Mid-nineteenth-century American periodicals: a case study.

Davidson, Mary Wallace

The two decades prior to the American Civil War were years of staggering social and cultural transition, whose details nevertheless tend to be glossed over in the broader historical surveys of American music. A chronology of significant events during those years might include the following:

1838 Boston admits music into the curriculum of its public schools, under the direction of Lowell Mason.

1839 First appearance in the United States (at the Apollo Theater) by the Rainer Family Singers from the Tyrol, inspiring the formation of several such American groups, notably the Hutchinsons.

1842 Founding of the New York Philharmonic Society, not the first, but America's oldest extant orchestra.

1843 The great Norwegian violinist Ole Bull makes the first of five American tours.

1840s Mason's followers begin spreading musical academies west as far as Ohio, eager to improve the cultured tradition.(1)

Early in the decade, blackface minstrelsy becomes popular as public entertainment.

Crop failures in Europe and wars of 1848 result in massive immigration - particularly of Germans, including German musicians. American musicians in turn begin studying in Germany and bringing back the influence of German romanticism.

1840s and 1850s The numerous ballads of Rochester's Henry Russell and Pittsburgh's Stephen Foster achieve their peak in popularity, while William Henry Fry and George Bristow write operas and symphonies based on continental European models.

1850s The Swedish soprano Jenny Lind makes many tours, beginning in 1850; the German soprano Henriette Sontag tours from 1852 to 1854; pianists Henri Herz and Sigismond Thalberg tour from 1845 to 1851 and from 1856 to 1857, respectively, resulting in much greater emphasis on the virtuoso performer and a consequent fissure between professional and amateur music-making and between concert and popular music.

1850s The number of pianos manufactured in America rises from 9,000 in 1851 to 21,000 in 1860. This decade sees the establishment of the Steinway and Mason & Hamlin piano companies, the phenomenal growth of parlor piano music, and the height of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's fame (last tour in 1862).

Recent cultural history of this period, particularly by Lawrence Levine and Michael Broyles,(2) suggests a division of musical activities at this time into the cultured and popular traditions, or to use Levine's terms, "highbrow" and "lowbrow." There was a simultaneous transition from the transcendentalists' concept of music as the composer's expression of the feelings (equivalent to the essayist's expression of thought) to Mason and his followers' writings about music as a science.

The trends cited by these and other historians might all be derived from the contemporary periodical literature, but are they? Broyles, for example, cites only one music periodical from these two decades; his other sources are all mainstream literary journals - the same ones cited by Lowens in his index of music subjects in general periodicals devoted to transcendental thought of the time.(3) Why then are music periodicals so infrequently cited in current research in American music?

It is not as though we lack bibliographic access to them - quite the contrary. There are excellent lists by Imogen Fellinger, chronologically arranged - most recently the one appended to the article "Periodicals" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.(4) John Shepard revised the portion of her article devoted to the United States, providing examples and illustrations from American periodicals and updating the bibliography for The New Grove Dictionary of American Music.(5)

There are also a number of comprehensive dissertations and theses that profile nineteenth-century American music periodicals, provide statistical overviews, and track every aspect - financial as well as literary - of their publication history. These dissertations are excellent guides to contents and editorial views and should be on the shelves of every research music library.

For example, Vera S. Flandorf, who studied all American music periodicals from the beginning to those that commenced in 1951, divided the subject into topics (geography, editors, publishers, contributors, and what she calls "content patterns") and provided many tables showing: the number of periodicals by city, state, and region; the kinds of sponsors and the relationship of the life-span of these periodicals (which was generally short) to the type of sponsorship; and the periodical size, price, frequency, and content.(6)

Charles Wunderlich studied music periodicals of only the first half of the nineteenth century but was particularly interested in the details of format and their changes even within each volume. He also characterized the contents, listed as tables of contents all the publications of printed music, and indexed the names of all their composers as well as those of other authors, editors, and publishers.(7) Calvin Grimes examined music periodicals in a similar period (1819-52), but considered only their content for music theory and musical thought.(8) Sister Mary Davison studied periodicals in the latter half of the century. In her first volume, she gave a chronological history of these publications, relating their contents to broad cultural trends, and in her second, offered a detailed profile of each periodical as a whole.(9)

Altogether there are approximately forty periodicals that were spawned, ran their course, and, more often than not, died during these two decades - "approximately," because one is immediately overwhelmed with how bibliographically confusing they are. Their genealogy is not always easy to decipher because of constantly merging and changing titles. A title may be slightly altered between issues or volumes, or one title may be printed on the masthead and another on the running head. In many cases, identifying text was originally printed on wrappers, which were discarded when bound by subscribers or cataloged by libraries.

