudience of mediumship. Implicit in its name, his “Harmonial” philosophy was steeped in sonic metaphor. Appealing to the auditory imagination of the country from the 1850s until his death in 1910, he passionately lectured on social harmony and celestial music, imploring all to open their “spiritual ear.” Long since forgotten, Davis once caught the ear of a generation. His metaphysical approach to listening, however, holds fresh relevance today.
Maeve Nagel-Frazel: A Lottery by Any Other Name: The New York Gift Concert Mania of 1851
In January 1851, the sheet music publisher S.C. Jollie published advertisements for a new type of musical entertainment in New York City — a gift concert. Purchasing a $2 ticket entered one into a drawing for a variety of musical prizes including many expensive pianos to be announced during an accompanying vocal and instrumental concert. Capitalizing on Jenny Lind’s recent success in America, the grand prize was “Jenny Lind's Erard Grand Piano worth two thousand dollars.” Additionally, all ticket holders were entitled to $1 worth of sheet music from Jollie’s. By calling these enterprises ‘gift concerts’ rather than lotteries, and by providing “free” sheet music to every ticket holder, music publishers skirted anti-lottery regulations and established a profitable gambling operation. Over 2500 tickets sold for Jollie’s initial gift concert on January 3, 1851, sparking a gift concert mania across the United States that lasted until the practice was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1893. While gift concerts are a vast and understudied form of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, this paper focuses only on the first three recorded gift concerts, all held in January 1851 by the sheet music publishers S. C. Jollie (January 3 and January 8) and Firth, Pond & Co. (January 23). Focusing only on 1851, I investigate the origin of the gift concert genre and its connection to sheet music publishers, professional musicians, and musical consumers. Archival newspapers reveal that sheet music publishers adapted the raffle model run by the American Art Union into the gift concert genre. Gift concerts helped music publishers sell musical instruments, discard sheet music backstock, and entice musical consumers with the allure of winning otherwise unaffordable musical ephemera. Ultimately, I argue that studying gift concerts expands our understanding of the rich fabric of nineteenth-century musical life.
4:00-6:15
Panel Discussion: The World and Music of G.F. Bristow (1825-1898)
(Eduardo Montes-Bradley, Katherine Preston, Douglas Shadle, John Graziano, Leon Botstein, Barbara Haws)
8:00-9:30
Concert
Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861)
Steve Hoagland, tenor
Neely Bruce, pianist
George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898)
William Henry Fry (1813-1864)
Alexander Goldberg, violin
TBA
Sunset Chimes is an enormous, sprawling cycle of twelve songs by Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), known in his day as “The Beethoven of America.” The poetry is by various authors who had some popularity at the time, including Frances Sargent Osgood, Augustine Duganne, Robert S. Coffin, and the composer himself. The general tone of the cycle is elegiac and valedictory and concludes with a somber setting of a funereal text by Isaac Watts. The music is a remarkable stylistic mélange. Elaborate vocal lines, in the manner of Italian opera, are supported with touches of extreme chromaticism in the German manner, the whole permeated with snatches of American popular song. Individual numbers progress from the simple to the ornate, and this is characteristic of the cycle as a whole. It becomes more elaborate, more fantastic, and more emotionally intense as it unfolds. Heinrich composed Sunset Chimes in 1852. Some of the songs are based on earlier work. It is a summary of his views on life, his accomplishments, and his dreams — something of a musical autobiography. At his Grand Valedictory Concert, April 21, 1853, Heinrich wrote: “There are many kind faces before me to-night — faces that have cheered me with their smiles for many years; and many ‘Loving Hearts’ will remember the Kentucky Minstrel, so that he feels not quite ‘The Forsaken.’ And perhaps they will listen, after his departure, to the ‘Sunset Chimes’ which tell his musical requiem, they will drop a tear to the memory of one, whose heart and energies were consecrated to the divine art of music, and whose professional life, both as musician and composer, has been devoted to the honor and glory of his adopted country.”
George Frederick Bristow composed two string quartets during the 1840s. Although he was only in his twenties, Bristow already had developed a unique concept of musical form and harmony. While his string quartets are clearly steeped in early Romanticism, they inhabit a different musical universe than the German quartets we know by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn. Bristow’s use of harmony often prolongs a single chord for multiple measures, while a melody or figuration floats above it. This unusual compositional process results in music that is unique for its time.
William Henry Fry’s eleventh string quartet in A minor, one of only two that are extant, dates from the late 1850s. It was written after his return from a five-year assignment as correspondent for the New-York Tribune. Among its interesting compositional features are the conclusion of the third movement on the dominant, and the return of the first theme of the first movement at the close of the quartet, albeit in a slower tempo.
