The American Symphony

Neil Butterworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138350342
• eBook ISBN: 9780429789441
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

First published in 1998, this volume is the first book to focus on the American symphony. Neil Butterworth surveys the development of the symphony in the United States from early European influences in the last century to the present day, and asks why American composers have shown such allegiance to a musical form which their European contemporaries appear to have discarded.

An overview of the growth of musical societies in America during the eighteenth century and the establishment of the first professional orchestras during the early part of the nineteenth century is followed by chronological analyses of the works of those composers who have played important parts in the progress of symphony in the United States, from Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, to contemporary figures such as William Bolcom and John Harbison.

Complete with a comprehensive catalogue of symphonies and an extensive discography, this book is an indispensable reference work.

1 Early Years and Orchestral Beginnings

Music in North America got off to an unpromising start. The early settlers at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Pilgrim Fathers, were not particularly sympathetic towards music. They accepted the singing of hymns and psalms in church but instrumental music, especially if associated with dancing, was forbidden as it was regarded as the work of the devil. For practical reasons, these emigrants could take with them only the basic essentials for survival in the New World: farming implements, animals, tools, seeds, firearms, food. Musical instruments were a very low priority. However, there are some inexplicable exceptions: inventories of two New Hampshire households in July 1633 include ‘15 recorders and hoeboys’ in the Great House, Newitchwaniche, and ‘26 hoeboys and recorders and 1 drum’ at Pascattaquack.

The British soldiers who were later sent out to protect the colonists were, for the most part, not Puritans. Naturally they enjoyed their own music-making, however primitive. Marches for pipes, trumpets and drums must have contrasted sharply with the solemn church music of the settlers, and often gave rise to complaints.

Thus during the seventeenth century when Europe was experiencing the birth of opera with Monteverdi, the lavish court entertainments of Louis XIV at Versailles and the masques and semi-operas for which Purcell provided the music in London, the North American continent could offer only hymns and marches. These two forms, one religious, the other secular, constitute the fundamental ingredients of American music up to the present day, from jazz to the symphonic repertoire.

By 1700 changes had occurred. Many of the more recent arrivals from Europe were not Puritans. They still held strong religious convictions but were not confined by the strictures of the original settlers, especially with regard to music. Also the British Isles were no longer the exclusive origin of the newcomers; other Europeans followed in ever-increasing numbers, bringing with them music and instruments to a musically-deprived continent. In 1716 the Boston Newsletter advertised:

This is to give notice that there is lately come over from England a choice collection of instruments, consisting of Flageolets, Flutes, Hautboys, Reeds for Hautboys, books of instruction for all instruments, book of ruted paper. Tb be sold at the Dancing School of Mr Enstone in Sudbury Street, near the Orange Tree, Boston.

The first organ was constructed in Philadelphia in 1703. In the following year an English organ-builder, Dr Christopher Witt, arrived to supervise the building of more instruments in Philadelphia and Boston. Around 1732, Karl Theodore Pachelbel, son of Johann Pachelbel, organist and composer of the famous Canon, arrived in Boston from Germany.

The strongest stimulus to music making in eighteenth-century America was the establishment of the Moravian sect in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1741. Although called the Moravians, many of their members came from Germany and Holland. Over the years these musical people brought with them instruments and the latest compositions including in particular the works of Joseph Haydn. Johann Friedrich Peter (1746-1813) made copies of Haydn’s music in Vienna in 1767 and 1769, including a complete set of parts of Symphony No.17 in F. He took these with him to America in 1770 where he settled in the Moravian Pennsylvanian communities of Nazareth, Bethlehem and Lititz. There is no confirmation of when or where he may have performed these pieces.

The first performance in America of at least a part of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation is believed to have taken place in one of these towns less than two years after the Vienna première in 1798. The Moravian composers concentrated on writing anthems for soloist, chorus and orchestra for the Sunday services. The Haydnesque style of the music contrasts sharply with the stark hymn tunes of the older settlers. No fewer than six players in Haydn’s orchestra in London in 1791 settled in America, including James Hewitt (1770-1827), an exact contemporary of Beethoven who conducted concerts and opera in New York.

