1. My earlier attempts include American Studies and American Musicology: A Point of View and a Case in Point , I.S.A.M. Monographs, no. 4 (Brooklyn, 1975); "A Historian's Introduction to Early American Music," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 89 (1979): 261-98; and Studying American Music , I.S.A.M. Special Monograph (Brooklyn, 1985).

2. See H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States , 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1988), 53-55.

3. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York, 1986), 42.

1. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?: The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961 (London, 1961). See chap. 5, "History as Progress."

2. The cornerstones for Ives studies were laid in the 1950s, especially by Henry Cowell and Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (New York, 1955), and John Kirkpatrick, A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives 1874-1954 (New Haven, 1960). In the 1970s, as Ives's 100th anniversary was celebrated, Ives's biography was further explored. His autobiographical Memos , edited by John Kirkpatrick (New York, 1972) appeared, as did Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven, 1974), Frank R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America (New York, 1975), and H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis, eds., An Ives Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference (Urbana, Ill., 1977). The Charles Ives Society was formed (1973) with the goal of bringing out authoritative editions of Ives's music. In the 1980s, J. Peter Burkholder has revised some of the Ives legend in Charles Ives: The Ideas behind the Music (New Haven, 1985), and Maynard Solomon has challenged Ives's near-legendary capacity for innovation in "Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," JAMS 40 (1987): 443-70, answered by Burkholder in "Charles Ives and His Fathers: A Response to Maynard Solomon," Newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music 18, no. 1 (1988).

3. Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955), 733 PP.; rev. ed. (New York, 1966), 759 PP.; rev. 3d ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1987), 712 pp. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (New York, 1966), 543 PP. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), 270 pp.; 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, 1974), 286 pp.; 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, 1988), 365 pp. Charles Harem, Music in the New World (New York, 1983), 722 pp.

To this list might also be added Daniel Kingman, American Music: A Panorama (New York, 1979), 577 PP.; 2d ed. (New York, 1990), 684 pp. I have not discussed Kingman's book in the text because, by the author's own description, it is not a history. Though comprehensive, it does not attempt to trace the development of American music chronologically. In the preface to the second edition, King-man explains: "I have . . . rejected a traditional chronological-historical approach to the whole subject, and have maintained an ordering that reflects my view of American music as a number of more or less distinct but parallel streams" (xv). Kingman's six "streams" are, in the order in which he presents them: "Folk and Ethnic Musics," "Popular Sacred Music," ''Three Prodigious Offspring of the Rural South" [Country Music, Blues, Rock], "Popular Secular Music," "Jazz and Its Forerunners," and "Classical Music."

Another work not discussed here is Irving L. Sablosky, American Music (Chicago, 1969), a volume in the Chicago History of American Civilization Series, edited by Daniel J. Boorstin. Sablosky's work is chronological, but it is also very short—just 185 pages of text, plus back matter. Written on a small scale, and by an author who seems to have had no musicological training, American Music is a balanced account of music in American society but hardly a major historical statement. A jacket note describes Sablosky as "a Foreign Service Officer of the United States Information Agency, where he has prepared material on American music for use overseas."

4. Hamm, Music in the New World , 656.

5. My foreword to Chase's America's Music , rev. 3d ed., gives a fuller account of his work than is possible here. There Chase is credited with being "the first general historian of the subject to recognize American music as a unique phenomenon that demanded to be studied as such" (xv).

6. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land , xiii. This is the only history of American music written by a historian who is not a permanent resident of the United States. Mellers writes: "While I may, as an outsider, miss many qualities, musical, psychological and social, that a native American would be aware of intuitively, there is also a chance that, as an outsider, I may see and hear things that cannot be experienced from within the American context" (xv). Mellers acknowledges "the Mellon Trust and the University of Pittsburgh" for enabling him "to live for two academic years in the States,'' presumably providing the stimulus for his book.

7. Hitchcock explains in the preface to his third edition that in dealing with American vernacular secular music, as "in the Colonial era, I discuss much music now considered 'folk music'—but in its function as the popular music of its time." He continues: "American folk music as such is considered more broadly by Bruno Nettl and Gerard Béhague in their companion volume in the Prentice Hall History of Music Series, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents " (x-xi).

My fuller evaluation of Hitchcock's contribution to American music studies, including his editorship, with Stanley Sadie, of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music , 4 vols. (London, 1986)—referred to here as Amerigrove —appears in A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock , edited by Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), especially 6-9.

8. Hamm, Music in the New World , 655. Hamm writes that his Music in the New World was "planned to take full advantage" of New World Records' massive Recorded Anthology of American Music, "a set of 100 phonograph discs ranging over the entire 200-year history of our music since the Revolution" and issued to commemorate the United States' Bicentennial (ix-x).

9. Chase, America's Music (1955), 658-59. In later editions, Chase restores Ives to his rightful place in historical chronology.

10. The four men bring varied scholarly backgrounds to their work, but Chase was the most fully occupied with the study of New World music. After obtaining his B.A. degree, Chase (b. Havana, Cuba, 1906) served as a music critic in Paris (1929-35), a Latin American music specialist at the Library of Congress (1940-43), an educational music supervisor for the National Broadcasting Company (1943-47), and a U.S. foreign service officer (1951-55; 1958-60). His academic positions include stints at the University of Oklahoma (1955-57), Tulane University (1961-66), the University of Texas at Austin (1975-79), and shorter appointments elsewhere. In 1941, Chase published The Music of Spain ; but from that time on he devoted his research and writing exclusively to music in Latin America and the United States. See New Grove , 4:178, and Amerigrove 1:409-10. Chase died in 1992. Mellers (b. 1914) read English and music at Cambridge University and studied composition in Oxford, followed by academic posts at Downing College, Cambridge (1945-48), Birmingham University (1948-59), the University of Pittsburgh (1960-63), and the University of York (1964 until his retirement). He has continued to compose while working as a scholar and teacher. Mellers's many books on topics in Western music include studies of François Couperin, the twentieth century, the Beatles, music and poetry, music and society, and Bob Dylan. See New Grove , 12:108. Hitchcock (b. 1923) and Hamm (b. 1925) both hold Ph.D. degrees in historical musicology, and both have spent their working lives in academia: Hitchcock teaching at the University of Michigan (1950-61), Hunter College (1961-71), and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (1971 to the present), and Hamm at Princeton University (1948-50; 1958), the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (1950-57), Tulane University (1959-63), the University of Illinois (1963-76), and Dartmouth College (1976-91). Hamm was also active as a composer in his earlier years. Neither man, however, received his Ph.D. degree for American music study, and both have continued to publish in the fields in which they did their graduate work: Hitchcock in the French and Italian baroque (his dissertation was on Marc-Antoine Charpentier) and Hamm in the Renaissance (his was on Guillaume Dufay). See New Grove , 8:73, 601.

11. For an incisive view of the European musical canon see Joseph Kerman, "A Few Canonic Variations," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 107-25. On the modem literary canon see David A. Hollinger, "The Canon and Its Keepers: Modernism and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectuals," in Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 74-91.

12. See Richard Crawford, "A Historian's Introduction to Early American Music," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 89 (1979): 281-91. See also Richard Crawford and D. W. Krummel, "Early American Music Printing and Publishing," in Printing and Society in Early America , edited by William J. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester, Mass., 1983), 186-227.

13. Quoted from Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers (New York, 1984), 516.

14. Simeon Pease Cheney, The American Singing Book (Boston, 1879; reprint, New York, 1980), 202.

15. George Hood, A History of Music in New England: With Biographical Sketches of Reformers and Psalmists (Boston, 1846; reprint, New York, 1970).

16. Hood, A History , vi.

17. Hood, A History , 216

18. Hood, A History , iv.

19. Hood, A History , 169n.

20. Hood, A History , 51n. Hood's research went beyond printed documents, and not all of it got into his book. In his introduction, he cites Oliver Holden, Nahum Mitchell, and Edward Pierce of Brookline, Massachusetts, as sources of information, suggesting that he had conversations with these men. Holden and Mitchell both compiled sacred tunebooks, and Pierce, a clergyman, sang with Billings and told later historians about the experience. See David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, 1975), 66, 187, 207. Hood also thanks "those persons who have so politely furnished materials for the biographical sketches of their friends" (v). Since no subject of a biographical sketch in Hood's book lived beyond the 1760s, he must be referring here to friends of more recent New England musicians whose biographies he wrote but did not include in his book. Hood is known to have gathered data for biographical sketches of Holden, Andrew Law, Elias Mann, Lowell Mason, Daniel Read, and Timothy Swan. Early in the 1840s, he solicited letters relating to these men, and they survive in a scrapbook in the Boston Public Library. In Hood's list of New England tunebooks, on pp. 176-77, he cross-references biographical sketches of Read, Holden, Hans Gram, and Samuel Holyoke that are not printed in the book.

21. Nathaniel D. Gould, Church Music in America, Comprising Its History and Its Peculiarities at Different Periods, with Cursory Remarks on Its Legitimate Use and Its Abuse; with Notices of the Schools, Composers, Teachers and Societies (Boston, 1853; reprint, New York, 1972).

22. Gould, Church Music , iii, describes his purview as "the last eighty years." On p. iv he writes, however, that he "did not deem it advisable to commence our narrative abruptly at the period of 1770."

23. Gould, Church Music , 238.

24. Gould taught his first district school at sixteen, became a specialist in handwriting, and eventually published Penmanship, or The Beauties of Writing (Boston, 1822), which enjoyed at least four editions. He also compiled seven tunebooks, of which National Church Harmony (Boston, 1824-29, 7 eds.) was the most successful. See Frederick W. Coburn, "Nathaniel Duren Gould," Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1928-36) 4:455.

25. Gould, Church Music , 39.

26. Gould, Church Music , iii. Gould's book was inspired by Warren Burton's The District School as It Was. By One Who Went to It (Boston, 1833), a nostalgic and altogether less substantial work than Gould's.

27. Gould, Church Music , 172.

28. Frédéric Louis Ritter, Music in America (New York, 1883); new ed. (New York, 1890; reprint, New York, 1970). Quotations here are from the new edition.

29. Ritter, Music in America , 55.

30. Frédéric Louis Ritter, Music in England (New York, 1883), v.

31. Ritter, Music in America , vii-viii.

32. Ritter, Music in America , 196.

33. Ritter, Music in America , 183.

34. Even in Amerigrove , which is broad-minded enough to treat Liberace with respect, Ritter earns the following barb: "Ritter's view of American music was, unfortunately, both simplistic and unsympathetic" (4:49). It should be noted that criticisms of Ritter focus not on his data but on his interpretive outlook.

35. Robert Stevenson, Philosophies of American Music History: A Lecture Delivered in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress, January 9, 1969 (Washington, D.C., 1970), 9.

36. Ritter's evaluations are by no means all negative. For example, he considered the era of Billings one of "rich growth" for American psalmodists and "interesting" to historians. "There was original life, great impulse, and energy about it," he added. "It was infancy in art; but it was alive, and seemed promising" ( Music in America , 73).

37. William S. B. Mathews, assoc. ed., A Hundred Years of Music in America. An Account of Musical Effort in America during the Past Century, Including Popular Music and Singing Schools, Church Music, Musical Conventions and Festivals, Orchestral, Operatic and Oratorio Music; Improvements in Musical Instruments; Popular and the Higher Musical Education; Creative Activity, and the Beginning of a National School of Musical Composition (Chicago, 1889; reprint, New York, 1970).

38. Mathews, A Hundred Years , iv.

39. Mathews, A Hundred Years , 7-8.

40. Mathews, A Hundred Years , iii. "The material thus furnished, some of it with singular reluctance," Mathews continues, "we have carefully digested, and added to it whatever seemed necessary from the personal knowledge of the editor."

41. In fact, Ritter, identified here as an "eminent scholar and composer" (686), is one of the very few who come in for any negative comment. At one place he is claimed to have said something "with his accustomed sneer" (52).

42. Mathews, A Hundred Years , 169.

43. Mathews, A Hundred Years , 403.

44. Louis C. Elson's The History of American Music (New York, 1904) was commissioned for the multivolume History of American Art series, under the general editorship of art critic John C. Van Dyke. The History of American Music (Toledo, 1908), edited by W. L. Hubbard, was one of twelve volumes in The American History and Encyclopedia of Music (1908-10), of which Hubbard himself was general editor. And Music in America (New York, 1915), edited by Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby, was one of fourteen volumes of The Art of Music whose editor-in-chief was Daniel Gregory Mason.

45. Elson, History of American Music , Chap. 18, "Qualities and Defects of American Music," 361-66.

46. Hubbard, History of American Music , Chap. [14], "Summary and Outlook," 345-49.

47. Arthur Farwell, "Introduction," in Music in America , edited by Farwell and Darby, vii-xxiii. The quotations are from vii-viii.

48. The only academic of the lot, Elson also did some composing on the side. As a writer, he produced textbooks, monographs, dictionaries, and journalistic memoirs on music. Elson's History of American Music was his eleventh book and, except for The History of German Song (Boston, 1888), the only one with a historical orientation. As noted in Richard Crawford, The American Musicological Society 1954-1984: An Anniversary Essay, with Lists of Officers, Winners of Awards, Editors of the Journal, and Honorary and Corresponding Members (Philadelphia, 1984), in Elson's day, the music of the concert hall was "heard, discussed, analyzed, and written about in forums accessible to music lovers—including books, articles in periodicals such as The Atlantic, Harper's , and Scribner's , and in the daily press. The most knowledgeable and active American writers about music in those days... worked as critics for large metropolitan newspapers. As journalists, their work was geared to regular production and wide dissemination" (2).

49. Thomas Stoner, " 'The New Gospel of Music': Arthur Farwell's Vision of Democratic Music in America," American Music 9 (1991): 186. I am grateful to the author for sending me a prepublication copy.

50. Janet M. Green, Musical Biographies , vol. 1 of The American History and Encyclopedia of Music , edited by W. L. Hubbard (Toledo, [1908]), 391-92. Hubbard, a mercurial figure who in later life changed his first name to Havrah and explored the occult, lived in California from about 1920 until his death. His letterhead in 1911 describes him as "Editor in Chief, The American History and Encyclopedia of Music," "Former Musical Editor of the Chicago Tribune ," and "author, critic, lecturer." A collection of Hubbard's personal papers is preserved in the Archives of the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

51. [Waldo Selden] Pratt, American Music and Musicians ([New York, 1920]), 101. According to Pratt, the Modern Music Society of New York "was formed in 1913-14 to give both choral and orchestral works by recent composers, especially Americans. Its nucleus was the Lambord Choral Society, founded in 1912 by Benjamin Lambord" (298). Richard Jackson, United States Music: Sources of Biography and Collective Biography , I.S.A.M. Monographs, no. 1 (Brooklyn, 1973), 16, supplies William Dermot Darby's death date.

52. Louis C. Elson, The History of American Music (New York, 1904); rev. ed. (New York, 1915). Edition revised to 1925 by Arthur Elson (New York, 1925). Quotations here are from the first edition.

53. Elson, History of American Music , title page.

54. Elson, History of American Music , v.

55. Elson's account of American composers includes a biography and picture, a review of works (sometimes with critical, though not technical, comments about specific compositions), and an evaluation. The composers are divided by their specialties (e.g., "The Orchestral Composers of America," "American Song-Composers"), though Paine, Chadwick, Parker, MacDowell, and Foote are honored in "American Tone-Masters," a chapter proclaiming them the leading American composers.

56. Elson, History of American Music , 336-37.

57. Elson, History of American Music , 337. Ritter says nothing about American composers in his first edition. In the second (1890), he includes a one-page, alphabetical list of those musicians who have, as far as I am aware, endeavored to do good, meritorious work in the field of the higher branches of composition. My list comprises the names of those immigrated musicians who, by means of their talent and knowledge, have honestly helped to create an elevated musical atmosphere, and promote musical culture, as well as those who, perchance born of European parents on American soil, have greatly profited by the solid artistic labor of "those foreigners." Every honest promoter of an ideal, pure art-endeavor who has settled here is justly entitled to an honored place in the annals of the History of Music in America. (504)

58. Hubbard is also named as "editor" (i.e., author) of six of the encyclopedia's other volumes: two on opera, two more of "musical biography," a musical dictionary, and a History of Foreign Music .

59. On 13 September 1907, Chadwick wrote Hubbard about his article, "American Composers," which he had almost finished. "I have of course not mentioned my own share in the proceedings. But I think I may say without egotism that the whole Boston movement in composition really dates from the performance of my Rip van Winkle overture. It was the keystone of my entire success in life and brought me Horatio Parker, Arthur Whiting, F. S. Converse & Henry Hadley for pupils who went to Rheinberger from me and by my advice." In December 1879, while Chadwick was still studying in Munich, the Harvard Musical Association's orchestra performed the overture, and in 1880, the Handel and Haydn Society played it under his direction. See Victor Fell Yellin, Chadwick: Yankee Composer (Washington, D.C., 1990), 40, 44. Chadwick's letter then went on to ask Hubbard: "Now could not you as editor explain this in a supplementary note to my article? I know of no one who could do it better" (letter to W. L. Hubbard in The William Lines Hubbard Papers, Archives of the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.). Hubbard followed Chadwick's request. His signed note following the composer's article (14-15) delivers the claim in words very much like Chadwick's own, while making the composer out to be the very soul of self-effacing modesty.

60. Damrosch wrote Hubbard on 29 September 1907 about his article on "Music in the Public Schools": "I think you will find that the subject has been treated as concisely as possible considering its scope and importance." Indeed, he would have liked to provide more on the subject.

You may, perhaps, think that I have given more space to the early history than is absolutely necessary, but I feel that the zeal, energy and clearsightedness of the early workers in this field were so wonderful that such a remarkable chapter in the history of American culture should receive the recognition it deserves. I consider the report of the school committee of Boston in 1837 [ recte , 1836, perhaps; see 21-25] to be as clear, intelligent and comprehensive an argument in favor of music in general education as I have ever seen, and it deserves wider publicity and appreciation than it has received by its burial in the archives of Boston's School Board. (letter to W. L. Hubbard in The William Lines Hubbard Papers, Archives of the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.)

61. Hubbard's democratic bent comes through in his sympathetic treatment of American unwritten and informal music. In his view, American Indian music possesses "great historical value" because it preserves bits of the culture of a disappearing race (39-40). Negro music is seen to be of higher aesthetic significance. "America owes much," wrote Hubbard, "to the negro in the creation and development of its popular music, for a large part of such music is due either directly or indirectly to negro sources" (69). Hubbard also notes that African-American influences "have had a marked effect in the production of music both of a popular and of a more pretentious character in this country" (49). As for popular music—to Hubbard, any music simple enough to be enjoyed by listeners without "special musical training" or "serious mental effort" (72)— its importance was self-evident. Although earlier historians had considered popular music unworthy of notice, except for an occasional brickbat aside, Hubbard simply stated: ''Popular music always has had and always will have its place in the lives of the people" (71). Patriotic music, which Elson had made part of his historiographical turf, was seen by Hubbard in functional terms: as an agent that, by giving voice to national pride, "inspires to action" (101).

62. Neither the conception nor the data in Hubbard's account, however, have made much impact upon the writing of American music history. One searches the literature in vain for references to it. Where Elson, Mathews, and Ritter are cited with some frequency, and all are acknowledged as holding a place in the American canon of history writing, Hubbard has disappeared from view.

63. César Saerchinger wrote the chapter on "The Folk-Element in American Music," Benjamin Lambord wrote "The Classic Period of American Composition" and also "The Lighter Vein" (on popular music), and M. M. M., so far unidentified, wrote on "Musical Education in America."

64. Farwell, "Introduction," vii.

65. Farwell, "Introduction," viii.

66. Farwell, "Introduction," xi.

67. Farwell, "Introduction," xv.

68. Farwell saw modern American composers as "divided into two camps, one seeking a national individuality for American music and the other a continuation of the most recent European developments, especially those of France and post-Wagnerian Germany." Neither approach had proved dominant. "The so-called 'Nationalists' experimented to some extent with the ultra-modern technical developments, and the ultra-moderns could not refrain from some essays with primitive American themes." The result? "It was inevitable that a broad eclecticism should arise, and in this a more truly national movement stepped forth than was presented by either of the existing wings. The will for the greatest freedom, essential to the American spirit, asserted itself, and in its newest phase the nation is declaring for a complete musical independence, based upon the unrestricted assimilation and reflection of every phase of music influence, within and without" (Farwell, "Nationalists, Eclectics, and Ultra-Moderns," in Music in America , 407-8).

69. Farwell, "Introduction," xviii.

70. Farwell, "Introduction," xx.

71. Farwell, "Introduction," xii-xiii.

72. Farwell, "Introduction," xxi.

73. Farwell, "Introduction," xix.

74. Farwell, "Introduction," xxii.

75. Farwell, "Introduction," xxii-xxiii.

76. Farwell, "Introduction," xviii.

77. One contradiction between Farwell's faith in proletarian musical taste and the rest of the book appears at the end of Darby's chapter on opera, where he writes: "That the faculty of intelligent aesthetic appreciation is somewhat rudimentary in the average American of to-day is a fact that the unbiassed [ sic ] observer can hardly escape" (W. Dermot Darby, "Opera in the United States, Part II," in Music in America , 180).

78. In the 1960s, however, after musicology as a scholarly discipline had established itself in this country, Frank Ll. Harrison observed that "American musical scholarship developed in close contact with the 'official' musicological outlook of Europe, but without real involvement in the musical culture of either Europe or America." See Frank Ll. Harrison, Mantle Hood, and Claude V. Palisca, Musicology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), 60.

79. William Lichtenwanger, ed., Oscar Sonneck and American Music (Urbana, Ill., 1983), collects articles by and about Sonneck.

80. For Sonneck's career there, see Gillian B. Anderson, "Putting the Experience of the World at the Nation's Command: Music at the Library of Congress, 1800-1917," Journal of the American Musicological Society 42 (1989): 108-49.

81. Quoted in Lichtenwanger, Oscar Sonneck , 18, 90.

82. Sonneck's books on American music, in chronological order, are: Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (Washington, D.C., 1905); new ed., rev. and enlarged by William Treat Upton (Washington, D.C., 1945; reprint, New York, 1964). Francis Hopkinson, the First American Poet-Composer (1757-1791), and James Lyon, Patriot, Preacher, Psalmodist (1735-1794): Two Studies in Early American Music (Washington, D.C., 1905; reprint, New York, 1967). Early Concert-Life in America (1731-1800 ) (Leipzig, 1907; reprint, New York, 1978). Report on "The Star-Spangled Banner," "Hail Columbia," "America," "Yankee Doodle " (Washington, D.C., 1909; reprint, New York, 1972). Early Opera in America (New York, 1915; reprint, New York, 1963). In addition, Sonneck wrote a number of articles on American music, collected in Lichtenwanger, Oscar Sonneck .

83. Quoted from Lichtenwanger, Oscar Sonneck , 29-30. The six-word aphorism ending this statement was often quoted in public addresses by Irving Lowens, founding President of the Sonneck Society for American Music.

84. Quoted from Lichtenwanger, Oscar Sonneck , 74.

85. Quoted from Lichtenwanger, Oscar Sonneck , 89.

86. Oscar G. Sonneck, "The History of Music: A Few Suggestions," in Oscar G. Sonneck, Miscellaneous Studies in the History of Music (New York, 1921), 334 (italics added).

87. My article, "Sonneck and American Musical Historiography," in Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson , edited by Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner (n.p., 1990), 266-83, claims Sonneck as the first historian of American music to work from a conscious, fully developed historiographical philosophy. The article also traces Sonneck's influence on other writers. Preeminent among scholars inspired by Sonneck's belief that "bibliography is the backbone of history" was Irving Lowens (1916-83), whose bibliographically based researches in early American music began in the late 1940s. See Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964). See also Richard Crawford, obituary notice for Irving Lowens, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 91 (1984): 40-44, for an assessment of Sonneck's direct influence upon Lowens. Allen P. Britton (b. 1914) began his work on early American sacred tunebooks at about the same time as Lowens. Lowens and Britton's work on early American tune-books is brought to fruition in Allen Perdue Britton, Irving Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Mass., 1990). Gilbert Chase wrote in the first edition of America's Music that Sonneck, Arthur Farwell, and Charles Seeger had been his three main inspirations for that work.

It should also be recalled that Sonneck had a close colleague, Waldo Selden Pratt (1857-1939), whose work, while not including a history of American music, was carried on under the influence of a scholarly ideal akin to Sonneck's. Pratt's "On Behalf of Musicology" was the first article in the first issue of The Musical Quarterly , edited by Sonneck. Moreover, Pratt was editor of the American Supplement to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians , 2d ed. (New York, 1920; rev. 2d ed., New York, 1928). The latter work incorporates Sonneck's historiographical precepts admirably; but, rather than a narrative history, it's written in encyclopedia format. See Richard Crawford, "Amerigrove's Pedigree: On The New Grove Dictionary of American Music," College Music Society Symposium 27 (1987): 172-86.

In another vein, D. W. Krummel has written that, however much Sonneck has been venerated, his example has not been enthusiastically followed. Krummel describes Sonneck as a "legendary" figure, "who with Germanic thoroughness saw only one way to proceed: start at the beginning, like any good historical scholar, and expect others to be inspired or compelled by the quality of your good work to continue. Unfortunately, little has been done to continue Sonneck's good work." See Krummel, Bibliographical Handbook of American Music (Urbana, Ill., 1987), 7.

88. John Tasker Howard, Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of It (New York, 1931); rev. ed. (New York, 1939); 3d ed. (New York, 1946); 3d ed., with supplementary chapters by James Lyons (New York, 1954). Our American Music: A Comprehensive History from 1620 to the Present , 4th ed. (New York, 1965).

89. Howard, Our American Music , p. vii. Quotations here and below are from the 4th ed.

90. In the fourth edition (1965), the bibliography, "revised and brought up to date ... by Karl Kroeger," runs to seventy-six pages.

91. In "The History of Music in America," delivered to the Music Teachers' National Association in 1916 and reprinted in Sonneck's Miscellaneous Studies , he notes "the scant courtesy shown to the first half of the nineteenth century" and recommends that "some intrepid historian of uncommon constructive gifts" should "devote several years of steady comprehensive research exclusively to the earlier half-century" (339). He then offers several pages of suggestions for specific research projects (340-43).

92. Howard, Our American Music , 72.

93. Howard, Our American Music , 42.

94. Howard, Our American Music , 56.

95. Allen P. Britton, championing the cause of New England psalmody, wrote as early as 1949: "At this late date we can do little else than mourn the loss of our first original art music. A sacrifice upon the twin altars of good taste and correct harmony, it vanished from the knowledge of serious musicians." And Britton found the lasting impact severe: "The American people, deprived of an art music based upon a native idiom of immediate appeal to their musical sensibilities, have ever since manifested an understandable suspicion of the essential validity of all serious music" ("Theoretical Introductions in American Tune-Books to 1800," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1949, 366). Irving Lowens, writing on psalmodist Daniel Read in 1952, held foreign influence responsible for a decline in the quality of American music-making. "The crude but eloquent American product had been supplanted by second-rate English importations and insipid 'arrangements' from the classic masters.... In today's historical perspective, the newer music appears to have been a regression rather than an advance in popular taste, but to Read [near the end of his life], the tune-books of the supporters of 'scientific music' represented progress" ("Daniel Read's World: The Letters of an Early American Composer,'' Notes 9 [1951-52]: 243).

96. Barbara Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism , Studies in Musicology, no. 19 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980), is one of several recent studies that examine the attempts of composers for the concert hall to draw upon American musical vernaculars.

97. Chase, America's Music , calls psalmodist Andrew Law a " 'better music' booster" (128), labels his praise for European sacred music "snobbism" (131), and declares Law "a staunch upholder of the genteel tradition" (130). For Chase, Lowell Mason and the next generation of American psalmodists pursued a false idea of "progress" (153) for pecuniary motives (150-51). Mason especially was responsible for "thrusting" earlier New England composers "into the background, while opening the gates for a flood of colorless imitations of the 'European masters'" (160). Chase attributes the rise of "The Genteel Tradition"— the title of his chapter 9—to the "aesthetic immaturity" of "the people of the United States as a whole" during the nineteenth century (166). Quotations here and below are from the first edition.

98. As noted in my foreword to Chase's revised third edition, Howard wrote to show how well American composers had mastered European forms. He organized his book into an epic in three parts: "Euterpe in the Wilderness" (1620- 1800), "Euterpe Clears the Forest" (1800-1860), and "Euterpe Builds Her American Home" (1860-1931). The saga of American music as told by Howard lay in the struggle of the Old World muse to hack out a place for herself on American shores, triumphing over nature and poverty, indifference and ignorance. See Chase, America's Music , rev. 3d ed. (1987), xii-xiii.

99. Chase, America's Music , xvii, xix. These fighting words do not appear in the revised third edition of Chase's book.

100. Chase, America's Music , xi.

101. Chase, America's Music , xix.

102. See Richard Crawford, "Tracking Vernacular Music ... across the Great Divide," Music Librarianship in America , edited by Michael Ochs, Harvard Library Bulletin , n.s., 2 (1991): 92-99.

103. It has been noted above that Chase believed so fervently in the truth of his historiographical image that he wrenched history out of shape to dramatize it. In devoting the last chapter of his first edition to Charles Ives, even though Ives had stopped composing more than thirty years before Chase's book appeared, Chase could treat Ives as American music's man of destiny: the amateur composer who brought together in one grand synthesis all that was most distinctive and vital in our musical past. On the one hand, Ives composed in European genres and accepted their challenge of craftsmanship and high seriousness. On the other, Ives's works drew heavily on techniques and melodic quotations borrowed from American vernaculars, including hymn tunes, patriotic and parlor songs, fiddle tunes, band music, rags—the very vernaculars that Chase had brought to the fore in his historical account. Ives's fusing of informal and formal traditions created a hybrid music that was American to the core and that also, in Chase's view, showed an artistic strength beyond anything achieved by earlier American composers working within either tradition. Chase's message was clear: The United States is a democracy, and the cultivated composers most likely to grasp the national spirit and character are those whose music, in one way or another, incorporates American vernaculars.

104. Hamm's interpretation of the central importance of popular song in American (and the world's) music was first set forward in Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979), in his articles on popular music for New Grove (1980) and Amerigrove (1986), in Music in the New World (1983), and elaborated in articles, speeches, and organizational activities on behalf of popular music, especially through the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).

105. A personal experience confirms the point. Although I had worked for more than two decades in American psalmody, I never read Gould's Church Music in America from start to finish until I began work on this chapter. I had jumped around in it, digested certain passages, even quoted Gould from time to time in various writings. But when I finally read it all the way through, I discovered a thesis about psalmody reform that appears nowhere else and that historians, myself included, had overlooked. My statistical studies confirmed Gould's thesis. See " 'Ancient Music' and the Europeanizing of American Psalmody, 1800-1810," in A Celebration of American Music , 225-55.

106. Martin Williams's Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (1973; rev., 1987), a series of recordings, is a widely accepted effort in this direction.

107. Stevenson's writings include Philosophies of American Music History (Washington, D.C., 1970); "America's First Black Music Historian" [James Monroe Trotter], Journal of the American Musicological Society 26 (1973): 383-404; "Written Sources for Indian Music until 1882" and ''English Sources for Indian Music until 1882," both in Ethnomusicology 17 (1973): 1-40 and 399-442; and "American Musical Scholarship: Parker to Thayer," Nineteenth-Century Music 1 (1977-78): 191-210. Since beginning work on this chapter in 1985, I have published a number of articles on the subject as well, most of them referred to above. See also Charles Hamm, "Some Fugitive Thoughts on the Historiography of Music," in Essays in Musicology , 284-91.

108. Chase, America's Music , xix, quotes Charles Seeger: "When the history of music in the New World is written, it will be found that the main concern has been with folk and popular music."

109. Quoted from Hitchcock, Music in the United States (1988), 54.

1. Appearing in Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture (July 1948): 1-2, 7-8, reprinted in Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays , edited by Edward T. Cone (Princeton, 1979), 157. The full statement reads: "No fact regarding music in America is more obvious, more pertinent, or more all-embracing in its implications than the fact that music here is in all of its public aspects a business, and a big one." This is the first sentence of an essay called "Music in a Business Economy."

2. "There is no doubt," Sessions continues, "that this is an inevitable state of affairs. I do not regard it as a favorable one for art or for culture ... but it is a condition which is wholly characteristic of our society, and one which exists and flourishes as a part of that society, entirely independently of the will or the intentions of individuals. I am not therefore deploring it[;] ... we must treat it as a condition and not a temporary accident" ("Music in a Business Economy," in Roger Sessions on Music , 157).

3. Sessions, "Music in a Business Economy," 158-59.

4. See Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music , translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1985), 37. When music becomes a commodity, Attali writes, it is transformed into "a means of producing money. It is sold and consumed. It is analyzed: What market does it have? How much profit does it generate? What business strategy is best for it? The music industry, with all of its derivatives (publishing, entertainment, records, musical instruments, record players, etc.) is a major element in and precursor of the economy of leisure and the economy of signs."

5. Sessions, "Music in a Business Economy," 158-59.

6. Sessions, "Music in a Business Economy," 161-63. On 161 Sessions acknowledges that the music he writes "costs money to perform, and yields little or nothing in the sense of immediate short-range box-office returns." His analysis of the "competitive" atmosphere of the concert hall, which he finds pernicious, appears on pp. 162-63.

7. See, e.g., Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, 1982), Introduction and Chap. 1, for a concise description of the sociological structure supporting the arts.