With respect to bibliographic and physical access, locations of titles and volumes cited in the dissertations or in the Union List of Serials(10) are generally fairly accurate for what is listed there, but OCLC and RLIN reveal many more libraries holding original or microform copies, even if (in the case of OCLC) we cannot tell whether these holdings are partial or complete. The Internet may yield more accurate information if it is represented in individual catalogs, but actually locating a periodical in those collections is less certain. Very few of these periodicals survived more than a few years, and few more than two to five years without a change of title - an anathema to serial catalogers, and thus indirectly to scholars, because of changes in cataloging rules over time. A reader sometimes has to search under several possible titles in a given library to find the volumes in question. In many libraries, periodical titles have not yet been processed in internal online catalogs, or if the titles have been incorporated, the specific holdings have not. At the Library of Congress, scholars visiting the Music Division have been dependent until very recently on brief entries in a heavily used photocopy of a typed list in three folders made for the use of Music Reading Room staff several years ago by Gillian Anderson. At the American Antiquarian Society, additions and changes are simply penciled into a reference copy of the Union List of Serials, which is holding up amazingly well and is still considered the authoritative list of holdings in spite of considerable progress in the creation of electronic catalogs at that library.(11)

If the periodical collection is not classified, library staff often have difficulty locating unbound copies, which may look like newspapers due to their format and frequency (weekly or biweekly). Deterioration of the paper and lack of funds (or demand) for microfilm preservation have already caused loss in some cases. Many are torn and brittle, and the small type is fading to near illegibility. Because the periodicals are older than the libraries in most cases, the latter have been dependent on gifts of the former from the heirs of private subscribers. Very few runs are complete in any one location.

What do we actually find in these periodicals, and are they worth preserving? "Improvement" is the primary intention of the rhetoric, as is made perfectly clear in the prospectus, or opening editorial, of almost every journal. The historian, however, needs to infer a description of the situation needing to be improved in order to interpret the recommendation. This is not always easy because of the bias of the writers. For example, those who study the history of gender roles in music and society may be interested in excerpts from an article published in the 30 April 1840 issue of the Worm of Music (Bellows Falls, vt.), comprising the first of two paragraphs said to have been borrowed on that occasion from the Newark Daily Advertiser.

We are resolved never again to visit a house where they keep a Piano, or music of any sort. . . . In every house, at every fireside, the moment tea is over, the girls begin to bore you with the murderous mania. To understand enough of the instrument, to make it ring . . . seems to have become an indispensible part of female education. . . . We are no enemy to music. But we reprobate the fashion of our time, which requires all our women without reference to tas[t]e, sensibility, and ear, to "play on the piano." They might as well make all our men painters, though they were without eyes. Millions are annually wasted upon music - for those of whom not one in a thousand can ever hope to attain any tolerable proficiency, and in which mediocrity is detestable.(12)

Yet just three years later, in the same periodical, albeit under different editorship, the Reverend Edward W. Hooker, D.D., writes a long article continued over four issues on the role of music in "female education." He argues that women have always been the keepers and conveyers of the musical spirit - the gentle passions - as part of their role as nurturers. Now, however, Lowell Mason and his colleagues have taken the trouble to prove that music is a science. Because everyone knows that women are not capable of learning science, how then are they to continue to learn music?(13) Given the fact that much of the writing about Mason at this time in this journal is derogatory, it is not easy to interpret the tone or meaning of these articles.

Outside the dissertations mentioned above, biographical information about the periodical writers and editors is scarce. The reader can confirm suspected biases only by finding other examples of the author's writings elsewhere. Would that we had the indexes to do that!

In addition to complex issues surrounding "improvement," there are easily detectable strands of what Daniel Boorstin has called "boosterism" - that peculiar brand of American chutzpah, which conceives of a product (or a hotel, or a new town) and then sets out to promote it.(14) This is particularly true of the musical conventions, which taught music via the new scientific methods and were widely reported in these periodicals. A detailed account appeared in the Musical Gazette (or the Boston Musical Gazette, depending on the day or page), which gives a catalog of events, by the hour, of the Teachers' Institute of the Boston Academy of Music, beginning on Tuesday, 18 August 1846, and ending on Friday, 28 August.(15) This was replicated in Rochester, New York, beginning 23 September, but for only eight days. By the second day in Rochester, the number of participants had grown so large that the institute had to be moved to the recently built Minerva Hall, with a capacity of between seven hundred and eight hundred seats. "If Boston or New York contains its equal," said the author, "we have not seen it."(16) The writer was most probably Artemus Nixon Johnson, one of the two editors of the periodical, the other being his younger brother James. Not coincidentally, the elder Johnson was then a member of the faculty of the institute, together with Lowell Mason, George Webb, and George Root. Obviously there are several threads of cultural history here - documentation of music education in detail, musical activities outside the major cities, biography of A.N. Johnson, detailed description and judgment of an early large concert hall, example of boosterism, etc. - that indexing, no matter how detailed, is not apt to capture in all its complexity.