Evidence of perhaps the earliest public concert appeared in the Boston Newsletter of 16 and 23 December 1731:

On Thursday, the 30th of this instant December, there will be performed a ‘concert of Music’ on Sundry instruments At Mr Pelham’s great Room, being the house of the late Doctor Noyes near Sun Tavern. Tickets to be delivered at the place of Performance at ‘Five Shillings’ each. The concert to begin exactly at Six o’clock and no Tickets will be delivered after Five the day of Performance. N.B. There will be no admittance after Six.

Peter Pelham was an engraver who had emigrated from London in 1726. His son, also Peter, became an assistant to Karl Theodore Pachelbel and took part in the earliest recorded concert in New York in 1736.

The Moravians were also responsible for the first musical organization in America, Collegium Musicum, founded in Bethlehem in the 1740s and replaced in 1820 by the Philharmonic Society. With the increasing population, the Southern states were also flourishing musically. The St Cecilia Society of Charleston, South Carolina, established in 1762, had 120 members, each of them paying an annual fee of £25, quite a considerable sum for that time. When vacancies arose in the orchestra, advertisements were placed in the newspapers of major cities, offering contracts of two and three years. Throughout the season there were two concerts a month of music by contemporary European composers, including Abel, J.C. Bach, Haydn, the Earl of Kelly, Pichl, Carl Stamitz and Toeschi. Although the orchestra was small by present day standards, it was complete: 2 flutes, 2 oboes or clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 4 first violins, 3 second violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and harpsichord. The society survived for over 150 years.

By 1800 immigrants were flooding into America as refugees, more from political and economic than religious oppression. The French Revolution of 1789 produced an influx of Parisian aristocrats; for them music was the only useful training that they had received, so that an upper-class hobby became the sole means of earning a living. One such is the Chevalier Marie Robert de Leaumont (d. 1812), a violinist, who is reported to have directed an orchestra in Boston in 1790 and on 1 June 1796 he conducted symphonies by Haydn and Stamitz.

A significant figure who greatly improved the standard of orchestral playing in Boston was Gottlieb Graupner (1767-1836). The son of an oboist in a German army band, he was born in Hanover. In 1788 he went to London and played oboe in Salomon’s orchestra during Haydn’s first visit to England. He moved to America in the early 1790s, making his debut in Boston on 15 December 1794. In 1810 he founded the Philharmonic Society of Boston, an orchestra of professional and amateur musicians who played symphonies by Haydn and others for their own pleasure. It was dissolved in 1824. With two other musicians he established an organization to provide authentic performances of music by Handel and Haydn. This was later to become the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, one of the oldest surviving musical institutions in America.

There is evidence that a symphony by J.C. Bach was heard in Boston on 17 May 1771 and Haydn’s Symphony No.85 (La Poule) was played in Philadelphia on 29 December 1792. Until recently it was believed that the first performance in America of Beethoven’s Symphony No.l took place in Lexington, Kentucky on 12 November 1817 conducted by Anton Philipp Heinrich, although probably only one movement was given on that occasion. What was claimed to be the première of the complete symphony is credited to the Musical Fund of Philadelphia in a concert on 24 April 1821 directed by Benjamin Carr. It is now known that an unspecified symphony by Beethoven was played in the Moravian community of Nazareth on 13 June 1813.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century orchestras were assembled to play for choral societies and opera companies. In 1800 Philadelphia was the largest city in the United States with a population of 70 000, enough to sustain increasingly ambitious musical events. New York was almost the same size with 60 000 inhabitants and growing by the day with new arrivals from Europe. By comparison Boston was more modest, population about 25 000, but musical life there was as enterprising as any place on the Eastern seaboard. Among the American premières were Handel’s Messiah (Philadelphia 1801), Haydn’s The Creation (complete) (Boston 1816), Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (New York 1819), Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (New York 1823), Weber’s Der Freischütz (New York 1823) and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (New York 1826).

The Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia was founded in 1821, whose leading lights were three musicians from Britain, Raynor Taylor (1747-1825), Benjamin Carr (1768-1831) and a Scotsman George Schetky (1776-1831). They had been inspired by the Royal Society of Musicians in London. At their first concert on 24 April 1821 no fewer than six conductors participated. The Music Fund Hall was completed in 1824; it was demolished in 1982 to make way for a residential building.

In Boston Lowell Mason (1792-1872) and George James Webb (1803-1887) established the Boston Academy of Music in 1833. Webb, born in England, took responsibility for instrumental tuition and founded an orchestra which performed seven of Beethoven’s symphonies. In 1847 the orchestral work was transferred to the Musical Fund Society which Webb also conducted shortly before it became defunct in 1855.

In 1848, the Germania Orchestra in New York, consisting of 25 players - mostly from Berlin seeking refuge from the revolutions in Central Europe - became the first orchestra to rehearse regularly on a daily basis. The players moved to Boston in the following year and in spite of financial difficulties and personal rivalry, the orchestra stayed together for six years, after which the musicians scattered to seek employment in other cities. Although they had to pander to popular taste with programmes of light music, they included symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn in their repertoire and gave the American premières of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1848) and Wagner’s overtures to Rienzi (1853) and Tannhäuser (1855).

The brief visit to New York of the French conductor Jullien had an impact disproportionate to his status as a serious musician. Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) gained a reputation for flamboyant behaviour on the platform, conducting Beethoven with white gloves and a jewelled baton; a white and gold throne was provided in which he rested between items.

After fifteen years in London, he arrived in New York in August 1853 for a series of Monster Concerts for the Masses in Castle Gardens and Metropolitan Hall. Jullien brought 29 musicians from Europe to whom he added 60 local musicians; the composer George Bristow and the conductor Theodore Thomas were two of them. The programmes combined complete symphonies instead of single movements, a rarity in America at the time, with popular music - quadrilles and opera selections. His famous novelty was The Firemen’s Quadrille during which real firemen with real water extinguished real fires.

A more significant innovation was the inclusion of works by American composers including four symphonies by William Fry. Following the New York season, Jullien embarked on a six-month nationwide tour before returning for a number of farewell concerts in the summer of 1854. Critics were unimpressed by his exhibitionism; the New York Courier and Enquirer dismissed Jullien as ‘A splendid, bold and dazzlingly successful humbug.’ To his credit, however, by promoting popular concerts on a huge scale for an admission fee of only 50 cents, he proved that there was a demand for such events. Later Theodore Thomas adopted the practice without Jullien’s gratuitous ostentation.

Permanent professional orchestras

To New York goes the honour of establishing the first professional orchestra to have survived to the present day. In 1842 Ureli Corelli Hill (1802-1875), a violinist and pupil of Spohr in Germany, was appointed President of the Philharmonic Society of New York. In the inaugural concert on 7 December 1842 in which Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony took pride of place, there were 53 players: 17 violins, 5 violas, 4 cellos, 5 double-basses, 3 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 4 trombones and 1 timpani. Hill conducted the first five seasons, returning to the orchestra in 1873 as a humble violinist. For the first 16 seasons, the orchestra gave four concerts a year. The repertoire was heavily weighted towards European, especially German, music. In 1846 the New York Philharmonic Orchestra gave the American premières of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Chopin’s First Piano Concerto and overtures by Berlioz. The first work by an American composer to appear in one of their programmes was George Bristow’s Concert Overture in 1847, but it remained for years an isolated example of home-grown music.