8. Webster's New International Dictionary , 2d ed., s.v. "trade," distinguishes among trade, craft, business, and profession. Trade, it says, "applies to any of the mechanical employments or handicrafts, except those connected with agriculture." Craft, while "often interchangeable with trade . . . denotes especially a trade requiring skilled workmanship; as a carpenter, bricklayer, blacksmith"; business "applies especially to occupations of a mercantile or commercial nature"; and profession ''designates the more learned callings" such as "a clergyman, a lawyer, a physician, a civil engineer, a teacher."

9. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), 86-87, gives four criteria for a profession:

1. it must be a full-time occupation providing a principal source of income

2. the professional must undergo theoretical training and master an esoteric body of knowledge or skill

3. the professional must be licensed to practice by a recognized institution

4. the professional would be likely to embrace an ethic of service, so that in a conflict a client's interest takes precedence over financial profit.

In spirit, if not letter, composing meets the last three of these criteria. See n. 12 below for more on the issue of income.

10. Virgil Thomson, The State of Music , 2d ed., rev. (New York, 1962), 70-72. Chap. 5 is called "Life in the Big City or the Civil Status of Musicians."

11. Thomson writes: "Our western societies consider original design as something just a little bit more important than execution. Either it is paid a special fee, or it is granted a share in the profits of exploitation, or both. And although in some cases the designer is allowed, and in others obliged, to execute his own designs, his civil status as a creator is different from and superior to that of the ordinary executant workman" ( State of Music , 69). Thomson also acknowledges that there are "rich" professions, "poor" professions, and "rich-and-poor" ones. Rich professions, which include law and medicine, operate on a fee basis and charge "what the traffic will bear." Members of poor professions, of which literature, scholarship, and musical composition are examples, "are small proprietors who live by leasing to commercial concerns the property rights in their work." Within the rich-and-poor group—painting and sculpture are included, as well as practitioners who live "sometimes on fees, sometimes on royalties"— wide differences in financial standing exist that have little to do with technical competence ( State of Music , 73).

12. Granting that composing provides less than a living wage for most composers, Thomson describes their working lives as a manifestation of composers' "multiple civil status." For all the "pride and intellectual authority" that musical creation brings, a composer who acts in the role of performer or teacher is at that moment behaving as a laborer, "a time-worker, a union-member, a white collar proletarian.'' At the same time, as an "author of published or frequently played works," a composer is "a small proprietor who leases out . . . property-rights for exploitation by commercial interests" ( State of Music , 126-27).

Attali, concerned primarily with economics and only in passing with professional hierarchy, also views the composer as a proprietor. A composer, Attali explains, "produces a program, a mold, an abstract algorithm. The score he writes is an order described for an operator-interpreter" ( Noise , 37). Attali describes the composer's place in the economy this way:

Generally remunerated with a percentage of the surplus-value obtained from the sale of the commercial object (the score) and its use (the performance), he is reproduced in every copy of the score and in each performance, by virtue of the royalty laws. His remuneration is therefore a kind of rent . A strange situation: a category of workers has thus succeeded in preserving ownership of their labor, in avoiding the position of wage earner, in being remunerated as a rentier who dips into the surplus-value produced by wage earners who valorize their labor in the commodity cycle [e.g., performers and others]. As the creator of the program that all of the capitalist production plugs into, he belongs to a more general category of people, whom I shall call molders . Entertainment entrepreneurs are capitalists; workers in publishing and performers are productive workers. Composers are rentiers. (40)

13. Thomson's often disparaging comments on teachers should be read in light of his long-standing "war" on a "Germanic" attitude apparently "in control everywhere—in the orchestras, the universities, the critical posts, the publishing houses, wherever music makes money or is a power." He describes that attitude as one of pretension and self-interest, masked by solemnity and based on "an intolerable assumption, namely, its right to judge everything without appeal" (Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson [New York, 1966], quoted from Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader [Boston, 1981], 180-81). In 1939, calling teachers "trade-unionists," Thomson wrote:

Pedagogy is not a profession like musical composition, nor even a trade like piano-playing. It has no traditions, no body of esoteric knowledge, no special skill, and no authority. . .. I don't mean to say one teacher isn't a more skillful pedagogue than another. Quite the contrary. I mean no system of pedagogy is any better than any other. The fact that there are so many systems on the market (they are as numerous in America as religions) means that there is no tradition. If the teacher knows his subject and keeps his temper, the student can usually be depended on to get everything out of him that he can digest. ( State of Music , 135-36).

In a further jab at pedagogues' pretensions, Thomson writes that "much as they would like to be considered an intellectual caste," teachers "are really white-collar proletarians." He explains: "Their organized activities are aimed at getting some kind of authority over school curricula and at defending their salaries and their tenure of office from the depredations of trustees and school-boards, who represent in such disputes the profit motive and the authoritarian methods of finance-capital'' (136).

14. In both cases, occupationally speaking, craft practitioners (i.e., in the first case, musical performers, and, in the second, instrument makers) function as wage earners, and their labor provides money for the entrepreneur or factory owners. Thomson writes: "The organizing of musical performances is a business like fruit-vending" ( State of Music , 67). But for Attali it is more complicated. Attali's overriding issue is "the site of the creation of money in music." His analysis, which he describes as that of Marxian political economy, asks: "What kind of musical labor produces surplus-value?" When a musician "is paid a wage by someone who employs him for his personal pleasure," no surplus-value, or capital, is created. "But if, for example, he plays a concert as the employee of someone in the entertainment business, he produces capital and creates wealth." The musician is thus the wage earner and the entrepreneur the capitalist. See Attali, Noise , 37-39.

15. The key question is how far economic processes might go toward illuminating musical processes. During a session entitled "Worldwide Transmutations of American Popular Music" at the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society in Berkeley, California (1977), William Austin noted the difficulty of studying the "vast cultural transactions" that certain musical processes embody. Can we study such processes as a whole, he asked?

If . . . the songs of some Eskimos are more popular than the songs of some Blackfoot Indians, or if the works of John Cage and Charles Ives are more popular than the symphonies and operas of Roger Sessions, still more popular than any of those things are, for instance, songs by Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, and Stevie Wonder. . .. Those are very, very popular, more popular than any classical music or ethnic music. The question about this is "How are these various popular processes connected?" My personal answer so far is in thousands of ways investigated through individual biographies.

Austin's words are an apt reminder of how complex such investigation really is—especially in fields, like American musical economics, where biographical materials can be scarce and no handy "silhouettes" exist. See International Musicological Society, Report of the Twelfth Congress, Berkeley, 1977 , edited by Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel, 1981), 586-87

16. These figures appear in a letter of 6 February 1753 from the Vestry of St. Philip's to an agent in London who was asked to recruit an organist there (see George W. Williams, "Early Organists at St. Philip's, Charleston," South Carolina Historical Magazine 54 [1953]: 87).

17. Andrew Adgate's Institution for the Encouragement of Church Music, formed in Philadelphia in 1784 and supported by subscription, was one of a number of singing schools known to be free to their scholars. More usual, however, were schools for which tuition was charged. As the Reverend William Bentley wrote in his diary in 1796, solo singing, as opposed to choral singing, "has never been taught in New England as a Liberal Art, in public schools, but by private tuition" (quoted in Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist [Evanston, Ill., 1968], 132). I have not found evidence documenting the cost of private music lessons in the eighteenth century, though it probably varied as much then as it has since. As for singing schools, in the years after the Revolutionary War, my impression is that scholars typically paid between one and two dollars per quarter (usually two meetings per week for thirteen weeks). In Salem around 1783, according to The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of East Church, Salem, Massachusetts , vol. 1 (Salem, Mass., 1905), 7, a singing-school session cost each scholar one dollar, with "deficiencies to be made up from the public fund." Oscar G. Sonneck's manuscript notes record psalmodist Samuel Holyoke charging two dollars per quarter in the same city in 1796, while Louis Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire, 1623-1800 (New York, 1960), 235, reports a singing master named [Ichabod] Johnson collecting the same fee in Portsmouth. In 1798, Andrew Law charged scholars two dollars per quarter for a Philadelphia school, plus an "equal proportion of the expenses of Wood, Room, Candles, and Doorkeeper." At the time, Law was paying $100 per quarter for the room in which he taught, high enough to complain about in a letter (Crawford, Andrew Law , 140). And in 1804, writing from Boston, he offered to return to Philadelphia if associates there guaranteed him ''one hundred scholars for two quarters at three dollars per scholar per quarter." The latter school never materialized; perhaps Law's proposal was simply a bargaining position (178). In 1821, a friend of Law's received a letter from Bond County, Illinois, from a singing master who reported he was teaching a school of "about 45 scholars [there] at $1" (246). Two years later, in 1823, Amos Blanchard was still charging two dollars per quarter for a school he opened in Salem. See Henry M. Brooks, Olden-Time Music: A Compilation from Newspapers and Books (Boston, 1888; reprint, New York, 1973), 115. Available figures support the notion that urban schools cost more than rural ones. I am grateful to Nym Cooke for help in documenting the cost of singing schools and for supplying the Sonneck reference from his notes.

18. Oscar G. Sonneck, after extensive: research, summed up the situation of New York's professional musicians, almost all of them immigrants, around 1800: "With their revenues from teaching, selling, copying music, with several societies and theatrical companies to engage them for their orchestras and with the salaries accruing from a participation in subscription-concerts . . . half [a] hundred musicians . . . were able to eke out a living" ( Early Concert-Life in America [Leipzig, 1907; reprint, New York, 1978], 233-24).

19. Allen Perdue Britton, Irving Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Mass., 1990), 14-16, surveys the singing master's occupation, calling it "the only professional calling readily open to Americans who had a knack for music."

20. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 4-5.

21. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 9-10.

22. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 20-21.

23. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 26-42, analyzes the tune-book trade in sections on "publishers and publishing," "engravers and engraving," "printers and printing," and the "sellers and selling" of tunebooks. In eighteenth-century psalmody, most tunebooks were brought out by newspaper and book publishers rather than specialized music publishers.

24. In psalmody as it persisted well into the nineteenth century, performing, composing, and publishing continued as activities still existing chiefly within the teaching trade.

25. Law's letters, preserved in the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, document a life of economic hardship. In December 1798, for example, Law opened a singing school in Philadelphia. Lacking enough tunebooks for his pupils, he appealed to his brother and publisher in Cheshire, Connecticut, to send the engraved plates of his The Art of Singing (1794) to Philadelphia for reprinting. By mid-February they still had not arrived. He complained in a letter that My school is coming on slowly. I have been almost sick for three weeks and unable to sing, tho I attended the school . . .. I [can] get a room, only for four evenings in a week, which is injurious to the improvement of the school; and I cannot get any except one room which, if I have it, I must take it from this time to the first of October at the rate of four hundred dollars a year. And there will be at least three [months] out of the time that I can have no school, for the people will be upon the wing [in the summer] whether there is any [yellow] fevor or not, which will make it at least 200 dollars per quarter for the room, which will take all the avails of the school. (Crawford, Andrew Law , 139-40) Law's letters abound in similar laments.

26. Any substantial amount of profit made from psalmody could only have come from the publication of tunebooks. Vinson Bushnell has concluded after a study of Daniel Read's papers that, by publishing his own tunebooks, Read probably made psalmody a profitable venture. See Bushnell, "Daniel Read of New Haven (1757-1836): The Man and His Musical Activities," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1979, 203-14. But Read was an exception. The only other publishers of tunebooks likely to have profited from the enterprise before the 1820s were professional printers: Isaiah Thomas, with The Worcester Collection (1786-1803), and Henry Ranlet, with The Village Harmony (1795-1821). See Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 6-8, 28, 35-36.

27. [Waldo Selden] Pratt, ed., American Music and Musicians ([New York, 1920]), 391.

28. For comments on Adgate's ambitions, see Crawford, Andrew Law , 63-65. Law's aspirations as a reformer are discussed on pages 97-108, especially 97, 105-8.

29. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life , 103-11, describes Adgate's attempt in 1786 to pay for his school with profits from an ambitious program of subscription concerts—a dozen in one season. Early in his career, Law sought to extend his influence through younger protégés like Adgate (Crawford, Andrew Law , 63-69) and Thomas H. Atwill (75, 79, 200-210). When those relationships turned sour, Law tried to sell tunebooks through agents located all over the country (121-28). Finally he tried to enlist the support of Protestant denominations for his tunebooks (144-46; 190).

30. Richard Crawford, "Ancient Music and the Europeanizing of American Psalmody, 1800-1810," in A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock , edited by Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 225-55. Between 1805 and 1810, as this article shows, a social movement sparked by the belief that the sacred character of psalmody was threatened, accomplished much of what Law had been struggling to achieve for the previous dozen years. In this case, once consensus was reached on an important issue involving sacred music, social interaction proved to be an agent of change.

31. Carol A. Pemberton, Lowell Mason: His Life and Work , Studies in Musicology, no. 86 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985), 4, notes that in old age Mason referred to the clarinet as "my instrument" but that, "even as a teenager . . . he was also at ease playing the violin, cello, flute, piano, and organ."

32. Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church , vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1979), describes Gardiner's work on pages 231-32.

33. Mason wrote John Rowe Parker, editor of The Euterpeiad , on 20 June 1821, describing his collection as a book "containing a sufficient number of psalm and hymn tunes for . . . public worship and a small number of larger pieces for Country Choirs . . . harmonized according to the modern principles of thorough bass—and I trust every false relation, and every forbidden progression will be avoided." Mason confided to Parker his fear that the collection would "be too classical—that is—too much of Mozart, Beethoven, etc." (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 32).

34. According to Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 35, Mason was "immediately given $500 as an advance payment."

35. Michael Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class": Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, Conn., 1992) contends that proceeds from the tunebook kept the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in existence during a period when financial insolvency forced many other such organizations to disband shortly after being founded. According to the secretary's minutes, Broyles writes, the society "was in serious financial trouble between 1819 and 1822." But the treasurer's report, he continues, shows that between 1824 and 1831 profits on the tunebook "alone netted the society between $600 and $1100 per year"— half of the society's revenues and "enough to enable it to present several large concerts per year with orchestra." In a footnote, Broyles details the yearly amounts: 1824: $601.90; 1826: $964.28; 1827: $800 (estimate); 1828: $820; 1829: $1,000 (estimate); 1830: $1,000 (estimate); 1831: $1,166.67. The terms of his contract with the society called for Mason to receive like amounts in these years (167, 353).

36. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 285. Arthur Lowndes Rich, Lowell Mason: "The Father of Singing among the Children " (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1946), 10, acknowledges that estimates of the book's total proceeds range from $10,000 to $30,000.

37. Charles C. Perkins, History of the Handel and Haydn Society, of Boston, Massachusetts , vol. I (Boston, 1883-93; reprint, New York, 1977), 83, writes that "at the end of five years" (1822-27) the book "had yielded the handsome profit of $4,033.32, to be divided between the contracting parties."

38. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 45, reports that an offer of the society presidency helped lure Mason to Boston. In addition, he was "guaranteed $2,000 salary for musical direction in three churches during successive periods of six months each: the Hanover Street Church, the Essex Street Church, and the Park Street Church."

39. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 391.

40. Broyles, Psalmody to Symphony , Chap. 2, argues that Mason's "historical position can be properly assessed only when his professional activities, thought, attitudes, and approach to musical issues are viewed within the context of nineteenth-century evangelicalism." Broyles believes that Mason had little interest in religion in his early years but that not long after he moved to Georgia— probably in 1813 or early 1814—he went through a life-changing conversion experience. From that time to the end of his life, Broyles believes, Mason always put religious values ahead of all others, including artistic and commercial ones (65-67).

41. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 49-54. Her Appendix B, pages 223-24, lists Mason's sacred tunebooks in chronological order. From 1832, until 1854 they appear at the rate of approximately one new tunebook per year, sometimes in collaboration with others (e.g., George J. Webb, brother Timothy B. Mason). After the mid-1850s their number tapers off.

42. According to Rich, Lowell Mason , 12, before Mason gave up the Handel and Haydn Society presidency in 1832, "he had hoped for its support in organizing note-reading classes for children, but the society's conservative board of managers declined to sponsor them, holding that their function was to cultivate classical and not elementary music."

43. Rich, Lowell Mason , 14. Rich does not give the date of this school, but Mason, An Address on Church Music (New York, 1851), 14, recalls that Mason taught it "for six or eight years, or until it was taken up by the Boston Academy of Music, by which society it was sustained until music was introduced into the grammar schools of the city" (quoted in Rich, Lowell Mason , 14). Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 64, reports that the school began in 1828 and grew by 1830 to 150-200 pupils. By 1832, she adds, George J. Webb had joined Mason in teaching this class.

44. For example, in Boston on 18 August 1830, the Reverend William Channing Woodbridge, an educational reformer, addressed the American Institute of Education advocating "Vocal Music as a Branch of Instruction in the Public Schools." Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 65-66, reports that when, as part of that event, some boys Mason had been teaching sang to illustrate the benefits of music education, "the beauty of their singing cast a spell upon the group." Writing in the North American Review in 1841, Samuel A. Eliot remembered the impact of Mason and Webb's first childrens' performances: "Never shall we forget the mingled emotions of wonder, delight, vanquished incredulity, and pleased hope, with which these juvenile concerts were attended. The coldest heart was touched, and glistening eyes and quivering lips attested the depth . . . of the feelings excited in the bosoms of parents and teachers . . .. A deep and lasting impression had been made on the public mind and the public heart" (quoted in Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 70-71).

45. Juvenile Psalmist; or The Child's Introduction to Sacred Music (Boston, 1829), a Sunday School tunebook, was followed by Juvenile Lyre; or Hymns and Songs, Religious, Moral, and Cheerful . . . for the use of Primary and Common Schools (Boston, 1831).

46. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 71, adds that, though Mason was "the key figure in the academy," he "deliberately kept his name in the background." Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class ," 182, credits the Boston Academy of Music, especially under the leadership of Samuel A. Eliot (1798-1862), with bringing about a rapid decline in "interest in sacred vocal music . . . in favor of classical instrumental music." Within ten years of its founding in 1833, Broyles writes, the academy ''became the principal purveyor of instrumental music" in Boston. With that shift in interest, he notes, Lowell Mason's influence in the academy declined.

47. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 87. Twelve teachers attended the first two-day session. By 1851 the enrollment of teachers at Mason's conventions had risen to about 1,500 (89).

48. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 87-88; Rich, Lowell Mason , 144-45, lists printings through 1861.

49. Rich, Lowell Mason , 23-25, and Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 114-17, document Mason's first year of public school teaching at the Hawes School in South Boston. Again, a new venue produced new publications. The Juvenile Singing School , on which Mason collaborated with George J. Webb, appeared in 1837 and was reprinted in six of the next seven years. In 1838, Mason brought out a volume to aid public school teachers: Musical Exercises for Singing Schools, to Be Used in Connexion with the "Manual of the Boston Academy of Music, for Instruction in the Elements of Vocal Music ." See Rich, Lowell Mason , 148-49.

50. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 118-24, traces Mason's career in the Boston public schools. Harry Eskew, in Amerigrove 3:187, reports his ten-year service in the teachers' institutes.

51. George Frederick Root, The Story of a Musical Life (Cincinnati, 1891; reprint, New York, 1973), 51-52.

52. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 66-67, tells the same story, reporting that the two men were not well acquainted until the summer of 1830. According to Root, Mason put the material from these twenty-four lectures into the Manual of the Boston Academy of Music (1834).

53. Root, Story , 52.

54. Root does not report whether Woodbridge shared in the class's proceeds.

55. Mason was an active composer, performer, and writer on music. But teaching and distributing music were the keys to his economic influence and success. The years 1848-52 must have been especially profitable for him. Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class ," 331, quotes List of Persons, Copartnerships, and Corporations who were Taxed Twenty-Five Dollars and Upward, in the City of Boston, in the Year 1847, Specifying the Amount of the Tax and Real and Personal Estate, conformably to an Order of the City Council (Boston, 1848), to show that Mason's total estate in 1847 was valued at $41,000, making him "far and away the wealthiest musician in Boston." As Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 135-36, shows, however, four years later, in The Rich Men of Massachusetts (Boston, 1852), Mason's worth was set at $100,000. "His musical productions . . . are in every household," that source reported, ''and this also accounts for his wealth, which would have been far greater, were his benevolence less." Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 391, quotes a Journal of Education article estimating that by September 1857, "over a million copies" of Mason's various publications had been sold. In 1869, when the Oliver Ditson Company bought the assets of the Mason Brothers publishing firm, the plates of Lowell Mason's works alone were valued at "over $100,000," according to Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 175. Even without a detailed profile of Mason's financial affairs, it's not hard to see how he was able to accumulate a large enough fortune to travel twice to Europe (1837, 1852-53), to purchase a large and important music library, and to engage in benefactions, such as supporting the studies and work of Alexander Wheelock Thayer. (See Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 179-81). Mason seems to have been the first American patron of music who made his money inside rather than outside the field.

56. Among the different musical occupations named earlier in this chapter, Mason worked as everything but a manufacturer. (His son, Henry Mason, however, with the help of a $5,000 loan from his father, established the partnership of Mason and Hamlin in 1854, eventually a successful producer of reed organs. In 1882, the firm also began making pianos. See Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 177.) There is no evidence that composing or writing about music brought Mason much reward. And as a choir director and church organist his career follows the standard economic pattern of the performer as wage earner. It is in his other two callings, teaching music and distributing it, that Mason moved into arenas where he could create surplus-value, the capital described by Attali.

Publishing is a business, of course, devoted to exploiting its products through reproduction and the widest circulation possible. The materials available about Mason's life have not been researched with publishing in mind. Nevertheless, there is every reason to think that much of Mason's fortune came from sales of his publications. Mason himself was never in the publishing business. Late in his life his sons, Lowell Mason, Jr., and Daniel Gregory Mason, became partners in publishing firms—first Mason and Law (1851-53), then Mason Brothers (1853-69)—that published their father's works. There is no evidence that Lowell Mason worked personally as a part of either firm. Perhaps the spectacular success of his first publishing venture explains his lack of direct involvement in the publishing trade. If, as seems possible, Mason was able to publish later works on an economic footing like that of The Handel and Haydn Society Collection (not an author's royalty arrangement but something more like a publisher's cut of the proceeds), then Mason would have. been in a position to reap substantial profit with little risk—ample reason to stay out of a trade that already served his interests so well.

On the matter of Mason's teaching as a capitalistic rather than a wage-earning enterprise, the evidence, while incomplete, points in that direction. As a teacher, Mason was given to launching ambitious projects that proved to be more than he could handle himself. From 1832, early in his teaching of children's classes, Mason employed George J. Webb as an assistant; and shortly after the Boston Academy of Music was founded (1833), with Mason as its "professor," Webb was named as its "associate professor" (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 64, 71). At the end of 1833, Mason opened singing classes in Salem, Massachusetts, to which he traveled while keeping up his Boston commitments. Mason himself taught some of the Salem classes, but he also hired Joseph A. Keller to teach others (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 79-80). And after Mason began to collect money for teaching in the Boston public schools (1838), he hired assistants to do some of the teaching for him, including Jonathan Call Woodman, James C. Johnson, George F. Root, and others, paying them out of the $120 per year that school authorities had appropriated for music instruction in each school (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 117-18). By 1844-45, Pemberton writes, "Mason was teaching without assistance in six of the Boston Public Schools and supervising ten teachers in ten other schools" (121). There is reason to think that Mason did not pass on to his assistants all the money he himself was paid for this teaching—that he hired disciples and took a cut of the proceeds their teaching produced, an act that would qualify him as an entrepreneurial capitalist of teaching. Evidence, as noted, is unclear. G. F. Root, a member of Mason's circle in the late 1830s and early 1840s, reported that Artemis N. Johnson, his first musical mentor, "proposed a partnership for five years, in which he should have two-thirds and I one-third of what we both should earn, he to have the privilege of spending one of the years in Germany, the division of profits to be the same during his absence" (Root, Story, 24)>during his absence" (Root, Story , 24). Perhaps Mason himself followed a similar principle: an older, well-established pedagogue, in effect, charging younger colleagues for helping set them up in the teaching trade.

At least two opponents attacked Mason for being mercenary, or overpaid, or both (see Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 91-92, 122). But George F. Root did not feel himself exploited. Admitting that Mason made plenty of money, Root testified that he considered Mason "the most misjudged man in this respect that I ever knew. . .. I do not believe he ever made a plan to make money, unless when investing his surplus funds. In his musical work it was . . . a clear case . . . of seeking first what was right" (Root, Story , 85-86).

57. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 31-34, 82, surveys the development of music education after the Civil War with particular attention to conservatories and colleges. See also pages 169-74 for a detailed list, geographically arranged, of music programs in American colleges and universities. For a detailed account of one important conservatory in the late nineteenth century, see Emmanuel Rubin, "Jeannette Meyers Thurber and the National Conservatory of Music," American Music 8 (1990): 294-325. See also George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America's First Family of Music (Boston, 1983), especially on Frank Damrosch's founding of the Institute of Musical Art, 226-29.

58. For empirical confirmation of this point, see Charles H. Kaufman, Music in New Jersey, 1655-1860: A Study of Musical Activity and Musicians in New Jersey from Its First Settlement to the Civil War (Rutherford, N.J., 1981), especially the index of music teachers and schools, 235-46. When analyzed, the data there show that almost 60 percent of the 400 music teachers known to have been active there during the entire period covered by Kaufman's book first advertised in the decade 1850-60. Of course, a wider assortment of newspapers makes data more easily available in the later years than in the earlier ones; but the evidence of increasing demand for music teachers in those years is striking.

59. Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens, Ga., 1978), 63-67, surveys the singing school in its passage from New England to the South and links it to the development of shape notation. See also Amerigrove 4:233-34.

60. Edward Bailey Birge, History of Public School Music in the United States , new and augmented ed. (Washington, D.C., [1966]), dates the beginning of the school band movement at "about 1910." See pages 186-92 for Birge's survey of the subject.

61. F. O. Jones, ed., A Handbook of American Music and Musicians Containing Biographies of American Musicians and Histories of the Principal Musical Institutions, Firms and Societies (Canaseraga, N.Y., 1886; reprint, New York, 1971), describes the aims of Normal Institutes of music as "primarily, the preparation of persons desiring to teach music for that profession and the improvement of teachers already in the work, and, secondarily, the advancement of musical students in general in the science of music and the cultivation of musical taste and judgment." Normal Institutes, Jones notes, generally lasted four weeks; the first was held by George F. Root in New York City in 1852 (78). "Musical conventions," which according to Jones were devoted to "social enjoyment and musical advancement," generally lasted three or four days. Jones traced their origin to New Hampshire in 1829 (42-43).

62. By "out west," Mathews meant Illinois. Birge, History of Public School Music , 80-83, quotes at length from Mathews's communication.

63. The bibliography on music in American higher education is substantial. It ranges from lists and comments in Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 33-34, 85-86; to studies of particular institutions, like Walter Raymond Spalding, Music at Harvard: A Historical Review of Men and Events (New York, 1935; reprint, New York, 1977) or J. Bunker Clark, Music at KU: A History of the University of Kansas Music Department (Lawrence, Kansas, 1986); to inquiries into particular disciplines, like W. Oliver Strunk, "State and Resources of Musicology in the United States," Bulletin of the American Council of Learned Societies 19 (1932); to personal interviews like Morris Risenhoover and Robert T. Blackburn, Artists as Professors: Conversations with Musicians, Painters, Sculptors (Urbana, Ill., 1976); to general surveys like that by James W. Pruett in Amerigrove 2:17-21. No study that I have found, however, concentrates on how university teaching in music has evolved as a means of supporting and subsidizing faculty members' professional activity.

64. Occupationally speaking, many musicians who teach in American research universities carry on dual careers, of which the second is professionally oriented. Typically, such men and women belong to "professional societies," like the American Musicological Society or the Society for Ethnomusicology. These organizations are only peripherally concerned, if at all, with the livelihood of their members, many of whom hold academic teaching posts. In that sense, they don't quite fit Bledstein's definition of a profession. On the other hand, as bodies providing forums for professional work, both oral and written, and as dispensers of professional awards and prizes, they do possess intellectual autonomy and the authority to pass judgment on work done in their fields. Moreover, acceptance or rejection of work in such professional forums may affect a teacher's occupational standing in his or her own institution.

65. From James Lyon, who contributed some half a dozen compositions to his Urania (Philadelphia, 1761), to William Billings, whose tunebooks (1770-94) are devoted almost entirely to his own music, to a large corps of American psalmodists who began to publish their compositions in the 1780s and 1790s, American composers produced some 5,000 sacred pieces by the end of the nineteenth century's first decade. This figure is a count made from a card index I prepared while completing Britton and Lowens, American Sacred Music Imprints . See that work, pages 9-11, for more on early American psalmodists as composers. As noted there on pages 27-28, the tunebook business directed income toward publishers rather than authors (composers, compilers).

66. Note, e.g., Thomson's and Attali's analysis, n. 12, above.

67. Biographical information on Reinagle is taken from Robert Hopkins's article in Amerigrove 4:26-27.

68. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life , 81-87, prints the programs of Philadelphia concerts in which Reinagle performed between 1786 and 1788. They include listings for all the examples mentioned except for the overture, which appears on page 128.

69. Richard J. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Printing: A History of Music Publishing in America from 1787 to 1825 with Commentary on Earlier and Later Practices (Urbana, Ill., 1980), 41-42.

70. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving , 116.

71. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving , 116-17.

72. For a description of how things worked in sacred music publishing at that time, see Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 26-29.

73. Oscar G. Sonneck, A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (18th Century ), new ed., rev. and enlarged by William Treat Upton (Washington, D.C., 1945; reprint, New York, 1964), and Richard J. Wolfe, Secular Music in America 1801-1825: A Bibliography , 3 vols. (New York, 1964), show that through the Federal era, virtually all of the music brought out by American music publishers was written by European-born composers, a few of whom immigrated to this country. The next major bibliographical source, Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music and Musical Works Published by the Board of Music Trade of the United States of America. 1870 (n.p., 1871; reprint, New York, 1973), carries a much higher proportion of American music, reflecting the vigorous growth of secular composition on this side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, as Dena Epstein notes in her introduction to that volume, before an international copyright agreement was reached in 1891, American publishers had a strong economic incentive to issue foreign music because no rights to print it in this country were required (vi-x).

74. Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage before 1800 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1962), 194-207, surveys the careers of Reinagle and other immigrant composers. The basic source on this tradition and its music is Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1973).

75. Alexander Reinagle, The Philadelphia Sonatas , edited by Robert Hopkins, vol. 5 of Recent Researches in American Music (Madison, Wis., 1978), [xxv]. See page xi for dating information.

76. Alexander Reinagle, "America, Commerce, and Freedom" (Philadelphia, n.d.).

77. The first edition bears no date, but the work in which it appeared was probably first performed on 3 March 1794. "America, Commerce, and Freedom" was reprinted in collections of 1813 and 1815. See Reinagle, Philadelphia Sonatas , xix.

78. Richard Crawford, "American Music and Its Two Written Traditions," Fontes Artis Musicae 31 (1984): 79-84.

79. Readers will note that although some overlap exists between "composers' music" and "performers' music" and the other pairs of polarities, the former pair applies only to written music.

80. The talent and dedication required to write performers' music of high quality has received relatively little scholarly attention, but it looms large in the lore of the songwriting profession. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 , edited and with an introduction by James T. Maher (New York, 1972), uses the word "professional" honorifically, applying it to masters like Arlen, Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers and to the tradition of craftsmanship that lies behind their songs. Irving Berlin's "ferocious appetite for work" is a leitmotif of Lawrence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York, 1990). In a magazine interview in 1920, Berlin's work ethic took center-stage as he denounced "mentally lazy" or "uninitiated" lyric writers for piling up images and ''thereby losing simplicity" (43, 170). For Berlin, more often than not, the simplicity of a good song was the outcome of toil. More recently, V. S. Naipaul has described a meeting with songwriter Bob McDill, who enjoys "a certain fame" in Nashville circles "for going to his office every working day to write his songs." For McDill, who began his career in rhythm and blues, then moved to country music, a "professional" attitude required having "a special relationship with singers. . .. You've got to say something that the singer wants to say and can identify with," he told Naipaul. "I had to learn this mind-set. I learned this subculture, which wasn't my own. The vocabulary is very limited. You have to learn to do big things with little words" (V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South [New York, 1989], 244-45).

Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979), describes in hierarchical terms the institutional background of conflicts in vernacular songwriting since the 1950s. On one side were establishment songwriters who belonged to ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), the country's oldest performing rights society; on the other were those who belonged to BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.)—"a new organization," Hamm says, "hastily formed . . . to produce music for broadcast purposes; its membership was made up of composers and lyricists who had not been invited to join ASCAP, many of them young and others who had been involved with sorts of music not favored by ASCAP songwriters and publishers" (389; see also 338-39, 376, 401-2). According to Gavin McFarlane, writing on performing right societies, "BMI's initial success was largely attributable to its open-door policy. For the first time, writers of country music, jazz, gospel, rhythm-and-blues, and other types of music that had not previously been eligible to earn performing money could share in performing rights income" ( Amerigrove 3:504).

