Art music from 1800 to 1860

Katherine Preston

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521454292.009

8 - Art music from 1800 to 1860

from PART ONE

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Katherine Preston

Edited by

David Nicholls

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David Nicholls: Affiliation:
University of Southampton

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Summary

In 1780, John Adams wrote home from Paris to his wife Abigail:

I could fill volumes with descriptions of temples and palaces, paintings, sculpture, tapestry, porcelain, etc., if I could have the time, but I could not do this without neglecting my duty. My duty is to study the science of government that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and science. My sons ought to study geography, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study philosophy, painting, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture, tapestry, and porcelain.

(Quoted in Mueller 1951, p. 17)

Adams’s prescience - at least concerning music – was remarkably accurate: it was not until the mid-1840s, when his grandson Charles Francis Adams was a young adult, that musical culture in America came of age. Music, of course, had been an important part of American life during the Colonial and early Federal periods. But the 1840s marked the United States’s emergence as a true music-supporting nation, equipped with the infrastructure necessary for the performing arts. With that development, musical culture could only grow, as it did throughout the 1850s.

Because the American musical environment changed so significantly after the mid-1840s, this chapter is divided into two parts. The first half introduces the situation at the dawn of the century and explores the foundation-building endeavors of the 1810s through the mid-1840s; the second covers the context and circumstances of musical activity in the mid-1840s and 1850s.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of American Music , pp. 186 - 213

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521454292.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1998

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