The Americas in European Music Encyclopedias
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The Americas in European Music Encyclopedias Part 1 ENGLAND (ANO SCOTLAND) Thomas Busby ( 1755-1838) compiled the first music lexicon reprinted in the United States, A Complete Dictionary of Mwic (Philadelphia: G.M. & W. Snider, 1827). Continental precedents would have permitted Busby's a1luding to American lndian music (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1768) or mentioning New World composers whose names were circulating in Europe by the 1790's (José Mazza). Busby did neither. lnstead his geographic biases permitted his snubbing even Spain, mother of American colonies. In the uxiv + 331-page "fourth edition with additions and improve· ments" of his A Dictionary of Mwic (London: Printed for Richanl Phillips, 1817), Busby offered these definitions (pages 45, 52, 246-247). CANARJES. 1ñe name of an old dance, of which we have a sample in PurceU's opera of Dioc/esian. lt is a sprightly air of two strains; the time, three quaven in a bar, the fll'St pointed. None of the foreign airs are distinguished by any name analogous to this; we have, therefore, rason to con clude that the Can aries is of English invention. CHACONN'E. (French.) An air, borrowed from the Arabians; the characteristic of whi<:h is a ground bas.s, consisting of four or eight measures of triple time of three crotchets, with its repetition to continuaUy varied melodies. 1ñe Chaconne somewhat resembles the Sarabande but is rather m<n grave, has the füst and last crotchet of every bar strongly accented, and was fonnerly used asan accompan:•.. ent to a certain dance, slow, and graceful in its movement. SARABAHDE. A dance said to be originaUy derived from the Saracens. According to sorne authors, it had its appellation from a comedian named Sarabandi, who fll'St introduced it in France. The tune of the Sarabande is written in: or !. and its character is both expressive and majestic. One of its distinguishing features is the lengthening of the second note of the measure, which at once gives a gravity and consequence to the mO\lement. Not untiJ George Grove (1820-1900) did British musical lexicography begin welcoming American information. In contrast with ali other chief English writers on music through World War l, Grove experienced America directly. From November 14, 1841, to June 1843 he superintended the construction of a lighthouse at Morant Point on Jamaica.• 'Summary of the diary Grove kept while in Jamaica in Charles L. Graves, Tlrt Lift & Ulltrs of Sir Geor,t Grow. C.B. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), pp. 22-23. 00ln the (Jamaica) diary itselr no hint is discernible of his literary tastes, but a clue as to the way in which he spent sorne of his leisure moments is 10 be found at the other end of lhe same note·book, where he has copied 001 a number of poems by Moore, WordswoMh, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge.'º Grove made no observations on 1he singing of the Jamaica Blacks assigned lo help with ligh1house construction but does record that on August 13. 1842, his life was saved by Blacks who got a ladder up to him while he dangled in danger of falling sixty feet. 159 - 160 INTERAMERICAN MUSIC REVIEW From April 20, 1844, to August 6, 1846, he did the same for a lighthouse on Gibb's Hill, Bennuda. sol On September 5, 1878, now 58, he sailed from Liverpool as a travelling companion of of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. Dean of Westrninster Abbey . Landing September 16 at Boston, U1 he met Charles Eliot, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Heruy Wadsworth Longfellow, and nu Jol merous other cultural and political leaders. He spent September 20 with Charles Francis a ! Adams (1807- 1886; minister to England 1861-1869), who gave him Adams family history tb particulars for his diary of the trip. Upon hearing the Harvard Musical Society sing lit "Believe me if all those endearing young channs" he noted in his diary that it was the college song. At fashionable Trinity Church of which Phillips Brooks was rector and Ju James CutJer Dunn Parker organist, he approved the "excellent singing of the solo quar C(l tet." Visits to Wellesley, Hartford, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore of brought him into personal contact with more college presidents and professors. At Phila A delphia, he and Dean Stanley who had preached at St. James's Church on Sunday E moming September 29 visited Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church that evening. m Grove's diary unsympathetically records the "violent contrasts ofjorte and piano, without u 1 any reference to the text, which characterized the singing of the coloured congregation. " N At Washington he and Dean Stanley met President Rutherford B. Hayes and visited the Admiralty Museum. After Mount Vemon next carne Richmond, whence Grove p departed on