81. For example, Clarence Eddy (1851-1937), identified in Amerigrove 2:9, as "the leading organist of his time," was also described in Jones, Handbook , 52, as a composer of "canons, preludes and fugues, and some other organ music, all of high order." B. J. Lang (1837-1909), a pianist said in 1886 to occupy "a leading place in Boston's musical affairs" (Jones, Handbook , 84) and by Steven Ledbetter in Amerigrove (3:10) to have been "a remarkable . . . organizer" and outstanding ensemble performer and accompanist," composed "an oratorio, David , as well as symphonies, overtures, piano pieces, church music, and songs" but published little of it. Frederic Louis Ritter, Louis Charles Elson, Oscar G. Sonneck, and John Tasker Howard, all remembered as earlier historians of American music, were active as composers at different times in their lives.

82. Thomson, State of Music , 77.

83. Composer George B. Wilson of the University of Michigan, when asked by the author how many American composers of composers' music there are— that is, how many people in the United States write such music and consider themselves composers—replied that the figure he uses is 40,000. Wilson says he first heard that number from Gunther Schuller "in the 1970s." He notes several reasons a reliable figure remains elusive: first, the designation "composer" is amorphous; second, no umbrella organization exists to which even a majority of composers belong; and third, the music of many composers remains unpublished and hence unavailable. The American Music Center in New York, founded in 1940 "to encourage the creation, performance, publication, and distribution of American music," claimed 1,200 members in 1985, most but not all of them composers ( Amerigrove 1:38). The American Society of University Composers in 1984 gave its membership as 900 ( Amerigrove 1:40), presumably overlapping some with that of the American Music Center. ASCAP has more than 35,000 members; but that number includes lyricists and music publishers as well as composers of popular or "performers' '' music ( Amerigrove 1:39).

The notion that the supply of new American composers' music far exceeds the demand for it is reflected in the contents of W. McNeil Lowry, ed., The Performing Arts and American Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1978). This book provided background reading for "the Fifty-third American Assembly," which in 1977 "brought together at Arden House, Harriman, New York, a group of sixty-one Americans—performers, trustees, critics, directors, managers, and teachers from the worlds of ballet, modern dance, opera, theater, and symphony—to discuss The Future of The Performing Arts," especially in its economic dimensions (v). According to the official report, no composers were invited. But composer Roger Reynolds has told me that he attended the assembly and "was noisy."

84. Louise Varèse, Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary , vol. 1, 1883-1928 (New York, 1972), shows that in 1921-22, when he was organizing the International Composers' Guild, Mrs. Whitney gave Varèse "An allowance" of $200 a month (155, 165-66, 170). She also paid the rent of a Paris apartment for Varèse and his wife during the summer of. 1922 (194). Rita Mead, Henry Cowell's New Music 1925-1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and the Recordings , Studies in Musicology (Ann Arbor, 1981), writes that Harriette Miller, "a wealthy woman from New York," subsidized Ruggles "for years" and eventually "bestow[ed] a lifetime annuity upon him" (14-15). Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York, 1984), reports Mrs. Wertheim's gift of $1,000 to Copland in 1924 (110, 112) and another of $1,800 to support Roy Harris's study in Paris in 1926 (129). Wertheim also financed Cos Cob Press, founded in 1929, which Copland describes as "an early effort to assist young American composers to publish music that would not be taken on by established publishers" (157). See also Carol J. Oja, "Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music in New York: The 1920s," typescript, consulted in manuscript through the kindness of the author.

85. Gillian Anderson, writing on Mrs. Coolidge in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, a Biographical Dictionary , ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 160-62, notes that the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at the Library of Congress, "which was to be administered by the Library's Music Division," produced "a yearly income of approximately $25,000." In addition another gift of $60,000, "later substantially increased . . . made possible the construction at the Library of the Coolidge Auditorium, a hall for chamber music.'' Frank Bridge and Gian Francesco Malipiero are two composers to whom Mrs. Coolidge gave long-term support in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, however, "her musical efforts were channeled through the Coolidge Foundation which, with her encouragement, supported modern music." Copland's Appalachian Spring (1944), choreographed by Martha Graham, was a foundation commission, as were additional new works by Bartók, Piston, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 130, reports all the works and many of the artists who performed at the first two Berkshire Festivals of Chamber Music (1918-19), sponsored by Mrs. Coolidge and held at her summer home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Reporting that a prize of $1,000 was offered "for the best chamber-work submitted" each year, Pratt notes that the winners were Tadeusz Iarecki in 1918, Ernest Bloch in 1919, and Francesco Malipiero in 1920.

86. Aaron Copland was the first recipient. He received a fellowship of $2,500 for the academic year 1925-26 and a renewal the next year (Copland and Perlis, Copland , 116). Other early recipients include Roger Sessions (1926, 1927), Roy Harris (1927, 1929), Robert Russell Bennett (1928, 1929), Randall Thompson (1929, 1930), and Otto Luening (1930, 1931) (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Directory of Fellows 1925-1974 [New York, 1975]).

87. Amerigrove 2:172-73 briefly describes the foundation's goals—"to promote the composition and performance of contemporary music and restore the composer to his rightful position at the center of musical life"—and activities. The article also contains a list of composers (and works) the foundation has commissioned. See also Deena Rosenberg and Bernard Rosenberg, The Music Makers (New York, 1979), 378-92, for an interview with Paul Fromm, the foundation's originator.

88. The Ford Foundation, Annual Report , 1957 (1 October 1956-30 September 1957), 19, reports a grant of $210,000 "for a three-year experiment by the American Music Center and six American symphony orchestras in multiple regional performances of new symphonic works." The next year, ten classical singers and instrumentalists received grants-in-aid, plus the right "to name American composers to write compositions for them to perform. The foundation will pay the composers' commissions plus additional rehearsal time" ( Annual Report , 1958, 34). In 1959, the foundation appropriated $950,000 for the commissioning and performance of new American operas over the next eight years ( Annual Report , 1959, 47-48). And the next year, a three-year grant of $302,000 was made to enable "young composers to write for and work with the musical ensembles of high-school systems." The Annual Report , 1960, 49, describes that program as follows:

Conducted jointly by the Foundation and the National Music Council, the project is also intended to acquaint high-school students with contemporary music written for their specific needs and abilities, and to expand the repertory of secondary-school music throughout the United States. Under the new appropriation, the schools themselves will help finance the resident-composer project, with the ultimate aim of making it an integral part of educational and musical life of the country. By 1964, a total of about forty composers and about forty communities in the United States will have participated. In 1960, twelve composers in their twenties and thirties received stipends of $5,000 plus dependency and travel funds.

The Young Composers program was renewed for six years in 1963, this time in a grant of $1,380,000 to the Music Educators National Conference. The composers who worked in high schools during these years, as noted in annual reports, include Emma Lou Diemer, Martin Mailman, Conrad Susa, Donald Erb, Philip Glass, Salvatore Martirano, Richard Wernick, and J. Peter Schickele. See Ford Foundation, Contemporary Music for Schools: A Catalog of Works Written by Composers Participating in the Young Composers Project, 1959-1964, Sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the National Music Council (Washington, D.C., 1966).

89. Among its many benefactions to the creation of new music, one of the Rockefeller Foundation's most notable was a sum of $500,000 between 1953 and 1955 that allowed the Louisville Commissioning Project, first established with resources from the Greater Louisville Fund for the Arts (1948), to commission works for the Louisville [Kentucky] Orchestra. See Amerigrove 3:116-17, and Jeanne Belfy, The Louisville Orchestra New Music Project: An American Experiment in the Patronage of International Contemporary Music: Selected Composers' Letters to the Louisville Orchestra . University of Louisville Publications in Musicology, no. 2 (Louisville, 1983). In 1963, the foundation established a Cultural Development Program that announced three missions related to music: "the development of creators and performers, the dissemination of new American music, and the encouragement of critical and interpretive writings about music." See the Rockefeller Foundation, President's Five-Year Review and Annual Report 1968 (New York, 1968), 94. Among Rockefeller-sponsored programs in the years 1963-68 was a joint project of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Spelman College. According to the report (95): "Of the 15 composers whose works were read and performed, eight were Negroes, and of this group only one had ever had a composition performed by a major American orchestra. The works of four of the hitherto unknown Negro composers—T. J. Anderson, Frederick C. Tillis, George Walker, and Oily Wilson—were subsequently played by the Baltimore and Minneapolis orchestras, and at least one is scheduled to be repeated by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in its subscription series."

90. Carolyn Bryant, And the Band Played On (Washington, D.C., 1975), 8, notes that the United States Marine Corps Band was "officially organized in 1798." Elise K. Kirk, Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit (Urbana, Ill., 1986), contains information on activities of the U.S. Marine Band as "the president's own" ensemble. (See Kirk's index, pages 453-54, for citations.)

91. See Amerigrove 4:567. As noted in Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States (Cambridge, 1978), 54, "the purpose of the program was simply to reduce the unemployment caused by the Depression." The Federal Music Project sponsored a Composers' Forum-Laboratory to encourage the composition and performance of new music. Barbara A. Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism , Studies in Musicology, no. 19 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980), 170-76, describes the Forum-Laboratory's activities.

92. See Amerigrove 3:325-26. Christopher Pavlakis, The American Music Handbook (New York, 1974), 63-68, provides a good description of the National Endowment for the Arts programs in the early 1970s, showing that little of the agency's grant money goes to composers and composition. Amerigrove 1:96-97 contains a list of cash prizes exceeding $500 that are available to composers.

93. Amerigrove 3:502-5 offers a concise introduction to "performing right societies" by Gavin McFarlane. As noted there, "in music, the most important right is the right of public performance, known as the 'performing right.' " (Others include copyright, the right to reproduce the notation in published form, and the "mechanical right," the right "to recover musical works in sound recordings.") McFarlane writes:

It is almost always impossible for an individual copyright holder to receive royalties on more than a very small number of the performances on which they are due. Even if he could locate a few of the performances, he would not always have the means or the expertise to negotiate appropriate royalties and issue licenses. Collection for performances nationwide or overseas would be out of the question for the individual or small publishing company. Societies have therefore been set up in most countries to collect royalties for the use of copyrighted music and to distribute the revenue among the parties entitled to it." (502-3)

The two main performing-rights organizations in the United States are ASCAP (founded in 1914) and BMI (founded in 1940). The two organizations have different formulas for distributing income. See, e.g., Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 (New York, 1988), 298-99, 403-4, et passim for detailed information on both.

94. In a famous article of 1958, originally titled "The Composer as Specialist" but published as "Who Cares If You Listen," Babbitt writes:

The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation can understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields. (Quoted from Gilbert Chase, ed., The American Composer Speaks: A Historical Anthology, 1770-1965 [(Baton Rouge, La.) 1966], 239)

95. Thomson, State of Music , Chaps. 6 and 7. Chap. 7 identifies four sources of income for a composer (whom Thomson always describes as male):

1. "non-musical jobs or earned income from non-musical sources"

2. "unearned income from all sources" ("money from home" and "other people's money," including patronage, commissions, and prizes)

3. "other men's music, or selling the by-products of his musical education" (e.g., performing, teaching, publishing, lecturing, writing)

4. "the just rewards of his labor" (e.g., royalties and performing-rights fees).

In Chap. 7, Thomson describes with gleeful irreverence the kinds of music that each income source is most likely to produce. Admitting that "art-music composers who live off their just share in the profits of the commercial exploitation of their work . . . are almost non-existent in America," Thomson pays respect to their achievement.

Of all the composing musicians, this group presents in its music the greatest variety both of subject-matter and of stylistic orientation, the only limit to such variety being what the various musical publics at any given moment will take. Even the individual members of the group show variety in their work from piece to piece. This variety is due in part to their voluntary effort to keep their public interested and to enlarge their market. (Stylistic "evolution" is good publicity nowadays.) A good part of it is due also to the variety of usages that are coverable by commercially ordered music. Theater, concert, opera, church, and war demand a variety of solutions for individual esthetic cases according to the time, the place, the subject, the number and skill of the available executants, the social class, degree of musical cultivation, and size of the putative public. Music made for no particular circumstance or public is invariably egocentric. Music made for immediate usage, especially if that usage is proposed to the composer by somebody who has an interest in the usage, is more objective and more varied. (122-23)<End Popup Text>

1. "Concert" should be understood to include theatrical presentations that feature music (opera, operetta, musical comedy) and, secondarily, performances that are facsimiles of the concert: recordings, radio and television broadcasts, and film.

2. The longest continuing institutional support in the United States has come from churches and the military, both of which have required music to carry out their functions. A complete survey of musical performance as a profession in this country would give proper attention to both. Philip Hart, Orpheus in the New World: The Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution (New York, 1973), 100, notes that in the late nineteenth century, one of the issues that contributed to the formation of musicians' unions "was the performance of military bands in situations where civilian musicians felt that their employment was being jeopardized." As for American churches, for some two centuries they have supported complex music-making and musical professionalism in the name of worship. Since the nineteenth century, singers and choir directors have found paid work in churches. Many important American composers have also been organists, including George Frederick Bristow, Dudley Buck, George W. Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Charles Ives, John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, and, in a later generation, Virgil Thomson. F. O. Jones, ed., A Handbook of American Music and Musicians (Canaseraga, N.Y., 1886; reprint, New York, 1971) suggests the instrument's importance to American musical life around the time of its publication; approximately one-sixth of its 285 biographical sketches are of organists. The organ has inspired a sizable bibliography. (A helpful introductory one may be found in Amerigrove 3:448.) But it centers on instruments and builders and says little about players. For a brief note on organists before 1810 see Allen Perdue Britton, Irving Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Mass., 1990), 22-26. Like the military, church musicians do not perform for a paying audience. This chapter concentrates on performers who have.

3. R. Allen Lott, "Bernard Ullman: Nineteenth-Century American Impresario," in A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock , edited by Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 176.

4. Lewis Hallam, Jr. (1740-1808), came to America in 1752 with the American Company of Comedians, managed by his father. When Lewis Hallam, Sr., died in Jamaica around 1756, his widow married David Douglass, who reorganized and managed the company with her. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789 (New York, 1976), notes that by 1763 the Douglass-Hallam New American Company "in effect monopolized the theater in the North American colonies" (60). In those early years, as Silverman notes, the company performed ballad operas and also other works that "demanded music, and gave employment to local musicians, professional and amateur, half a dozen of whom were needed for the theater orchestra, sometimes more" (63). By 1765, several singer-actors were performing with the company, including Miss Wainwright and Stephen Woolls, pupils of English composer Thomas Arne, and "tenor Thomas Wall, who had worked as a musician at Drury Lane and Haymarket Theaters" and who "gave guitar lessons wherever the company played" (93). After the Revolutionary War, Lewis Hallam, Jr., and John Henry took over the New American Company. As Silverman notes, in addition to a corps of singers, in 1786 they employed "several of the recent musical emigrants, probably enlarging the theater orchestra: the French violinist Henri Capron, the German Philip Phile, and the English harpsichordist John Bentley, who later conducted the orchestra" (539). When Henry and Hallam built a new theater, Harmony Hall, in Charleston, they opened it with "a three-hour 'Grand Concert of Music in Three Acts' " including dancing and "a harpsichord performance by a 'foreign Gentleman, lately arrived in this City' " (543).

5. Thomas Wignell (ca. 1753-1803), a cousin of Hallam, joined the New American Company in 1774. When the company returned from wartime exile, Wignell was one of its leading comic stars. In 1791, he joined forces with Alexander Reinagle to form a theatrical company to occupy a new theater on Philadelphia's Chestnut Street. Wignell hired outstanding singers and players from England to perform with the new company. See n. 9, below. See also Amerigrove 4:524-25·

6. Oscar G. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America (Leipzig, 1907; reprint, New York, 1978), 175.

7. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life , 52.

8. In the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Journal of 8 November 1770, John Gualdo advertised that after an upcoming concert, he would "have the room put in order for a Ball, likewise there will be a genteel Refreshment laid out in the upper room for those Ladies and Gentlemen who shall chuse to Dance, or remain to see the Ball." He added: "For the Ball he has composed six new minuets, with proper cadence for dancing" (Sonneck, Early Concert-Life , 74).

9. Sonneck, in Early Opera in America (New York, 1915; reprint, New York, 1963), for example, describes the opening of Philadelphia's New Theater in Chestnut Street in 1793. Wignell, he writes, convinced "some financiers of Philadelphia that the erection of a new theater garrisoned with a company to defy comparison would pay," whereupon "a stock company" was formed with Wignell and Alexander Reinagle as managers. Wignell, Sonneck reports, then "went abroad to recruit a company" (113). He returned with Mrs. Oldmixon [ née Miss George] "of the Haymarket Theatre and Drury Lane, who was equally famous as an oratorio singer," Miss Broadhurst, "whom Wignell captured at Covent Garden when she was barely out of her teens,'' plus "Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, the Warrell family, and the Darleys, who all enjoyed a good reputation in England," and Mr. and Mrs. William Francis, "popular and clever dancers and pantomimists." The company's orchestra—"probably the best yet united in this country"—was led by George Gillingham, "celebrated violinist from London," and "was largely composed of Frenchmen" (115-17).

10. Two problems make this a difficult point to document without much more biographical study. For one thing, determining what musicians of this period were able to earn a livelihood chiefly as performers in America is not easy. For another, while we know that virtually all of the most prominent performers were foreign-born, there are many others—church organists, theater orchestra players, and bandsmen, for example—about whom we know neither birthplace nor more than the sketchiest career details. The musicians who dominated public musical life before 1840 include both immigrant professionals—James Hewitt, Benjamin Carr, George P. Jackson, S. P. Taylor, Gottlieb Graupner, George Gillingham, George J. Webb, Charles Zeuner—and performers who after extended visits returned to the Old Country, including Thomas Philipps, Charles Incledon, John Braham, the Garcia Opera troupe, Henry Russell, and Maria Caradori Allan. The former have been studied enough to show that performance was only part of their musical vocation. The latter were received with fanfare as star performers and seldom stayed more than a few years on this side of the Atlantic.

All evidence indicates that performers in theatrical companies were foreign-born. Benjamin Carr's popular ballad, "The Little Sailor Boy," was advertised on its title page in 1800 as "sung at the theatres & other public places in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, &c. by Messrs. J. Darley, Williamson, Miss Broadhurst, Mrs. Hodgkinson & Mrs. Oldmixon." See Oscar G. Sonneck, A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music , rev. by William Treat Upton (Washington, D.C., 1945; reprint, New York, 1964), 233. Thanks to Sonneck's research, we know that all of these singers had been recruited for the American stage from London. However, when we find in Richard J. Wolfe, Secular Music in America 1801-25: A Bibliography (New York, 1964), No. 605, that Henry Bishop's "Echo Song" was being sung "by Mrs. Burke at the theatre, Philadelphia,'' [1818?] or that Bishop's "popular Scotch ballad . . . Donald" (No. 601) in 1819 was sung "with great applause by Mrs. French at her vocal concerts" (57), without more research of the kind Sonneck did for earlier years, we have no way of confirming our hunch that Mrs. Burke and Mrs. French were also immigrant professional singers.

In Amerigrove 3:448, William Osborne notes that in the late eighteenth century "organists, nearly all of them European immigrants, began to preside" in American churches. He lists ten organists active before 1850, of whom only Samuel P. Jackson, the son of an English-born organ builder, was a native of the United States. From that evidence, one might think it fair to assume that virtually all earlier American organists were foreign-born. However, of the twenty compilers of American tunebooks before 1810 who worked as organists, only nine are known to have been immigrants. Jonathan Badger, Daniel Bayley, Jr., Peter Erben, U. K. Hill, Francis Hopkinson, and Oliver Shaw were all born in this country, and the birthplaces of Adam Arnold, William Cooper, Conrad Doll, and David Ott are unknown. If half a dozen American-born organists, if not more, were active before 1810, it seems likely that, as the population grew and prejudices against organs dissolved in some congregations, many more homegrown Americans performed as church organists. See the biographical sketches in Britton et al., American Sacred Music . As shown in Chapter 2, however, there is no evidence that organ playing alone formed a livelihood at that time.

One imagines that bands provided an opportunity for many American-born musicians to play in the early nineteenth century, but it seems unlikely that many at that time could have earned their living as bandsmen. Of the best-known keyed bugle virtuosi active before 1820, Richard Willis was Irish and Frank Johnson, according to Eileen Southern, hailed from Martinique or the West Indies. See Southern, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians (Westport, Conn., 1982), 205. Thomas Dodworth, patriarch of the family that sparked New York City's band world beginning in the 1830s, was an English immigrant who arrived with two sons in 1828. The chief American-born actor in this drama was keyed bugle virtuoso Edward Kendall, a native of Newport, Rhode Island, and founder of the Boston Brass Band (1835).

11. Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), notes that "in the closing decades of the antebellum period . . . new groups rose to challenge the privileged positions of vested corporations. The note of egalitarianism is struck again and again in the political discourse of the time . . . [and one finds] hostility to the privileged corporation possessing exclusive rights entrenched in law" (208). A case decided in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1837 symbolizes the conflict between older and newer attitudes. The original investors in the Charles River Bridge, which linked Boston and Charles-town, claimed the right to collect tolls in perpetuity. The court, however, ruled that unless "granted explicitly by the corporate charter," those investors could have no "monopoly rights to income from public utilities." In Bruchey's analysis, the conflict was between an "older elite" and "the forces of change.'' The court came down on the side of the latter, in the name of economic development and competition (212). With such development came urbanization, a wider distribution of wealth, and an increase in leisure time, all of which helped to widen the available audience for music.

For the aristocratically minded Henry Adams, the same period brought technological progress that shattered the world into which he had been born. In a single month, he wrote in his autobiography, The old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created. He [Adams] and his eighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut apart—separated forever . . . by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six years old. (Quoted from Peter Baida, Poor Richard's Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump [New York, 1990], 170-71)

12. The years after 1815 saw the start of "a transportation revolution" in the United States, which by 1850 had resulted in 3,700 miles of canals and 9,000 miles of rail. See James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 11-12. And that made tours by performers and troupes much more feasible than they had been before. As the journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers show, however, all touring did not depend on the railroads. When, in July 1842, the Hutchinsons set out on their first tour from their native Milford, New Hampshire, they drove their own carriage. They spent most of August in the area of Albany, New York, then headed eastward into Massachusetts, giving their first concert in Boston on 15 September. By the end of the month, they were in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in October their itinerary took them as far north as Portland, Maine, as well. In November they were back in Boston for several more concerts. The tour ended with their return to Milford in early December. Occasionally during those months, members of the family took the train, as on 7 September 1842, when Asa wrote: "Abigail & I took the Carrs for Boston" from Lynn, Massachusetts. But, with its frequent references to boarding their team of horses, and the description of their return to Milford—their horse "was completely enveloped in the snow drifts"—the Hutchinsons' journal makes clear the manner of conveyance through the five months of their first concert tour. See Dale Cockrell, ed. and annotator, Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846 (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1989), 1-85, passim, especially 82, 89; and 388-89. References such as "we returned to Lynn by stage" (111) and "we left Boston for New York . . . in the Cars via of Wo[r]cester and Norwich. And from thence to N.Y. . .. in the Steamboat Cleopatra'' (115) show that beginning with the family's second tour (May-June 1843) they relied on public transportation.

13. William Brooks, writing in Amerigrove 1:152, calls Jenny Lind's concerts in 1850-51, arranged by P. T. Barnum, "the first major tour in the USA to be managed by a nonperformer." Brooks adds that the tour also "marked the rise of a separate class of agents and promoters. Barnum's methods influenced popular entertainers as well as impresarios such as Max Maretzek and the Strakosch brothers; his impact on America's music industry was lasting and profound." R. Allen Lott's research, however, reveals that Leopold DeMeyer's first American tour in 1845 was managed "unobtrusively" by his brother-in-law, G. C. Reitheimer. Moreover, when Henri Herz arrived in 1846, it was with Bernard Ullman as his manager. See Lott, "Bernard Ullman," 175-76.

Jones, Handbook , 163, lists forty-four "famous artists" who "traveled under the management" of Max and Maurice Strakosch, including Teresa Carreño, Anna Louise Cary, Karl Formes, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Tom Karl, Clara Louise Kellogg, Edward Mollenhauer, Christine Nilsson, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Adelina Patti, Sigismond Thalberg, and Henri Vieuxtemps.

14. Britton et al., American Sacred Music , 21, touches on the early history of musical societies. In bringing together local musicians for the improvement of musical life and taste, these organizations formed the model for the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, founded in 1815 and called in 1886 "the largest and most noted musical association of the United States" (Jones, Handbook , 18). Jones's articles on cities—especially Boston, Cincinnati, and New York—center chiefly on musical societies active in each. Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, 1836-1875 , vol. 1, Resonances 1836-1850 (New York, 1988), is full of information on such groups in antebellum New York City. For example, she notes the founding of the New York Sacred Music Society as a group of amateur choristers devoted to performing sacred masterworks, especially oratorios (xxxviii). And she reports that by 1836 their oratorio concerts featured as soloists "vocal luminaries from one of the theatres" (31). Here and in other cities with theaters, musical society orchestras drew on the services of local professionals.

15. Katherine K. Preston, "Travelling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-1860," Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1989, a comprehensive study, is forthcoming (1993) from the University of Illinois Press as Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-60 . Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), cites Preston's work in progress, especially on pages 88-89 and 95.

16. DaPonte assisted with Garcia's production of Mozart's Don Giovanni , whose libretto he had written. See Amerigrove 1:580.

17. According to Lawrence, Strong on Music , each subscriber to the Astor Place venture agreed to pay $75 per year for five years in return for seventy-five admissions to the opera house each year (454). Management of the house was leased to Antonio Sanquirico and Salvatore Patti, both singer-impresarios (457).

18. Karen Ethel Ahlquist, "Opera, Theatre, and Audience in Antebellum New York," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1991, Chap. 4. See page 313 for prices and page 312 for her analysis: "Efforts between 1847 and 1858 to find a profitable price scale eventually produced the most inclusive policy: the most expensive seats were priced high, while the cheapest cost only slightly more than at the theatres. This policy was developed as managers responded to competition and to calls for more 'democratic' prices."

19. New Orleans's operatic history can be traced back to the building of an opera house in 1792, and to performances of operas there before 1800. From 1805 such performances, under managers Jean Baptiste Fournier and Louis Tabary, seem to have been continuous. By the 1820s, John Davis's company at the Théâtre d'Orléans, stocked with singers, dancers, and orchestra players from France, was touring the northeastern part of the country; six tours between 1827 and 1833 took the company to such cities as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The opening of the lavish French Opera House in 1859, and the company assembled there by Charles Boudousquié, continued the city's strong tradition of foreign-language opera performance. See Amerigrove 3:341, which claims New Orleans as the first city on the North American continent to have a permanent opera company.

20. Unfamiliarity with plot, language, and the dramatic conventions of opera plus a distrust of foreign imports were deterrents for some, however. See Levine, Highbrow , quoting Wait Whitman, who wrote in the 1840s that Americans had long enough received Europe's "tenors and her buffos, her operatic troupers and her vocalists, . . . listened to and applauded the songs made for a different state of society . . . made for royal ears . . . and it is time that such listening and receiving should cease" (94n.). Diarist Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York, had complained earlier: "We want to understand the language; we cannot endure to sit by and see the performers splitting their sides with laughter, and we not take the joke; dissolved in 'briny tears,' and we not permitted to sympathize with them; or running each other through the body, and we devoid of the means of condemning or justifying the act" (quoted from Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America [New York, 1979], 69).

21. Lawrence, Strong on Music , 61, 133, 135, 218.

22. See Hamm, Yesterdays , Chap. 4. Harem writes that "the music of Italian opera . . . was familiar to Americans in a wide variety of forms and at different cultural levels" (78).

23. The foreign-language opera first introduced to the northeastern United States was Italian. But French opera had played in New Orleans from even before the start of the century. Germart works made their appearance during the 1830s, though sometimes in Italian translations.

24. Lawrence, Strong on Music , 232. Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, Okla., 1977) is the basic source on minstrelsy. See Chap. 8, 113-22, for circumstances of the Virginia Minstrels' first performance. George B. Woodridge is identified as their agent, but no details of his work on their behalf are given (see 116, 119, 138). According to Nathan, in 1839 banjo player Whitlock was being managed by P. T. Barnum (115). Whitlock later performed with Barnum's circus ( Amerigrove 4:521).

25. Sheet-music covers reflect the change. From its establishment in America in the late 1780s, the sheet trade had emblazoned covers with the names of well-known performers identified with the pieces they published. Hamm, Yesterdays , 73, reprints the cover of "Once a King There Chanced to Be" by Rossini, "Sung by Mrs. Austin in the much admired new Opera of Cinderella." (Lawrence, Strong on Music , 40n., notes that Cinderella starring the English soprano Elizabeth Austin opened in New York in January 1831, so the sheet music must come from shortly after that time.) A flew years later, however, the covers of Stephen Foster's early songs featured artists of another stripe. "Written for and sung by Joseph Murphy of the Sable Harmonists,'' read a legend on "Lou'siana Belle" (1847), and "Foster's Ethiopian Melodies as sung by the Christy & Campbell Minstrels and New Orleans Serenaders" appeared on the cover of "[Gwine to Run All Night] De Camptown Races" (1850).

26. The career of Francis Johnson (1792-1844) raises two related issues: performance style and concert format. On the first, Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans , 2d ed. (New York, 1983), reports that, as early as 1819, an observer identified Johnson as a musician with "a remarkable taste in distorting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song, into a reel, jig, or country dance" (108). Southern goes on to note that Johnson's surviving music, which consists only of "piano arrangements of band music or melodic skeletons . . . hardly seems extraordinary." Yet, she observes, "since Johnson competed successfully with white musical organizations for public patronage against the overwhelming odds of race discrimination, his music must have gained something in performance that is not evident in the scores" (113). As for concert format, Johnson and four of his bandsmen spent six months performing in England in the fall and winter of 1837-38. In January 1838, Londoners (and Johnson and his men) had their first chance to hear a ''promenade concert." Introduced by Philippe Musard in Paris in 1833, the innovation, according to Southern, was "the concept of combining a program of light classical music with a promenade." Johnson took key ingredients of the idea back home: "the programs consisting of operatic airs and quadrilles; the use of the 'new' cornet-à-pistons and ophecleide; the arrangements to which the audience could promenade between Parts One and Two of the program; and the small admission fees." He introduced his "Concerts à la Musard" to Philadelphians during the Christmas season of 1838-39. Southern calls them "wildly successful; the press reported that thousands attended each night, and hundreds had to be turned away" (109-10).

The Hutchinson Family Singers recorded a meeting with Johnson and his men in the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, railroad depot on x September 1842. "The old Fellow was quite well," they noted, but then added, "Sadly he did not do so well in Albany as he Expected." Asa Hutchinson commented, "They are a Rough sett of Negroes" (Cockrell, Excelsior , 80).

27. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974), 46.

28. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years , vol. 2, From 1790 to 1909 (New York, 1988), 155.

29. See Sanjek, American Popular Music , 2:155; also Amerigrove 4:37-38. Rice began playing his character on stage in 1828. In the Amerigrove article Robert Winans has noted that, although he "is often called 'the father of American minstrelsy,' " Rice "rarely performed in minstrel shows, preferring to continue performing his songs and farces as entr'actes and afterpieces."

30. Amerigrove 2:47. But Nathan, Dan Emmett , shows that Emmett knew the "Negro" stage character well enough in 1838 or 1839 to write his first song in black stage dialect. He learned to play minstrel-style banjo in 1840-41 from a man named Ferguson, whom one circus manager described as both "the greatest card we had" and "a very ignorant person and 'nigger all over' except in color" (109-11).

31. Quoted from Toll, Blacking Up , 13.

32. Levine, Highbrow , 26.

33. Richard Sennet's word "witness" is quoted from Levine, Highbrow , 194. The witnessing took a variety of forms. On 10 February 1844, Asa Hutchinson of the Hutchinson Family Singers recorded in his journal that at a concert in Washington two days earlier, "the Assembly Room was full of all sorts of people.

The farmer, mechanic, clergyman, lawyers, doctors, senators, representatives, merchants and loafers. All were very quiet through the performance of every piece of music but when we closed any song they would clamor and make such noises as to shake the building to its foundation." See Cockrell, Excelsior , 226.

34. Toll, Blacking Up , 12-13.

35. According to Sanjek, American Popular Music , 2:174, Christy's long run brought in gross receipts of $317,000, half of which he kept himself. The quotations are from Lawrence, Strong on Music , 417, and the rest of the information is from Amerigrove 1:440.

36. Amerigrove 4:183. The Pyne and Harrison English Opera Company, another such outfit, performed in 1854 in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, then launched a six-month tour that took them to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, New Orleans, Mobile, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, according to Levine, Highbrow , 89, which draws on research by Katherine Preston. "After a brief return to New York" in 1855, Levine continues, "the company took off again on tours to Chicago, Detroit, Madison, Wisconsin, and other interior cities and towns. During the three years the Pyne and Harrison Company spent in America, it performed complete operas more than 500 times and gave over 100 operatic concerts."

37. Lott, "Bernard Ullman," 174-75.

38. Amerigrove 4:7.

39. Amerigrove 2:445.

40. Cockrell, Excelsior , 33-43. John Hutchinson's journal entry notes about the Ballston concert: "Tickets 25 cts single. Admitting a Lady and gentleman 37½ cts." Cockrell notes the family's apparent policy "of adjusting their ticket prices to the relative affluence of the audience. When in rural areas at this time, tickets would typically be half or less than charged in urban or well-to-do places like Ballston Spa" (43). John also notes the family's attempt to devise new ways of appealing to the audience. "Dear Jud. & others are a trying to rake up something new. They are a playing on one anothers fiddles." Apparently it worked well enough to be continued. Cockrell quotes a Boston review of 20 September: "The way all three of the brothers play on two instruments—the violin and violoncello—at the same time, is a caution to the fraternity of fiddlers. No x holds and fingers the violoncello, while No 2 bows it, No 2 also holding and fingering a violin for No 3 to bow" (43n.).

