Conference Agenda

During the first half of the nineteenth century, New York’s foreign- and US-born musicians were principally concerned with gaining recognition and credibility as professionals while aiming to “improve” the public’s musical taste. As Vera Brodsky Lawrence and others have shown, well-trained German musicians arrived in large numbers in the wake of the 1848 revolutions and created a distinctive social subset within the larger musician community based on nationality and language. This cultural rift prompted musicians born in the United States to stake out distinctive community territory of their own, including with institutional segregation and compositional experimentation. Seen through the experiences of Americans of two different generations, Ureli Corelli Hill (1805–1875) and Charles Jerome Hopkins (1836–1898), these shifting attitudes directly shaped the institutions they established: the New-York Musical Fund Society (1828)--one of the country's first musician-led organizations--and the New-York American Music Association (1855)--the country's first organization devoted to programming music by "American" composers. Meanwhile, the New York-born composer George Frederick Bristow (1825–1898) found himself caught in the middle of this realignment as he assimilated European conventions into an individual creative voice. Drawing from fresh archival research, this panel sheds new light on the murky past of classical music-making in New York in the years surrounding the formation of the now-famous Philharmonic in 1842.

New York in the 1820s saw the rise of seminal yet short-lived music organizations that reflected an evolving American identity and an expanding sense of entitlement among musicians. Within these organizations, the city’s musicians eventually coalesced into a collegial and supportive community.

In 1824, New York’s monied elites founded a “Philharmonic” that subordinated performing musicians by barring them from any decision-making roles and direct compensation. This method of organization contrasted sharply with the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, which was founded in 1820 as a joint venture between wealthy amateurs and professional musicians. Within a year of the Philharmonic’s founding, the differences between the two organizations were readily apparent as the Philharmonic governors created something of a quid pro quo with the Garcia Italian opera company (1825–1826) wherein the musicians served as the pit band for the opera and the Garcias sang at Philharmonic concerts. Largely because of personal greed and unchecked ambition, however, this partnership led to the Philharmonic’s demise.

In the wake of this disaster, the patronizing and demeaning treatment of Philharmonic musicians galvanized the players to take control of their professional identity and establish their own organization, the New-York Musical Fund Society. Involved in this effort was the American-born violinist Ureli Corelli Hill (1805–1875), who along with at least five others would, nearly twenty years later, establish what is today’s New York Philharmonic as a democratic American orchestra, an organization of professional musicians with an emphasis on the fair and equal treatment of its members. Using Hill's diary, archival documents and press reports to track the relationships between key musicians, this paper uncovers their contribution to establishing the city’s musical culture prior to 1848 while providing fresh insights into how professional musicians embraced the broader ideals of America's popular democracy.

During the 165 years since the demise of the New-York American Music Association (NYAMA) in 1858, only one side of the story has made it into history books: that of the news media. Until now, scholars have unfortunately missed the story’s other side: that of the group’s founder, C. Jerome Hopkins (1836–1898), a young pianist and composer from Vermont yearning for a reputation in New York.

Begun in 1855 in the wake of a feud between the New York Philharmonic’s German- and US-born members, the NYAMA was the country's first organization devoted to the support of music written by self-identifying Americans. Between 1856 and 1858, it presented ten concerts of (mostly) American music, performed (mostly) by American musicians. By harnessing an impressive group of the city’s musical luminaries, including Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the barely twenty-year-old Hopkins and his fledgling society seemed destined for success. But the NYAMA mysteriously failed after only three short concert seasons. The press speculated that lack of patronage or the performers’ unappeasable egos caused the failure. Using only these press accounts to make their assessments, scholars who have studied the NYAMA have blamed Hopkins’s poor policymaking skills.

All of these explanations are partially true, but there is a more pressing historiographical issue: the Association as such never materially existed. Hopkins’s unpublished diaries reveal that there actually was no NYAMA, only a group of individuals whose sole connection was Hopkins himself. The diaries also colorfully describe the interminable struggles he endured to maintain the façade. This paper opens a new window on the history of classical music-making in New York by exploring the early career of US-born composers’ most vociferous—and most loquacious—defender, Hopkins himself.

Numerous scholarly accounts of American compositions from the nineteenth century devote virtually no space to chamber music. This issue is particularly acute for music written during the first half of the century. Part of this gap stems from the absence of published scores: with the exception of pieces that included a piano part, most works for strings and for winds survive only in parts. But another, more important reason is that until recently, most music historians simply assumed that the few pieces that might exist could not compete artistically with the European masterpieces of the first Viennese school.

Over the past three decades, however, a limited number of chamber works by American composers have been published, challenging the conventional wisdom. They include string quartets and a quintet by Charles Hommann, a composer who lived in Philadelphia and New York at various times; a string quartet by Clara Kathleen Rogers; and the five quartets by George Whitefield Chadwick. Meanwhile, quartets and quintets by such leading composers as Leopold Meignen, William Henry Fry, and Horatio Parker are not available in modern performance edition.

This presentation focuses on the chamber music of another “forgotten” American composer, George Frederick Bristow (1825–1898), whose output includes two duos for violin and viola, two string quartets, and several works for violin and piano. Composed when Bristow was in his twenties, these pieces provide significant insights into the state of musical life in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century—what music was heard and performed, both in public and private venues. Through a detailed examination of Bristow’s two duos, I speculate on how these works and the other surviving chamber pieces from antebellum America inform the development of chamber music in New York and other cities. I also speculate on which European works may have influenced the youthful Bristow.