a three-day side trip that took him to the Blue Ridge Mountains 25 miles below Lynchburg. Retuming north, Grove rejoined Dean Stanley at New York. Albany, 'a Niagara, Quebec, Montreal, Lake George and Lake Champlain, "seat of much of the old ( wars," followed in that order. On October 23 they stopped at Saratoga and on October 25 d spent the day with 75-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson at Concord. On October 29 they travelled back to New York, there meeting other "seores of distinguished Americans" ranging from Henry Ward Beecher to Theodore Thomas. In 1879, the year after this momentous trip, appeared the first volume of the dictionary that was to immortaliu Grove. He began the preface to volume 1 of his A Dictionary of Music ami Musicians fA.D. 1450-1880) by eminent writers, English andforeign (Lon don: Macmillan and Co., 1879) with this fine American gesture: "A growing demand has arisen in this country and in the United States for infonnation on ali matters directly and indirectly connected with Music." So far as American contributors of articles on American subjects go, the most persistent throughout ali four vol u mes ( 1879, 1880, 1883, 1889 (with appendix added by J.A. Fuller Maitland]) was the Massachusetts-bom Francis Henry Jenks (Nantucket, June 2, 1838; Roxbury (Massachusetts), December 9, 1894). Son of Samuel Haynes Jenks, member of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society June 1, 1815 to January 1, 1828, F.H. Jenks studied organ at Berlin with Dorn before settling in Boston as church organist and writer for the Globe, Advertiser, and Courier. From 1881 to his death he served the patrician Transcript as both music and drama critic. From 1884 to 1886 he was librarían of the Handel and Haydn Society (of which he had been a member since November 1, 1865). His Episcopal church organ appointments included St. Peter's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and St. James's, Roxbury. '/bid., p. 234. Dean Stanley c:alled the sennon a " hideous exhibition." Perc:y M. Young. Gf'orgf' Gro"f' 1 8~1 900 A Biograplty (1..ondon: Mac:millan. 1980), p. 146, gratuitously surmised that Philadelphia AME Blac:ks on this occasion sang from Southern shapc·note books (Sacrf'd Harp. Tltr Soutlrun Harmony) that were the property of whites. The Anrericas in European Music Encyclopedias: Part I 161 The four volumes of the first edition contain 25 articles by Jenks.1 However, the sote article with an extensive bibliography and that quotes examples is "Negro Music of the United States" (five music notations, three taken from Slave Songs aj the United States JNew York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867)). According to Jenks, John Andrew Broekhoven (1852-1930) of the Cincinnati CoUege of Music "has writtcn a suite for orchestra based on crcole tunes, which has been performed at concerts in the United States. "' Jenks in this same article properly defers to Gottschalk as the first who incorporated Negro music in piano pieces. Another Jenks article (sufficiently viable to survive into The New Grove) profiles Julius Eichberg, resident in Boston after 1859. In his section on the United States concluding the Opera article (111, 529-530) Jenks justly signals Eichberg's T>ie Doctor of A/cantara as "the most successful work of any pretensions with an exclusively American reputation." Although omitted from Chase's textbook onAmerica's music, Eichberg-rated the most successful Jewish~ cornposer of theater music as well as rnusic educator in nineteenth-century America-found due recognition in at least one unbiased textbook preceding Chase's, Louis C. Elson's The History of American Music (New York: Macmillan, 1904)-pages 344-346 of which include a portrait and a facsirnile manuscript page from an Eichberg song to Tennyson lyrics. Jenks also profiled the managerial careers of the Jewish Maurice and Max Strakosch, "brothers well known in the United States for a quarter of a century as entrepreneurs of operatic and concert ventures." Jenks's 490-word article on the Jewish Leopold Damrosch (1832-1885; portrait and biography in Elson, omitted by Chase) concludes with a detailed works-list reaching 19 opus-numbers published in Germany and an almost equal quantity of music published in the United States. Apart from Jenks, Massachusetts-born contributors to the first edition of Grove included also Henry Ware, Alexander Wheelock Thayer, and (Hiram) Clarence Eddy. Colonel Henry Ware, longtime Keeper of Bates Hall at Boston Public Library.• contributed a 510-word article on "Dwight's Journal of Music" (A Dictionary, 1 [ 1879), 478) that can be flavored in these excerpts: For sill years (1852-1858) Dwight was editor, publisher. and proprietor of the Journal. the pub lication of which was then assumed by Oliver Ditson & Co. During the war it wu changed from a weekly to a fortnightly paper.... Dwight has been sote editor up to this day.