The art of music, Vol. 04 (of 14) — Text and Context

Institutional Roots and Transatlantic Influences

The narrative highlights how English and German musicians collaborated in early American music education. Dr. G. J. Jackson, an English musician who arrived in 1796, taught in Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York before settling in Boston in 1812. He became organist at multiple churches and published a book of chants and anthems. His friend Rayner Taylor also contributed to The Churchman's Choral Companion (1808). The Handel and Haydn Society, founded in 1815, is credited with educating Boston and New England, and with having a “formative influence on the taste of the entire country.” The text notes that English talent “conjoined at Boston with German” in this educational work, illustrating a transatlantic blend that would characterize much early American musical life.

The Harvard Musical Association and the Rise of Academic Music

A singing club at Harvard in 1786 evolved into the “Pierean Sodality” (1808), a fraternity that became the germ of Harvard’s Department of Music. In 1837, the Harvard Musical Association was formed by alumni. Its founding report declared: “Nothing unites men more than music. It makes brothers of strangers.” The association aimed to advance music at the university, collect a musical library, and promote symphonies. It sponsored chamber concerts under artists like Herwig and Hohnstock, leading to the Mendelssohn Quintet Club (1849). J. S. Dwight, a leading spirit, established Dwight's Journal of Music in 1852, which ran until 1881. The association’s efforts eventually led to a formal Department of Music at Harvard, fulfilling the vision of music as “worthy of its professorship.”

Contrasts in Musical Appreciation: Boston vs. Dartmouth

The text contrasts the success of Boston’s musical institutions with the fate of the “Handel Society of Dartmouth College,” which “dwindled and died for lack of recruits.” The editors attribute this to the “low state of musical appreciation in the smaller colleges of the times” and the class background of students, who were “chiefly drawn” from the “common people.” This observation underscores a recurring tension in the volume: the uneven spread of musical culture across different regions and social strata. While Boston’s elite fostered lasting organizations, smaller colleges struggled to sustain interest, revealing the challenges of democratizing music in a vast, diverse nation.

The volume’s emphasis on institutions and their founders—Graupner, Jackson, Dwight—offers a concrete entry point into early American music history. Readers may find it useful to compare the development of musical societies in other cities, as the text provides a template for understanding how local conditions shaped national trends. The excerpts suggest that the editors were less concerned with individual composers than with the organizational and educational frameworks that made composition possible.

The rain kept a steady rhythm against the windows as I read about the Handel and Haydn Society, how those early choruses clung to European masters while yearning for something of their own. That push-and-pull felt so familiar, so human. Later, I found myself reaching for Tschaikowsky and his orchestral music — Background and Themes, wondering if he’d felt the same ache. He had.