Cairo’s visual culture so impressed the medieval scholar Ibn Khaldūn that he pronounced the city the umm al–dunya (“center [lit. “mother”,] of the world”). Cities and their buildings stood at the center of the visual culture of medieval Egypt. Recognized as significant forms in themselves, the cities and their buildings both provided a central focus and constituted an underlying structure to which other elements of the visual world related. Medieval authors saw this structure evolving in the visual world they described.

Ibn Khaldūn was overwhelmed by the richness of Cairo’s arts, particularly in its architecture and the related arts of woodworking, gilding and masonry. He noted as well those arts he understood as supporting a luxurious lifestyle such as textiles, fine glass, ceramics, costly papers and books, and the working of precious metals. To Ibn Khaldūn, Cairo was the epitome of “sedentary culture,” a term he used to highlight the role of cities as the locus of civilization and as a fundamental art form in themselves. The luxury and diversity he found in early fifteenth–century Cairo was something he believed went hand–in–hand with the strong dynasties which had maintained it as the capital from the tenth century on. He noted also that travelers spread its sedentary culture throughout the Mediterranean by bringing Cairene luxuries back to their home towns.

If the history of American music in the twentieth century can be said to have imparted at least one clear lesson, it is that tonality has proved to be a far more durable and resilient force than many, at least among the more progressively minded, would ever have predicted at the century’s beginning. Indeed, although there is still an identifiable musical avant garde, and although prominent figures in modernism’s second (post-World War II) wave, such as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, are still making their voices heard, it is tonality in all its many varieties that seems poised to set the tone, as it were, for the concert music of ad 2000 and beyond. Among those performers and audiences with at least some interest in recently composed music, it is tonal music especially during the last two decades that has garnered the lion’s share of attention. Elderly composers who grew up neoclassical and never wavered; middle-aged composers who started off as atonalists or dodecaphonists only to repent later on; and younger composers for whom a nontonal idiom was never really a viable or seriously considered option – all are enjoying exposure in performances and recordings as never before.

Why has this happened? And why now? For all its history as a melting pot, open to new influences of every sort, America has, paradoxically, always had a deeply conservative streak. And this conservatism is nowhere more evident than in its attitude toward the arts. As has often been pointed out, the Þrst Caucasian arrivals in the territories that eventually became the United States, as well as the many succeeding waves of immigrants over the next several centuries, brought what “culture” they had from their former, European homelands.

This chapter traces the complex results of a paradigm shift: around the middle of the twentieth century, commercially mediated working-class and rural musics disrupted the dominance of Tin Pan Alley popular song. Records became more important than sheet music, and oral traditions grew ever more audible and less local. The music industry resisted these changes, which rewarded ‘untrained’ performers and songwriters, upstart record companies, and eccentric disc jockeys more than the composers, arrangers, copyists, crooners, and studio orchestras of the reigning commercial system. But by 1952 the value of record sales exceeded that of sheet music, and the handful of major record companies saw their share of the popular music market drop from 78 percent in 1955 to 34 percent in 1959, even while that market tripled in size during those few years. Never before had the sentiments and critiques of working-class music been so accessible and persuasive to other groups. Previously separate audiences found new affinities as mass culture offered them fresh pleasures and identities. Music that had expressed the world views of primarily marginal groups brought its styles and sensibilities to the center stage of American life.

From the early days of the recording business, genre categories served to separate artists and audiences along racial lines, implying that “race records” and “hillbilly, ” for example, came from mutually exclusive sources. But demographic shifts encouraged cultural mixtures throughout the twentieth century: not only generational changes, but perhaps more importantly, the mass movements of people from the country to the cities.

In chapter 2, I discussed three aspects of the interaction between individualism and egalitarianism which characterizes American music as well as her politics and society: elitist art and egalitarian folk musics, which in some respects mark the poles of a spectrum, and the mediational role of musical reformers. The present chapter explores three other aspects: a counter-reform, the popular music industry, and the interlinked techniques of improvisation and experiment. I begin by returning to the reformers.

Counter-reform

The reformers sought to elevate America’s tastes by presenting artistic values in a musical language suited to ordinary citizens. They were most successful in cities, where their ideas both supported and rested on a rich concert life. The links between art music, reform, and patronage thereby grew steadily stronger, so that by the 1870s many reformers had effectively become upper-class conservatives.