41. Cockrell, Excelsior , 140, 150-51.

42. Cockrell, Excelsior , 141. Nathan, Dan Emmett , 158, posits a connection between blackface minstrelsy and the four-part harmonized performances of singing families—first the Rainers and later the Hutchinsons. "It is noteworthy," he writes, that in 1842-43, the very moment when "American 'singing families,' usually quartets, sprang into existence . . . blackface comedians, too, banded together in groups of four." Nathan doubts that the two events were "mere coincidence." Most blackface groups "styled themselves 'minstrels'—'Ethiopian Minstrels,' to be exact—replacing the former designation, 'Ethiopian delineators.'" The new name, Nathan believes, was "clearly suggested by the Rainers who also appeared as 'Tyrolese Minstrels.' " The Rainers' and Hutchinsons' success, Nathan believes, "encouraged the introduction of part singing into minstrel performances, as revealed by the following playbill of the Congo Minstrels of 1844: 'Their songs are sung in Harmony in the style of the Hutchinson Family.' " Cockrell, Excelsior , 297-300, supports Nathan's connection with further evidence.

43. Cockrell, Excelsior , 149. A correspondent who heard the Hutchinsons sing at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention (Boston, May 1844) gave a remarkable account of the group's performance of "Get Off the Track," sung to the tune of "Old Dan Tucker." In this writer's words, when the Hutchinsons reached the chorus, When they cried to the heedless pro-slavery multitude that were stupidly lingering on the track, and the engine 'Liberator' coming hard upon them, under full steam and all speed, the Liberty Bell loud ringing, and they standing like deaf men right in its whirlwind path, the way [the Hutchinsons] cried "Get off the track," in defiance of all time and rule, was magnificent and sublime. They forgot their harmony, and shouted one after another, or all in confused outcry, like an alarmed multitude of spectators, about to witness a terrible catastrophe. But I am trying to describe it, I should only say it was indescribable. It was life—it was nature—transcending the musical staff—and the gamut—the minim and the semibreve, and the ledger lines. It was the cry of the people, into which their over-wrought and illimitable music had degenerated ,—and it was glorious to witness them alighting down again from their wild flight into the current of song, like so many swans upon the river from which they had soared, a moment, wildly, into the air. The multitude who heard them will bear me witness, that they transcended the very province of mere music. ( Herald of Freedom , 14 June 1844, quoted in Cockrell, Excelsior , 254)

44. Cockrell, Excelsior , 160-61. Cockrell writes: "Figures like this may have been commonplace for the Hutchinsons during this time. Early in their New York stay, the Albany Knickerbocker (2 October 1843) reported" earnings of $750 for one concert, a figure that, according to the paper, "exceeded the revenue for Henry Russell's concert the night before by '260 dollars 75 cents.' "

45. Cockrell, Excelsior , 167n.

46. W. Porter Ware and Thaddeus C. Lockard, Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind: The American Tour of the Swedish Nightingale (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 6; see also plate [3] following 70.

47. Ware and Lockard, Barnum and Lind , 20, 25. Before the first concert, 11 September 1850, Barnum agreed to divide its proceeds equally with the singer, estimating her share as $10,000. After consulting with local officials, Lind distributed that sum among twelve New York charities: the Fire Department Fund ($3,000); the Musical Fund Society ($2,000); the Dramatic Fund Association ($500); several orphan asylums ($500 each); a lying-in asylum ($500); and two homes for the aged ($500 each). Proceeds from ticket sales came to $17,864.05, less than the $20,000 Barnum had predicted. Barnum then agreed to split the proceeds of the second concert (13 September) on the same basis as the first. That event brought in $14,203.03. The "regular" concerts that followed were governed by the tour contract, under which Lind received $1,000 plus expenses for each, and Barnum took $5,500 per night, "for expenses and my services," as he put it. Proceeds exceeding that amount were split equally between Lind and Barnum (14).

48. Ware and Lockard, Barnum and Lind , prints complete programs of Lind's concerts in Boston (32-33), Washington, D.C. (54), and Nashville (80-81).

49. Quoted from Ware and Lockard, Barnum and Lind , the first from the New York Commercial Advertiser , 21 September 1850 (28), the second from the New York Home Journal , 22 February 1851 (57), and the third from the Nashville Daily American , 1 April 1851 (81). In a cornic case of mistaken identity, Barnum's daughter Caroline was taken for Lind by members of a church congregation in Baltimore. As Ware and Lockard tell it: "When Caroline rose to sing as one of the choir, every ear was strained to catch her voice. 'What an exquisite singer!' 'Heavenly sounds!' 'I never heard the like!' " When the service was over, Caroline had to fight to reach her carriage as the congregation surged forward to catch a glimpse of her. Barnum noted afterward that his daughter "had never been known to have any 'extraordinary claims as a vocalist' " (50-51).

However much purple prose Lind inspired, many found being a part of her audience a deeply affecting experience. The Nashville review just quoted groped for language to describe the impact of her soft singing:

If music ever becomes divine in its utterance it is in the moment when on her lips it sinks almost into a whisper, when the delicate melody is heard in every corner of the theatre. While the breath which a bare whisper would at once destroy the effect is finding its way through every portion of the house, nothing can be more thrillingly poetical. The murmur that is shed by the first faint moving of the evening breeze over some lovely bed of roses, or the distant voice of some fountain amidst rocks as yet untrodden, are but faint similitudes. It can literally be compared to nothing of which we have previously any experience in the beauties and capabilities of sound. (82)

50. Ware and Lockard, Barnum and Lind , 9-11, 53-54, and plate [4] following 70; Amerigrove 3:88. Barnum's reckoning, as noted by Ware and Lockard, Barnum and Lind , 98, is that Lind's net share of the proceeds of her tour under his management was $176,675 "exclusive of her very large charitable contributions." Barnum's gross receipts came to $535,486, of which it has been estimated that "something more than $200,000" was profit. It should also be noted why, when information on the financing of music in this period is so hard to come by, the details of Lind's tour are so easily accessible. We know about them because Barnum, by far the most famous entrepreneur of the age, set them down for the public to read. His autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years' Recollections (Buffalo, 1875) contains a complete financial breakdown of Lind's concerts, reprinted in Ware and Lockard, Barnum and Lind 184-85. The latter also contains the "Contract Between Jenny Lind and P. T. Barnum" (179-81).

It should be noted that Barnum did not work alone. Ware and Lockard note that "at one time he had no less than twenty-six private newspaper reporters in his employ" (12). For Lind's tour, Barnum employed LeGrand Smith, "who traveled ahead of the group to smooth out the arrangements" (29). When the party moved to a new city, e.g., Baltimore in December, Barnum's agents would telegraph ahead the time and place of Lind's train's arrival, guaranteeing that the singer would be met by a noisy crowd hoping to catch a glimpse of her (50).

51. W. S. B. Mathews, ed., A Hundred Years of Music in America (Chicago, 1889; reprint, New York, 1970), devotes whole chapters to "Piano Playing and Pianists" and "Concert and Operatic Singers." And in another chapter, he covers organists, violinists, and other virtuosi. Mathews writes about performers who appeared before the American public, thereby including many foreign-born musicians. But the contributions of such notable American-born pianists as Louis Moreau Gottschalk and William Mason are mentioned (114), and Julie Rivé-King (122-26), Carlyle Petersilea (134-37), and Amy Fay (137-41) receive extended biographical sketches. After complaining a bit about the dearth of good voice teachers in this country, Mathews profiles, among others, singers Clara Louise Kellogg (172-74), Annie Louise Cary (184-86), Minnie Hauk (186-88), Myron W. Whitney (214-16), and Emma Abbott (230-32).

52. Southern, Music of Black Americans , ranks James Bland, Sam Lucas, Billy Kersands, and Horace Weston as the outstanding black minstrel performers of the years following the Civil War (234-38). Prominent singers on the concert stage included the Hyers sisters and Sissieretta Jones, the "Black Patti" (240-45). Thomas "Blind Tom" Bethune had a long career as a concert pianist (246-47). And a number of other professional performers, including those in professional jubilee singing groups and traveling road shows, are also mentioned (228-52). See also Eileen Southern, "An Early Black Concert Company: The Hyers Sisters Combination," in Celebration of American Music , edited by Crawford et al., which offers some information and hypotheses on the management of the Hyers' touring (31-32).

53. Late in the century, circuits were established at which "vaudeville"—variety entertainment suitable for families—was being presented for reasonable prices. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 2, From 1970 to 1909 , 337-45, traces the founding of vaudeville circuits, and vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 16-17, 57-61, chronicles their sudden decline in favor of radio and moving pictures. Between 1893 and 1900, Sanjek writes, "vaudeville became a big business, with its own monopolistic apparatus, two interlocking coast-to-coast circuits—controlled by [B. F.] Keith in the east and by Martin Beck's Orpheum from Chicago to the Pacific" (Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 17). To give an idea of the extent of the business, 104,000 vaudeville contracts were approved in 1911 by New York's commission of licenses. These contracts, San. jek reports, "gave an average salary of $80 for vocal performers, $115 for teams, and $250 for acts with four or more members." In that year there were some 1,000 "big-time" theaters putting on two shows a day and about 4,000 more "small-time" houses, many of them showing movies too, offering from three to six shows a day (Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 16, 18). The owners of the big theatrical circuits were millionaires many times over. Sanjek writes that by around 1910 Keith was "so wealthy he was leaving most management decisions" to his assistant, E. F. Albee. S. Z. Poli, the leading owner of New England variety houses, had an estate valued at $30 million at his death. Other impresarios were "the Californian Martin Beck, former German waiter, builder of the Palace Theater on Broadway, who introduced fifteen-piece orchestras in 1909 and handed out printed programs; and Percy G. Williams, who began with a medicine show after the Civil War . . . and sold his theaters to Albee in 1912 for around six million dollars" (Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. e, From 1790 to 1909 , 342).

54. An unpretentious saga of chamber music being made to pay for itself is told by Irish-born clarinetist and violist Thomas Ryan (1827-1903), who in 1849 joined with several colleagues to form the Mendelssohn Quintet Club of Boston. After a decade of local activity, the group performed in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington in 1859, "practically our first playing outside of New England," Ryan writes. Urged to play in "the West," the club made a successful concert trip of about a month—Ryan doesn't give the year, but it was around 1860—with operatic singer Adelaide Phillips and violinist Camille Urso, under the management of Harry McClennen, "the well-known advertising manager, so long at the Boston Theater." "After that trial-trip," Ryan recalled, the group decided on a season-long tour. They also decided "that we did not need 'stars' to attract audiences. Individual star singers and players had been heard everywhere in the West; ensemble playing was the novelty.'' On their first western tour, the group took along "one of our charming home singers . . . Miss Addie S. Ryan," who "had a rich and very sympathetic voice, was a good all-round singer, and very 'taking' in ballads." Ryan reported: "The financial result of the long season of travel was good, and for many years we made similar trips, and (which will surprise many persons) without the help of any advance agent. All details and arrangements for our appearance in towns and cities were made by correspondence." As Ryan tells it, at first the Mendelssohn Quintet Club had "the West" pretty much to itself. "There were no other musical people travelling. There were very many minstrel companies (which did not injure us), and a few dramatic troupes. We were in demand everywhere." Competition began to appear "either in '63 or '64." By 1868 the Mendelssohn Quintet Club, which continued to tour until 1872, had hired an advance agent. See Thomas Ryan, Recollections of an Old Musician (New York, 1899), 162-68.

55. Michael Broyles has shown that the beginnings of this development—the creation of a sphere for secular performance not obliged to support itself financially—lie in Boston during the 1830s and 1840s. In a new book, consulted in manuscript through the author's kindness, Broyles traces the discovery of instrumental music as an artistic realm different from vocal music, bringing to the fore a broadened idea of the sacred, centered upon symphonic masterworks. That idea, as will be noted below, came to be the basis for a structure of support for music-making that relied neither on commercial entrepreneurs nor churchly sponsors. See Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class": Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 13-14 and elsewhere.

56. "In those days," Thomas wrote late in life, "the only resource open to an instrumentalist was to join a brass band, and play for parades or dancing" (Theodore Thomas, A Musical Autobiography , ed. George P. Upton [Chicago, 1905; reprint, New York, 1964], 20).

57. The orchestra's organizational prospectus states: "The chief object will be, to elevate the Art, improve musical taste, and gratify those already acquainted with classic musical compositions, by performing the Grand Symphonies and Overtures of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Spohr, Mendelssohn, and other great Masters, with a strength and precision hitherto unknown in this country" (Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York's Orchestra [Garden City, N.Y., 1975], 85). The American Musical Directory (New York, 1861; reprint, New York, 1980) summarizes the society's object as "the cultivation and performance of Instrumental Music" (251).

58. According to The American Musical Directory , four categories of members—Actual, Professional, Associate, and Subscribing—supported the society. Each Actual member was "required to be a professor of music, and an efficient performer on some instrument, and to pay, when elected, an initiation fee of $10, and an annual tax of $8." Professional members, also "professors of music," were "entitled to admission to the public rehearsals and regular concerts of the Society, on the payment of $3 a year." Associate members had "the same privileges as the Professional members, on the payment of $5 a year." And Subscribing members were "entitled to three tickets to each regular concert, on the payment of $10 a year'' (251). A membership list from 1861 shows that most, but not all, of the Actual members were performing members (251-53).

59. Thomas, Autobiography , tells how Karl Eckert, conductor of soprano Henriette Sontag's orchestra, chose him as leader of the second violins (30). He doesn't give the year, but Mathews, A Hundred Years , 61, notes that in March 1853, Sontag, "under direction of Carl Eckert, appeared at Niblo's in La Fille du Régiment. " Waldo Selden Pratt, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (New York, 1924), 329, reports that, after his American trip with Sontag in 1852, Eckert "from 1853 was director of the Court Opera in Vienna." Lott, "Bernard Ullman," 177, identifies Ullman as manager of Sontag's North American tour of 1852-54. As Thomas remembered it ( Autobiography , 31), he was named concertmaster of the opera orchestra the year after becoming leader of the second violins. Opera orchestras, Thomas wrote, were "generally engaged and formed by some man . . . who was supposed to know the better musicians, and had some business capacity. This man would receive, besides his salary from the manager, a percentage from every man in the orchestra. . .. As concertmeister, I had both power and responsibility, and I dispensed with this middle man, and began by making all engagements with the members of the orchestra myself" (32-33). He describes the late 1850s as his years of " 'apprenticeship' as a practical musician and conductor" (48-49). According to Upton, who edited his autobiography, in 1861 Thomas "gave up all connection with the theatre. He became animated by his great purpose of educating the public to an appreciation of music'' (48n.).

60. Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America's Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835-1905 (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 16. In Thomas, Autobiography , 51, the conductor writes that he "called a meeting of the foremost orchestra musicians of New York, told them of my plans to popularize instrumental music, and asked their cooperation." He dates the first of the Irving Hall concerts in 1864.

61. Thomas, Autobiography , notes: "When I began to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic concerts, the conductor's fee, which was the same as Eisfeld and Bergmann had had, was not much more than that of any member of the orchestra" (37). The letter appointing Thomas conductor of the Brooklyn orchestra was written on 28 June 1866 and specified a salary of $500 for the 1866-67 season (53). But "afterwards," Thomas reports, "with the growing success of [the Brooklyn] concerts, my salary was increased until it reached several thousand dollars for the season" (37).

62. Joseph Mussulman, Music in the Cultured Generation: A Social History of Music in America, 1870-1900 (Evanston, Ill., 1971), 110, suggests how that attitude crystallized toward the end of the century. At the death of Stephen Foster in 1864, George William Curtis wrote that "the air is full of his melodies" and that "their simple pathos touches every heart." Curtis concluded: "They are our national music" ( Harper's 28 [1864]: 567). By 1881, however, Frederick Nast was writing in the same journal that "plantation melodies and minstrel ballads" came from "the lowest strata of society" ( Harper's 62 [1881]: 818). "Cankerous commercialism had rendered the genre sterile," Mussulman comments. In 1904, Emma Bell Miles complained that "the commercial spirit of the age," in fact, had killed the development of folk music ( Harper's 99 [1904]: 118; quoted in Mussulman, Music in the Cultured Generation , 116-17). Oscar G. Sonneck, writing in the 1910s, found "commercialism"—defined as "the creed of those who prostitute commerce, deliberately turn the temple of art into a bucket-shop of art and let every stroke of their pen be governed by the desire to do profitable work instead of good work"—still rampant, calling it "that hideous curse of our age" ("The History of Music in America: Some Suggestions," in Sonneck, Miscellaneous Studies in the History of Music [New York, 1921; reprint, New York, 1970], 328). In the 1960s, Irving Lowens identified the postbellum years as a period in which "American intellectual life [was dominated] by a powerful small group, the big-business class." "Crass materialism" ruled the age, according to Lowens, and "the 'almighty dollar' became the standard of value, infecting the country with contempt for things of the spirit" ("American Democracy and Music [1830-1914]," in Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America [New York, 1964], 269-70).

63. Sonneck's article, " Deutscher Einfluss auf das Musikleben Amerikas, " in Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika , edited by Max Heinrici (Philadelphia, 1909), 355-67, is translated by the editor as "German Influence on the Musical Life of America," in Oscar Sonneck and American Music , edited by William Lichtenwanger (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 60-75. Sonneck finds the performance of German orchestral music by German-born musicians in America one of the most important phenomena in this country's musical life (69-70). ''Since about 1850," he notes, such performances have proceeded "almost exclusively" through the efforts of "German conductors and German orchestra musicians" (71). About Thomas himself, Sonneck comments: "We younger people, who perhaps heard Theodore Thomas at the end, at the extremity of his career, can scarcely appreciate the legacy he bequeathed us. Only when the memory of him loosens the tongues of our musical veterans shall we be able to measure what America gratefully owes this great prophet of German art" (72). Sonneck also slips into his article a message for American politicians. "That the Germans are a people dedicated to music they well know," he writes, adding: "What they do not understand is that the Germans would not have become such a people without governmental subvention of music" (75).

64. Schabas, Theodore Thomas , 17.

65. Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 21. The inscription at the front of Hart's book reads: "'I would go to hell if they gave me a permanent orchestra.' Theodore Thomas."

66. Quoted from Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 30.

67. Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 21.

68. Quoted from Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 22.

69. Quoted from Schabas, Theodore Thomas , 244.

70. Thomas also believed that "only the most cultivated persons are able to understand" the best symphonic music. "How, then, can we expect the ignorant or immature mind to grasp its subtleties? The kind of music suitable for them is that which has very clearly defined melody and well-marked rhythms, such, for instance, as is played by the best bands" (quoted from Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 30). The Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight, who played a key role in the establishment of instrumental music in America, wrote in 1862: "We never have believed that it was possible to educate the whole mass of society up to the love of what is classical and great in Art: we know that all the great loves, the fine perceptions and appreciations belong to the few" ( Dwight's Journal of Music 12 [1862]: 271; quoted from Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class, " 264).

71. Schabas writes, "In effect, the Central Park Garden made the Thomas Orchestra, providing, for a third of the year, a setting in which it could hone its skills and broaden its repertoire. Thanks to these concerts, New York became the English-speaking capital (if not the capital) of the symphonic world" ( Theodore Thomas , 38).

72. "Both the Brooklyn Philharmonic' and my New York Symphony Concerts were successful," Thomas wrote in his Autobiography , but "the travelling had to be continued to fill out the rest of the time of the orchestra, for I had no subsidy from others to help to meet the expenses of the organization, but was personally responsible for the salaries of my musicians, and my only source of income was the box-office" (65).

73. Amerigrove 4:380-81.

74. Not the least of the hardships for Thomas was the financial risk that touring entailed. In the late 1870s, for example, the orchestra "made a week's tour to Buffalo and return. A storm came up on the way out, and we were snowbound, with the result that when we returned to New York for the Symphony Concert, we had spent most of the time in the ordinary day cars, had given but two concerts on the trip, instead of six or seven, and I had become indebted for salaries, etc., about three thousand dollars. I confess I felt that I ought to be relieved of this financial responsibility" (Thomas, Autobiography , 75).

75. Thomas, Autobiography , 58, notes with relish that "during the seventies" he received a visit from a man who proposed that Thomas "'star' around the country under his management." ''Can anybody blame me," Thomas asked with tongue in cheek, "for feeling properly elated that the greatest manager of the greatest menagerie on earth considered me worthy of his imperial guidance?" The visitor was P. T. Barnum.

76. Quoted from Schabas, Theodore Thomas , 52.

77. As Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class, " notes, as early as 1838, John Sullivan Dwight was comparing Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven to Socrates, Shakespeare, and Newton (247).

78. The context for this development is sketched out in two articles by Paul DiMaggio, "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America," and "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art,'" Media, Culture, and Society 4 (1982): 33-50; 303-22.

79. The dress as well as the behavior of both performers and audience members at an orchestral concert are calculated to foster an atmosphere of respect and seriousness. Much of the occasion's aura is produced by a consciousness that a large throng can make so little sound. ("You could hear a pin drop.") Both performers and audience assume that a work performed in a symphonic concert deserves such care and attention. If it turns out not to measure up, at least it has been accorded the respect due its station, which is that of an aspirant to be heard alongside the music of Beethoven and Co. See also Mussulman, Music in the Cultured Generation , 135-36, however, in which opera audiences are chided for noisy, inattentive deportment at performances.

80. Charles Edward Russell, The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (Garden City, N.Y., 1927), 3; quoted in Levine, Highbrow , 112.

81. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction , 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1988), 54.

82. Of earlier general histories of American music, Frédéric Louis Ritter's Music in America (New York, 1883; 1890; reprint, New York, 1970) pays the most attention to opera performance. In the second edition, chapter 8 deals with English opera in New York and French opera in New Orleans before 1825. Chapter 10 covers opera in New York from 1825 to 1842, the year of the Philharmonic Society's founding. Chapter 15 picks up the same story in 1843 and carries it to 1861, adding a few pages on French opera in New Orleans. Chapter 18 tells of opera in New York during and shortly after the Civil War. And Chapter 23 is entitled "Opera in New York: Italian, German, American; French Opera in New Orleans." It covers New York from the early 1870s through the founding and early years of the Metropolitan Opera Company (1883). In all, approximately one-fifth of Ritter's book is devoted to opera performance. Mathews, A Hundred Years , devotes Chapter 5 to the "Career of Opera to 1840," and most of Chapter 7, "Two Decades Preceding the War," also deals with opera. Thereafter, however, the book's focus is biographical. Chapter 12, "Concert and Operatic Singers,'' does not cover opera performance. In fact, only eleven of Mathews's 701 pages of text deal with the performance of opera on American shores. Louis C. Elson's The History of American Music (New York, 1904), gives a good-sized chapter to "Opera in America." In keeping with his interest in American composers, they are emphasized in his account, while Ritter and Mathews barely mention them. Hubbard's History of American Music (1908) includes a substantial chapter with the same title that treats developments outside New York City as well as inside it. Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby's Music in America (New York, 1915), treats the subject more generously than anyone since Ritter, with three consecutive chapters by Darby—"The Beginnings of Opera," "Opera in the United States, Part I: New York," and "Opera in the United States, Part II"—filling approximately one-sixth of the book. Farwell and Darby are the last general historians of American music to include whole chapters on opera. With Howard's Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of It (New York, 1931), musical genres disappear as an organizing device. In his book, as well as in Chase's, Mellers's, Hitchcock's, and Hamm's, opera performance, when discussed at all, is subsumed into chapters focused on other issues. Hamm's Chapter 4, however, is entitled "Concert and Operatic Music in Colonial and Federal America" (in Music in the New World [New York, 1983]), a reflection of the work of Sonneck, which focuses on performance rather than on composition.

83. In today's musical culture, the word "authenticity" is most often used in connection with the performance of early music. Advocates of so-called authenticity insist on using instruments from the composer's own time, and, through research and experiment, they strive to recover the era's performing habits. It should be noted that, at this writing, musicians who take this approach seldom refer to their goal as "authenticity" but rather describe it as "historically informed performance." Faithfulness to the work's original spirit is a high priority. One performer has written that she would hope to play a piece so that the composer would recognize it, "at worst, without bewilderment, and at best, with pleasure" (Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History [New York, 1988], 175; the musician quoted is Marie Leonhardt). Chapter 9 in Haskell's book explores various ways in which advocates and critics of early music have pursued the ideal of "authenticity." A recent symposium on the subject, Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music (London, 1989), carries debate on the issue further.

84. Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class, " 255, shows that in an "Address, Delivered before the Harvard Musical Association, August 25, 1841," and printed in The Musical Magazine 3 (August 28, 1841): 257-72, Dwight separated "sacred Music" from churches and public worship. In his new definition, music meriting the label of sacred was "elevating, purifying, love and faith-inspiring." Broyles writes that for Dwight, "absolute instrumental music represented the highest type of sacred music, because it existed purely on its own terms, uncorrupted by language.''

85. John H. Mueller, The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste (Bloomington, Ind., 1951), 80, describes the founder's motives in economic terms. "Higginson, who had been a music student in Vienna, was well aware what a paternalistic government could accomplish. However, in this country, according to his creed, this function should devolve upon paternalistic capitalism, through the efforts of those who had been financially successful." Boston Symphony Orchestra members, Mueller notes, were Higginson's full-time employees, hired to make music "which would then be resold to the public, of course at considerable loss, by the philanthropically-minded employer." In 1881, Higginson's public proposal for founding an orchestra called for players and a conductor, paid by the year "to give in Boston as many concerts of serious music as are wanted . . . to keep prices low always . . . 50 cents and 25 cents being the measure of prices." He estimated his costs: "sixty men at $1500 = $90,000 + $3000 for the conductor and + 7000 for other men = $100,000. Of this sum, it seemed possible that one-half should be earned, leaving a deficit of $50,000, for which $1,000,000 is needed as principal." In 1914, after thirty-three years, Higginson's total deficit stood at "about $900,000" (Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 49, 55). Levine, Highbrow , analyzing Higginson's "complex agenda" (see 119-27), finds him less "a proselytizer to the masses than . . . a preserver of the faith: a builder of the temple and a keeper of the flame" (126).

86. Fay, a businessman, was the brother of pianist Amy Fay and of Rose Fay, who married Theodore Thomas after his first wife died in 1889. Mueller notes that through its first eleven seasons the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ran a deficit that averaged $33,000 per year. The trustees' solution, which Mueller calls "truly farsighted," was "to endow the orchestra by building a permanent home which would be a source of income and security." A public campaign was mounted, and the city's Orchestra Hall opened in December 1904 (Mueller, American Symphony , 102-5). Hart, Orpheus in the New World , 43, notes that rental of Orchestra Hall and its office space made only a partial dent in the orchestra's yearly deficit. Nevertheless, he believes, thanks to the new hall's "more limited capacity and to the stimulation of interest in the orchestra by the campaign for construction funds, the Chicago Symphony secured a much stronger base of audience support, which it needed . . . to survive the death of Thomas."

87. The one told in the greatest detail, and with ample attention to economics, is that of symphony orchestras in New York. See Shanet, Philharmonic .

88. Howard Shanet's history of the New York Philharmonic attributes that attitude chiefly to German influence and the absence in America of effective opposition to it. For Shanet, the ultimate irony is that the United States' powerful commercial sector, which, he believes, could have helped to steer musical life, never entered the arena of the symphony orchestra at all, leaving foreign values to shape the orchestra's American history. (In a chapter called "Loss of the Native Heritage," Shanet especially deplores the Philharmonic's treatment of American composers. See Shanet, Philharmonic , 139-45.) Lawrence Levine leaves no doubt that he considers the mid-nineteenth century, with its volatile, heterogeneous audience, a healthier time than the more self-conscious end of the century. Levine's key pejorative words are "hierarchy"—he argues that the existence of a clear cultural one is a late nineteenth-century development—and "sacralization of culture." The latter is adapted from Paul DiMaggio's phrase "sacralization of art,'' used in his articles on "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston," cited above. Levine's terms are clearly intended as a criticism of people who naively put art on a pedestal as a sacred object. (Levine, Highbrow , 85-146, centers on music. See especially pages 132-34 on the "divinity" of some compositions.) And Theodore Thomas's biographer, Ezra Schabas, is harsh on the "museum" atmosphere that came to the fore in Thomas's later years, fragmenting audiences ( Theodore Thomas , 257). All three of these writers detect snobbishness and exclusivity at work in the later nineteenth century, and they deplore its results. In the New York Times of 9 June 1991, Joseph Horowitz cites Levine's analysis approvingly in a diagnosis asserting that, in 1991, "classical music is in decline—and its troubles are artistic, not just financial. The audience is old and dwindling. Piano and song recitals are disappearing. New music has no certain role. Concerts, and the canonized repertory they recycle, are rituals of familiarity, marketed and consumed according to the overpriced celebrity performers they showcase" ("Immortal Masterpieces to Snooze By," Arts and Leisure section, 1).

89. George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America's First Family of Music (Boston, 1983), 231.

90. Martin, Damrosch Dynasty , 260. The implication here is that some patrons of music are more interested in the social prestige their money brings than in music itself. According to Hart, that was not true of Higginson, whose "sincere dedication to music" stands behind his heavy financial investment (see Orpheus in the New World , 70). Nor, apparently, was it true of financier Otto Kahn, himself a proficient amateur musician, who gave at least $2 million to the Metropolitan Opera over three decades and is said to have spent "several" nights a week attending its performances (see Mary Jane Matz, The Many Lives of Otto Kahn: A Biography [New York, 1963], 19, 65, 98, and elsewhere).

Samuel Lipman, The House of Music: Art in an Era of Institutions (Boston, 1984), believes that attitude is in decline. Lip man describes himself as a critic "who now finds musical power increasingly shifting from music makers to those who are either not musicians or who are not acting for solely musical purposes" (xi). The separation "of patronage and consumption" in American musical life especially disturbs Lipman. He cites as "participant support" the patronage of past Europeans—the Esterházys, Archduke Rudolph, Ludwig of Bavaria—who ''savored what they supported." In the United States of the 1980s, however, Our numerous governing cadres have neither historical nor present attachments to . . . high musical culture. For reasons of political convenience our leaders are willing to arrange for the transfer of public monies for artistic purposes. That they have up to this point done so with a surprising amount of disinterest is perhaps no more than a sign of their basic uninterest. It is this uninterest that makes them so eclectic in their practical decisions. Thus freed from any burden of their own tastes, they are able to preside smilingly over the gradual vulgarization of what was once a civilized glory. (310-11)

91. Luther Noss, Paul Hindemith in the United States (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 174.

92. Gertrude Hindemith wrote an American friend: "We feel this letter is a document of impoliteness and almost insulting hostility. As there is still a year between now and the proposed date it is at least a lack of courtesy not to have added 'I will do my best to get more dates,' or something like that" (Noss, Paul Hindemith , 174). Noss adds: "Needless to. say, there were no further negotiations with Judson" (175).

93. Hart, Orpheus in the New World , Chap. 4, "Arthur Judson—Manager," confirms that Judson's view of his own position was not exaggerated. After discussions with both Judson's admirers and his detractors, Hart writes: "All agree that from 1915 to 1956, at least, Arthur Judson exercised a power and influence in the symphony and concert affairs of this country without equal then or at any other time" (71).

94. As shown by Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), the player piano, able to reproduce mechanically the sound of musical performances, played a key role in the transformation of music from a participant's to a consumer's activity. See especially the preface and Chapter 1.

95. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 507-17, is devoted to a chapter on the years 1967-70 called "Big Money Invades the Music Business." See also Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American (New York, 1979), and Armand Mattelart, Multinational Corporations and the Control of Culture (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979).

96. Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (New York, 1983), 296-97, for example, explains how recordings brought about the decline of Harlem's Apollo Theater.

Earlier in the century, Fox writes, black artists "had made most of their money from personal appearances, and the record companies kept the bulk of the profits from their recordings . . .. Most acts toured constantly, as the best way to increase their income. But as performers grew into superstars, they began to demand a larger slice of the pie from recordings. Then they could afford to relax their touring schedules." By the mid-1970s, Fox notes, "even new and untried acts could demand star salaries—if they had a hit record." Apollo manager Bobby Schiffman noted that well-known acts "could make more money in one night in a bigger and better location than they could make in the Apollo in a whole week." Consequently, the 1,683-seat Apollo "got priced out of the market."

97. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music , translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1985), characterizes recent musical culture as one of "repeating." "Repeating," in fact, is the title of his Chapter 4. Attali contends that "by the middle of the twentieth century, representation, which created music as an autonomous art, independent of its religious and political usage, was no longer sufficient either to meet the demands of the new solvent consumers of the middle classes or to fulfill the economic requirements of accumulation" (88). Recording, he points out, "makes the stockpiling of time possible." Hence, ''people must devote their time to producing the means to buy recordings of other people's time," and "people buy more records than they can listen to. They stockpile what they want to find the time to hear" (101). In Attali's view, since "the economy of music . . . constituted itself as an industry, directly after the Second World War," its political economy has concentrated on "the production of demand , not the production of supply " (103).

