Music in Boston

Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918

Bill F. Faucett

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498537391
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: North American History

Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918 is a history of the city's classical-music culture in the period that begins a decade before the American Civil War and extends to the close of the Great War. The book provides insights into the intellectual foundation of Boston's musical development as revealed in the writings of its significant critics and thinkers, including John Sullivan Dwight, John Knowles Paine, William Foster Apthorp, and others. It also examines the influence of outsiders—Patrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, Richard Wagner, New York's Metropolitan Opera, and Richard Strauss—on Boston's performance and composition scene while also considering events that affected music in Boston, such as the building of the Music Hall, the acquisition of its Great Organ, the National Peace Jubilee, Chicago's Columbian Exposition, Boston's first Wagner Festival, and the rise and fall of the Boston Opera Company. Music in Boston also accounts for the ascent of the Second New England School of composers—John Knowles Paine, Edward MacDowell, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach and others—and discusses their key compositions and legacy. Finally, the book explores Boston itself: its transformations via immigration, its ever-changing topography, and its economy.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Beethoven’s Statue
• Chapter 1: “Something to Represent the Movement”
• Chapter 2: “Running after Strange Gods”
• Chapter 3: Forging Boston’s Musical Atmosphere
• Chapter 4: Varieties of American Music
• Chapter 5: Modern Music Comes to Boston
• Chapter 6: The Lure of Opera
• Chapter 7: Musical Boston and the Great War
• Epilogue: “Bear us into Realms Ideal”
• Appendix 1: Thomas’s “Flying Visits” to Boston
• Appendix 2: HMA Orchestra Performances of Music by Boston Composers
• Appendix 3: Selected HMA Orchestra Performances of Music by Modernist Composers
• Appendix 4: Selected BSO Performances of Music by Boston Composers, 1881–1918
• Select Bibliography
• About the Author