By that time, however, America was becoming more self-critical about its social and economic polarities. The aesthetics of working-class citizens seemed less important than their economic position, and values derived from European art music seemed far removed from the affection citizens granted their folk and popular musics. Though reform methods still served to promote musical literacy and performance, they became increasingly irrelevant to the reformers’ original, broader objectives: mediation, reconciliation, acculturation. A counter-reform was needed.

This, like its predecessor, was grounded in religion – in particular, the unending succession of religious revivals that swept across nineteenth-century rural America. The music sung at these ranged from traditional psalms to remnants of the New England repertory to, eventually, reform hymns by Mason and his brethren.

‘Take it for granted from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so.’ So wrote Busoni two years before the beginning of the twentieth century, prophesying the extraordinary explosion of compositional innovation which the new epoch would bring, and in which the development of the piano's technical and sonorous capabilities would play a crucial role. Yet in spite of the apparent desire on the part of several composers at the turn of the century to break firmly with tradition and cultivate an almost avant-garde approach to pianoforte composition, with hindsight it now seems abundantly clear that the exciting new developments in piano music in the early years of the century were firmly rooted in nineteenth-century precedent.

By 1916 the piano's impact on compositional developments had become sufficiently evident for E. J. Dent to publish an article entitled ‘The pianoforte and its influence on modern music’, in which he expressed the opinion that Liszt had been the ‘foundation of modern pianoforte-playing and pianoforte composition’ in spite of his various ‘shortcomings as a composer of real music’. The influence of Liszt's technical virtuosity and harmonic experimentation is to be seen clearly enough in Ravel's Jeux d'eau (1901), which owed much to the water-figurations of Liszt's Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este (1877). The impressionistic application of virtuoso figurations to create atmospheric effects was adopted by Debussy in his piano music from the Estampes (1903) onwards, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (1908) marked the apparent limits to which such technically demanding figurations could be stretched.

Introduction

Many factors shaped the piano music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a period of change during which keyboard instruments extended from five to seven octaves, and from the relatively light-framed instruments of the 1760s and 1770s to the much more robust concert pianos of the 1820s (see chapter 2). It was also a period which saw an increasing emphasis on virtuoso performance and technique. At the same time, amateur music making increased rapidly and publishing houses expanded to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for cheaper, popular music. These and other factors led composers to write in certain ways for certain audiences, and if we are to understand the piano music of this period we must first give some attention to the circumstances in which composers worked as well as the settings in which music was performed.

One of the most significant developments of the late eighteenth century was the establishment of the public concert. Concerts for a paying audience had existed prior to this time, but their popularity grew in importance at the end of the eighteenth century to such an extent that composers who might previously have devoted their energies to the service of a rich aristocratic patron now found themselves writing to satisfy the public taste. London was the most important centre for the public concert at the time, with its newly rich mercantile class, and concert promoters such as Johann Christian Bach and Johann Peter Salomon lost no time in engaging a wide variety of musicians for their series of subscription concerts.

These astonishing lines from a song written in 1898 may be read as a harbinger of key developments in twentieth-century American music. Behind the mask of racist, stereotyped black dialect that marked the popular genre known as coon song, the black composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) makes a sly and powerful assertion: that African American music would become a universal musical language, that everyone would soon be “singin’ coon.” At least two things made it possible for Cook to imagine that scenario. First, a new generation of African Americans, born in freedom, reached maturity in the 1890s, allowing for the unprecedented blossoming of black secular music styles. Second, the same decade witnessed the emergence of a business culture that created a “cult of the new” (Leach 1993, p. 3). New merchandising techniques stoked consumer desire for novel items produced in bulk, and among the hot new commercial products was black music on published sheets and, later, sound recordings. Between 1890 and 1930, then, the rise and spread of ragtime and jazz held out the promise of realizing Cook’s prediction.

Ragtime in American culture

The poetic diction that Cook adopted in Darktown Is Out Tonight and other songs – spiked with the derogatory word “coon” for African American – was common currency in ragtime songs dealing with black subjects at the turn of the century.