Friday, 30 January
Segal Hall, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
9:00-10:00
Session 9: Black Identities
Kristen Turner: The Afterlives of Stephen Foster’s Minstrel Songs and the Lost Cause
“Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home” by Stephen Foster had moved beyond the minstrel stage and its attendant stigma by the end of the nineteenth century. They were still favorites among blackface entertainers, but they had also become mainstays in operatic recitals, vaudeville acts, musical theater, instrumental adaptations, and home performance. Important white sopranos, including Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti, routinely ended their recitals with performances of the songs and recorded them. Perhaps more surprisingly, Black singers also embraced the tunes. Sissieretta Jones, the most famous Black operatic soprano at the turn of the century, considered “Old Folks at Home” her signature song, and both tunes were common on Black concert programs and in theatrical spaces.
Performances of Foster’s songs in their many different iterations were routinely reviewed in print media. Using these sources as evidence, I argue that the connotations of these two popular songs were very different in Black and white communities. Black musicians and critics understood the two sentimental songs as heartfelt, potentially “authentic” expressions of the grief and trauma of family separation and enslavement. Meanwhile, white listeners, influenced by the ascendancy at the end of the nineteenth century of the Lost Cause myths of the “happy slave” and the honorable Old South, heard longing for family and life on the plantation during enslavement. Building upon scholarship by Susan Cook on white operatic performances of minstrel songs, and the consequences of racialized listening by Eidsheim, Stover, and others, I contend that Black performances of “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home” tended to reinforce the falsification of history perpetuated by the Lost Cause among white listeners, which Black entertainers were trying to resist.
Lynne Foote: The Effect of German Bildung on Shaping Harry T. Burleigh's Art Song Career
At the turn of the twentieth century, composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949), trained in German high art traditions, made unique intellectual and musical contributions to American culture. In early 1890s New York, Burleigh was invited into White, art music, café culture by German-trained musicians Antonín Dvořák, Anton Seidl, and Frank Van der Stucken. For several years, he socialized with New York’s musical elites and assimilated Bildung, the German philosophy that prescribed rigorous personal ennoblement through the arts in order to comprehend and nurture a shared humanity.
Burleigh Americanized Bildung by integrating it with Black uplift ideology. For Black Americans, uplift entailed education and achievement for their community. But Burleigh extended this responsibility to work toward mutual recognition across the color line. Educated at the National Conservatory in New York (filled with German musicians) and a devoted Wagnerian his whole life, Burleigh naturally applied the tools of German high culture to his Black Bildung project.
Reflecting this Germanic influence are his mid-career art songs for voice and piano, including “Grey Wolf” (1915) and the song cycles “Saracen Songs” (1914) and “Five Songs of Laurence Hope” (1915). Reviewers variously described them as having “the sweep or an orchestra body,” “tone pictures of exquisite colors,” and “ris[ing] in more than one place to the symphonic.” In 1916, the press considered Burleigh’s new art song spirituals to have “Schumanesque or Beethovenian dignity and breadth.” His Bildung-cultivated acuity and artistry aimed at spiritual healing of America’s racial wounds.
This presentation offers fresh insight on Burleigh’s philosophical and musical commitments by examining the reception of his art songs by New York music critics and audiences. I argue that his intellectual and cultural work situate Burleigh as an architect of Black modernity before the Harlem Renaissance and for a later generation of mid-twentieth century Black orchestral composers.
10:15-12:15
Session 10: Beyond the Score
Hilary Poriss: Companion to a Diva: Ada Wilson Baldwin
In 1913 and 1914, Lillian Nordica (1857-1914), one of the most famous prima donnas of her day, set sail for distant lands, embarking on a tour to Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand. Tragically, this was Nordica’s final journey: her ship was grounded on a coral reef off the coast of Sydney during which time she suffered hypothermia. She was rescued three days later, moved to Thursday Island, Queensland, and then to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), but she never fully recovered, passing away on May 10, 1914.
Like most divas who travelled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nordica was not alone. She was accompanied by a personal assistant, a companion who attended to her personal and professional needs. This type of assistant was not considered to be a diva’s equal, but she was ranked higher than maids and butlers, joining her in social gatherings, dining, shopping, and providing much-needed emotional support. In Nordica’s case, her companion was an extraordinary single mother, Ada Wilson Baldwin, whose archives are held in a private collection.