98. Lawrence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York, 1990), is a detailed portrait of one of the most intense and successful of these competitors. As Bergreen shows, Berlin grew up writing for stage performers like A1 Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Harry Richman, all "frantic crowd pleasers" who performed "for the folks in the back of the highest balcony at the Palace." But by 1930, the new singing star was Bing Crosby, whose style was totally different. "When Crosby and the next generation of singers (crooners, they would be called—no more belting out the songs) stood before a microphone," Bergreen writes, "their careful underplaying sufficed to put the tune across." And Berlin, "the constant student of performing styles," eventually taught himself "to write a new kind of song—subtle and nuanced—for this new type of performer" (292).

99. The library of my wife, a fortepianist and harpsichordist, is full of books confirming that investment. Almost literally at random, for example, I can pull out Sandra P. Rosenblum, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music: Their Principles and Applications (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), a scholarly volume of over 500 pages, with chapters on "The Fortepiano circa 1780-1820," "Dynamics and Accentuation," "Use of the Pedals," "Articulation and Touch," "Historical Technique and Fingering," "Ornaments," "Choice of Tempo,'' and "Flexibility of Rhythm and Tempo."

100. To take one example among many, Bud Freeman, Crazeology: The Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman , as told to Robert Wolf (Urbana, Ill., 1989), chronicles the difficulty of making a living as a jazz musician. Freeman thought that in some periods whites had it tougher than blacks. Around 1930, he writes, "there were some good-paying jobs on the North Side but they didn't last as long as the South Side jobs did. Some South Side players, such as Jimmie Noone, stayed with jobs that lasted years; we whites counted the length of ours by weeks, sometimes days. The upshot was that we often had to piece odd jobs together to make ends meet." Freeman recalls that he ran into a drummer friend around that time "and saw he was carrying a gun. I said, 'Why are you carrying that?' and he said, 'Jeez, Freeman, I can't make no money playing jazz' "(33). Freeman, however, always admired black artistry. He recalls having played in a Broadway show, Swingin' the Dream (1939), that combined Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with black vaudeville. Despite having a cast with "the finest talent you could get," the show failed. Freeman believed that if the producer "had known the greatness of the black people he could have had a revue that would still be running" (49).

101. Jack V. Buerkle and Danny Barker, Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman (New York, 1973), a sociological study, centers on musicians' working lives. In a summary statement, the authors write:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the music business as the jazzmen know it today really had not yet begun. The Negro musician's employment status as a professional in New Orleans was not well organized. Gigs were played whenever he could get them. There was no Local [union] to act as a clearinghouse. With some exceptions, they were just unable to earn enough money to be full-time musicians. Most of the time the musician had a day job (often menial) which allowed him to do music moonlighting. In our interviews, a number of the jazzmen described their musically trained fathers as longshoremen, mattress makers, and draymen—not as musicians. After the Local was founded in the early twenties, the music scene gradually became more formal, secure, and professionalized. In time, more of the men came to describe themselves as musicians. More became full-time because the market was beginning to open up somewhat for blacks in New Orleans and elsewhere. (155)

102. Tom Davin's interview with Johnson in 1953, first published in The Jazz Review (1959-60), is reprinted as "Conversations with James P. Johnson" in John Edward Hasse, ed., Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music (New York, 1985). See especially pages 171-74 for information about professional life in New York City in the years 1911-14.

103. Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (Garden City, N.Y., 1962; reprint, New York, 1981), 23-41, centers on James Reese Europe and the Castles. It also discusses Europe's organization of the Clef Club, a professional organization for black musicians, which from its founding in 1909 into the early 1920s served as a booking agency and sponsored concerts. See also Eileen Southern, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians (Westport, Conn., 1982), 73 (the Clef Club), and 128-29 (Europe), and Southern, Music of Black Americans , 344-45.

104. John Chilton's assessment of this group reflects present-day opinion among most writers on jazz. Because they made the first jazz recordings, Chilton writes, "the musicians achieved a degree of eminence that was out of proportion to their musical skills." He adds, however, that the ODJB's "collective vigor had an infectious spirit" ( Jazzgrove 2:450). All sources acknowledge that the group was perceived as something new and exciting from the beginning of its New York engagement in January 1917 See, e.g., David Jasen, Tin Pan Alley — The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and their Times: The Golden Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956 (New York, 1988), 94-96, and Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 29-30.

H. O. Brunn, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (Baton Rouge, La., 1960; reprint, New York, 1977), flies in the face of historical consensus by claiming the ODJB as the real "creators of jazz" (v) and denying black musicians any leading role in the music's historical development. However, Brunn's treatment of commercial aspects of the ODJB's career is detailed and apparently reliable. He notes that after the successes of early 1917, Max Hart, the group's manager, "was deluged with a hundred offers for the Original Dixieland Jazz Band— dances, Broadway musicals, vaudeville tours, conventions—more jobs than the band could handle in a single lifetime" (61).

105. Southern, Music of Black Americans , 365, notes that "the earliest documented recording of a black female singer" was Mamie Smith's record date for OKeh on 14 February 1920. Smith sang two songs by Bradford, her manager: "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" and "This Thing Called Love." Record producer Fred Hager "had intended" to use well-known white singer Sophie Tucker on the date, but Bradford "eventually persuaded him'' to record Smith instead. According to Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (New York, 1970), 9-10, when the recording was released in July 1920, OKeh "made no attempt to draw special attention to it. But the black press proclaimed 'Mamie made a recording' and sales were unexpectedly high." In August, Smith and her Jazz Hounds made two more recordings, including "Crazy Blues." "This time," Dixon and Godrich write, "OKeh advertised widely in black communities and when the disc was issued in November it was an instantaneous success." Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, Wis., 1986), 398, shows that beginning in the week of 11 December 1920, "Crazy Blues" ranked as one of the hottest-selling recordings and that it remained on the charts for eleven weeks, reaching a peak position of number 3. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 31, notes: "within a month, 75,000 copies were sold, mostly to black buyers." According to Jazzgrove 2:343, beginning in 1921, Ralph Peer of OKeh began listing recordings made chiefly for black buyers as "race records." The term was used by the industry until 1942. See also W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (New York, 1941; reprint, New York, 1970), 207-8, for Handy's account of Bradford's recording, whose popularity confirmed his long-time conviction that "our people were lovers of music and . . . they were great buyers." Charters and Kunstadt, Jazz , 82-92, deals with Mamie Smith and her epoch-making recordings.

106. Trumpeter Joe Smith was heard prominently in Sissle and Blake's Chocolate Dandies of 1924. See Charters and Kunstadt, Jazz , 116, and Walter C. Allen, Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians: A Bio-Discography (Highland Park, N.J., 1973), 130. Of Fats Waller's show Hot Chocolates (1929), Gary Giddins writes that Louis Armstrong's "rendition of 'Ain't Misbehavin',' performed at first from the pit and later onstage," was "one of the highlights." One night, Giddins reports, "the leading white musicians came uptown to Connie's [a Harlem club] and threw a party for Louis. Bandleader Ben Pollack presented him with a gold watch inscribed, 'Good luck always to Louis Armstrong from The Musicians on Broadway' " ( Satchmo [New York, 1988], 107). On 2 July 1929, less than two weeks after Hot Chocolates began its Broadway run, producer Florenz Ziegfeld opened Show Girl , with music by George Gershwin. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra played in the pit (see Bordman, American Musical Theater , 452). In the same year, composer Vincent Youmans planned to use Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra in his new show, Great Day , but those plans were eventually abandoned. See Allen, Hendersonia , 228-32, for details. Rex Stewart, Boy Meets Horn , edited by Claire P. Gordon (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991), 118, however, documents that sorne of Henderson's men, including Stewart himself, did play in the pit band of Great Day .

107. These developments are well documented in standard histories of American music. One perceptive early account of the concert hall's response to jazz is Roger Pryor Dodge, "Consider the Critics," in Jazzmen , edited by Frederic Ramsey, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith (New York, 1939), especially 301-28.

108. Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories , chart of "The Top 10 Artists by Decade" (625), shows that during the 1920s Whiteman's orchestra sold far more recordings than his nearest competitor, Ben Selvin and His Orchestra. The other leaders, in order of sales, were Ted Lewis and His Band, Jolson, Gene Austin, Isham Jones and His Orchestra, Nat Shilkret and the Victor Orchestra, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, Ruth Etting, and Marion Harris. In the same period, Bessie Smith placed fifteen recordings in the top twenty, with "The St. Louis Blues" reaching number 3 (1925), and "Gulf Coast Blues" (1923) and "Lost Your Head Blues" (1926) both reaching number 5. Louis Armstrong made eleven recordings whose sales reached the top twenty, with "Ain't Misbehavin','' which ranked number 7 in 1929, as his biggest hit. Beiderbecke was featured on six Frank Trumbauer Orchestra recordings that made the top twenty, including "I'm Coming, Virginia" (no. 5, 1927); "Changes," with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra (no. 4, 1928), "I'm Gonna Meet My Sweetie Now," with Jean Goldkette and His Orchestra (no. 20, 1927), and two sides made under his own name, including "At the Jazz Band Ball" (no. 15, 1928), for a total of ten top twenty sides in all. Of the nine recordings by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra that made the top twenty in the same period, "Charleston Crazy" (1924) and "Sugar Foot Stomp" (1925) both reached number 8. Five of Oliver's recordings reached the top twenty in those years, with ''Dipper Mouth Blues" achieving number 9 (1924). Four ensemble recordings of Morton made the list, with "Black Bottom Stomp" reaching number 13 (1927). Earl Hines appeared on three of Armstrong's recordings that made the top twenty in the same period, including "West End Blues" (no. 8, 1928). Bechet played on two top twenty recordings by Clarence Williams's Blue Five, including "'Tain't Nobody's Bus'ness If I Do" (no. 9, 1924). Johnson's lone appearance was with his piano performance of "Carolina Shout" (no. 10, 1922). During the same period, Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra placed 159 recordings in the top twenty, including twenty-eight number 1 hits (total compiled from Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories ). As for the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, it placed fourteen recordings on the charts between 1917 and 1923. In 1917, "Darktown Strutters' Ball" reached number 2, "Livery Stable Blues" number 4, and "Indiana" number 8. "Tiger Rag" held the number x spot for two weeks in 1918, and "At the Jazz Band Ball" reached number 8. In 1921, the ODJB achieved seven top-selling records: "Home Again Blues" was ranked number 2 for a week, "St. Louis Blues," "Palesteena," and "Royal Garden Blues" all reached the number 3 spot, "Margie" and "Jazz Me Blues" were ranked number 9, and "Sweet Mama (Papa's Gettin' Mad)" went as high as number 12. The ODJB's best seller in 1922, "Bow Wow Blues (My Mama Treats Me Like a Dog)," achieved a number 9 ranking for just one week. Their last record to make the charts was "Some of These Days," which went as high as number 5 in 1923. This information is all found in Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories . Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 29, seems to contradict Whitburn's tallies by claiming "The Livery Stable Blues" as one of the Victor recording company's "earliest million-seller Black Label records."

Paul Whiteman's fees in the mid-1920s confirm his band's preeminence. Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 192, quotes a Boston Post reporter in August 1926 who wrote that Whiteman commanded $2,000 per night, as compared with $1,000 for Vincent Lopez, "less than $500" for the California Ramblers and Mal Hallett, and $200 for the Memphis Five. Tucker estimates that "Ellington's fee for a one-night stand was probably between $200 and $500" at this time.

109. James Lincoln Collier, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York, 1989), 33-38, traces the development of "modern dance-band arrangements" (33), which he attributes largely to Ferdie Grofé, Whiteman's arranger, perhaps in collaboration with West Coast bandleader Art Hickman. According to Collier, the evolution took place chiefly in the late 'teens. Its principles were: "1) the division of the orchestra into sections, at first brass, reed and rhythm, and later with brass sometimes further split into trumpet and trombone sections; 2) the playing off of the sections contrapuntally or in call-and-answer fashion; 3) the intermixing throughout of shorter or longer solos, mostly improvised jazz, but occasionally straight renditions of a melody; and 4) the playing of ensemble passages with the jazzlike feel of an improvised solo." Collier writes: "All of these principles were at work in the early Whiteman band" (37).

110. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition , new and rev. ed. (New York, 1983), 64, writes of Armstrong that even "well into his sixties" he could "play on some evenings in an astonishing way—astonishing not so much because of what he played as that he played it with such power, sureness, firmness, authority, such commanding presence as to be beyond category, almost (as they say of Beethoven's late quartets) to be beyond music. When he played this way, matters of style, other jazzmen, and most other musicians simply drop away as we hear his eloquence. . . [We] hear a surpassing artist create for us, each of us, a surpassing art."

111. Early responses to jazz have been described and analyzed, among other places in Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago, 1962), which is rich in bibliographical references. It is a well-known fact of jazz historiography that European authors published the first books on jazz to take the music seriously: especially Hughes Panassié, Le jazz hot (Paris, 1934; English translation, London and New York, 1936), and Charles Delaunay, Hot Discography (Paris, 1936). That fact, plus the continuing interest of English and French writers in jazz and blues, together with the knowledge that some American jazz musicians have settled overseas to escape racial discrimination, have led to a belief that Europeans have appreciated jazz more than Americans. James Lincoln Collier, The Reception of Jazz: A New View , I.S.A.M. Monographs no. 27 (Brooklyn, 1988), considers that belief a "myth" that has "badly distorted both the nature of American culture and the process by which jazz evolved from a local New Orleans music into a national—indeed international—phenomenon" ([1]). Collier's revisionist work has itself been criticized in a review by Lawrence Gushee in Ethnomusicology 33 (1989): 352-54.

112. Collier, Reception of Jazz , 34.

113. Roger Pryor Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," Jazz 1 (July 1942): 6. I am grateful to Lawrence Gushee for calling my attention to this article.

114. Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," 6.

115. "Maudlin New York eulogy," Dodge recalled, "led me to essay an exposition of jazz, which I titled 'Jazz Contra Whiteman' " in the fall of 1925. "I peddled it about to a few magazines,'' he noted, "with no success. The subject was too light for the serious magazines" (7). Dodge's article was eventually published in the London Dancing Times (October 1929) under the title "Negro Jazz." See also Dodge, "Consider the Critics," a critical survey of early jazz writing less well known than it deserves to be. Here Dodge notes: "As soon as jazz became disturbingly identifiable as something more than 'our popular music,' countless uninformed commentators sprang up with something to say about it." Most music critics, he writes, shared three mistaken assumptions: (1)jazz's "significant development is dependent upon immediate separation from the untutored musician"; (2) so-called symphonic jazz was "a progressive advance upon primitive improvisation"; and (3) jazz would "blossom'' as "an art form" only when "divorced from the dance" and allowed to develop in a way "comparable to nineteenth century concert music" (301).

116. Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," 7.

117. "The occasions when I managed to hear Bessie Smith in Harlem Vaudeville," Dodge wrote, "were for the most part disappointing. In show business she generally sang quick-fast popular numbers. In these her voice hardly ever took on its fine quality." Dodge found Smith at her best "singing the blues with simple piano accompaniment. Such moments would intensify all the beauty that is to be found on her best records." Dodge continued: "Constant playing of Bessie Smith records . . . deepens ordinary enjoyment [and] sustains the seriousness of her music." In his view, The significance of the surpassing art of Bessie Smith has been overlooked by her own race to a much greater extent than the significance of the outstanding instrumentalists. Never theatrically pointed up by good stage management, Bessie Smith missed the mass acclaim of, say, a Louis Armstrong. Amongst white people the significance of her art has been shamefully overlooked in favor of Negro choirs and their dilute spiritual music. Bessie was part of a period that could manifest art straight and clean, but those who were supposedly trained to see gave no more than a superficial look. Once more one of the best examples of period art has slipped in and out unnoticed by the mature critics of the period. ("Jazz in the Twenties," 7)

118. Dodge's article is a reminder that Armstrong's fame was a product of a later period. "While in Chicago in 1927," he wrote, "I went to the Sunset Inn to hear the redoubtable Louis Armstrong. He was very slightly known then. He was delighted that someone had come simply to hear him" ("Jazz in the Twenties," 7).

119. Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," 8. In Dodge's view, Miley "was the greatest trumpeter in jazz history—in fact, the greatest musician of them all." Dodge wrote in some detail about his interaction with Miley.

Bubber rehearsed many numbers. Among other things he played the "King of the Zulus" by Louis Armstrong and did from notation his own forgotten improvisations on the "Yellow Dog Blues." When I first showed him notations of his solos taken off records, he was quite confused—doubted he even created them! But we soon discovered that when reading notes he used the correct valve, whereas when improvising he reached for them with his lip—sometimes reaching as much as a whole tone. I found through rehearsing with him that he was very conscious of what was important to jazz. He never had to warm up to play hot; he could play with immediate hot emphasis—even when his lips were still cold. He also thought in terms of musical invention and was never blandly satisfied with 'weird jungle' notes. When he improvised a melodic turn that was inventive, he tried to remember it. Often in the dressing room before going on stage, he thought of new complicated little breaks to introduce. He was a musician packed with half-formed ideas for composition, but he was very slow in fully materializing them. Unless he was supervised by a Duke Ellington [he] would leave it [a musical idea] hanging in his mind or just play about with it in the dressing room. (8; 15)

120. Dodge was convinced that "from 1920 on . . . fragments of jazz appear which are in spite of their brevity, the exact counterpart of 'swing' solo choruses in 1939" (Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," 29).

121. See, e.g., Williams, Jazz Tradition , 25 2 : "To a jazz musician, thought and feeling, reflection and emotion, come together uniquely, and resolve in the art of doing."

122. That, he believed, was responsible for "the more florid, rippling solo [that] came into existence" in 1927-28, replacing the earlier "rhythmic" approach (Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," 29).

123. Dodge, "Jazz in the Twenties," 29.

124. Few musical labels have been more widely reviled than the designation of Whiteman as "the King of Jazz." Whiteman's appropriation of that title, jazz writers since the 1930s have widely agreed, violates truth both by denying the contributions of black musicians, who originated jazz and developed it as an art form, and by applying the label to styles less adventurous artistically than Armstrong's brand of jazz in the same period. In Duke Ellington's view, however, Whiteman carried his title with "certainty and dignity." Despite his classical background, Ellington wrote, Whiteman "didn't have a snooty bone in his body." He continued: "Now there have been those who have come on the scene, grabbed the money, and run off to a plush life of boredom, but nobody held on to his band like Paul Whiteman did. He was always adding interesting musicians to the payroll, without regard to their behavior. All he wanted was to have those giant cats blow, and they blew up a storm" (Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress [Garden City, N.Y., 1973], 103).

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development (New York, 1968), 192n., treats Whiteman even-handedly. "Hard-core jazz critics dismiss Whiteman summarily as a destructive influence," he writes, while "apologists for popular mass culture have seen in Whiteman the great arbiter between jazz and symphonic music. . .. On purely musical terms," however, "the Whiteman orchestra achieved much that was admirable, and there is no question that it was admired (and envied) by many musicians, both black and white." The orchestra "was overflowing with excellent musicians and virtuoso instrumentalists." Lennie Hayton, Ferde Grofé, and Bill Challis wrote arrangements that "were marvels of orchestrational ingenuity'' for these men, and Whiteman's performances featured "excellent intonation, perfect balances, and clean attacks." On the other hand, according to Schuller, Whiteman's music was "not based on a jazz conception." That it was considered jazz, he believes, is a "sociological phenomenon . . . the analysis of which go[es] beyond the purview of this book."

125. See, e.g., Williams, The Jazz Tradition , which is built on that idea.

126. Jazzgrove 2:176.

127. A unique, useful feature of Jazzgrove is a geographically arranged directory of "Nightclubs and other venues" for jazz performance (2: 176-247), including bibliographical references for clubs and theaters that have been written about—e.g., in New York City: the Apollo Theater, Eddie Condon's, the Hickory House, Nick's Tavern, the Onyx, Three Deuces, and the Village Vanguard. For the latter see Max Gordon, Live at the Village Vanguard (New York, 1980). See also John Hammond, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography , with Irving Townsend (New York, 1977), 206-10, for a vignette of Barney Josephson, owner of New York's Café Society, which opened in 1938 as an unusual enterprise: an "integrated night club with mixed entertainment and mixed audiences." Whitney Balliett, Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 198 1- 1990 (New York, 1991), 245, comments on this part of Jazzgrove , however: "The New York night-club settings are far from complete. (See the priceless glossary of Harlem clubs in the booklet prepared in the early sixties by George Hoefer for the Columbia boxed set called 'The Sound of Harlem'—a booklet nowhere mentioned in the bibliography. And where in the New York listings are such places as Pookie's Pub, Bourbon St., Buddy's Place, the Back Porch, Frank's Place, the Royal Box, Plaza 9, Hopper's, the Composer, the Limelight, the Roosevelt Grill, the Rainbow Grill, Shepheard's, and the Guitar?)."

Music business figures like club owners receive widely varying treatment from different authors. For example, Morris Levy, founder of Roulette Records and owner of Birdland, which opened in 1949 as a bebop club, is treated sympathetically by Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, but Frederic Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business (New York, 1990), 31-57, depicts him as a rich, colorful crook. "By the eighties," Dannen reports, "Morris Levy was worth no less than $75 million" (32). In 1988 Levy "was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit extortion" (53). In Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie , as told to Albert Murray (New York, 1985), 322, Levy is called "our old friend.'' And Dizzy Gillespie, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop , with A1 Fraser (Garden City, N.Y., 1979), 345-46, tells how, "in a shoebox full of money," Levy lent the trumpeter and his wife the downpayment on their apartment house, interest free. "Morris Levy was a nice man," Gillespie writes. "Morris Levy was very kind. If we only could have collected like that from others whose commercial success was due largely to our music."

128. Not much writing has centered specifically on jazz musicians and their management, but a good deal may be pieced together from biographies and other sources. To cite just one better-known case, under the management of Tom Rockwell, a record producer for the OKeh label, Louis Armstrong appeared in the Broadway show Hot Chocolates (1929). According to James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York, 1983), 213, the latter proved "a turning point" in Armstrong's career, making him "known to the more sophisticated New York theatergoers" as well as opening up opportunities with club owners. With Johnny Collins as manager (1931-33), Armstrong traveled to England (253), where he fired Collins for avaricious incompetence (263). Joe Glaser served as Armstrong's manager from 1935 until he died in 1969. Collier argues that, since whites controlled the infrastructure of the entertainment business—theaters, film companies, ballrooms, record companies—a successful black artist needed a competent white manager (274). Under Glaser's guidance, Armstrong landed a new recording contract with Decca (276), began in 1936 to appear in Hollywood films, and was regularly heard on radio from 1937 on (276; 278). "By the end of the 1930s," Collier writes, "Armstrong was a star. He had good management, finally, his financial problems were being solved, he was working as frequently as he cared to, making movies, broadcasting regularly" (278). Gordon, Village Vanguard , devotes an affectionate chapter to Glaser, "the most obscene, the most outrageous, and the toughest agent I've ever bought an act from" (79-83). Giddins, Satchmo , 129-36, probes the human and business sides of the Armstrong-Glaser relationship, within which Armstrong came to be not just a jazz musician but a major force in American show business. From all reports, Glaser took at least 50 percent of Armstrong's earnings, in return for managing his career and personal financial affairs.

129. Russell Sanjek, From Print to Plastic: Publishing and Promoting America's Popular Music 1900-1980 , I.S.A.M. Monographs no. 20 (Brooklyn, 1983), tells briefly what he covers at greater length in American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , in several chapters: "Popular Songs and the Movie Business" (47-56), "The Decline and Fall of the House of Albee" (57-61), "The Mechanical Music Business" (62-73), "A Simple Radio Music Box'' (74-90), and "A Glut of Movie Music" (91-114).

130. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 123.

131. Tucker, Ellington , 195-98, sorts out conflicting stories, notes that Mills recruited Ellington for a Vocalion recording session on 29 November 1926, and "began to manage the Ellington band some time after the November Vocalion date, either in late 1926 or early 1927." Terms of the first agreement are not known, but Tucker reports that later, Ellington received "45 percent of his earnings, with 45 percent going to Mills and 10 percent to Mills's lawyer" (198).

132. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 124. Tucker, Ellington , 208, notes also that Jimmy McHugh, in charge of planning a new review for the Cotton Club in 1927, was a "former associate of Irving Mills at Mills Music."

133. Mercer Ellington, with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir (Boston, 1978), 33-42, presents details of Mills's and Ellington's relationship.

134. Sanjek, American Popular Music . vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , 472. The buyers were Utilities and Industries Management Corp. of New York City, which Sanjek describes as "a $42-million public-utilities holding company that had been doing business for seventy-five years" (471).

135. The Mills stable also included several publishing firms: Jack Mills, Inc., the American Academy, Inc., the Gotham Music Service, and Milsons Music Publishing Corp. See Allen, Hendersonia , 541

136. The years 1938 and 1939 saw the publication of three major works on jazz: Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (New York, 1938), Wilder Hobson, American Jazz Music (New York, 1939), and Ramsey and Smith's Jazzmen , cited above. Delaunay's Hot Discography , also previously cited, was reissued by the Commodore Music Shop (New York, 1940). As for periodicals dealing with jazz, two foreign journals predate American counterparts: Panassiè's Jazz Hot (Paris, 1935-39) and the older Melody Maker (London, 1936-), which included jazz in its purview. Charles Edward Smith, with Frederic Ramsey, Jr., Charles Payne Rogers, and William Russell, The Jazz Record Book (New York, 1944), 510, recommended three American periodicals, Down Beat (Chicago, 1934-), whose interest in jazz begins after 1936, Metronome (New York, 1885-1961), and Music and Rhythm (Chicago, 1940-42). These journals, the authors wrote, deal "with the popular music field in general, carrying articles, bibliographies of records, and so forth, on hot music insofar as space will allow. They also carry news and feature articles pertaining to the music world."

Smith et al., Jazz Record Book , is a canon-making endeavor. The authors write: "More and more of the record companies are looking towards standard catalogs of such music, both in their contemporary output and in the issuance of old masters. The commercial term for such items almost always is qualified by the word classic " (vii). They go on to say that "only from an extremely selective choice of artists and recordings" can a listener get a true "idea of the variety and greatness" of jazz. For example, "there are probably upwards of two hundred blues pianists who play boogie woogie, but out of these twenty or so might be worth listening to as exponents of style, and perhaps a dozen would find their way into the record catalogs and, hence, into the blues and boogie woogie section of this book." With the book's help, the authors believed, "the listener will be able to find his way through record catalogs and remainder piles alike, . . . reasonably confident that what he buys will be worth listening to far in the future'' (viii-ix).

137. Collier, Reception of Jazz , 67-77, however, makes the case that many writers on jazz during the 1930s were political leftists who were writing within an edifying social framework: namely, the belief that jazz is the music of disenfranchised, exploited blacks.

138. Collier's article on jazz history in Jazzgrove says about this development that in the 1970s "schools and colleges . . . began to institute courses in jazz studies; in fact such courses became so numerous that, according to Down Beat , in the late 1970s a quarter of a million people were studying jazz formally. The US government and state and local governments began to offer grants totaling millions of dollars to jazz musicians and students" (1:605). Symptomatic of the institutionalization of jazz are the large numbers of organizations listed in Jazz-grove : Jazz and People's Movement (Roland Kirk, 1970s), Jazz Artists Guild (Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Jo Jones, 1960), Jazz Composers Guild (Bill Dixon, 1964), Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association (Carla Bley and Mike Mantler, 1966), Jazz Institute of Chicago (Don DeMicheal and others, 1969), Jazzmobile (Billy Taylor, 1964), National Association of Jazz Educators (Music Educators National Conference, 1968), and the National Jazz Service Organization (David Baker and others, 1984), which in 1985 received "a grant from the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts, allowing] it fully to establish its operations."

139. Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (New York, 1990), 5.

140. Among many examples, one that might be cited is Bob Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival (25 July 1965) with an electric guitar. R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana, Ill., 1971; reprint, Baltimore, 1973), writes that the audience's reaction was "hostile." According to a report of the time: "The' sight of the instrument infuriated the crowd. It was to them the hated emblem of rock 'n' roll, the tool of performers whose only aim was to take big money from dumb kids. In the hands of the man who had been their god, it was the symbol of the sell-out." ''Dylan was driven from the stage," Denisoff notes. "Reportedly, Pete Seeger stood backstage with tears in his eyes" (182-83).

141. A recent compact disc recording of George and Ira Gershwin's Girl Crazy (Elektra Nonesuch 9 79250-2, 1990) bears its pedigree proudly. The program booklet carries statements by Lenore (Mrs. Ira) Gershwin and James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, co-sponsors of a larger Gershwin recording project. Also included is an essay by "musical theater historian" Tommy Krasker, providing details on how the original score was constructed for this recording (39-43). One member of the orchestra told me that conductor John Mauceri had players listen to recordings from the period (1930) so that they would perform with the original concept of sound and rhythm in mind.

142. As Charles Hamm has shown, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway popular song, though sometimes touched in their rhythm and harmony by ragtime and jazz, still carried a heavy European influence. Hamm demonstrates how American songwriters from the 1920s and 1930s showed particular ingenuity and sophistication in using the harmonic vocabulary of Romanticism. See Hamm, Yesterdays , 361-72. "The mature style of Tin Pan Alley," he concludes, "drew its formal structures from earlier generations of popular song writers in America and its harmonic and melodic language from Western European classical music, particularly the German, Russian, and French composers of the second half of the nineteenth century and the very first years of the twentieth" (372). In sharp contrast, the roots of rock lie in rhythm-and-blues, which was black in origin, aesthetically distant from the world of Jerome Kern, and carried on chiefly by independent record companies and producers outside popular music's commercial mainstream. According to Robert Witmer and Anthony Marks, the term" 'rhythm-and-blues' (or 'R & B') came into use in 1949, when the music-trade paper Billboard proposed it as a replacement for 'race music;' it was in turn superseded by 'soul' in 1969, and 'black music' in 1982" (see Amerigrove 4:36).

143. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York, 1988), argues for the authenticity of rhythm and blues on the basis of the music's close connection to black expression and black audiences. George makes his case on economic as well as cultural grounds, stressing R & B's relationship to radio, its chief means of dissemination. Radio, he writes, "has historically been so intimately connected with the consciousness of blacks that it remained their primary source of entertainment and information well into the age of television" (xiii). Moreover, "one of the things that defined the R & B world, one that separated it from most other American businesses, was the ability of blacks to form businesses and profit from a product their own people created" (31). Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York, 1976), is excellent in explaining the function of blues, jazz, and other styles of black music in African-American communities. For comments that include R & B, soul, and gospel, see pages 36-42. George seeks to show that Booker T. Washington's view of how blacks should deal with racism—seize economic control of their own destiny—has virtues when compared to that of W. E. B. DuBois, who saw black involvement in high culture as the path to social equality.

Dannen, Hit Men , 87, presents what he claims to be an industry view of the difference between "pop" and "R & B." "Pop in the record industry,'' he writes, "is a euphemism for white; R & B means black. Until 1949 Billboard listed music by black artists as 'race' records, but then a staffer named Jerry Wexler coined the term rhythm and blues. This is about all that has changed (though the industry has found other euphemisms, including 'soul' and 'urban'). A rock record by a black act is automatically R & B—regardless of its sound —unless white radio plays it and white people buy it, at which point it is said to 'cross over' to the pop charts."

144. In the late 1970s composer Milton Babbitt, a faculty member at Princeton University, complained: "We receive brilliant, privileged freshmen at Princeton, who in their first year of college are likely to take a philosophy of science course with Carl Hempel, and then return to their dormitories to play the same records that the least literate members of our society embrace as the only relevant music" (see Deena Rosenberg and Bernard Rosenberg, The Music Makers [New York, 1979], 57). While those listeners would most likely have objected that the pop music they listened to was not the music heard on top forty radio, Babbitt's more general point—that even highly educated young Americans have shown almost no interest in the kind of music he and other advanced, research-oriented composers are writing—is hard to dispute. It would probably be fair to say that for many Americans—especially those who have come of age since the mid-1960s—music that lacks an explicit political message, or that lends itself readily to the imposition of no such message, lacks relevance to "real life."

145. For a start in that direction see Simon Frith, " 'The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community," in Popular Music I: Folk or Popular? Distinctions, Influences, Continuities , edited by Richard Middleton and David Horn (Cambridge, 1981), 159-68.

1. The Complete Works of William Billings , edited by Karl Kroeger and Hans Nathan, 4 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1977-90) was undertaken with the sponsorship of the American Musicological Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts as a project to commemorate the Bicentennial of the American Revolution. See also Karl Kroeger, Catalog of the Musical Works of William Billings , Music Reference Collection, no. 32 (Westport, Conn., 1991). The basic studies of Billings's life and music are J. Murray Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings (East Lansing, Mich., 1960), David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, 1975), and Hans Nathan, William Billings: Data and Documents , Bibliographies in American Music, no. 2 (Detroit, 1976).

2. Both quotations are from William Billings, The Continental Harmony (Boston, 1794), xxviii n.; reprinted in Complete Works 4:29n.

3. McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 98-102; also Complete Works 3: xviiixix.

4. Billings's The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770), a collection composed entirely by Billings himself, was first advertised for sale on 10 December 1770, some two months after the composer's twenty-fourth birthday. See Allen Perdue Britton, Irving Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Mass., 1990), 176.