Prologue - “Americana” at century’s end

With little fanfare and without anyone really taking notice, a new type of music appeared during the early months of 1997 in the bins of record shops, the announcements of CD catalogues, and on radio folk-music shows: “Americana.” From the beginning it was hard to determine what Americana was, or rather, what it embraced. Americana surely embraced folk music, and, indeed, many singer-songwriters were quick to use the term to refer to the music they created and performed. Singer-songwriters are on the whole politically liberal, which by extension suggests that Americana does not have the more conservative overtones it might otherwise possess. The music of this “Americana,” moreover, is eclectic, multicultural, and multiracial; its styles embrace ethnic diversity, and its repertories self-consciously reflect racial diversity, notably the blues. Americana, so it seems at first glance, offers something to everyone. It’s a music that provides aesthetic and ideological identity to each individual and to a limitless range of cultural and political issues. If stylistic borders are blurred in Americana, the ability to use music to cross social and class borders is nonetheless crucial to the cultural agenda of those who perform and consume it, those who transfer its sense of engagement with America to their own lives.

Americana is taking shape as the twentieth century is coming to a close. Not only is it a product of a particular moment in American history, but it is a music that describes and ascribes the changing American identities that mark that moment. Through its wanton embrace of folk, ethnic, racial, regional, and class distinctions Americana lays claim to multiculturalism and postmodernism, that is to the aesthetic ideologies of inclusivity that characterized many sectors of American society in the post-Civil Rights and post-Vietnam era of the 1970s and 1980s. With its political agendas Americana strives to memorialize the folk-music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s, and before that of the 1930s.

In the fall of 1961 regular readers of the New York Times would have encountered a pair of brief articles published a day apart which, while unexceptional individually, are striking, at least in retrospect, in their juxtaposition. Thursday, September 7 of that year saw the publication of a short review (Salzman 1961) of a concert sponsored by the Fromm Music Foundation. Presented the previous evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the aegis of the International Musicological Society, which was holding its eighth congress at Columbia University from September 5 to September 12 (with ancillary events at Yale and Princeton Universities and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [LaRue 1962]), the concert offered only three works. Of these the first two – Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized accompaniment, by Milton Babbitt (born 1916), and the Double Concerto, by Elliott Carter (born 1908) – were world premieres, both commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. The third – the Concerto for Violin, Cello, Ten Winds and Percussion by Leon Kirchner (born 1919) – was a New York premiere.

The following day the New York Times printed an unattributed piece (anon. 1961) announcing details of the New York Philharmonic’s new subscription season that was doubtless read with greater anticipation by the majority of readers. According to the article, Leonard Bernstein would frame the season with two special “cycles,” the “Gallic Approach” and the “Teutonic Approach,” occupying the first and last six weeks respectively of the orchestra’s calendar. The French cycle featured not only the works of French composers but also works of “French influenced American composers,” and similarly for the German cycle.

Italy and the Iberian peninsula

Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1732) is generally credited with the invention of the piano in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century. Although some earlier accounts of keyboard actions survive, it is only from Cristofori that a continuous line of development can be drawn.

Cristofori entered the service of Prince Ferdinando de'Medici in 1688 as curator and instrument maker. In this capacity he maintained harpsichords, spinets and organs and made a variety of keyboard (and possibly stringed) instruments. His work on the piano may have begun as early as 1698, certainly by 1700, and in 1709 or 1710 Scipione Maffei noted that Cristofori had ‘made three so far, two sold in Florence, one to Cardinal Ottoboni’. In 1711 Maffei published a detailed description of Cristofori's pianos, including a diagram of the action (Fig. 1.1).

The action in Maffei's diagram works in the following way: as the key (C) is depressed one end of the intermediate lever (E) – which pivots around the pin (F) – is raised. This causes the escapement (G) to push the hammer (O) towards the string (A). The escapement then ‘escapes’ from contact with the hammer and allows it to fall back to its resting position, on a silk thread (P). When the key is released, the escapement, which is hinged and attached to a spring (L), slides back into its resting position and the damper (R) – which had been lowered when the key was depressed – comes back into contact with the string in order to damp the sound.

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

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.

As with any music before the age of sound recording, what survives of pre-nineteenth-century American sacred music is that which was written down or published. This means, in the main, Anglo-American Protestant psalmody. Psalmody - the word here referring to musical settings not only of the Biblical psalms but also of hymn texts and Biblical prose – was an extraordinarily rich creative phenomenon in late-eighteenth-century America. The vast literature of this tradition and the high artistic quality of many of its compositions are substantially the reasons why a separate chapter on early American sacred music is found in the present volume.