Included in this trove of documents are previously unknown letters, photographs, and most importantly, three journals in which Baldwin kept meticulous track of Nordica’s tours, including her fateful final journey. This talk will introduce Baldwin and outline her relationship with Nordica. I will then turn to her descriptions of Nordica’s tours, a stunning first-hand narrative of the joys and miseries of a star’s life on the road at the turn of the nineteenth century. Baldwin’s accounts not only illuminate aspects of Nordica’s final years that have been hitherto unknown; they also provide a fascinating glimpse into the relationship of a diva to her personal assistant, offering rare, behind-the-scenes insights into the world of opera and the social hierarchies that governed artistic life in the early twentieth century.
Lindsey Jones Zagorodnev: Marion Bauer’s Early Works as a Composer and Critic in American Music
Marion Bauer (1882–1955) has often been remembered for her mid-century musicological work and pedagogical influence. However, her early career as a composer and critic offers vital insight into the construction of American musical identity during the long nineteenth century’s final decades. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Bauer contributed essays and reviews to leading periodicals such as The Musical Leader, while composing works that reflected both her European training and a commitment to American modernism. As a woman in the male-dominated worlds of composition and criticism, Bauer forged a public voice that shaped contemporary perceptions of new music and cultural nationalism.
This paper examines Bauer’s early writings and selected compositions, particularly her 1912 tone poem Up the Ocklawaha and her published art songs, as a lens through which to consider American modernism not as a post-WWI phenomenon, but as a field of discourse already in motion before 1920. Her engagement with European aesthetics, American regionalism, and the cultural politics of concert programming reveals how women critics and composers participated in defining what American music could be, and who it could represent.
Joyce Li Yue: The Musical Salon of John Singer Sargent: Fauré, Loeffler, and the American Imagination
Art and music have long been intertwined, evolving in tandem throughout history. In the late nineteenth century, around the time of Claude Monet and Claude Debussy, whose works are often associated with Impressionism, John Singer Sargent emerged as one of the most influential portrait artists of his generation. Best known for his commissioned portraits of upper-class women, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Sargent was also deeply embedded in musical circles and maintained close friendships with composers like Gabriel Fauré and Charles Martin Loeffler.
More than a passive admirer of music, Sargent played an active role in supporting musical culture, hosting performances, painting musical figures, and even offering financial assistance to friends like Fauré, who initially struggled for recognition. His portraits often captured the ethos of musical events and the sensibilities of his time, whether in the intimacy of chamber music performances or the flair of salon society. Some of his paintings, featuring Spanish dancers and musicians, evoke the same stylistic world as Debussy’s Ibéria or “La soirée dans Grenade,” reflecting a shared fascination with exoticism, gesture, and rhythm.
This paper examines Sargent’s position within turn-of-the-century transatlantic musical culture, arguing that his work served not only as artistic expression but also as cultural curation. Through visual portraiture, social networks, and aesthetic sensibility, Sargent helped shape the visibility and identity of musical taste in Gilded Age Boston and beyond, offering a historical parallel to today’s algorithmic gatekeepers of artistic value.
Marion Casey: Natoma: Opera as American History
At the turn of the twentieth century, Victor Herbert was a household name in the United States, familiar through his compositions, concerts, musical theatre, and sheet music, both classical and popular. Herbert was European born and trained but, nevertheless, was considered by many to be the foremost American composer of his day. As such, he was part of the debate over whether American music, conductors, and musicians were equal to their European counterparts. Opera was a particularly sensitive topic in this debate since the genre was dominated by a large repertoire of foreign language favorites. “Just as soon as the opportunity arrives when the American composer can with dignity find a market in this country for an opera he might write, I will be among the first to present my claims,” Victor Herbert said in 1907.
Herbert’s Natoma, an opera sung in English with a libretto by Joseph D. Redding, will be contextualized from the perspective of an historian rather than a musicologist. The decision to set the opera in the early nineteenth century, in a part of the west that was then a Spanish colony, and to make the eponymous heroine an indigenous woman who becomes a Catholic were not predictably “American” at all in 1911. Some, like Herbert’s contemporary Reginald De Koven, outright rejected the idea that any folk music or themes, such as Native American, could be representative of the United States. Why did Herbert and Redding make the musical and dramatic choices they did? What were the implications of embracing a clearly non-Anglo-Saxon history of the United States for an American opera?