5. Frèdèric Louis Ritter, Music in America , 2d ed. (New York, 1890; reprint, New York, 1970), 58, writes: "To Boston will belong most of the honor of having opened a new era for musical development in the New World. It was one of her sons who, first among Americans, stepped forward with the publication of a number of pieces of church-music composed by himself; and this first Yankee composer was William Billings. "

6. See Richard Crawford, ed., The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody , Recent Researches in American Music, vols. 11 and 12 (Madison, Wis., 1984), an edition of the 101 sacred compositions most often printed in America before 1811. Billings composed eight core repertory pieces—besides "An Anthem for Easter," A MHERST , B ROOKFIELD , C HESTER , J ORDAN , L EBANON , M AJESTY , and M ARYLAND —a total exceeded only by Daniel Read, who composed nine.

7. As one example, the anonymous compiler of a Philadelphia tunebook wrote in 1970:

On perusing the foregoing pages the Psalmodist will find a very considerable number of the most pleasing tunes, are by our ingenious countryman, Mr. Billings . Every lover of music will, I am persuaded, thank the Editor for inserting so great a proportion of tunes, from an author of such distinguished merit. By mere force of nature, he has excelled all his cotemporaries [ sic ], and equalled any, perhaps, who have gone before him, in composing for the voice. ( A Selection of Sacred Harmony , 3d ed. [Philadelphia, 1790], Appendix, quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 548)

8. See chap. 2 above, 49-50.

9. The first section of John Tasker Howard, Our American Music (New York, 1931), bears that title. See chap. 1 above, 248-49n.98.

10. Billings, New-England Psalm-Singer , 20. Quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 177.

11. Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955), was the first general history to tell that story. See especially Chap. 7, "Native Pioneers" (which includes a section on "Billings of Boston," 139-45), and Chap. 8, "Progress and Profit," in which Lowell Mason plays a leading role.

12. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , Appendix I, for a chronological list of tunebooks.

13. See Kroeger, Catalog .

14. Josiah Flagg, A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (Boston, 1764), fol. 2v, quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 272.

15. See Crawford, Core Repertory , xxiii, 3-4.

16. Both passages are from William Billings, The Singing Master's Assistant (Boston, 1778), [2], quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 181.

17. Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston, Ill., 1968), 16.

18. The passage is from Stowe's story "Poganuc People." Quoted in Chase, America's Music , 142; also in Crawford, Core Repertory , xliii.

19. Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, D.C., 1968), 15, quoted in Crawford, "A Historian's Introduction to Early American Music," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 89 (1979): 293.

20. Crawford, Core Repertory , xi-xvi, sorts out and describes the different kinds of declamatory motion.

21. Crawford, Core Repertory , xiv-xvi.

22. The tunes with four printings were published only in The Singing Master's Assistant , which appeared in four editions, all printed from the same engraved plates. The numbers are taken from an unpublished index of the entire repertory (1698-1810), made while I was working on Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , and Crawford, Core Repertory .

23. Printings referred to here are in the following collections: Andrew Law, Select Harmony ([Cheshire, Conn.], 1779); Daniel Bayley, Select Harmony ([Newburyport, Mass., 1784]); The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony (Worcester, Mass., 1786); A Selection of Sacred Harmony (Philadelphia, 1788); Amphion or the Chorister's Delight (New York, ca. 1789); E. Sandford and J. Rhea, Columbian Harmony (Baltimore, 1793; compiled in Alexandria, Virginia); Thomas H. Atwill, The New-York Collection of Sacred Harmony (Lansingburg, N.Y., 1795); The Village Harmony (Exeter, N.H., 1795); Amos Pilsbury, The United States' Sacred Harmony (Boston, 1799; compiled in Charleston, S.C.); and Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music (Harrisburg, 1810). See Crawford, Core Repertory , xxviii.

24. Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, A New Version of the Psalms of David (London, 1696). Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (London, 1719). Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Three Books (London, 1707-9). All of these works were often reprinted in America through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

25. For more on patriotic elements in Billings's texts see McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 63-65, 97-98.

26. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 2-8, for a description of tunebook types.

27. CHESTER was first published in The New-England Psalm-Singer , set to Billings's own "Let tyrants shake their iron rod," to which he added four more patriotic stanzas when he reprinted the tune in The Singing Master's Assistant . That text hardly survived the war, however. In later years, C HESTER appeared most often as a setting of Philip Doddridge's hymn, "Let the high heav'ns your songs unite." The original words were still sometimes sung on patriotic occasions. See Crawford, Core Repertory , xxx-xxxi.

28. Crawford, Core Repertory , li.

29. George Hood, A History of Music in New England: With Biographical Sketches of Reformers and Psalmists (Boston, 1846; reprint, New York, 1970), documents the custom in some congregations during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries of singing the whole psalter. The Salem, Mass., First Church records for 1667 complain of Ainsworth's collection of tunes that "we had not the liberty of singing all the Scripture Psalm's according to Col. 3.16" (53). Church records in Plymouth, Mass., from 1692 record that on 19 June the congregation resolved to "consider of some way of accommodation, that we might sing all the psalms," and on 14 August, "began to sing the psalms in course" (54). According to Hood, in Massachusetts in the early eighteenth century, "in pious families two [psalms] were sung every day in the week, and on the Lord's day not less than eight, thus repeating each psalm not less than six times a year" (78). Moreover, in congregations at this time, Hood writes, "the psalms were not selected to suit the preacher's subject, but were sung in order; at least this was the custom for one part of the day, and in many congregations it was their constant rule'' (79; see also page 81 for Cotton Mather's documentation of that premise). I have found no evidence that congregations of Billings's time continued the earlier custom of singing the whole psalter, nor that they gave it up. Thanks to Nym Cooke for calling my attention to these references.

30. See McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 221-30, on Billings's attempts to copyright his music.

31. McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 228.

32. Of the fifty-one compositions in The Continental Harmony , only four—S T . T HOMAS , S UDBURY , T HOMAS T OWN , and WEST S UDBURY —-or 8 percent, were printed in American tunebooks in the succeeding fifteen years (1795-1810). In the other four tunebooks Billings devoted to his own music, the proportion of compositions borrowed by other compilers is higher: The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), 20 percent; The Singing Master's Assistant (1778), 72 percent; The Psalm-Singer's Amusement (1781), 50 percent; and The Suffolk Harmony (1786), 44 percent.

33. Cf. Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 643-44 with 644-46.

34. Karl D. Kroeger, "The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony and Sacred Music in America 1786-1803," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1976, is the standard work on Thomas and his tunebook.

35. Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 6-8, documents The Worcester Collection's impact as a model for other tunebooks.

36. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 7, for the figures.

37. Simeon Jocelin, The Chorister's Companion (New Haven, 1782-83) carries no compiler's name. However, its title page reports that it was "printed for and sold by Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle." Doolittle signed the work as engraver. The preface, which is unsigned, uses the plural "we," indicating that Jocelin and Doolittle were co-compilers as well as copublishers. A second edition (1788), also without compiler's name, was "published and sold by Simeon Jocelin," and the preface is written in the singular. The preface of The Chorister's Companion's first edition is dated 16 December 1782; it was advertised for sale as early as 19 December. It also contains a forty-eight-page supplement, "Part Third'' with a separate title page but no separate date. Because it is not known whether Part Third was issued with the rest or later, I have treated it here as a part of the first edition. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 366-70, for bibliographical details.

38. Other spondaic tunes in The Singing Master's Assistant are BALTIMORE (six printings), H OLLIS S TREET (five), and R OXBURY (five).

39. See Playford's English Dancing Master 1651. A facsimile Reprint, with an Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes , edited by Margaret Dean-Smith (London, 1957). The rhythm of "Saraband" (18) is almost identical to J UDEA from start to finish, though its melodic contour is different. And the melody to Playford's "Tom Tinker" (74) begins with a similar gesture, though it soon goes a different way.

40. The Chorister's Companion (New Haven, 1782), 1, quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 368.

41. Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964), 72-77, illuminates relationships between Law's and Thomas's tunebooks.

42. Worcester Collection (1786), fol. 2v, proclaims:

For the progress of Psalmody in this country the Publick are in a great measure indebted to the musical abilities of Mr. William Billings , of Boston: It is but doing him justice here to observe, that he was the first person we know of that attempted to compose Church Musick, in the New-England States; his music has met with great approbation. Many tunes of his composing are inserted in this work, and are extracted from the Chorister's Companion, printed in Connecticut, from Copper-plates. (Quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 621)

43. The Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany (April 1788): 212-13, quoted in McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 155-56. According to the author of this piece, Billings's style "upon the whole bears a strong resemblance to that of Handel, and nature seems to have made him just such a musician, as she made Shakespeare a poet."

44. See above, chap. 1, p. 25 and n. 83.

1. George F. Root, The Story of a Musical Life: An Autobiography (Cincinnati, 1891; reprint, New York, 1973), 112. The autobiography is the basic source on Root's life and career. See also Polly H. Carder, "George Frederick Root, Pioneer Music Educator: His Contributions to Mass Instruction in Music," Ed.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1971, and the article in Amerigrove 4: 85-87, by Dena J. Epstein and H. Wiley Hitchcock.

2. Of his life at Willow Farm in Massachusetts in the late 1850s, for example, Root wrote: "These were ideal days—writing until noon, and then driving to a neighboring town, or fishing in some of the pretty ponds that were all about us. The favorite fishing ground was a little lake in North Andover, about eight miles away, and many a time have we spent until dark, after our return, distributing to the neighbors the surplus fish of our afternoon's catch" (Root, Story , 122).

3. The work-list by Carder in Amerigrove 4: 86-87 names all of Root's collections, cantatas, and method books, plus the most popular of the more than 200 songs he composed.

4. Root, Story , 46-48.

5. Root, Story , 3.

6. William W. Austin, " Susanna," "Jeanie," and ''The Old Folks at Home": The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours (New York, 1975), 262.

7. Root, Story , 9.

8. Root, Story , 7.

9. Root, Story , 18.

10. W. S. B. Mathews, ed., A Hundred Years of Music in America (Chicago, 1889; reprint, New York, 1970), 68.

11. At the first meeting of the Music Teachers' National Association (Delaware, Ohio, December 1876), George W Chadwick, then a twenty-two-year-old instructor at Olivet College in Michigan, delivered a paper, "Popular Music— Wherein Reform Is Necessary." In Chadwick's view, popular music lacked truth and suffered from an "utter lack of originality." As a result, he believed, "music has been and still continues to be dragged through the mire. Our own businesslike, avaricious, Yankee natures have caused us to forget, in this headlong race after money, that music as an art is a very different thing from music as a business." Root, who attended the meeting, rose to defend his own popular songs when Chadwick had finished his denunciation. Although "they are simple in character," he argued, "I have no reason to be ashamed of them" (quoted in Victor Fell Yellin, Chadwick: Yankee Composer [Washington, D.C., 1990], 23-25).

12. In the early 1850s, for example, Nathan Richardson entered the music publishing business in Boston. As Root tells it, Richardson had lived some years in Germany, and had come home filled with a strong desire to improve the musical tastes of the benighted people of his native land. This sounds like laughing at my old friend. Well, it is so; but not so much as I have done to his face many a time. . .. He determined that he would publish nothing but high-class music. I doubt if there was an American then whose compositions he would have taken as a gift. He had an elegant store on Washington street, fitted and furnished in an expensive manner through the generosity of an older brother, who had plenty of money. . .. All went well for a few months. Musicians met there and greatly enjoyed a chat amid the luxurious surroundings, and they occasionally bought a piece of music when they found what their pupils could use. . .. But it did not pay. At length both Nathan and the rich brother became convinced that they could not make people buy music, however fine, that they could not understand nor perform, and they found that calling the music that the common people liked, "trash," did not help the matter at all.

Eventually (see below), Richardson asked Root to write some songs for his publishing house "that the people would buy" ( Story , 110-11).

In Root's judgment, musical societies in America had been blighted by the same misconception. The history of musical societies is pretty uniform. A few insist in the outset upon practicing music beyond the ability of the chorus to perform, and of the audience to enjoy, and both drop off. Then come debt and appeals to the consciences of the chorus, and the purses of the patrons, to sustain a worthy (?) enterprise. Then follows a lingering death—and all because a few leading members will not give up the difficult music they like best, for the simple music that can be well sung and so enjoyed. ( Story , 204)

As for Root's own autonomous leanings, he cites with pride the formation, shortly after his move to New York City (1844), of a vocal quintet (Root, his wife, his sister, his brother, and a bass singer) that he rehearsed to near-perfection. "I could carry out every conception I had in the way of expression," he wrote: "increasing, diminishing, accelerating or retarding, sudden attack or delicate shading, with the utmost freedom, being sure that all would go exactly with me." When the quintet sang Mendelssohn's "Hunting Song'' for Theodore Eisfeld, conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society, Eisfeld was impressed enough to invite them to sing on the Philharmonic's next concert. "The papers," Root recalled, "said only pleasant things of our performances," and "from that time on I had the good will and friendship of the best musicians in New York" ( Story , 42-43). Within a few years Root was being urged by such colleagues as William Bradbury and Isaac Woodbury to compile instructional tunebooks. "We are doing well in that line," they told him. Root confides: "I am ashamed to say it, but I looked then with some contempt upon their grade of work. My ladies' classes and choirs were singing higher music and my blind pupils were exciting the admiration of the best musical people of the city by their performances of a still higher order of compositions." Still captivated by pride in his own students' accomplishments, Root compiled his first tunebook, George F. Root and Joseph E. Sweetser, eds., A Collection of Church Music . . . with New and Original Sentences, Motetts, Anthems &c . (New York, 1849). Root describes it as containing "an elementary department which, for scientific but uninteresting exercises, could not be excelled." The book proved ill-adapted "for popular use." See Root, Story , 52-54.

13. Root, Story , 97, asserts that only "two or three" genius composers— composers "who invent and give to the world new forms and harmonies that live "—appear in a century. He rates Mendelssohn, though a "great composer," a lesser figure than Beethoven and Wagner. Visiting London in 1851, Root heard performances of Messiah and Elijah that he considered "authentic and authoritative, both for tempos and style,'' and that served him as touchstones in later years ( Story , 76). See also Story , 67-68, for evidence of his interest in performing traditions. As Root saw it, The first English tenor of this generation is Edward Lloyd. In the last generation Sims Reeves was the acknowledged best, and in the generation before, [John] Braham. When, therefore, at a recent Musical Festival in Cincinnati (May, 1888), I heard Lloyd, I had heard the three great tenors of the three generations, and what greatly increased the interest of this fact was, that I heard Braham sing Handel's "Sound an alarm," Sims Reeves the "Cujus animam" [from Rossini's Stabat Mater ], and Edward Lloyd both of those songs.

14. Root, Story , 54-55. On page 54 he explains the failure of his first tune-book by confessing: "I did not then realize what people in elementary musical states needed."

15. Root, Story , 98.

16. Root, Story , 101. Much in demand for "conventions," Root writes that he "could easily have occupied every week of the year" in that work, William Bradbury and he "being almost the only prominent people in it for a while." Yet he also felt "a constant pressure for a book, or a cantata, or songs, so I spent about half the time at my desk" ( Story , 121).

17. Root, Story , 8.

18. Root, Story , 9, describes the state in which the psalmody of Billings and his contemporaries had survived in his own youth.

A singing-school had been held in the old red school-house, where "faw, sol, law, faw, sol, law, me, faw," were the syllables for the scale—where one must find the " me note" (seven) to ascertain what key he was singing in, and where some of the old "fuguing tunes," as they were called, were still sung. I well remember how, shortly after, we heard that a new system of teaching music had been introduced into Boston, in which they used a blackboard and sang "do, re, mi," etc., to the scale. But how silly "do" sounded. We thought it smart to say that the man who invented that was a dough -head.

19. Root, Story , 26-27.

20. In Root's Story , Lowell Mason is a dominating figure: Root's respected mentor, model, and, eventually, colleague. From the time of Root's successful audition for Mason's Boston Academy Chorus in 1838 (14), to his teaching as Mason's deputy in the Boston Public Schools in 1840 (26), to his teaching in one of Mason's conventions in 1841 (28-29), to his carrying Mason's teaching methods to New York in 1844 (37), to his enlisting Mason himself to teach at the first three-month normal institute in New York City in 1853 (85), Root linked his professional destiny to Mason and his work.

21. Root, Story , 95.

22. Root, Story , 82-83.

23. Root, Story , 49.

24. Root, Story , 81.

25. After he began composing, however, Root did take "a course of lessons . . . from an excellent harmonist and teacher" in New York: "a Frenchman by the name of Girac" ( Story , 98).

26. Root, Story , 81-82.

27. Root, Story , 82.

28. In Root, Story , 201, he writes: "It is interesting to note the popularity of the idea of 'cantatas for the people.' We know at once what is meant when we say 'songs for the people.' In that sense I use the term 'cantatas for the people.' " And he claims credit for inventing the genre: "They began with 'The Flower Queen,' 'Daniel,' and 'The Haymakers,' as representatives of the three kinds— juvenile, scriptural, and secular. They have multiplied greatly of late years, especially in England."

29. "The Hazel Dell," Root's "first successful song," won him a contract with New York publishing house William Hall and Son to bring out all his "sheet music publications for three years" (1852-55; Story , 91). At the end of that period, Nathan Richardson, who was struggling to survive in the music publishing business, asked Root to write him songs "that the people would buy." Among the half dozen that Root produced was ''Rosalie, the Prairie Flower." As Root told the story:

When I took the songs to my friend he said he would prefer to buy them outright. What would I take for the "lot"? There was a bit of sarcasm in the last word. "Well," I replied, "as you propose a wholesale instead of a retail transaction, you shall have the 'lot' at wholesale prices, which will be one hundred dollars apiece—six hundred dollars for all." He laughed at the idea. His splendid foreign reprints had cost him nothing. The idea of paying such a sum for these little things could not be thought of. "Very well," I said, "Give me the usual royalty; that will suit me quite as well." This was agreed to, and when he had paid me in royalties nearly three thousand dollars for "Rosalie" alone, he concluded that six hundred for the "lot" would not have been an unreasonable price, especially as all the songs of the set had a fair sale, for which he had to pay in addition.

Root concludes this anecdote with a reaffirmation of his belief in the "wisdom" of musicians who understand "what people in elementary states must have" ( Story , III).

30. The copy is in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. The added fermata is on page 5.

31. The cover reads: "Christy's Old Folks Are Gone as Sung by E. P. Christy at Christy's Opera House, N. Y." For more on Christy see above, chap. 3, 76.

32. Austin, " Susanna," "Jeanie," and "The Old Folks At Home ," 264.

33. Root, Story , 89.

34. Root, Story , 96-97.

35. Root, Story , 132.

36. Root, Story , 54.

37. Root, Story , 138.

38. Austin, " Susanna," "Jeanie," and "The Old Folks At Home ," 131-34, discusses Moore's influence on Foster's songs.

39. Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979), 139. "There is not a black face in this collection of lovely and beloved ladies," Hamm writes. "But their tales and tunes would have been unimaginable without the plantation song of the minstrel stage."

40. Austin, " Susanna," "Jeanie, "and "The Old Folks At Home ," 264, also notes that Fanny Crosby wrote the words of "The Hazel Dell,'' as she did for "about half" the "nearly a hundred songs" that Root published in his early years (266). In Amerigrove 1:547, Mel R. Wilhoit also attributes to Crosby the words to "There's Music in the Air" and "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower." It was not until 1864, Wilhoit says, that Crosby "turned her poetic talents to hymnwriting," the work for which she is most often remembered today.

41. Austin, " Susanna," "Jeanie," and "The Old Folks At Home ," 264.

42. Quoted in Root, Story , 122.

43. With keen rhetorical relish, Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955), denounces "the genteel tradition" in nineteenth-century American music, linking it with "the cult of the fashionable, the worship of the conventional, the emulation of the elegant, the cultivation of the trite and artificial, the indulgence of sentimentality, and the predominance of superficiality." Admitting that "we cannot afford to neglect these songs," for "some of them continue to appeal to the sentimental streak that is in all of us," Chase still claims that nineteenth-century Americans "as a whole" lived in a "state of aesthetic immaturity. Hence the success," he explains, "of any music that made a blatant appeal to the feelings of the listeners . . .. Aesthetic appreciation—that is, the quality that permits an artistic experience to be received and enjoyed as such—was almost entirely lacking. People were continually crossing the line that separates art from reality; indeed, most of them were not aware that such a dividing line existed" (165- 66). Neither this passage nor the point it makes appears in Chase's third revised edition (1987).

44. The copy is found in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

45. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years , vol. 2, From 1790 to 1909 (New York, 1988), 137-38, prints D. W. Krummel's estimates of American sheet-music production. According to Krummel, in the half-decade 1841-45, the trade issued roughly 1,600 titles, which increased to 3,000 in the years 1846-50 and to 5,000 in 1851-55, the time of Root's own entry into the market.

46. In Amerigrove 3:560, Cynthia Adams Hoover writes that in 1840 Boston piano maker Jonas Chickering "patented a metal frame with a cast-iron bridge for a square piano" of the kind found in many American parlors. Hoover adds that Chickering "was the first to devise a successful method of manufacturing and selling pianos with metal frames."

47. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction , 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1988), 77, writes: "Having decided to try for some of the popular household-song market occupied by Foster but taking a patronizing attitude toward it, Root sought a pseudonym; in view of the adulation of German musicians at the time, a German translation of his own name was his choice."

48. Root, Story , 63, relates this incident with more than a hint of embarrassment. Guido Alary, Root's voice teacher in Paris, invited him at the end of a lesson to attend "the last rehearsal" of an opera Alary had composed. "I was in trouble," Root admitted.

I knew I could not make him conceive how there could be any conscientious scruples against accepting his invitation, but at that time, in the church to which I belonged, it was thought wrong to go to opera or theatrical representations, and I determined when I left home that I would do nothing in Paris that I would not do in New York. So I explained as well as I could why I could not go. He did not understand it at all, as I knew he could not, and evidently regarded me as a kind of fanatic—an opinion in which I coincided a few years later.

49. Root's own explanation of his verbal disguise harks back to the conflict between whether a musician should serve music or the public. When he began to compose, he perceived at once that he was best suited for "the 'people's song.' " Yet he admitted that at that time, "I am ashamed to say, I shared the feeling that was around me in regard to that grade of music. When Stephen C. Foster's wonderful melodies (as I now see them) began to appear, and the famous Christy's Minstrels began to make them known, I 'took a hand in' and wrote a few, but put 'G. Friedrich Wurzel' . . . to them instead of my own name. 'Hazel Dell' and 'Rosalie, the Prairie Flower' were the best known of those so written" ( Story , 83). Root adds that friends "who knew who 'Wurzel' was, used to say: 'Aim high; he who aims at the sun will reach farther than he will who has a lower object for a mark.' But I saw so many failures on the part of those who were 'aiming high,' " he explains, "that I had no temptation in that direction, but preferred to shoot at something I could hit" ( Story , 95).

Root was not the only song composer of the time to affect a pseudonym. He recalled an "eminent musician in New York" who boasted that he "could write a dozen" so-called people's songs "in a day . . .. Thinking there might be money in it, he did try under a nom de plume . But his dozen or less of 'simple songs' slumbered quietly on the shelves of a credulous publisher until they went to the paper mill" ( Story , 97).

Chase, America's Music , 3d ed., 155, wrongly ascribes to "the Lowell Mason circle" Root's initial reluctance to admit publicly his composition of "people's songs." As Root says, "it was not until I imbibed more of Dr. Mason's spirit, and went more among the people of the country, that I saw these things in a truer light, and respected myself, and was thankful when I could write something that all the people would sing" ( Story , 83). Mason's "circle," in other words, supported rather than disapproved of the spirit of Root's new venture.

50. The separation of the two personas, however, is not entirely clear-cut. While "Wurzel" compiled no tunebooks, "Root" did publish some songs. Perhaps more bibliographical work will reveal patterns that are not now discernible—Wurzel's fondness for the minstrel stage, for example, and Root's absence from it. The earliest published song by Root that I have seen dates from 1852. All the songs discovered so far from the years 1852-54 were published by William Hall of New York, to whom Root, for a time, was under contract (cf. n. 29 above). Of more than a dozen songs Hall published in those years, only "The Old Folks Are Gone," "The Hazel Dell," and ''Old Josey" were attributed to Wurzel. The rest were attributed to Root, including "Early Lost, Early Saved," "Mary of the Glen," "The Reaper on the Plain," and "The Time of the Heart" (all 1852), and "Look on the Bright Side" and "The World as It Is" (1853), plus "Pity, O Saviour" (1854; arranged from Stradella by G.F.R.). In 1855, ten new secular songs came out, all attributed to Wurzel, and the single songs from 1856 and 1858 carried Wurzel's name as well. The Wurzel songs of 1855-56 were issued in Boston and New York. By 1858, Root and Cady of Chicago had become Root's song publisher, and a dozen new songs came out in 1859-60, half by Root and half by Wurzel. From 1861 on, Wurzel listings decline sharply: two of fifteen songs in 1861, two of nine in 1862, one of fifteen in 1863-64, and one of fourteen in 1865. The last Wurzel song I have found, "Banner of the Fatherland," was published in 1870.

51. George F. Root and W. B. Bradbury, Daniel: Or the Captivity and Restoration, a Sacred Cantata in Three Parts (Boston, 1853), was written to a text by C. M. Cady and Fanny Crosby. Of this work Root explained:

About the time the cantata was completed I was approached with reference to making a church-music book with [William] Bradbury. This I was very glad to do, and "The Shawm" was the result. All interested thought it would be a good plan to print the new cantata at the end of the book— that many of its choruses could be used as anthems, and that some of its solos and quartets might also find a place in church service. So that was done; but in order that Mr. Bradbury's name might rightfully appear as joint author, I took out two of my numbers from the cantata, and he filled their places. "The Shawm" was a success, but the cantata was so much called for, separate from the book, that it was not bound up with it after the first or second edition . . . "Daniel" has been printed as a book by itself ever since. ( Story , 89)

In addition, Root published The Pilgrim Fathers: A Cantata in Two Parts (New York, 1854), with words by Fanny Crosby.

52. Root, Story , 113. From the time of the firm's founding in 1853 until 1864, Mason Brothers of New York City published Root's instructional books and cantatas, and he describes himself as being "in constant communication" with them. Root credits Lowell Mason, Jr., the house's senior partner, with a key role in The Haymakers . First, Mason "suggested that I should write a cantata for mixed voices, but on some secular subject." Then, "to a great extent," Mason "planned it, not only as to characters and action, but as to what, in a general way, each number should be about. Taking his plan," Root reports, "I wrote both words and music.''

53. George F. Root, The Haymakers , edited by Dennis R. Martin, Recent Researches in American Music, vols. 9 and 10 (Madison, Wis., 1984), 197-98.

54. Dwight's Journal of Music , March 1859, quoted in Root, Haymakers , ed. D. Martin, ix. Note that the accompaniment to this work is for piano, ad lib; only a partially realized piano part is given in the published score.

55. Root's autobiography traces his involvement with the firm.

In 1858 [while he was still living at Willow Farm], my brother, E. T. Root, and Mr. C. M. Cady started a music business in Chicago . . . under the firm name of Root & Cady. My convention work brought me occasionally to their neighborhood, and it was an odd and very pleasant sensation to find in this new section a kind of business home. This was not so much on account of the small pecuniary interest I had in the enterprise as the great interest I took in everything my brother did . . .. Whatever applications for conventions I declined, none from the West were refused, and I appeared more and more frequently at the little store. It was very pleasant to see the new business grow, and it was not long before the partners said: "Come, put in some more capital, and join us; we need the capital, and your name will help us." I was delighted with the idea, not that I thought of giving up my professional work—I did not dream of that, nor of living in Chicago; but to have this connection with my brother, and this business for a kind of recreation, was extremely attractive. So it was soon brought about, and I became a partner in the house of Root & Cady. ( Story , 122-23)

Within a few years, "the little business was improving," and Root "enjoyed more and more being in the neighborhood of its small whirl" (130).

56. Root, Story , 130.

57. Root, Story , 136.

58. Dena J. Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago before 1871: The Firm of Root & Cady, 1858-1871 , Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography, no. 14 (Detroit, 1969), 48.

59. Root, Story , 133. Facsimile reprints of "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "Who'll Save the Left?," "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (or The Prisoner's Hope)," ''Just Before the Battle, Mother," "O Come You from the Battle-Field?," "The Vacant Chair (or We Shall Meet but We Shall Miss Him)," and "Glory! Glory! (or The Little Octoroon)" may be found in Richard Crawford, ed., The Civil War Songbook: Complete Original Sheet Music for Thirty-seven Songs (New York, 1977).

60. The title phrase is still firmly identified with the period. James M. McPherson's prize-winning history of the Civil War is entitled Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era , Oxford History of the United States (New York, 1988); and McPherson goes so far as to print the words and tune of Root's song— including a Confederate version—on the page facing his preface. A column by Mike Royko printed in my local newspaper, The Ann Arbor News , on Flag Day (14 June) 1990 criticized members of the United States Congress for "rallying round the flag" (i.e., trying to make political hay from a constitutional amendment against flag-burning) when more pressing issues remained to be solved.

61. Root, Story , 132-33, describes the song's genesis.

I heard of President Lincoln's second call for troops one afternoon while reclining on a lounge in my brother's house. Immediately a song started in my mind, words and music together: "Yes, we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again, / Shouting the battle-cry of freedom!" I thought it out that afternoon, and wrote it the next morning at the store. The ink was hardly dry when the Lumbard brothers—the great singers of the war— came in for something to sing at a war meeting that was to be holden immediately in the court-house square just opposite. They went through the new song once, and then hastened to the steps of the court-house, followed by a crowd that had gathered while the practice was going on. Then Jule's magnificent voice gave out the song, and Frank's trumpet tones led the refrain—"The Union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah!" and at the fourth verse a thousand voices were joining in the chorus. From there the song went into the army.

62. Mathews, One Hundred Years , 98.

63. The Story of a Musical Life makes it clear that war songs contributed greatly to Root and Cady's financial success in the early 1860s. Root's last hit, "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," though not published until 1864, reaped a profit of $10,000 in "less than a year." But when the war ended, Root recalled, "the war songs stopped as if they had been shot," for "everybody had had enough of war" ( Story , 151-52). As the years passed, however, public memory of the war's horrors began to fade. Root explained: "Time has changed the terrible realism of the march and the battle-field into tender and hallowed memories" (202). See also Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York, 1987), "Epilogue." By the late 1880s, the war had gained a foothold in patriotic lore, veterans' organizations were being formed, and war songs were starting to play an important part in the new celebratory atmosphere, for these songs were still remembered by millions of Americans, and they preserved much of the emotional climate of that perilous time. Root writes of the new fashion of "war-song" concerts, of his being elected to membership in the exclusive Loyal Legion for the inspiring songs he had written, of the many anecdotes that grew up around the songs, of the letters he received from veterans and their families relating details of his songs' performances and their efficacy, and of the honors that came his way for them ( Story , 202-4, 210-15). Root's impact on American musical life, as this chapter has sought to show, was considerable. But through his war songs, his influence reached much further. They made him a player in this country's greatest national drama as it was taking place, and, long after the sounds of battle had died away, songs like his could still kindle the war's emotion-charged memories as perhaps nothing else was able to do.

Further verifying Root's enduring place in American culture are the parodies of some of his war songs that found their way into the labor movement. Philip S. Foner, American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1975), cites "The Battle Cry of Freedom" (264, 270, 276, 279, 304), "Just Before the Battle, Mother" (163), "The Little Octoroon" (268), and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" (112, 114, 141, 157, 164, 217, 232, 280, and 314) as examples that have appeared over the years in labor songsters—e.g., "Shouting the Battle-Cry of Labor'' in Vincent's Alliance and Labor Songster (270). Moreover, Irwin Silber, comp. and ed., Songs America Voted By with the Words and Music That Won and Lost Elections and Influenced the Democratic Process (Harrisburg, Pa., 1971), shows how "The Battle Cry of Freedom" (92, 93, 99, 135, 155, 174), "Just Before the Battle, Mother" (96, 206), and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" (98, 137, 142, 268) were used as rallying songs in later presidential election campaigns.

64. Root, Story , 193-94.

65. Root, Story , 174, invokes his ideal of service and duty to explain why "the English people have been using our American music for so many years." It is not, he contends, "that we are better composers than the English, but that we are nearer and more in sympathy with those for whom we write."

66. Root, Story , 192.

67. Austin, " Susanna," "Jeanie," and "The Old Folks At Home ," devotes Chapter ix to "'People's Song' Writers Following Foster." The chapter concludes with these words:

The comprehensive tradition that Root called "people's song" embraced many distinguishable subdivisions, not merely a spectrum of types from simplest to most complicated, but a network: patriotic songs, hymns, parodies, cantatas; solo songs, performances with and without instruments, performances by close-knit groups and by crowds of thousands; exclusively white groups, separate Black groups, groups segregated within one bigger group, and occasionally mixed groups integrated, especially in Britain or Canada. The Foster songs were adaptable throughout this range. They helped to unify it. It reinforced their popularity. (280-81)

68. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 2, From 1790 to 1909 , 66.

69. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (New York, 1975), 113, quotes Chandler.

70. Root, Story , 97.

71. Root, Story , 99. Esther Heidi Rothenbusch, "The Role of Gospel Hymns Nos. 1 to 6 (1875-1894) in American Revivalism," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1991, 304, notes the pentatonic melody of "The Shining Shore" and calls it a "gospel spiritual . . . bridging the gap between the end of the Second Awakening [and the campmeeting spiritual of the early nineteenth century] and the advent of gospel hymnody."

1. Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), x. Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir (Boston, 1978), 171-72, describes the commissioning and writing of Music Is My Mistress . Mercer notes that Stanley Dance, Ellington's collaborator, had expected that it would be done with a tape recorder, following the same method they had used for articles, so he was surprised to find that Pop intended to write it himself. The manuscript that eventually materialized was undoubtedly unique. It was written on hotel stationery, table napkins, and menus from all over the world. Stanley became so familiar with the handwriting that he could often decipher it when Pop could not. That is the meaning of the minuscule credit at the beginning of the book, which they mutually agreed upon.

In the credit—part of the "Acknowledgements" printed on the verso of the title page—Ellington hails Dance as "Monarch Miracolissimo for extrasensory perception revealed in his amazing ability to decipher my handwriting." Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 310, reports about Music Is My Mistress that "large sections of the manuscript . . . written in longhand on hotel stationery from around the world—are now in the Smithsonian's Duke Ellington Collection." Tucker finds the work "invaluable for providing Ellington's own view of his career and development—often filtered through layers of protective coating, diplomatic tact, and historical self-consciousness." And he considers it ''especially rich in information about the early years." James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York, 1987), in an opinion that suggests a less-than-careful reading, treats the autobiography as evidence "that Duke Ellington was a dreadful writer. . .. There is nothing in the interviews he gave," Collier contends, nor "in his book Music Is My Mistress . . . to suggest that Ellington was in any way the wise and ultimately sophisticated man he actually was" (295).

2. Ellington, Music , 468.

3. In "Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday," written for the Washington Sunday Star , 27 April 1969, Ralph Ellison highlights the "aura of mockery" surrounding Ellington and his persona, hinting also at its complexity.

Mockery speaks through his work and through his bearing. . .. He is one of the most handsome of men, and to many his stage manners are so suave and gracious as to appear a put-on—which quite often they are. And his manner, like his work, serves to remind us of the inadequacies of our myths, our legends, our conduct, and our standards. . .. For many years he has been telling us how marvelous, mad, violent, hopeful, nostalgic, and (perhaps) decent we are. He is one of the musical fathers of our country, and throughout all these years he has, as he tells us so mockingly, loved us madly. (See Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory [New York, 1986], 225-26)

4. Tucker, Ellington , 24. Ellington dedicated his autobiography: "To my mother and father, Daisy Kennedy Ellington and James Edward Ellington."

5. In writing about musical associates, Ellington, who attributed much of his own success to his upbringing, lost few chances to praise the families in which these men were raised. Of Otto Hardwick he wrote: "His father and mother were wonderful people . . . Toby's background was solid and he never felt insecure, a wonderful feeling for any human being" (Ellington, Music , 50-51). Sonny Greer grew up "in a fine home, . . . wonderfully warm" (51). Jenny Carney, Harry's mother, was ''a lovely lady, and a good cook known for her warm hospitality" (111). The family of Ray Nance, who lived in Chicago, were "wonderful" and "hospitable" (162). As for Paul Gonsalves, Ellington says that he came "from a beautiful family in New Bedford, Rhode Island. His mother is beautiful, his sisters and brothers are beautiful, and all of his children are beautiful" (221).

6. Ellington, Music , 457.

7. Rex Stewart, who played with Ellington from 1934 to 1945, wrote in his autobiographical Boy Meets Horn , edited by Claire P. Gordon (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991):

Ellington is the most complex and paradoxical individual that I've ever known. He is completely unpredictable, a combination of Sir Galahad, Scrooge, Don Quixote and God knows what other saints and sinners that were apt to pop out of his ever-changing personality. The above are the facets which he permits to be observed. Deep down under this facade there is the devout man, the one who reads his Bible every day and the caring family man who never forgets for a minute the ones he loves. And, at the same time, rarely did he forget or forgive anything. I could go on and on trying to describe this indescribable man. (156)

Stanley Dance, who delivered the eulogy at Ellington's funeral, noted on that occasion what a "complex human being" Ellington was, at once sophisticated, primitive, humorous, tolerant, positive, ironic, childlike (not childish), lionlike, shepherdlike, Christian. . .. I certainly would never pretend that I wholly knew this wonderful man, although I spent much time in his company and enjoyed his trust. . .. His various associates and friends knew different aspects of him, but never, as they readily admit, the whole man. (Quoted in Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 217)

Mercer Ellington's book devotes most of Chap. 6 to a discussion of Ellington's character traits, which, he said, included taking "pleasure in manipulating people" (149), watching his health (149-52), being a spokesman for black Americans (152-53), being superstitious (153-54), having a tendency toward paranoia (157-59), remaining alert to the musical opinions of the younger generation (160-61), having bouts of despondency (164), being a good businessman who didn't want to be bothered with business details (162-68), maintaining dominance by knowing the weaknesses of those who worked with him, and being sparing in compliments to his men ("after fifty years of dealing with musicians his theory was that to praise them was to raise the price," 168).

8. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (New York, 1989), 48, 157.

9. Tucker, Ellington , 259-72, is an appendix listing chronologically the "Compositions and Recordings of Duke Ellington, 1914-November 1927." According to Tucker, Ellington's output as a composer before 1923 consists of just two piano pieces and a song from the years 1914-17. A song called "Blind Man's Buff," for which Ellington wrote the music, was copyrighted in 1923 but never published. Ellington's first published song, "Choo Choo (I Gotta Hurry Home)," was issued by the Broadway Music Corp. on 5 September 1924, more than four months after his twenty-fifth birthday.

10. Edmund Anderson, a friend of Ellington's, recalled in an interview that later in life he had once suggested that the composer go to Juilliard and study theory formally. According to Anderson, Ellington replied: "Edmund, if I were to do that I think I'd lose everything else that I have. I would ruin everything" (Collier, Duke Ellington , 21-22). Ellington's early teacher was Henry Grant. See Tucker, Ellington , 59, 61-62.

11. Ken Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer (London, 1990), 306-7, an appendix of "Ellington's Copyrighted Works," provides some statistics. He attributes 769 compositions to Ellington "as sole composer," 191 to Ellington "in collaboration with musicians in his employ," and 52 to Ellington "in collaboration with others," for a total of 1,012 works. In the second category, Ellingtonians who contributed 5 or more works are Barney Bigard (10), Johnny Hodges (23), Bubber Miley (5), Rex Stewart (8), Billy Strayhorn (102), Juan Tizol (8), and Cootie Williams (9). In a highly critical review of Rattenbury's book, Andrew Homzy questions the total of 1,012.

My rough count, from a nineteen-page ASCAP listing, yields 1,119 individual pieces. (This includes the few arrangements of public domain material, e.g., The Nutcracker Suite , that are more on the level of re-compositions or perhaps sets of very sophisticated variations. Still, many of these have fallen through the cracks because of sloppy business practices and the failure to register some pieces by Ellington's three major publishers. Nor is Ellington's last work, incidentally, the opera Queenie Pie , considered in either count.) (Andrew Homzy, Review of Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer by Ken Rattenbury, Notes 48 (1992): 1,241)

12. Paraphrased from Stewart in Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York, 1977), 102; quoted from Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , 23.

13. Rex Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York, 1972), 97-98. A paper Mark Tucker delivered at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1989 (Austin, Texas), challenged the view that Ellington composed only in the way described here. By the late 1930s, if not before, Ellington was also writing out some pieces in much greater detail, including even suggestions for "improvised" solos. (Gunther Schuller confirmed Tucker's point in a talk at the Smithsonian Institution on 27 April 1990.) Tucker found evidence for this side of Ellington's composing in the Smithsonian's Duke Ellington Collection. Of that collection, he notes: "After years of inaccessibility, Ellington's personal library of music and memorabilia was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1988. This collection will form the cornerstone for much future Ellington research, containing as it does an extraordinary cache of Ellington original scores, orchestral parts, and sketches." He adds that "after spending two months in the summer of 1988 surveying the collection, I found little relating directly to Ellington's life and music before 1930" (Tucker, Ellington , 312).

14. Ellington used the phrase in Music . See, e.g., page 54, where he writes of Arthur Whetsol: "As a trumpet player, he had a tonal personality that has never really been duplicated. Sweet, but not syrupy, nor schmaltzy, nor surrealistic, it had a superiority of extrasensory dimensions." And in a eulogy written the night Johnny Hodges died, Ellington said: "Johnny Hodges and his unique tonal personality have gone to join the ever so few inimitables—those whose sounds stand unimitated, to say the least—Art Tatum, Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, Billy Strayhorn" (119).

15. Ellington's reliance on others for much of his musical and sonic material has led James Lincoln Collier to contend that it is "not necessary to see Duke Ellington as a 'composer' in the narrow sense of the word." Rather, following Billy Strayhorn, Collier calls Ellington "an improvising jazz musician" whose instrument "was a whole band" ( Duke Ellington , 306). Elsewhere, Collier tries another tack: "It does not hurt to think of Ellington not so much as a dramatist, as Beethoven was, or an architect, as was Bach, but as a planner of meals" (141).

16. Quoted in Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , 23. Ellington, Music , 214, confirms Stone's point. (Perhaps it should be noted that Ellington's sketches of individuals in this book appear under the heading "Dramatis Felidae"—"Cast of Cats.") He writes:

The cats who come into this band are probably unique in the aural realm. When someone falls out of the band—temporarily or permanently—it naturally becomes a matter of "Whom shall we get?" or "Whom can we get?" It is not just a matter of replacing the cat who left, because we are concerned with a highly personalized kind of music. It is written to suit the character of an instrumentalist, the man who has the responsibility of playing it, and it is almost impossible to match his character identically. Also, if the new man is sufficiently interesting tonally, why insist upon his copying or matching his predecessor's style?

17. Schuller, The Swing Era , 48.

18. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition , new and rev. ed. (Oxford, 1983), 107, makes the same point in different words. "Ellington was so attuned to the sounds of his men," he writes, "that the very originality of his textures and the daring of his harmonic language were determined not in the abstract but in his inquisitiveness about, let us say, how this reed player's low A-flat might sound when juxtaposed with that brassman's cup-muted G."

Schuller, Swing Era , 49n., pays special tribute to Ellington's piano playing, calling him "a rhythmic energizer of the orchestra" but, above all, "possessor of the most remarkable piano tone and touch." Schuller writes:

Perhaps one needed to have stood close to Ellington's piano-playing to fully appreciate the remarkable fullness and depth of his sound. I had that privilege many times, and I can say with total conviction that, with but very few exceptions ... I have never encountered a pianist, jazz or classical, who could command at once such purity of tone and range of dynamics and timbres as Ellington. He had a way of playing what I call "deep in the keys" to produce the clearest, most controlled impact of the hammer on the strings and, as a result, the fullest purest resonance of those strings. Ellington could play the most forceful piano, matching his entire orchestra at full tilt; and yet I never heard him force or bang, as so many pianists do when they venture into the ff range. His tone and projection were such that with one chord or a few fill-in notes he could energize the entire orchestra. And in addition he could combine his basic piano sonority with all manner of timbral sonorities; one heard trumpets, saxophones, horns, oboes, even strings in his playing.

19. The phrase, apparently coined by Billy Strayhorn, was used in an interview he gave in 1952. Schuller uses it in his analysis of Ellington's career. And Ken Rattenbury uses it as the title of his first chapter. Tucker, Ellington , which covers Ellington's life and work through 1927, calls the orchestra's recording session for Vocalion on 26 November 1926 "a turning point in Ellington's career." The recordings he made from that time on, Tucker explains, "differed in several fundamental ways from those that had come before." First, they were of Ellington's own music; second, they were made for labels aimed at distribution beyond the "race" market; third, rather than published songs, Ellington was beginning to record original instrumental pieces; and finally, they show how, in collaboration with key figures in the ensemble, Ellington was "coming into his own as a composer" (211-13).

20. Ellington, Music , 261. He also wrote, more ornately: "Billy Strayhorn said we were exponents of the aural art. Ours is the responsibility of bringing to the listener and would-be listener—as to those unwilling to be listeners—some agreeable vibration that tickles the fancy of the eardrum" (447).

21. Ellington, Music , 227. Ellington recalled a memorable example of rhythm taking over the whole atmosphere of a nightclub. During the 1920s, as he walked down the steps of the Capitol Palace in Harlem to hear Willie "The Lion" Smith and his group, he realized that "everything and everybody seemed to be doing whatever they were doing in the tempo The Lion's group was laying down. The walls and furniture seemed to lean understandingly—one of the strangest and greatest sensations I ever had. The waiters served in that tempo; everybody who had to walk in, out, or around the place walked with a beat" (Ellington, Music , 90).

22. Ellington, Music , 453.

23. Tucker, Ellington , quotes Otto Hardwick, a member of "The Duke's Serenaders," on this subject: "All of a sudden, around 1918, we began to get a lot of 'dicty' jobs. We would all pile into my Pullman automobile ... and Duke would direct us to drive to an embassy or private mansion. Other times we would go out to Manassas, Culpepper, Warrenton, or Orange [Virginia], for fancy balls and society receptions. This was Meyer Davis territory and none of us was able to figure out how Duke was muscling in." According to Tucker, Ellington's "promotional efforts and attractive personal qualities" were partly responsible, and so was "his experience working under Louis Thomas" (56), a black bandleader who, as one musician recalled, managed to get "all the society work around Washington'' in the years 1915-20 (48).

24. Mills's importance to Ellington's career is generally acknowledged, though Music Is My Mistress assigns him only a small role (and no place in the "Dramatis Felidae"). In an interview in Down Beat magazine (1952), Mills said that his strategy for Ellington was "aimed at presenting the public a great musician who was making a lasting contribution to American music" and to make Ellington's "importance as an artist the primary consideration" (quoted in Tucker, Ellington , 201, who adds that Ellington had begun to court a "sophisticated image" in Washington well before he went to New York or met Irving Mills). On the matter of record labels, Tucker notes that Ellington's orchestra in 1927 "appeared on two labels with race series aimed at black buyers—Vocalion and OKeh—but also recorded for three with a wider network of distribution: Brunswick (Vocalion's parent company), Columbia and Victor" (212). According to Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , the radio wire from the Cotton Club engagement brought the band and its music to national attention, which allowed Mills "to engineer the first trip to Hollywood" for the film Check and Double Check (1930), featuring the radio comedy team of Amos 'n' Andy (34). In 1929, while appearing at the Cotton Club, the band also performed in the Ziegfeld-produced Show Girl on Broadway, with music by George Gershwin. (In 1929, Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra were considered for an appearance in Vincent Youmans's Great Day . According to Rex Stewart, Boy Meets Horn, 118 , Mills tried to keep Henderson out of Great Day . See chap. 3 above, n. 106.) Jewell, Duke , 47, calls the Chevalier event "a coup ." And Mercer Ellington notes that it was "the first time" he'd seen the band play in a theater, "just sitting there, going from one number to another.... I can remember becoming aware of Chevalier's importance" (45). As for the European tour, Louis Armstrong had anticipated Ellington by a year, but by all accounts the Ellington tour, sponsored in part by British bandleader Jack Hylton, was more successful. See Jewell, Duke , 48. Finally, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 33-41, is an illuminating discussion of "all the maneuvers and stratagems that helped push Pop to the top" (41). Mercer credits press agent Ned Williams with especially effective and faithful service on Ellington's behalf from 1931 until the break with Irving Mills in 1939.

Ellington, Music , 82, attributes the idea for "Creole Rhapsody," the first of his extended works, to Mills. As he tells it:

When we were playing the Oriental Theater [in Chicago, in 1931?] Irving Mills came to me one day with an original idea. He was always reaching toward a higher plateau for our music. "Tomorrow is a big day," he said. "We premiere a new long work—a rhapsody." "Really?'' I replied. "Okay." So I went out and wrote Creole Rhapsody , and I did so much music for it that we had to cut it up and do two versions. One came out on Brunswick and the other, longer one, on Victor. Irving almost blew his connection at both companies for recording a number that was not only more than three minutes long, but took both sides of the record. That was the seed from which all kinds of extended works and suites later grew.

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development (New York, 1968), 354, finds in Ellington's piece "some subtle 'borrowing' from Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue ."

25. Schuller, Swing Era , 49, describes Ellington's balancing act as "an extraordinary tightrope walk" but without bringing the audience into it. "Evidently," he writes, Ellington "had a phenomenal instinct for allowing a degree of individuality and creative freedom within the framework of his musical conception."

26. Ellington, Music , 460. In the self-interview near the book's end, Ellington poses the question: "Does inspiration come from sorrow, frustration, and disappointment? It has been said that great love songs have followed a broken heart or the end of an affair. Do emotions such as love, anger, loneliness, or happiness affect composition?" And he answers: "I think the artist's true position is that of an observer. Personal emotion could spoil his pièce de résistance ."

27. Ellington, Music , 93, describes, for example, Ellington as a budding young pianist going to hear James P. Johnson play in Washington's Convention Hall. "I was always a terrific listener. I'm taller on one side than the other from leaning over the piano, listening. This time I listened all night long." Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 160, reports:

As he traveled and moved among people, he was always alert to opinions of all kinds. When he and Harry Carney pulled into a gas station to fill up, there would often be youngsters hanging around, and he'd get into conversation with them and find out what they listened to on the radio and records.... When they stopped for something to eat, he'd note what was on the jukebox and what was being played. In this way he was always better informed than some may have imagined.

28. Ellington, Music , teems with references to his appreciation of "artistry"— as in his father's speech, for example. Ellington called his father "a wonderful wit," adding: "he knew exactly what to say to a lady," and "whatever place he was in, he had appropriate lines" (12). He found a similar flair in his mother who, as a cook, "had the knack, talent, imagination, and exciting skill of a pure artist'' (390). In Frank Holliday's pool room on T Street, social center of the neighborhood where he grew up, the same quality abounded. Gamblers there skillfully manipulated the cards. "Interns used to come in, who could cure colds. And handwriting experts who would enjoy copying somebody's signature on a check, go out and cash it, and bring back the money to show the cats in the poolroom what artists they were. They didn't need the money. They did it for the kicks. There were also a couple of pickpockets around, so smooth that when they went to New York they were not allowed in the subway. At heart, they were all great artists" (23).

Ellington well understood that these manifestations of artistry applied to the theatrical vocation he had chosen. In 1923, he and other members of his Washington band performed with Wilbur Sweatman in vaudeville. "It was another world to us," he recalled. "We'd sit on the stage and keep a straight face. I began to realize that all cities had different personalities.... I also learned a lot about show business from Sweatman. He was a good musician, and he was in vaudeville because that was where the money was then" ( Music , 36). The challenge of theatrical effect for Ellington lay in convincing the audience, which he called "the other side of the realm that serves the same muse I do" (465). Ellington analyzed Frank Sinatra's success in these terms: "Every song he sings is understandable and, most of all, believable, which is the ultimate in theater" (239). He saw himself as practicing a trade akin to that of actors and actresses. "The theater," he wrote, "is a place for skill. Some people say, 'I don't see how he can play that part every night without going out of his mind!' It may be a wild, dramatic part, but the actor doesn't necessarily have to throw his emotions into it, because he has studied how to make the people believe that he is doing all that suffering. It is one of the arts, and all the arts have similar qualities" (463).

29. Ellington, Music , 80.

30. Schuller, Swing Era , 46, comments: "The orchestra's ability to survive the wear and tear of literally thousands of one-night stands, of an endless succession of bus-, train-, and plane-trips, must be counted as one of the minor miracles of human physical endurance."

31. Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York, 1970), 61.

32. Lawrence Gushee, Notes to Duke Ellington 1940 (Smithsonian Collection recording DPM 20351, 1978), [2].

33. Gene Lees, Waiting for Dizzy (New York, 1991), 10, writing about a group of compact disc reissues of recordings from the 1920s by Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Ellington, Red Nichols, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, and others, stresses another trait. Lees finds the music on these albums "almost universally joyous" and "enormous exuberant fun."

34. Gushee, Notes to Duke Ellington 1940 , [2].

35. Oklahoma City native Ralph Ellison recalls the impression that Ellington and his men made when they visited his home town in Ellison's youth. "Where in ... any white community," he asks, "could there have been found images, examples such as these? Who were so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?" (Ellison, Going to the Territory , 220). Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (New York, 1990), 54, notes the efforts of Ellington and others to replace with "images of class, taste, and discipline" jazz's earlier "shady connections" with vice and superficiality.

36. Strayhorn's comment, appearing in an article in Down Beat (July 1952), is quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It (New York, 1955), 224, and in Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , 21.

37. Quoted in Schuller, Early Jazz , 350.

38. Williams, Jazz Tradition , 106.

39. Ellington, Music , 54, wrote of Arthur Whetsol that when illness forced him to retire from the band in 1937, "he left behind an echo of aural charisma that I can still hear."

40. Ellington, Music , 462. This was not a nostalgic comment, for in 1973 Ellington found "the caliber of musicians ... higher today." In earlier days, he added, if a player could be identified by his tone quality, he "didn't even have to read. Nowadays, the same guys play in symphonies, dance bands, and radio and television studios."

41. Ellington, Music , 118.

42. Except for those in exx. 22 and 23a-b and table 4, the recordings cited in this chapter may all be heard on The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz , revised ed. "Dusk" (ex. 22) is on Duke Ellington 1940 (Smithsonian Collection); "Braggin' in Brass" (exx. 23a-b) on Duke Ellington 1938 (Smithsonian Collection); and "Old Man Blues," diagrammed in table 4, is on The Indispensable Duke Ellington , vols. ¾ (French RCA).

43. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 25, writes:

There are three basic elements in the growl: the sound of the horn, a guttural gargling in the throat, and the actual note that is hummed. The mouth has to be shaped to make the different vowel sounds, and above the singing from the throat, manipulation of the plunger adds the wa-wa accents that give the horn a language.... In the Ellington tradition a straight mute is used in the horn besides the plunger outside, and this results in more pressure. Some players use only the plunger, and then the sound is usually coarser, less piercing, and not as well articulated.

Mercer notes that "the chief exponents of growling in the band" were trumpeters Miley, Cootie Williams, and Ray Nance and trombonists Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton and Tyree Glenn. Nanton, he recalled, "made such a science of distortion that he would sometimes use a soda bottle when he was playing in the dressing room, thereby changing the fundamental positions of the slide." Other trombonists like Lawrence Brown and Quentin Jackson "did very well ... when they growled on trombone, but they moved their tuning slide, something that Tricky, Cootie, and Ray Nance never did. Where Tricky was unique was in the way he could make his sound so sheer that someone once likened it to tearing paper."

44. Ellington, Music , 106.

45. Gunther Schuller, in Early Jazz , 326-29, discusses "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" at some length. Schuller follows Roger Pryor Dodge's lead in praising Miley not only for his inventive sound but for his "enormous contribution to pure classic melody in jazz." Miley and Ellington are listed as co-composers of "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." Mark Tucker, Ellington , concludes with a longer description of the piece (248-57), tracing and comparing several different recordings and printed versions. Tucker sees Miley as a seminal figure in Ellington's development as a composer, especially through his mastery of the spirit of the blues. "Miley's hot trumpet filled a special function in Ellington's compositions," he writes. "When the tempo slowed down and the lights dimmed, it was Miley's turn to step forward and play the blues. Inspired by the soul in Miley's horn, Ellington fashioned pieces that went beyond hot jazz and made his band sound like no one else's. In the process he discovered new paths as a composer'' (231).

46. Ellington, Music , 419-20, writes:

During one period at the Cotton Club, much attention was paid to acts with an African setting, and to accompany these we developed what was termed "jungle style" jazz. (As a student of Negro history I had, in any case, a natural inclination in this direction.) Its most striking characteristic was the use of mutes—often the plumber's everyday rubber plunger—by Bubber Miley on trumpet and Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton on trombone. They founded a tradition we have maintained ever since. This kind of theatrical experience, and the demands it made upon us, was both educative and enriching, and it brought about a further broadening of the music's scope. We, too, began to think in terms of concert and theater.

Collier, Duke Ellington , 92-93, attributes so-called jungle music to Mills's and Ellington's perception "that the band had to have an identifiable and consistent style that could be promoted through clever publicity." For him, Ellington's jungle music was nothing more than "a gimmick ... suggested by the fact that the Cotton Club was at one point using a lot of 'jungle' skits as excuses to introduce erotic dances—shake dances and shimmies performed by the club's dancers, like Freddi Washington and Bessie Dudley, wearing little besides feathers and beads, supposedly to suggest jungle attire." But Mark Tucker, in a paper delivered at the American Musicological Society's annual meeting in Cleveland (1986), showed how, over the years, Ellington transformed jungle music from a floor-show convention (in the 1920s) to an important part of his expressive vocabulary as a composer (late 1930s and 1940s).

47. Ellington, Music , has only restrained praise for Williams, who, he writes, entered the band in 1929 and "soon became one of our most outstanding soloists. He began to use the plunger mute, one of our major tonal devices, and he used it very well" (121). Schuller, Swing Era , 53, notes that on a 1932 remake of "Creole Love Call" (1927), Williams "takes over Miley's old chorus with the plunger and growl, but towards the end of the performance he also breaks into a new role as the first of Ellington's trumpets to develop a prominently displayable high register." Later, Schuller goes on to say that, by 1935, ''the increasing technical skills and musical sophistication" of players like Armstrong, Williams, Hodges, and others was making the notion of jazz "as a collectively improvised form of musical expression" outdated. From that time forward, what Schuller calls "the concerto idea" takes hold, in which composers and arrangers write pieces featuring outstanding soloists like these men (84). "Concerto for Cootie" is one of many products of that impulse.

Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , carries a detailed analysis of the piece, with copious musical illustrations (164-201). Along the way, he describes some of the different tone qualities Williams employs, including: "plunger-muted (closely), with a pronounced vibrato frequently developed into a lip trill and a trace of growl"; "plunger-muted (closely), with almost no vibrato and with no throat growl"; "plunger-muted, with the plunger cup ... freely manipulated around the half-open position, and with a dramatic increase in volume, a savage growl, and exaggerated vibrato"; a "quiet, cool vibratoless delivery"; and a section "played with a superb tone on open trumpet" (187-89).

48. Ellington's autobiography says little about Carney as a "tonal personality," but Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 65-66, makes comments that certainly apply to the opening of "Ko-Ko." Mercer notes Carney's "massive tone," which, he writes, "not only gave the saxophone section a depth and roundness no other had, but it gave the whole ensemble a rich, sonorous foundation that proved inimitable." Schuller loves Ellington's trombone section; in fact, by the fourth paragraph of his long chapter, "Duke Ellington: Master Composer," he is discussing its members, noting the Ellington band as "the first to acquire a permanent trombone trio." Lawrence Brown, Juan Tizol, and "Tricky Sam" Nan-ton, as Schuller notes, "were all totally different from each other in their musical conception: unique individual voices." And yet, he notes, "this trio of uniquely distinctive personalities could, when necessary, blend chameleon-like into a single sonority" ( Swing Era , 47). That is what they do when playing the sharply articulated harmonies that begin "Ko-Ko."

The dedication of Schuller's book reads: "For Edwin and George—and Marjorie—and in memory of the incomparable Lawrence Brown."

49. Schuller, Swing Era , 116, comments that here the sound of Tizol's valve trombone "makes it the non-pareil instrument for the occasion. A saxophone would have sounded ordinary," he explains (not noting that saxophone "calls" seem to demand responses from another section of the orchestra), "and on the slide-trombone this riff in that register and that tempo is virtually unplayable. It lies perfectly on the valve-trombone."

50. Ellington wrote that he composed "Mood Indigo" (1930) with an electronic effect in mind. Remembering that an earlier recording of " 'Black and Tan Fantasy' with the growl trombone and growl trumpet" had touched off "a sympathetic vibration or mike tone,'' he thought to himself, " 'maybe if I spread those notes over a certain distance ... the mike tone will take a specific place or a specific interval in there.' It came off, and gave that illusion" ( Music , 80). Schuller waxes personal on the subject of "Dusk," devoting several pages of Swing Era (122-26) to an analysis with transcriptions. He finds it "one of those pieces that go beyond the confining labels of jazz, dance music, and light entertainment." For Schuller, "Dusk" strikes a "plaintive[,] nostalgic mood, an image of loneliness at eventide, a night of longing about to descend." And he adds: "It is deeply affecting, gently, subtly disturbing, perfect in its utter simplicity. It is music that haunts you—it has haunted me since I first heard it some forty-five years ago, and it never fails to move me. Though it pleads and supplicates, it never whimpers; it is never sentimental"

51. Schuller, Swing Era , 94.

52. See also Schuller, Swing Era , 95.

53. The song, with words and music by Hughie Prince and Don Raye, was published in 1941. See Roger Lax and Frederick Smith, The Great Song Thesaurus , 2d ed., updated and expanded (New York, 1989),

54. Schuller, Swing Era , 104-5, describes this introduction, including a diagram of the textural buildup.

55. In an interview with Stanley Dance in the late 1960s, Ellington talked about some of the impulses that lay behind his music. "Everything" that Bubber Miley and Joe Nanton played, he recalled, "represented a mood, a person, a picture." He explained: "As a matter of fact, everything we used to do in the old days had a picture." For example, "the guys would be walking up Broadway after work and see this old man coming down the street, and there was the beginning of 'Old Man Blues.' Everything had a picture or was descriptive of something. Always" (Dance, World of Duke Ellington , 7). Whatever its inspiration, the main strain of "Old Man Blues" strongly suggests the harmonic progression of Jerome Kern's "Old Man River," from Show Boat (1927). The correspondence is especially strong in the bridge.

56. Schuller, Early Jazz , 351, notates the break.

57. Schuller, Swing Era , 128n., discusses Ellington's lifelong "difficulty with endings."

58. Gunther Schuller, the closest student of Ellington's extended works, deals with "Creole Rhapsody" (1930-31) in Early Jazz , 352-53, and "Reminiscing in Tempo," "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," and the much longer "Black, Brown, and Beige" in Swing Era , 75-83, 90-92, and 141-50. Schuller acknowledges that "Black, Brown, and Beige" and most of Ellington's later large compositions are not uniformly successful, and he devotes pages 149-57 to a forthright discussion of what they show about Ellington as a composer.

59. First recorded in New York City on 20 September 1937, the work began to show up on Ellington broadcasts in the mid-1940s, according to Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942-[1969]: A Discography (Holte, 1964-68), 3:406ff. On 7 July 1945, for example, "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue" were performed in a New York City 'radio broadcast with "Carnegie Blues" sandwiched in between (406). In broadcasts recorded in October of the same year, the two pieces were separated by ''I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)" (410). Jepsen lists nine recorded performances between 1945 and 1951; in six of them, the two flank a third item. ("Transblucency" is the centerpiece listed on pages 413, 414, and 416.) On 7 July 1956, at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Ellington orchestra gave its most famous performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue." That night the two parts were separated by Paul Gonsalves's extended solo: twenty-seven choruses based on the twelve-bar blues. The performance, which drew an ecstatic audience reaction, is credited with boosting the band's fortunes and has taken its place in jazz lore. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 112, describes its impact succinctly.

60. Since bar 5 (17), however, was exactly what the ear expected, it could be understood as an addition only after the fact.

61. Standard blues practice puts calls at the beginnings of phrases, i.e., in bars 1, 5, and 9 of a chorus. In Chorus 3, however, after appearing in bars 1 and 5, the calls return at three-bar intervals (bars 8 and 11).

62. Dance, World of Ellington , 84.

63. Schuller, Swing Era , 90-92, is of two minds about the work. On the one hand, he admires the conception as "one of Duke's most ambitious efforts ... remote from the world of popular tunes and 12-bar blues (even though based on blues changes)." Schuller is also impressed that "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," in "its original 1937 form[,] was ... a full-fledged written composition with virtually no improvisation." He finds it "relatively demanding in structure and harmonically, technically complex." On the other hand, he finds the 1937 performance lacking, especially in "the more complex full-orchestra episodes," which seem to him "beyond the performance capabilities of the 1937 Ellington band, particularly in respect to intonation." Moreover, Schuller thinks the work lacks thematic inventiveness. "The dichotomy between the innocuousness of the melodic-thematic material and the comparatively sophisticated and perhaps overly complex fragmentation of underlying component material," he writes, "constitutes a weakness of the work, although an interesting risk-taking one." Elsewhere in his book, however, he cites "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" approvingly, as evidence of (1) Ellington's ambition as a composer ("the struggle, the torment, and the anguish," 93); (2) his playing with "unusual phrase structures" (118); (3) his achievement of "concerted constructive logic" (131) and progress in "structural unity" (147); and (4) his ability to do without programmatic effects in longer works (152). Near the end of his book, moreover, Schuller cites "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" as a "historic breakthrough creation" and one of "the dozen or so major stations in the development of jazz in the twenty years between 1926 and 1946." Other Ellington pieces on his list were "Mood Indigo,'' "Reminiscing in Tempo," and "Cotton Tail" (840).

64. Gushee, Notes to Duke Ellington 1940, [2].

65. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 94.

66. Schuller, Swing Era , 78, in discussing "Reminiscing in Tempo," writes that in this work, "more than ever before, [Ellington] was trying to break out beyond the narrow categorizations of the commercial world which by an accident of fate he was forced to inhabit. He was determined more than ever before, to avoid the trap into which the market place and the obsession for labeling were trying to lure him."

67. Stewart, Jazz Masters , 96, reminds his readers of the performers' role in this process. "In the Ellington organization," he wrote in the 1960s, "there is the combined knowledge of these gifted artists, who by virtue of years of experience are able to create, on the spot, any mood that they choose."

68. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 169, describes what occupied Ellington "in his later years." "He really didn't have time to go around listening to musicians. He had to keep his ear to the ground in a different sense. He was too busy checking prices and the politics of the music industry. When he could throw that stuff out of his mind, he was busy with the commissions he had accepted."