These periodicals have been accused, sometimes rightly, of being mere vehicles to promote other publications issued by these firms, or, as was seen above, to promote the activities of their editors. Later issues begin to devote more and more space to advertisements. Thus they function as important documents of the music trade - even more so than of the "art" of music or music education. This information is difficult to index and must be seen in context, both graphic and textual.

What recommendations might we make at this time? First and foremost is the matter of preservation. The situation is deceiving because of the state of the ill-fated project undertaken in the 1980s by Opus Publications, now absorbed into the Chadwyck-Healey catalog.(17) This catalog currently offers for sale microfilm reproductions of six of the forty or so extant titles from 1840 to 1860, some with their offspring. Although a search in OCLC indicates that many of these reproductions were widely purchased, editorial care unfortunately was not taken to be sure that the runs were complete before they were filmed. As a result much bibliographic work remains to be done to gather exemplars that are complete. Five other titles were filmed by University Microfilms International (UMI) for its American Periodicals Series (1946-77), and one periodical (Saroni's Musical Times, 1849-52) was filmed by both firms. One title filmed by Opus (American Musical Review and Choir Singers Companion, 1850-51) is no longer available through Chadwyck-Healey. A few individual libraries, notably the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society, have undertaken to preserve at least some of their copies on microfilm, which a few other libraries have purchased, but this practice has not been widespread and accounts for only six titles. In the early years of microforms, the Lost Cause Press (founded by the colorful former mayor of Louisville, Charles Farnsley) and the University of Rochester both issued microcard sets for a few titles, but few libraries still have the equipment to view them. Dwight's Journal of Music, which had the longest run of any periodical in this period, has of course been reproduced in hardcopy, film, and fiche by a number of trade publishers.(18) In all, not quite half the periodicals of this period have been filmed and registered in OCLC.

Many of these periodicals are definitely worth preserving as cultural, but not necessarily literary, artifacts. Of the journals quoted at length above, the [Boston] Musical Gazette has been filmed (in the Opus project), but the two journals titled World of Music and their relatives have not. All are equally valid primary sources of the same decade and are even more valuable to the historian because their authors frequently wrote about the same events from opposite points of view.

This preservation must be accomplished soon, however, to avoid substantial permanent loss. The likelihood of a nationally funded project is dim, considering the relative merit of this material and the reduction of federal funds available for these purposes. The success of such an effort might nevertheless be assured if a national library organization (the Music Library Association or IAML-US) or a scholarly association (American Musicological Society or the Sonneck Society) took responsibility for pairing libraries that own partial runs and asked them to create one preservation exemplar to be shared among them and made available to scholars. When national and international standards for preservation and access by digital means have been established, these exemplars would then be good candidates. Several need to be reproduced in images better than the original. Their full text is crucial for research in the period. The availability of the complete runs of preservation copies would be recorded in the logical international database, with alphabetical and keyword access.

The difficulty of indexing them all seems insurmountable. All six of those filmed only by UMI, representing titles from 1839 to 1846 and 1849 to 1852, were also indexed.(19) But if the films are known to be incomplete, we can assume the indexing is too. We are exceedingly grateful for the efforts of the REpertoire internationale de la presse musicale (RIPM) to date. Two periodicals from the second decade of this period have had their contents listed and indexed: the Message Bird (1849-52) and its continuation, the New York Musical World (1852-60), with all their changes of title, indexed by David Day,(20) and the more familiar Dwight's Journal of Music (1852-81) by Richard Kitson.(21) These indexes are fine models for capturing the myriad detail, including advertisements, in these particular periodicals. We just need more of them, but alas no more are listed as forthcoming in this series. In sum, only twenty percent of the titles are indexed, although we do have something for almost every year of the decades under consideration; a few years in the late 1840s are bereft.

Finally, alternative access to transitory musical information from these decades should be pursued. Music librarians need to learn about and provide references to the various local and regional newspaper-indexing and preservation projects. In some cases they must take responsibility for more detailed indexing of musical subjects themselves. Because these decades witnessed much international study and concertizing on the part of Europeans and Americans alike, perhaps these efforts could become more universal through the activities of IAML in providing encouragement and "pointers" to these indexes as they are created.

