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Introduction to the Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Katherine K. Preston
Katherine K. Preston
Affiliation:
The College of William and Mary
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The history of music in nineteenth-century America, and the place of music within American culture of the period, is an area of scholarly inquiry that recently has received increased attention. It is also, as the varied articles collected in this issue illustrate, a complex topic and an area ripe for much additional research. The four articles deal with different aspects of nineteenth-century American music history and culture; in each, however, there are also areas of overlap and intersection. All four authors use as a starting point issues that have already been the subject of some scholarly attention, and examine these topics either more thoroughly or from a new theoretical or contextual point of view. The resulting aggregate should help readers to understand better a complicated and under-explored world, for all four articles highlight the complexity of musical life in America and explore some of the many ways that cultural life in the United States reflected and resonated with that of Europe. All four authors, furthermore, either hint at or explicitly mention areas that are ripe for further research.

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , June 2009 , pp. 3 - 5
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

References

1 This issue of articles on music in nineteenth-century America was originally proposed in 2005 by Charles S. Freeman of the University of Kansas. He solicited most of the articles and shepherded the issue faithfully, but felt compelled to withdraw as issue editor in the summer of 2008, when newly discovered documents revised the basis for his own article.

2 Izzo cites two Italian-language articles on this topic, but to my knowledge there is very little scholarship in English.

3 I deal briefly with this issue in a forthcoming article titled ‘To the Opera House? The Trials and Tribulations of Operatic Production in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Opera Quarterly, forthcoming; electronic publication in August 2008), in which I examine performance materials from a translation by the American prima donna Caroline Richings of Donizetti's La fille du Régiment. Based on these primary documents, I conclude that Richings’ adaptation was neither a mutilation nor a travesty. There are extant performance materials for many other English adaptations of operas in the Tams-Witmark Collection at the University of Wisconsin/Madison (see http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/kb n026?ijkey=pd58zD9Ec14fo3D&keytype=ref doi: 10.1093/oq kbn026. See also ‘Notes from (the Road to the) Stage’, Opera Quarterly, 2008. http://oq.oxfordjournals.org.cqi/content/ full/kbn025?ijkey=Gb9paUVQsZwkZQF&keytype=ref doi: 10.1093/oq/kbn025).

4 Lawrence, Vera Brodsky, Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, vol. 2, Reverberations, 1850–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 378.Google Scholar