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.