1:15-2:45
Session 11: Planting Musical Ideas
Sean Curtice: Phil. Trajetta and the American Conservatorio: Neapolitan Musical Traditions in the Nineteenth-Century United States
In 1799, Filippo Trajetta (1777, Venice – 1854, Philadelphia), son of the celebrated opera composer Tommaso Trajetta, fled Naples as a political refugee aboard a ship bound for the United States. A pupil of Fedele Fenaroli and Niccolò Piccinni, Trajetta would spend the rest of his life cultivating Neapolitan musical traditions in America. He founded three successive schools of music, each called the American Conservatorio: in Boston (1800-1802), in New York (c.1812-c.1820), and in Philadelphia (1828-c.1846). Trajetta’s teaching integrated newly-prepared pedagogical materials with the very exercises that he himself had studied in Naples, including solfeggi and partimenti. In a dramatic public demonstration of the merits of his methods, Trajetta composed the oratorios The Daughter of Zion (1829) and Jerusalem in Affliction (1830)—the first oratorios written in the United States—which he performed alongside his students and colleagues to enthusiastic acclaim.
While the Conservatorio attempts eventually faded, Trajetta’s influence rippled across American musical life. A dedicated and charismatic teacher, he inspired lifelong devotion in his pupils, who pursued careers as composers, organists, professors, authoritative writers on music, and even the first conductor of the New York Philharmonic. This lecture will devote particular attention to the musical development of Uri K. Hill (1780[?]-1844), examining compositions written both before and after his studies with Trajetta in order to evaluate the nature of this influence. The careers of Trajetta and his pupils shed new light on the early development of American musical culture, as well as the global dissemination of Neapolitan solfeggi and partimenti.
Sarah Cox: Teaching America to Sing: Carlo Bassini and the Dissemination of “Voice Culture” at the Geneseo Normal Musical Academy, 1859–1865
This presentation places singing teacher Carlo Bassini (c.1815–1870) at the heart of historical voice pedagogy in mid-nineteenth century America. Relatively under-researched, possibly because none of his students became famous opera singers, Bassini’s system for training beginner vocal development was the first method for teaching singing that adapted and developed historical bel canto techniques to the specific needs of American amateur singers.
Carlo Bassini, a naturalized Italian-American immigrant, trained in Naples in the 1820s. He lived and taught singing in Brooklyn from 1852, writing extensively on ‘voice culture,’ including Bassini’s Art of Singing (1857). In 1859 Bassini was hired as a specialist singing teacher by the composer and educator William Bradbury for his summer school in Geneseo, NY. Bassini became closely involved with the Geneseo Normal Musical Academy, becoming its president in 1861. This made possible the dissemination of arguably the first truly American method of teaching singing, developed to support students for whom existing European voice literatures were inapplicable because of cultural differences in childhood music education, and forming the foundations of a scientifically supported attitude to voice teaching.
Bassini’s pedagogical philosophy influenced many who studied at Geneseo, including Gospel singer-songwriters such as Philip Bliss and James McGranahan. Eben Tourjée, founder of the New England Conservatory, studied with Bassini prior to teaching for the Musical Institute in Providence, R.I., and Bassini’s training system underpinned the curricula of many singing departments, including Milton College under Jairus Stillman.
Uniquely formulated to support the training of 19th-century American music teachers to teach vocal technique in the classroom, Bassini’s system deserves to take its place within the context of historical voice pedagogy in the United States, bridging the gap between old world voice training methods and the needs of a young and developing musical nation.
Bradley Hoover: Delsartemania: How Americans Transformed a French Operatic Training System into Modernist Performance Practice
François Delsarte’s System of Expression, developed in early nineteenth-century France, was explicitly designed for the operatic stage, a fact well-documented yet frequently overlooked in scholarship. Fundamentally musical, the system coordinated physical gestures with operatic elements of orchestration, mode, and harmonic structure, creating a unified performance practice that amplified emotional expression in alignment with musical composition. Prominent composers, including Georges Bizet (Delsarte’s nephew), Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Richard Wagner, attended Delsarte’s Course in Applied Aesthetics in Paris, with Wagner particularly influenced by its principles. Thus, Delsarte’s approach—harmonizing expressive movement with musical composition—arguably revolutionized operatic performance. However, when actor-playwright Steele MacKaye introduced the system to America in the late nineteenth century, its musical foundations were largely overlooked, as MacKaye emphasized its applications for stage acting. This shift gave rise to ‘American Delsartism,’ a phenomenon that profoundly shaped fin-de-siècle arts and culture.
In America, Delsarte’s expressive system formed the technical foundation for MacKaye’s pioneering actor-training programs, whose principles influenced early silent film acting. The system served as the aesthetic cornerstone of the modern dance movement, inspiring pioneers such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and Martha Graham. It also shaped elocutionary training at institutions like Emerson College, Curry College, and Boston University. Women’s social clubs adopted “Delsarte poses” in Greek-inspired costumes, a practice reflected in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, embodying a distinctive American cultural phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond performance, American Delsartism inspired women’s clothing reform, physical education and body culture, and aesthetic expression, with advocates like Edmund and Henrietta Russell gaining international attention.