This has been a case study of periodicals published during two decades of the nineteenth century in one country, but the situation is the same or worse in others. Ideally, a central bibliographic agency in each country would do the surveying necessary, even if only in chunks as in the present study. The first steps would be: (1) to identify the periodicals, although by and large this has been achieved by the remarkable work of Imogen Fellinger;(22) (2) to determine the current state of bibliographic access (Are they listed in national lists? Are indexes available?) and the existence and location of complete preservation copies; and finally, (3) to establish priorities for preservation. The next step would be to distribute the work of preservation among holding libraries and to register their location and the presence of indexes when available. This is "cottage industry" work, unglamorous, probably unfundable - but, like many other homegrown projects, worth the effort for the sake of the results.

1. Rochester and Cincinnati are cited as examples of "our new-grown towns" in an editorial in Musical Cabinet: A Monthly, Collection of Vocal and Instrumental Music and Musical Literature 41, pt. 1 (July 1841): 3.

2. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michael Broyles, "Music of the Highest Glass": Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

3. Irving Lowens, "Writings about Music in the Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (1835-50)," Journal of the American Musicological Society 10 (1957): 71-85; republished with slight changes as "Music and American Transcendentalism (1835-50)" and "A Check-List of Writings about Music in the Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (1835-50)" in his Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1964), 249-63, 311-21.

4. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, s.v. "Periodicals," by Imogen Fellinger.

5. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, s.v. "Periodicals," by Imogen Fellinger and John Shepard.

6. Vera S. Flandorf, "Music Periodicals in the United States: A Survey of Their History and Content" (masters thesis, University of Chicago, 1952).

7. Charles Edward Wunderlich, "A History and Bibliography of Early American Musical Periodicals, 1782-1852" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1962).

8. Calvin Bernard Grimes, "American Musical Periodicals, 1819-1852: Music Theory and Musical Thought in the United States" (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1974).

9. Mary Veronica Davison, "American Music Periodicals, 1853-1899" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1973). Other such works include: Irene Millen, "American Musical Magazines, 1786-1865" (master's thesis, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1949); Isabel S. Snodgrass, "American Musical Periodicals of New England and New York, 1786-1850" (master's thesis, Columbia University, Library School, 1947).

10. Edna Brown Titus, ed., Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada, 3d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1965).

11. American Antiquarian Society, "Introduction to the AAS Online Catalogs for Internet Users" (typescript, 1995); confirmed by telephone inquiry to the reference desk, 16 June 1997.

12. The World of Music 1, no. 7 (30 April 1840): 56.

13. Edward W. Hooker, "Music As a Part of Female Education," The World of Music 2, no. 15 (1 March 1945): 57; no. 16 (15 March 1945): 61; no. 17 (1 April 1845): 65; no. 19 (1 May 1845): 73-74.

14. Daniel J. Boorstin, "The Upstarts: Boosters," in The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 113-68.

15. [Boston] Musical Gazette 1, no. 16 (1846): 124-26; no. 17 (1846) 129-32.

16. [Boston] Musical Gazette 1, no. 20 (1846): 156.

17. Opus Publications intended to microfilm all the periodicals cited in William J. Weichlein, A Checklist of American Music Periodicals 1850-1900 (Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1970), and reissued this work as 19th-Century American Music Publications on Microfilm: The Guide (Guillford, Conn.: Opus Publications, [1987?]). A current catalog of the microfilms from this project is available on request from Chadwyck-Healey.

18. In hardcopy, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968; in microfilm, New York: AMS Press, [n.d.] and Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1970-71; in microfiche, New York: University Music Editions, 1975.

19. Jean Hoornstra and Trudy Heath, eds., American Periodicals, 1741-1900: An Index to the Microfilm Collections: American Periodicals. 18th Century; American Periodicals, 1800-1850; American Periodicals, 1850-1900; Civil War and Reconstruction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI International, 1979); republished in electronic form as Index to American Periodicals of the 1700's and 1800's, Release 6 (Indianapolis: Computer Indexed Systems, 1995).

20. David Day, The Message Bird, 1849-1852, 4 vols., Repertoire internationale de la presse musicale (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1992); David Day, The New York Musical World, 1852-1860, 4 vols., Repertoire internationale de la presse musicale (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI, 1993).

21. Richard Kitson, Dwight's Journal of Music, 1852-1881, 6 vols., Repertoire internationale de la presse musicale (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1991).

22. In addition to the dictionary articles by Imogen Fellinger cited above, see her Verzeichnis der Musikzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 10 (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1968); supplemented in Fonlers artis musicae 17 (1970): 2-8; 18 (1971): 59-62; 19 (1972): 41-44; 20 (1973): 108-11; 21 (1974): 36-38; 23 (1976): 62-66.

[TABULAR DATA FOR APPENDIX OMITTED]

Mary Wallace Davidson directs the Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. This article is a revision of a paper by the author presented on 18 June 1995 during the 17th Congress of IAML at Helsingor, Denmark. For a chronological list of the periodicals under discussion, see the appendix.