69. Ellington, Music , 463.

70. Ellington, Music , 459.

71. Ellison, recalling his days as a high-school student in Oklahoma City, describes the impact of Ellington's music on him and his musician friends. "We were studying the classics then," he remembers, "working at harmony and the forms of symphonic music. And while we affirmed the voice of jazz and the blues . . . it was not until the discovery of Ellington that we had any hint that jazz possessed possibilities of a range of expressiveness comparable to that of classical European music" ( Going to the Territory , 220).

1. Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions: A Selection of Stage & Screen Lyrics Written for Sundry Situations; and Now Arranged in Arbitrary Categories. To which have been added many informative annotations & disquisitions on their why & wherefore, their whom-for, their how; and matters associative (New York, 1959; reprint, New York, 1973), xi.

2. Gershwin, Lyrics , 342-43.

3. The book was by Guy Bolton and John McGowan, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Eight songs from the show were published:

"Bidin' My Time," "Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!," ''But Not For Me," "Could You Use Me?," "Embraceable You," "I Got Rhythm," "Sam and Delilah," and "Treat Me Rough." Girl Crazy , produced by Alex A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley, ran for 272 performances on Broadway, closing on 6 June 1931.

4. A recording released in 1990, George and Ira Gershwin, Girl Crazy , (Elektra Nonesuch compact disc 9 79250-2), contains an informative program book. A plot synopsis appears on pages 62-64.

5. In Gershwin, Girl Crazy (program book), 22, Miles Kreuger writes:

Theater mythology tells us that the audience first felt the impact of Merman's vocal power when she sang "I Got Rhythm." Not so. That was her second song. Throughout the entire first act, never singing a note, Merman engaged in comic banter, generally with William Kent [Slick Fothergill, Kate's husband]. There was no reason for the audience even to suspect that she was a singer. It was not until the final scene of the first act, the bluesy saloon, with gambling couples sinuously dancing to Al Siegel's on-stage, upright piano, that the Merman explosion was felt. In a saucy slit skirt and a loosely draped, low-cut blouse, she slinked out and began to sing, "Dee-li-laaaah, was a flooosey . . ." with a disarming blend of pure vocal power and yet suggestive innuendo. The effect was stunning. No sooner had she finished "Sam and Delilah" than Ethel Merman, surrounded by chorus girls, tore the house down with "I Got Rhythm."

As Merman wrote in her autobiography, during her "high C" chorus "the audience went a little crazy."

6. The DeMarcos were a dance team, Antonio and Renée DeMarco. Others featured in the original cast were William Kent and Allen Kearns.

7. Merman's performance is pitched in F rather than the published key, B-flat. In the second chorus, she sustains the C above middle C (the dominant) on the syllable "Ahh" through the first six bars of each "A" section, then sings the words "Who could ask for anything more?" to Gershwin's melody.

8. The recording, numbered Decca DXB.153 (T34), was taped for me by Arnold Jacobson of Arnold's Archives, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1985.

9. In Gershwin, Girl Crazy (program book), 51-55, Richard M. Sudhalter discusses the jazz performers in the pit. Nichols, he writes, was "a shrewd and aggressive businessman . . . on good terms with Broadway contractors," but some musicians questioned his credentials as a jazz player. (Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman called Nichols "a synthetic. . . [and] very mechanical player" who "copied every line he had ever learned in jazz from Bix" Beiderbecke—Bud Freeman, Crazeology: The Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman , as told to Robert Wolf [Urbana, Ill., 1989], 20.) According to Sudhalter, Nichols's ensemble, plus trombonist Jack Teagarden but minus the Girl Crazy string section, "doubled at the Hotel New Yorker" in the evenings after the show was over (Gershwin, Girl Crazy [program book], 54). In the spring of 1931, when Benny Goodman left the ensemble, he was replaced by reedman Jimmy Dorsey (55).

Sudhalter also tells a tantalizing but inconclusive story about "I Got Rhythm" in its first incarnation. Before the show opened, Nichols and Gershwin were discussing the work of Robert Russell Bennett, who was orchestrating Girl Crazy . Sudhalter reports:

Bennett, at the time riding high among Broadway orchestrators, had little feeling for (and reportedly even less interest in) jazz. But certain of the hotter numbers, notably "I Got Rhythm," seemed to cry out for an arranger who understood swing and could write comfortably in a more rhythmic vein. [Glenn] Miller, Nichols said, would be in the new band, so why not let him do some scoring as well? Gershwin's answer is lost to history. But reports persist that Miller wrote at least the rideout chorus to "I Got Rhythm" and some of the incidental music. (52-53)

Bennett's orchestrations and Miller's possible contributions to them are heard on the Elektra Nonesuch recording. One earwitness to several 1930-31 Girl Crazy performances recalled: "During the intermissions, they'd really turn the band loose, and you should have heard the hot stuff they played. It wasn't like a regular pit band—more like an act within an act" (54).

10. Russell Sanjek, From Print to Plastic: Publishing and Promoting America's Popular Music (1900-1980 ), I.S.A.M. Monographs no. 20 (Brooklyn, 1983), 13, 15.

11. Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), documents the role of the player piano in the vast change that took place in American musical life early in the present century. See especially pages 42-46. Roell calls "the miracle of sound reproduction . . . indeed revolutionary." Before the invention of the player piano, the reproducing piano, and the phonograph, Roell writes, "the musician was human—active and creative—and the music was live. The ideology of the entire musical experience was derived from the producer culture. The revolutionary nature of the player piano changed these concepts forever, for increasingly the musician was a machine. The musical experience was becoming passive" (45).

12. Sanjek, Print to Plastic , 12-13.

13. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 (New York, 1988), explains how publisher Max Dreyfus, for whom Gershwin worked beginning in 1918, conquered "the production-music field"—the publishing of Broadway show music—for his firms of T. B. Harms and Harms, Inc. (97). Dreyfus, Sanjek writes, "was known as a prodigious gambler, ready to advance up to $15,000 for the music to a show his writers were assigned to create" (98). By 1929, with talking pictures becoming a major force in the entertainment industry, film studios were buying music publishing companies. In the summer of that year, Warner Brothers film studios bought the Harms empire for $8. 5 million. The publishing firms involved were those owned or backed by Dreyfus, including Harms, Inc., Chappell-Harms (its "repository for non-production music''), De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson, Remick Music, Green and Stept, Famous Music, T. B. Harms, "and George Gershwin's New World Music, publisher of all [Gershwin's] music" (109).

14. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , notes Max Dreyfus's dictum about show music that, "although nobody could tell if a song might become a hit, 'it would become one if you worked to sell it'" (96). Producers of Dreyfus-backed shows, according to Sanjek, "expected one or two hit songs from any production with which he was connected. An average of twenty-one songs were generally written for a musical show, many of them the ensemble and chorus numbers to fill gaps in the action or carry the plot along. Most were printed and on sale in the theater lobby" (98).

15. In Gershwin, Girl Crazy (program book), 23-24, Miles Kreuger explains that after it closed the show made no post-Broadway tour, "in part due to a sudden drop-off of Depression theater attendance, and because both Willie Howard and Ethel Merman were wooed by George White to star in his Scandals of 1931 ." A West Coast production, however, opened in San Francisco on 29 September 1931 and another in Chicago on 8 October. RKO studios filmed Girl Crazy in 1932; in 1943, MGM studios brought out another version with Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Gil Stratton, June Allyson, Nancy Walker, and Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.

16. At this writing, the standard biography is Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (Garden City, N.Y., 1987). See also Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon, The Gershwins (New York, 1973), and Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music (Indianapolis, 1973) and Deena Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (New York, 1991). For a shorter account and a complete worklist by Wayne Schneider, see my Gershwin article in Amerigrove .

17. Some of the workings of the Tin Pan Alley trade in which Gershwin got his start are shown by the facts and lore surrounding "Swanee." Gershwin and lyricist Irving Caesar wrote "Swanee" and placed it in a revue marking the opening on 24 October 1919 of the Capitol Theater, a new Broadway movie house. The song became a hit, however, only after Al Jolson, the era's chief male singing star, introduced it in his show, Sinbad . According to David Jasen, Caesar convinced "his friend" Jolson to sing it in that show. Herbert G. Goldman, on the other hand, writes that Jolson, hearing Gershwin play it at a party in late December . . . became intrigued by "Swanee" and made plans to record the song at his next session for the Columbia Gramophone Company. By the end of January, Jolson was belting "Swanee" to the rafters in performances of Sinbad , Al Goodman had his pit musicians play the number faster than it had been played by the Columbia Orchestra, and "Swanee," aided by a heavy advertising campaign, became one of the biggest hits of the season. (See Herbert G. Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life [New York, 1988], 109-10)

Jasen reports: "With a full-page headshot of Jolson on the cover, 'Swanee' sold over a million copies of sheet music and two million copies of his disc. It became the biggest-selling song Gershwin would have in his life" (see David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley — The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and Their Times: The Golden Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956 [New York, 1988], 165). According to Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, Wisc., 1986), 233, Jolson's recording first appeared on his top-seller charts on 8 May 1920, remained there for eighteen weeks, and was the number 1 seller for nine of those weeks. Whitburn also lists successful performances by the All-Star Trio (Victor Arden, piano; F. Wheeler Wadsworth, alto sax; George Hamilton Green, xylophone; their recording made the top-seller charts in the week of 24 April 1920, when it was ranked number 11; page 22) and the Peerless Quartet (four male singers; the recording made the top-seller charts in the week of 27 November 1920, also as number 11; page 352). Jasen's claim that "Swanee" was Gershwin's largest-selling song is confirmed, insofar as recordings are concerned, by Whitburn.

18. Many accounts of this famous event have been written. One that captures its original flavor is Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin: A Study in American Music (1931), supplemented by Edith Garson, with Foreword and Discography by Alan Dashiell (New York, 1958), 136-55. An archival recording, An Experiment in Modern Music: Paul Whiteman at Aeolian Hall (Smithsonian Collection recording, DMM 2-0518), with notes by Thornton Hagert, has been issued; see also The Birth of "Rhapsody in Blue": Paul Whiteman's Historic Aeolian Hall Concert of 1924, reconstructed and conducted by Maurice Peress (MusicMasters recording MMD 20113X/20114T, 1986).

19. Between 1919 and the end of 1924 Gershwin wrote the scores to twelve Broadway shows. From 1925 until the end of his life in 1938, he composed scores to fifteen more such works.

20. As early as 1922 Gershwin had been able to try his hand as an "opera" composer with the brief, one-act Blue Monday , presenting it as part of a revue, George White's Scandals of 1922 . Even though Blue Monday was deemed a failure and withdrawn after one performance, Gershwin, twenty-three years old and with no prior experience, had found himself in a position to write such a work and have it produced on Broadway. (Will Vodery did the orchestration.) Here is ample indication that his was to be no ordinary career for an American composer. See Jablonski, Gershwin , 49-53. See also Goldberg, George Gershwin , 120-23. Rhapsody in Blue (1924), as noted, was commissioned by Whiteman and unveiled in a "historical" event, in the full glare of public attention. The Rhapsody's success led to another commission, this one for the Concerto in F, from Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Society (1925). Gershwin's track record by the time he composed An American in Paris (1928), his next work for orchestra, had eminent figures competing to premiere it. As Jablonski notes, Walter Damrosch told Gershwin he "would love to arrange with you to do your new work at a Philharmonic symphony this winter." Meanwhile, "even as he worked," Gershwin was approached by Russian dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev, ''who wanted to produce a ballet around it," and Leopold Stokowski of the Philadelphia Orchestra (Jablonski, Gershwin , 171). In 1929, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned Gershwin to compose a full-length opera, The Dybbuk , with a libretto by Henry Ahlsberg, for performance in 1931. He never fulfilled the commission (Jablonski, Gershwin , 194-95).

21. I am grateful to James Dapogny for this suggestion.

22. Jablonski, Gershwin , 258-59. In Jablonski's opinion, "much of the wit and charm of this work is smothered in the reorchestration by William C. Schoenfeld published in 1953" (260).

23. The song was "The Real American Folk Song (Is a Rag)," written under Ira's pseudonym "Arthur Francis," with music by George. It was interpolated into the Broadway musical comedy Ladies First , whose music was mostly by A. B. Sloane. Its refrain begins: "The real American folk song is a rag— / A mental jag— / A rhythmic tonic for the chronic blues." See Gershwin, Lyrics , 180.

24. "Fascinating Rhythm" was sung by Fred Astaire in Lady Be Good and led into a dance number. See Jablonski, Gershwin , 83.

25. The line comes from the verse of "Embraceable You," written originally for "an operetta version of East Is West " (1928), a show that was never completed, then put into Girl Crazy . See Gershwin, Lyrics , 30-31.

26. The quotation is from "Slap That Bass," another Astaire number, seen in the film Shall We Dance? See Gershwin, Lyrics , 221.

27. William Austin to Richard Crawford, 23 February 1985. My own unsystematic but fairly extensive search through song lists confirms Austin's point. "Rhythm" became a kind of catchword in the 1930s, as "syncopation" had been earlier. But the only prominent use I found before the Gershwins' "Fascinating Rhythm" (1924) is the name of a well-known white jazz group that began recording in August 1922 under the name of the Friar's Society Orchestra, changed by March 1923 to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. A search through Brian Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897-1942 , rev. 5th ed. (n.p., [1983]), turned up no other groups that recorded between the NORK and three who began to record in 1925: the St. Louis Rhythm Kings (April), Paul Fried and His Rhythmicians (September), and the Blue Rhythm Orchestra (October). Rust's index yielded only one tune with the key word in its title that circulated before "Fascinating Rhythm" was published (December 1924): "The Rhythm Rag'' by Willard Ro-bison, recorded in September 1924 by Robison and his Deep River Orchestra. In October 1925 a tune called "Rhythm of the Day" received its first jazz recording in a performance by Ross Gorman and the Earl Carroll Orchestra. Roger Lax and Frederick Smith, The Great Song Thesaurus , 2d ed. updated and expanded (New York, 1989), list no hit with "rhythm" in its title before "Fascinating Rhythm." Other hits or "notable" songs that followed, according to the Thesaurus , are "Crazy Rhythm" (1928), "Futuristic Rhythm" (1929), "I Got Rhythm" and "Rockin' in Rhythm" (1930), "Rhythm Is Our Business" (1934), "Broadway Rhythm" and "Rhythm of the Rain" (1935), "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" (1937), and "Lullaby in Rhythm" (1938).

28. Good News , with a score by Henderson, Brown, and DeSylva, opened in September 1927 and ran for 557 performances (Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle [New York, 1978], 428).

29. Victor V22558. See Brian Rust, The American Dance Band Discography, 1917-1942 (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1975).

30. Brian Rust and Allen G. Debus, The Complete Entertainment Discography from 1897 to 1942 , 2d ed. (New York, 1989), 328, dates this recording (Victor 12332) 10 July 1938, New York City. It is part of a medley of "Vocal Gems" from Girl Crazy .

31. Decca 23310; the LP reissue on Decca is numbered DL 5412.

32. In his discographical supplement to Goldberg, George Gershwin , 366, Alan Dashiell criticizes the recording as evidence of "star trouble." "Miss Martin," he complains, "chose to bend the songs to her will (and style) so that there is as much Martin here as Gershwin." ''I Got Rhythm" is one song said to be marred by the singer's "coy mannerisms." Jablonski, Gershwin , 404-5, follows suit. He writes: " Girl Crazy is spoiled a little (not enough to hurt) by the mannered singing of Mary Martin who, as A Star, was assigned songs that could have been better sung by others, i.e., hear Louise Carlyle do 'Sam and Delilah' and then wish she had done the other Merman songs from the show." Jablonski identifies this record as "an album in Jay Gold's 'American Musicals' series for Time-Life Records. These are the Goddard Lieberson-produced show reconstructions of Oh, Kay ! and Girl Crazy , plus the out-of-print Capitol original cast recording of the 1952 revival of Of Thee I Sing " (Time-Life Records TL-AM00, three-record set).

33. Transcribed from original cast recording, MGM E2323. End Popup Text>

34. To sum up public response to the song "I Got Rhythm," Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories shows it as a success on record but not a major hit. Red Nichols's recording made the top-seller charts for eight weeks beginning 6 December 1930, reaching a peak position of number 5 (page 336). Recordings by Ethel Waters (one week, 17 January 1931, number 17; page 440) and Louis Armstrong (two weeks, 2 April 1932, number 17; page 33) also enjoyed some success. However, Nichols's recording of "Embraceable You," also from Girl Crazy and made the same day, outsold "I Got Rhythm" (nine weeks, 22 November 1930, number 2; page 336).

Rust and Debus, Complete Entertainment Discography , besides Jane Froman's recording of "I Got Rhythm," lists ones by Kate Smith (New York, 6 November 1930), Adelaide Hall (London, 28 September 1931), Al Bowlly (London, 19 May 1932), Elizabeth Welch (London, 20 January 1938, as part of a "Gershwin Medley"), and the Merry Macs (New York, 5 September 1939). This work covers artists who are deemed neither "jazz and blues musicians" (though Hall's 1931 recording is also listed in Rust's Jazz Records A-z ) nor involved with "commercial dance bands, American and British." That leaves "the minstrel pioneers, the vaudevillians, the film stars and radio personalities, and the straight actors and actresses" who are either "artists of American birth, or of such status that they are as well-known in America as their own countries" (1).

Lax and Smith, Thesaurus , 57, lists "I Got Rhythm" as one of the "top hits" of 1930. It also lists "I Got Rhythm" and Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" as Ethel Merman's two theme songs (166). And it notes that, as well as film versions of Girl Crazy in 1932 and 1943 and An American in Paris (1951), the song also appeared in the film Rhapsody in Blue (1945), the "biopic" of Gershwin (265).

Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950 , ed. James T. Maher (New York, 1972), is the richest account of the musical tradition in which Gershwin wrote his songs. In the introduction to this work James T. Maher estimates that in the United States during the first half of the century, roughly 300,000 "'popular' songs of every variety" were deposited for copyright. Wilder, a composer of both popular songs and concert music, examined some 17,000 of these, from which he cites about 300 in his book (xxxviii). While granting its wide acceptance, Wilder is no fan of "I Got Rhythm" as a song. In discussing Irving Berlin's "Back to Back'' (1939), for example, he notes that "its release slightly recalls that of 'I Got Rhythm' but is much less four-square, by which I obviously mean it's much better" (114). Later, in a somewhat dyspeptic mood, Wilder comments: "I know that 'I Got Rhythm' has been played ad nauseum by jazz groups since the time it was first heard. And if it made many players happy, I'm glad. But to be candid, my particular gratification is that, since jazz presumes improvisation, in all my hearing of the song by jazz groups, I've always heard endlessly different variations of the original. . .. As an effort by a major writer, I find it a passing fancy, enormously successful though it obviously has been" (151). Wilder also questioned the Gershwin brothers' taste in quoting themselves in the release of their song "Nice Work If You Can Get It" (1937). "I'm slightly embarrassed," he confides, by the "somewhat lordly allusion to a phrase from 'I Got Rhythm' ['Who could ask for anything more?']. No doubt the Gershwins were right: everyone did know the earlier song. But it does seem a bit like boasting" (159).

35. Rust, Jazz Records A-Z . Full discographical information can be found there. For an idea of how the recording history of "I Got Rhythm" compares with that of other tunes in the jazz repertory, see Richard Crawford and Jeffrey Magee, Jazz Standards on Record, 1900-1942: A Core Repertory , Center for Black Music Research Monographs, no. 4 (Chicago, 1992), especially v-vii and xx-xxi.

36. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (New York, 1989), 127, outlines the "traditional way" jazz musicians harmonize "I Got Rhythm." In the A section, the harmonic progression is B Gm7|Cm7 F7|B Gm7|Cm7 F7| B B 7|E E |B F7|B [F7].

37. A comment Virgil Thomson made about Aaron Copland may apply to "I Got Rhythm," though certainly not to many other Gershwin songs. In 1932, in a discussion of his colleague's "American" side, Thomson wrote that Copland, for all his fondness for displaced accents, "never understood that sensuality of sentiment which is the force of American popular music" (quoted in Minna Lederman, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine [Modern Music, 1924-1946 ], I.S.A.M. Monographs no. 18 [Brooklyn, 1983], 22). "Sensuality of sentiment" is not a conspicuous trait of "I Got Rhythm."

38. Jazz being a music in which the status of players and singers rests upon the judgment of their peers, the literature is full of stories of performers having to prove themselves. One tells of Charlie Parker, as a youngster of sixteen, being derided on the bandstand at a Kansas City jam session (Robert George Reisner, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker [New York, 1962], 185-86). Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), tells of challenges offered by other musicians. Ellington's drummer, Sonny Greer, for example, recalls that when Ellington was "just a yearling" filling in for the regular piano player in a Washington, D.C., night spot, "Bill Jones used to be drummin', and he'd catch him out there in those three-four, five-four switches, and scare him stiff. But he'd hang on, and as I said he had a pretty good left hand, and he'd hold the solid deuce till Bill let him off the hook" (446). In answer to the question "what does America mean to you?" Ellington replied that the music world in the United States ''has been an extremely competitive scene, and that in itself incites drive. Without competition you wouldn't have it" (464). Ellington describes jam sessions as a very tough environment, a "cutting contest" in which "you defended your honor with your instrument" (466). In his judgment that was as it should be, as contrasted with a situation in which jazz is subsidized. "The minute you start subsidizing it," he warned, "you are going to get yourself a bastard product. It started as a competitive thing, and if you take away the competition, where a guy must fight to eat, it's going to become something else" (471).

By 1937, "I Got Rhythm" was standard cutting-contest fare. Frank Buchmann-Møller, You Just Fight for Your Life: The Story of Lester Young (New York, 1990), 71, reports Billie Holiday's taking Lester Young around New York shortly after he joined Count Basie's band in 1936. At a New York jam session early in 1937, Young "met Leon 'Chu' Berry, who was considered to be the greatest tenor saxophone player next to Coleman Hawkins. Berry did not have his saxophone with him, but when a duel between him and Lester was in the offing Benny Carter went and fetched it. Berry suggested that they start with 'I Got Rhythm,' which was grist to Lester's mill. 'He blew at least fifteen choruses, none of them the same, and each one prettier than the last,' Billie recalls. 'When the fifteenth one was down, Chu Berry was finished.'"

39. Miller's performance is reissued in Big Band Jazz: From the Beginnings to the Fifties , selected and annotated by Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams (Smithsonian Recordings, 1983). Cf. Merman's "high C chorus," which reduces the same six bars of the A section of "I Got Rhythm" to nothing but a high-energy single note. One wonders if hearing Merman belt her "high C" at this place, night after night in Girl Crazy , left its mark on Miller's idea of the tune to the point that, seven years later, he found a way to create a similar effect in his arrangement.

40. First issued on Commodore Records, Byas and Stewart's performance is included in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz , edited and annotated by Martin Williams, revised ed. (Smithsonian Recordings, 1987). Like the blues, "I Got Rhythm" was a tune on which jazz performers often improvised many choruses in succession, shaping musical statements that built in intensity from chorus to chorus. Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman tells a story about a performance he gave as a member of a Special Service company of the United States armed forces stationed in Alaska during World War II. The point of Freeman's recollection was to expose commercial gimmicks that in his view pandered to the audience. But, considering the tradition of extended performance already established for Gershwin's song, it was no coincidence that "I Got Rhythm" was the piece on which he tried his clownishly satirical ploy.

It was in Alaska that I found out an interesting thing about being commercial. I discovered that people don't listen as much as they look. We were doing a show on one of the little islands on the [Aleutian] chain. We were playing in the mess hall, and we were doing our best playing but it didn't seem to be going over so well. These were a lot of bitter men who had been stuck up there a long time and they just defied us to entertain them. Now we were dressed in heavy Arctic equipment and looked like a bunch of Eskimos. It wasn't that it was so terribly cold there, but this was our way of dressing. You could fall down and not get hurt because the clothing was so thickly padded. I used to play a solo, about ten improvised choruses, on "I Got Rhythm," and suddenly during my solo the idea came to me just to fall back and not break the motion of the play[ing], just to fall back. So I fell on my back with my feet up in the air and some of the men jumped up. They were completely out of their minds. "This is the greatest fuckin' saxophone player in the world," they were screaming. (Freeman, Crazeology , 59)

41. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition , new and revised ed. (Oxford, 1983), 94-95, puts it in a somewhat different way. "Art Tatum's capacities for melodic invention were limited," Williams writes. " He was basically an artist of the arabesque, true, but he also functioned in that middle ground which André Hodier has called paraphrase, where fragments of the original theme take their place beside invented phrases, to form allusive structures in variation. . .. Tatum's best harmonic and melodic adornments help us discover what is potentially beautiful in a popular song; his invented, passing phrases subdue what is not." By that standard, Tatum found little that was beautiful in the melody of "I Got Rhythm."

42. On 30 June 1932, Don Redman and His Orchestra made the first wholly instrumental recording of "I Got Rhythm"—an early example of many black musicians' tendency to omit Ira Gershwin's lyrics.

43. Williams, Jazz Tradition , 49, identifies Bechet's "Shag" as "the first non-thematic use on records of the 'I Got Rhythm' chord progression." "Shag" is attributed to Bechet on the record label, but I was unable to find in the Library of Congress copyright records any evidence that it was published or even copyrighted.

44. "Yeah, Man," a song with words by Noble Sissle and music by J. Russel Robinson, was copyrighted as a published item on 27 May 1932 (entry no. 30349) and published by DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, Inc. Joel Shaw made the first jazz recording in October of that year, just after Bechet and the New Orleans Feetwarmers recorded "Shag." "Stomp It Off," with a melody attributed to Sy Oliver and Jimmy Lunceford, was copyrighted as an unpublished piece on 1 April 1936 (entry no. 121547) by Denton and Haskins Music Co. Lunceford had recorded it in October 1934.

45. "Don't Be That Way," attributed to E. M. [Edgar] Sampson, was copyrighted as an unpublished piece on 16 May 1935 (entry no. 104261). Webb had recorded it on 19 November 1934. As table 6 indicates, it seems to have had the most active independent life of all "I Got Rhythm" contrafacts during the swing era.

46. Schuller, Swing Era , 24, attributes Goodman's arrangement to Edgar Sampson and calls it "one of the band's most popular successes." He also finds Webb's 1934 recording far superior to Goodman's two versions of 1938. Both use Sampson's arrangement, reworked in 1938 to accommodate lengthy solo spots for Goodman and [the] famous pre- In The Mood fade-away ending. Comparison of both bands' versions affords us a dramatic lesson in how interpretation is everything in jazz. The same arrangement, the same notes can be exciting or vapid, depending on their execution. The gulf here between Webb and Goodman was a wide one, the former delivering these pieces with a raw excitement, rhythmic drive (faster tempos, too) and heated sonority; the latter with a neatly packaged cooled-off sound, bouncing along in a safe inoffensive manner. (296)

47. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie , as told to Albert Murray (New York, 1985), 239, confirms that "Blow Top," recorded by Basie and his orchestra on 31 May 1940, was composed and arranged by Tab Smith. I have not checked the Library of Congress copyright records for this item. "Apple Honey," attributed to Woody Herman, was recorded by Herman's orchestra on 10 August 1944. Its tune was copyrighted in unpublished form on 25 October 1944 (entry no. 395490) and as a published piece on 18 July 1945 (entry no. 133874) by Charling Music Corp.

48. Ellington first recorded "Cotton Tail" on 4 May 1940. On 20 July 1940, it was copyrighted as an unpublished piece (entry no. 225831) by Robbins Music Corp. A copyrighted orchestration arranged by Will Hudson was published on 21 June 1944, also by Robbins.

49. Ellington's composed variations on Gershwin's tune are striking. But Schuller, Swing Era , points out another distinctive property of "Cotton Tail"— one that surely can be traced to the tradition of performance already established for "I Got Rhythm." Taking his cue from Ben Webster's two-chorus solo, Schuller writes:

Never before had Ellington opened up a piece for out-and-out blowing on a record date as he did for Webster and "Cotton Tail." The occasional showcase pieces and "concertos" were considerably more pre-planned and determined by Ellington as composer. . . . [But] "Cotton Tail" and Webster's solo loosened, ever so slightly, the compositional harness that Ellington had been constructing for over a decade and more. "Cotton Taxi,'' particularly in its execution, let in a gust of spontaneity, of freshness, of flexibility, which the Ellington band was never to lose again and which offered a whole new way of integrating composition and improvisation. (129-30)

50. Quoted from Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop: Memoirs (Garden City, N.Y., 1979), 207. Roach expanded his discussion of the economic roots of contrafacts as follows:

When the music moved from uptown to downtown, downtown meaning whites were now the clientele, a few more pennies were being made than when we were uptown. . .. Downtown, people wanted to hear something they were familiar with, like "How High the Moon," "What Is This Thing Called Love?" Can you play that? So in playing these things, the black musicians recognized that the royalties were going back to these people, like ASCAP, the Jerome Kerns, the Gershwins. So one revolutionary thing that happened, they began to write parodies on the harmonic structure. (209)

Roach's comments suggest that bebop musicians were the first to write new themes on old chord changes, a notion contradicted by the history of "I Got Rhythm" and, more generally, in Martin Williams, Jazz in Its Time (New York, 1989), 27-30.

51. Like "I Got Rhythm," tunes based on its chord changes are virtually all in B-flat. Art Pepper's "Brown Gold," written in E-flat, is an exception.

52. Note also that none of Parker's versions use the two-bar extension at the end of Gershwin's tune.

53. Gillespie, To Be , 143.

54. Examples include the following, whose dates are the earliest date of copyright deposit. Copyright entry numbers are designated EU for unpublished pieces and EP for published ones. All but three (Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Sonny Stitt) have been verified in the Library of Congress copyright records:

Clifford Brown, "Brownie Speaks" (27 December 1956, EU453249)

Al Cohn, "The Goof and I" (26 March 1948, EU122626)

Tadd Dameron, "Delirium" (copyright information not looked for)

Miles Davis, "The Theme" (28 March 1966, EU918852; unattributed in some other sources)

Dizzy Gillespie, "Anthropology" with C. Parker (10 December 1947, EU107329), "Dizzy Atmosphere" (10 June 1944, EU378389), "Oo Bop

Shabam" with Gil Fuller and Jay Roberts (12 May 1948, EP25545), "Ow" (18 April 1958, EU521399), "Salt Peanuts" with Kenny Clarke (13 October 1941, EU272651; published 1 September 1943, EP116206), and ''Shaw 'Nuff" with C. Parker (22 November 1948, EP32267)

Hampton Hawes, "Hamp's Paws" (30 January 1956, EU424351)

Thelonious Monk, "Fifty-Second Street Theme" (29 March 1948, EP24775), and "Rhythm-A-Ning" from Brilliant Comers Suite (29 May 1958, EU516975)

Fats Navarro, "Eb-Pob" with Leo Parker (16 May 1947, EU75756)

Art Pepper, "Brown Gold" (19 March 1957, EU472263)

Bud Powell, "Bud's Bubble" (copyright information not looked for; recorded on Roost Records RLP 401)

Sonny Rollins, "No Moe" (31 March 1965, EU885064), and "Oleo" (13 June 1963, EU8777119)

Sonny Stitt, "Sonny Side" (copyright information not looked for; attribution not established; recorded on Prestige NJLPo-103 by Stitt and Bud Powell)

George Wallington, "Lemon Drop" (25 May 1949, EP37174)

Kai Winding, "O-Go-Mo" (18 February 1947, EU63539)

55. Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942-[1969]: A Discography , 8 vols. (Copenhagen, 1963-70), lists the following recordings of "Anthropology" (chronologically):

Dizzy Gillespie's Orchestra (22 February 1946; vol. 4a:307)

Claude Thornhill's Orchestra (4 September 1947; 8:48)

Tadd Dameron's Sextet (29 August 1948; 3:107), his septet (16 October 1948; 6 November 1948; 3:108)

Charlie Parker's All Stars (5 March 1949; 6:66), Parker and the Swedish All-Stars (22 November 1950; 6:69; and 24 November 1950; 6:70)

The Parker-Gillespie Quintet (31 March 1951; 6:71)

Poul Hindberg (28 July 1955; 4b:296)

Clifford Jordan (10 November 1957; 4c:240)

The Embers Quintet (29 August 1959; 4a:12)

The Barry Harris Quintet (28 September 1961; 4b:178)

The Vi Redd Sextet (21/22 May 1962; 6:237)

The Don Byas Quartet (14/15 July 1964; 2:214)

The Elvin Jones Quartet (23 February 1965; 4c:199)

The Bengt Hallberg Trio (14 May 1968; 4b:117)

56. There are many more "I Got Rhythm" contrafacts than the ones on which I have gathered information here. But to provide a statistical summary of the ones I've dealt with: Between 1930 and 1968, a total of 280 jazz recordings of "I Got Rhythm" and 45 of its contrafacts have been traced. Of that number, 160 (57 percent) were contrafacts. The count is based on pieces listed in Rust and Jepson's discographies. The contrafacts, in alphabetical order by title, are

57. See chapter 2, p. 65.

58. Ella Fitzgerald, The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (Verve recording VE-2-2525).

59. As I hear it, a melodic quotation follows the semitone hike after bar 8. Bars 9-10, plus the first three notes of bar 11, sound to me like a reference to "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" by Léon Jessel, first published in Germany in 1905 (James Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular and Folk , rev. ed. [New York, 1971], 421).