The principal rivalry that faced the New York Philharmonic was the rise of the conductor Theodore Thomas (1835-1905). Born in Darmstadt, he was taken to the United States at the age of ten by which time he was already an accomplished violinist. After playing in various New York orchestras, he founded his own in 1862 for ‘Symphony Soirées’ in the Irving Hall, New York. His intention was to cultivate public taste for symphonic music by skilfully balancing popular works with the major German repertoire. A prodigious capacity for hard work enabled him to combine a winter season with a series of 100 summer concerts in Central Park. Between 1866 and 1875 he conducted 1227 concerts in the May to September season. In 1869 he undertook the first of his coast-to-coast tours, covering the whole of the United States from Maine to Georgia, across the continent to California with an excursion into Canada, thereby offering steady employment to his players. In later years he organized short seasons in Chicago and Boston.

In 1877 Thomas was appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which absorbed the leading members of his own orchestra. He held the post until 1891, with the exception of 1878 when he served as Director of the newly-opened College of Music in Cincinnati. Under Thomas’s authoritarian regime, standards of orchestral playing in the United States were among the highest in the world. After a visit to the United States in 1872-73, the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein wrote:

I had no idea that such a new country had an orchestra like Theodore Thomas’. Never in my life, although I had given concerts in St Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London, had I found an orchestra that was as perfect as the organization Theodore Thomas had created and built up.

This one man was responsible for the extraordinary expansion of public interest in serious orchestral music. As a brilliant organizer, he brought the classics to almost every city in the country. Among his enterprising schemes were children’s concerts and carefully planned programmes of ‘pops’ to recruit new audiences.

After leaving the New York Philharmonic, Thomas was encouraged to establish an orchestra in Chicago. In the fourteen seasons with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891-1905), he conducted a total of 274 concerts including works by 170 composers, an indication of his broad musical taste. Pride of place went to Wagner with 164 performances of his works, with Beethoven in second place, a tally of 108 pieces. In his huge repertory, ranging from Bach to Wagner, were numerous American premieres including symphonies by Berlioz (Harold in Italy), Brahms (Nos 2 and 3), Bruckner (4 and 7) Dvor̆ák (7), Saint-Saëns (3), Schubert (8 and 9), Sibelius (2) and works by Wagner, Richard Strauss and Elgar. His services to American music were less impressive but he did give the first performance of pieces by George Bristow, Dudley Buck, George Chadwick, Frederick Converse and John Knowles Paine. His autobiography published posthumously in 1905 with reminiscences and appreciation by George Upton (reprinted Da Capo Press: New York 1964), presents a vivid account of the difficulties facing the performance of music in America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The demand for concerts was such that New York acquired a third orchestra in 1878 when Leopold Damrosch (1832-1885) established the New York Symphony Orchestra. Like Thomas, Damrosch came from Europe; he was born in Poznan, now in Poland but at that time a part of Germany. Early in his conducting career in New York in December 1877, he gave the American première of Brahms’ First Symphony. On his death he was succeeded by his son Walter (1862-1950) who continued to conduct the orchestra until its merger with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1928.

Orchestral activity in Boston had begun with the Philharmonic Society in 1799 guided by Gottlieb Graupner. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Boston Musical Fund Society and the orchestra of the Academy of Music served the people well. In addition there were the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra (1855-1863) and the Harvard Mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Early Years and Orchestral Beginnings
• 2 Pioneers
• 3 John Knowles Paine (1839-1906)
• 4 Dvor̆ák and the Search for National Identity
• 5 After Dvor̆ák: The Romantics
• 6 Charles Ives (1874-1954)
• 7 Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
• 8 Elder Statesmen
• 9 Walter Piston (1894-1976)
• 10 Howard Hanson (1896-1981)
• 11 Roy Harris (1898-1979)
• 12 Serialism and Beyond
• 13 Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
• 14 William Schuman (1910-1992)
• 15 The American Spirit
• 16 Traditionalists in the Shadows
• 17 Eastern Influences
• 18 Peter Mennin and George Rochberg
• 19 Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
• 20 The Present Generation
• 21 Symphonie Music for Band
• Postscript
• Catalogue of Symphonies
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index