American Music

I

Introduction

American Music, the folk, popular, and classical music of the United States—created by American-born or American-trained composers, or originating in American culture, or written primarily for American audiences.

II

Colonial Era Through 1820

The colonial roots of American music are British. The first book printed in the American colonies was the Bay Psalm Book. Its ninth edition (1698) contained 13 psalm tunes, all of them from Europe; some, including “Old Hundred,” are still sung. After 1750 native-born composers in New England established a distinctive religious music. Spread through singing schools (informal courses of musical instruction), Yankee hymnody—with its angular melodies and open-fifth chords—was unconventional by European standards. A favorite form was the fuguing tune, a four-part piece that began like a hymn and ended like a round. The most famous of the New England “tunesmiths” was William Billings, whose collection The New England Psalm Singer (1770) marked the appearance of the new style. His colleagues included Oliver Holden and Daniel Read.

Some early American religious sects—such as the Ephrata Cloister, the Shakers, and the Moravians—also produced original music, but it had little influence beyond their communities. One Shaker melody ('Tis the Gift to Be Simple) became famous when it was used by the composer Aaron Copland in his ballet Appalachian Spring (1944). The Moravians, who were musically the most prolific and sophisticated of these sects, re-created in their chamber and church music the instrumental music of their Old World German culture. The three string trios written about 1780 by the Moravian composer John Antes were the first chamber works composed in the colonies.

Political songs, broadsides (one-page song sheets), dance music, and piano music—largely reflecting British models or imported from England—were also published during this era. Among such tunes of English origin are “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), with words by the American lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key; “Yankee Doodle” (published about 1780); and “America” (1831), with words by the American clergyman and poet Samuel F. Smith. The lawyer, author, and politician Francis Hopkinson was one of the first Americans to compose secular music; he is best known for his Seven Songs for the Harpsichord (1788). Professional European-born musicians resided in several of the larger American cities. Among them were the English-born James Hewitt in New York City and the German-born Alexander Reinagle, a composer of ballad operas in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Virginia planter and politician Thomas Jefferson was an avid amateur musician, and his collection of music scores became the basis of the music holdings in the Library of Congress.

---

---

III

Early 19th Century

After the American Revolution (1775-1783), European taste reasserted itself in church music. The music of the New England tunesmiths was scorned as “unscientific” by such composers as Thomas Hastings and William Batchelder Bradbury. The dominant figure was Lowell Mason, who had a profound influence on 19th century musical life in America. Besides establishing music education by introducing music into the schools of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1838, he composed more than 1,200 hymns—most notably, “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (1856)—and compiled five major collections of church music, the most important being The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music (1822). Several of Mason's protégés and descendants became performers and teachers of music, as well as builders of pianos and organs; grandson Daniel Gregory Mason was a respected composer of impressionistic and romantic music, and his pupil and distant relative Luther Whiting Mason helped establish music education in Japan. See also Mason (family)

Traditional New England religious music migrated to the South, where a new kind of folk hymnody emerged from the camp meetings of the religious revival movement. Close to modern gospel tunes in their repetitious, catchy refrains, the revival hymns and spirituals include such well-known examples as “Amazing Grace” and “Wayfaring Stranger.” Southern folk hymns were taught in singing schools and typically printed in “shape notes,” an easy-to-read system of notation in which the notes had different shapes to represent the seven syllables of the scale. The shape-note collection of greatest and most lasting popularity was The Sacred Harp (1844) of Benjamin Franklin White and E. J. King.

Touring European performers of opera and immigrant German instrumentalists dominated American classical music during this period. The most noteworthy classical composer was Bohemian-born Anthony Philip Heinrich, a romantic who wrote several descriptive symphonies and a massive collection of songs and piano pieces, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky (1820). As pianos and sheet music became more affordable, Americans bought increasing numbers of Italian opera arias and German orchestral selections arranged for parlor performance.

IV

Mid-19th Century Through the American Civil War

The first African influence in American popular music surfaced in the blackface minstrel show. Its characteristic white, four-man troupe was defined in the 1840s by the Virginia Minstrels, performing on banjo, tambourine, bone castanets, and fiddle. The banjo virtuoso Daniel Decatur Emmett was the outstanding composer of minstrel songs; his best-known work is “Dixie” (1859). For the first time, a form of American music acquired tremendous appeal in Europe and elsewhere. By midcentury the first black performers began to appear in minstrel shows.

Genuine African American music was already established in oral tradition by the beginning of the 19th century. The first published collection of it, Slave Songs of the United States, appeared in 1867. The collection includes the famous songs “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” After the Civil War (1861-1865), the fundraising concerts of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers made such spirituals the first African American folk music to reach a national and international audience.

Parlor songs modeled on popular English, Irish, and Scottish melodies overflowed with sentiment, lavished on the ordinary aspects of domestic life. One example is “The Old Arm Chair” (1840) by the English singer Henry Russell, who barnstormed the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Russell's American successors included the Hutchinson family, who espoused in song such causes as abolition and woman suffrage.

The greatest songwriter of the period, and perhaps of the century, was Stephen Collins Foster. Foster composed songs for the famous Christy Minstrels, such as “Oh! Susanna” (1848), “Camptown Races” (1850), “Old Folks at Home” (“Swanee River,” 1851), and “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853), and parlor songs, such as “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1854) and “Beautiful Dreamer” (1864). Foster’s songs were the first to be called distinctly American. He was immortalized by his sympathetic lyrics, folklike melodies, and ability to combine Anglo-Irish and African American idioms with those of Italian operatic song. Notable composers after Foster were Henry Clay Work, George Root, and James Bland.

In classical music, touring European musicians—such as the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, the conductor Louis Jullien, and the Germania Orchestra—still prevailed. The first great American piano virtuoso, the New Orleans-born and Paris-trained Louis Moreau Gottschalk, became an international celebrity. The best of his salon music for piano—such as “La Bamboula” (the name of a dance) and “Le Banjo”—blended an exotic mixture of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, Creole melodies, and romantic pyrotechnics.

The country's first permanent orchestra was the New York Philharmonic Society, founded in 1842. Among the first symphonic and operatic composers the most prominent was William Henry Fry, who composed the first opera by an American (Leonora, 1845). Fry is best remembered, however, for four symphonies written in the 1850s and 1860s. George F. Bristow wrote the first opera on an American theme; his Rip Van Winkle was performed in New York City in 1855.

Town bands, a popular form of community music-making since the Revolution, performed sometimes-elaborate arrangements of popular and classical melodies for festivals and holidays. During the Civil War, thousands of musicians served in regimental and brigade bands in the armies of both the North and the South.