Musical Learning in Nineteenth-Century America

American musical historiography has been dominated by two different perspectives. Nineteenthand twentieth-century writers, from Frederic Louis Ritter, Oscar Sonneck, and Louis Elson to John Tasker Howard and H. Earle Johnson, accepting music as a European-based art, have told history of music on American soil through tracing extension of European music-making, especially its art music, to New World. In their chronicles, beginning with seventeenthand eighteenth-century psalm-singing, each noteworthy event can be seen as another link in a chain of musical progress:1 introduction of regular in place of the old way in New England churches; replacement of Americancomposed psalm tunes with more smoothly harmonized European-style pieces; spread of music instruction, from informal singing schools to public school curriculum and then to conservatory and university; influx of talented musical immigrants from Europe, some as traveling virtuosos and others as residents; advent of talented American-born performers and composers who sought out European training; and, finally, emergence of an American concert culture that in creativity, performance standards, and general energy can be seen to rival or even outstrip those of mother countries whose sons and daughters have made America's music. Because beginnings of formal music-making by European settlers in America are both relatively well known and extremely modest, metaphor of growth is almost unavoidable when one talks about American music from this perspective.2 This is what might be called chip-off-the-old-block school of historiography, in spirit of he's looking more like his dad every day. More recently a second perspective on American musical history has come to fore, especially in work of such scholars as Gilbert Chase, Irving Lowens, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Charles Hamm, and others. Drawing on work of earlier scholars, they have nevertheless rejected assumption that European musicmaking is worthy and inevitable model for American music-making. From this

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