This presentation argues that American Delsartism, through the transformative efforts of its practitioners, bridged European musical traditions with innovative expressions, forging a modernist performance identity. Through analysis of historical texts, performance practices, and cultural artifacts, it highlights the system’s musical origins and transformative impact. This exploration offers a novel perspective on an underexamined chapter in American performing arts, illuminating how Delsarte’s operatic system helped shape a unique American cultural identity.
3:00-4:30
Session 12: An American Kaleidoscope
John Koegel: A MUSA Anthology of Mexican American Music: Editing the Lummis Wax Cylinder Collection (Los Angeles, ca. 1904-1905) and Other U.S. Sources
In 1904 and 1905 Los Angeles folklorist, journalist, bibliophile, and photographer Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859-1928) made more than 300 wax cylinder recordings of 35 local singers and guitarists, preserving many of the song types performed by Californio and Mexican American musicians.
In my presentation I will discuss how I selected songs for inclusion in my two-volume MUSA edition: the connections between the pieces in the edition with other U.S. folksong and popular song collections; Lummis’s recording methods and my transcription and editing process; the commercial publication of Mexican American music; and how the lives of the main collaborators influenced the music they composed, performed, and preserved. If the MUSA series is a form of national musical Denkmäler, consisting of editions of “musical works of exceptional artistic quality and historical significance” (AMS/MUSA website), then my edition can be considered a national anthology of Mexican-American music, which seeks to recover the voices of the musicians who created and performed this music more than a century ago.
Nancy Rao: The Transpacific World in Early American Music History
In recent decades, broadly conceived transnational performance networks have received considerable attention as part of early American music culture. Much insight has been gained from studies about the Atlantic world, in which musical performance emerged as sites where performers and audiences enacted, negotiated, and contested music identities amid racial and class tensions. The growing body of scholarship evidences the inspiring transnational envisioning. However, the focus on the trajectory of the trans-Atlantic performance to construct the history has established a dominant narrative, which has the effect of rendering “distant” the history of the transpacific music life. Keeping the transpacific perspectives at the margins of the historiography is to miss a vital part of American music history. How could we account for the uneven field of early American music history? What does early transpacific American music culture encompass? How has it manifested? Moreover, what significance does it hold today as we reflect on these questions at the 250th anniversary of the 1776 landmark?
In recent decades, scholars have begun to address the lacuna. We are able to develop some understanding of the history of transpacific music performances in the United States since the mid-19th century, such as Chinese opera theaters, and gain insight into their social and cultural influence. Such knowledge production led to an appreciation of the multitude of roles they play, interact with various political and economic forces, and fulfill social functions. Using a historical lithograph print, the paper shows how a 1852 commemoration of the Declaration of Independence played a role in marking the beginning of transpacific performing history in the United States. Since then, the paper argues, the transpacific migration of repertoire, costumes, sound, and dance became integral to early American cultural life and played a key role in shaping cultural authority and music identity.
Heather Platt: Does a Preposition Matter? Folksong in America or American Folksong
Beginning in the 1890s, illustrated lectures and song recitals featuring European and American folksongs proliferated across the United States. Whereas previously only songs by minstrels and Foster were considered “American folksongs,” now programs increasingly argued or implied that African-American, Creole, and Native-American songs were “American folksongs.” As new research emerged, other repertoires, including Appalachian songs, were also incorporated. Nevertheless, some researchers and singers registered discomfort with this all-embracing approach. Henry Krehbiel, for example, carefully titled his presentations “Folksongs in America.” While Arthur Farwell preferred to classify songs by genres, such as African-American, Native-American, Spanish-American, or minstrel, rather than use the broader label. Discussions concerning the classification of folksongs were not confined to researchers and music critics; they were also taken up by professional and amateur performers and music lovers nationwide. Krehbiel and Farwell had considerable influence on these explorations because they undertook multi-state tours during which they gave presentations to gatherings of amateurs, including at events sponsored by women’s clubs. Club members, in turn, created recital programs, study days, and presentations for schools that were influenced by their theories. While the contested nature of American folksong has often been examined in relation to the development of a distinctively American compositional idiom, less attention has been paid to how professional and amateur singers engaged with the concept of American folksong in presentations and performances for urban and rural communities. Drawing on Ross Cole’s notion of the “folkloric imagination,” this paper surveys publications by researchers and reports of recitals at women’s clubs and educational organizations to reveal how presenters negotiated the existence of multiple American folk traditions and appropriated them for their own cultural agendas.