It is important, however, to consider the tradition of Protestant psalmody within a larger context: that of music as an aspect of worship - or, more broadly stated, of sacred activity. Humans have used music in various ways to express, intensify, channel, or unblock their relationship to the divine. Music can bring a person closer to God or to the spiritual realm; it can also create and strengthen the bonds within a community of worshippers or spiritual seekers. In different ritual settings within different cultural traditions, religious music has worked in very different ways: intensifying consciousness or dissolving it; exciting the body and spirit or rendering them tranquil; reinforcing established social hierarchies or providing a temporary alternative.

Seen from these perspectives, Protestant worship music occupies a very particular place in a wide spectrum of traditions. Both German Protestantism and the mainstream of Anglo-American Protestantism have always been wary of departing from consciousness and rationality in worship. And they have rarely encouraged individual or personal religious experiences.

The Cambridge companion to the piano brings together in a single volume a collection of essays which covers the history of the instrument, the history of its performance and a study of its repertory. Each chapter is written by a specialist with access to the most recent research on his or her topic, but all the authors have written accessibly, with the student of the instrument, or an enthusiastic amateur, in mind.

Chapters 1–3 bring together as much up-to-date piano history as is possible in the space available. In recent years, some extremely important work has been published on the early history of the piano. Stewart Pollens's The early pianoforte and Michael Cole's The pianoforte in the Classical era between them provide a comprehensive survey of the technical developments which took place in the eighteenth century. These developments are summarised in chapters 1 and 2 along with information about the specific kinds of instrument played by the early pianists. Necessary technical terms are explained in the glossary at the end of the volume. The equivalent history of the piano in the first half of the nineteenth century is much less well documented and a new, detailed history of the piano in the nineteenth century is urgently needed. It is remarkable that Rosamond Harding's book The piano-forte, first published as long ago as 1933, remains the standard text for this period.

‘Art music, what is that?’ Music lovers and many others in the second half of the nineteenth century were confronted with a new idea, a choice and an obligation. Some music, art music, had acquired a special status, and whatever one thought, there were things one was supposed to think about it. Earlier it had been much simpler: music was either utilitarian or fun. As utilitarian it had a function, be it in church, a militia ceremony, or a public commemoration, but the event dictated its role and except for the musicians, there was nothing to ponder. Music for music’s sake, that was just a diversion, enjoyable, entertaining.

A lot of earlier nineteenth-century music had of course been serious, in either perception or intent. Church music composers sought to enhance the dignity and decorum of the worship experience in their hymns and anthems; Henry Russell’s songs moved the population to tears; and vocal groups such as the Hutchinsons stirred, inspired, and outraged the population with their moral and political topics. But only in the second half of the century did the notion spread generally through society that certain types of music were fundamentally different. This music, the argument went, had the capacity to do more than entertain; it inspired and elevated. Even though it might be instrumental and abstract, it spoke to the ethical side of humanity. Even though it might be secular, it was sacred, in an intangible way. It was moral, it was good, it was good for you. Such music was called art music.

The history of American music begins with American Indians, who were the original inhabitants of North America. Their distant ancestors migrated from northeast Asia across the Bering land bridge and settled in the Americas some 15,000 years ago. Through time, Native Americans developed extraordinarily diverse lifeways as they adapted to a wide range of environments and climates. The first sustained contacts between Native Americans and Europeans began in the late fifteenth century, and by the early seventeenth century, Europeans had established permanent colonies in North America. Indian–White relations before 1800 were characterized by conflict over land, fraudulent treaties, and a steadily increasing imbalance of power. Native American social and economic conditions deteriorated during the nineteenth century, as the people were removed from their homelands, confined to reservations, and subjected to aggressive but unsuccessful acculturation programs. Misunderstanding and prejudice continued in the twentieth century, but Indian political activism since the 1960s resulted in legislation that supports tribal self-determination and religious freedom. Since the 1970s, Native Americans have experienced cultural renewal, and Indian identities remain strong and vibrant.

American Indians are the heirs to an enduring musical heritage that is as impressive in its modern richness and variety as in its historical depth and continuity. Each of the more than 200 tribes now in existence has its own historic musical culture, with unique repertories, styles, instruments, theories, and practices. American Indians also compose, perform, and listen to a wide spectrum of recently developed native musics, as well as European and American art, popular, and folk musics.