In the 1850s, anyone who asked which city in the United States had the most to offer in the way of cultural life would almost certainly have been told to head for Boston; this New England city was, at the time, considered "the Athens of America." But just a few years into the 1860s, the answer might have been different. By then, New York had become a thriving metropolis of 800,000 and, unlike either Boston or Philadelphia, it was growing. A melting pot of nationalities with Germans and Irish making up over half the population, its residents could enjoy a host of foreign language daily newspapers, including some in German and French. Many historians believe that the America of this era had little interest in cultural matters, and that the transformation of New York into an international city with a cosmopolitan character was propelled by a single driving force—commerce. But a closer look reveals a somewhat different picture.
From a musical perspective, that closer look is being provided by Music in Gotham, 1863–1875, a long-term scholarly project administered under The Graduate Center's Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation. Through a rigorous exploration of contemporary diaries and newspapers, it is attempting to document every musical event that took place in New York City during those years. The picture that has emerged is hardly one of a city uninterested in culture.
On the contrary, musical offerings on a single weekday evening of the period might have included a visiting German opera company performing Beethoven's Fidelio; a variety vaudeville show; three different minstrel shows; a play with musical accompaniment at Wallack's Theatre; or an Italian opera at the Academy of Music, the best equipped stage in the city with a house that seated over 3,000. The city boasted several opera companies, two orchestras, and a number of choirs, and conductors like Theodore Thomas and Carl Bergmann were exposing audiences to the new works of Meyerbeer, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. Musically speaking, New York was a city virtually exploding with culture, with something to appeal to people of virtually every class, background, or level of musical literacy.
Until recently, the Co-Directors of Music in Gotham were John Graziano, Professor Emeritus of Music at The Graduate Center and City College, and Adrienne Fried Block. Sadly, Block, a music historian and author of a highly regarded biography of American composer Amy Beach, passed away in April. (She also had the distinction of being one of the first people awarded a Ph.D. in music from The Graduate Center.) The friendship between the two went back over thirty years and revolved largely around the activities of the Society for American Music, of which they were founding members. Graziano, who now carries on as the sole Director, says, "This project is a groundbreaker worldwide for what we're attempting to do—to document in detail every musical event we can find on a daily basis over a period of thirteen years. In this respect, it's absolutely unique."
The initial labor of Music in Gotham, conducted mostly by research assistants, involves long hours of viewing microfilms of newspapers of the era, looking for reviews, advertisements, and announcements of musical events. Though this type of work can be tedious, it ultimately yields surprising facts. For example, during the 1863–1864 season, over 250 performances of 46 operas were presented in New York. Graziano points out that it would be astonishing to see 46 operas produced in a single season today, a time when the city and the nation are not in the throes of a wrenching and bloody civil conflict. The process also offers insight into the nature of musical performances at the time. Thanks to careful readings of reviews, we know that a "solo" concert in the 1860s bore little resemblance to our current notion of the format. A popular pianist like Louis Moreau Gottschalk might have been the name that sold tickets, but he would most likely share the stage with another pianist, a singer, or a violinist. The solo concert as we understand it did not evolve until the 1870s, with pianists like Anton Rubinstein and Hans von Buelow.
And the project has unearthed a considerable amount of information related to some familiar names. Theodore Thomas was an early Music Director of the New York Philharmonic during the 1870s, and went on to found the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But Music in Gotham demonstrates that his career began more modestly, not in ornate concert halls but in the open air of public parks. As a young man, he made his mark in the world of music by conducting 100 outdoor concerts each summer for several years during the 1860s. These concerts, which became fixtures of New York City life, featured overtures, waltzes, and excerpts from the latest operas. Verdi's Don Carlos premiered in Paris in March of 1867; in July of that year, Thomas, in his summer concerts, performed orchestral arrangements from the work.
Occasionally, a full production of a new opera was seen in New York before it was seen in London or Paris. This was the case with Verdi's La Forza del Destino, which was presented in Manhattan soon after its Italian debut. According to Graziano, it was during this period that New York City began to build its reputation as an international cultural leader. "This was when the City was starting to feel its oats," he says. "People were buying art works that would eventually be placed in the Metropolitan Museum, and the public library begins to blossom through a number of private collections. New York is assembling itself in a way that competes with the largest cities of Europe." He quickly adds that most of the people presenting music were "not doing it because the king or the emperor wanted it," as in Europe but, rather, to make money. So while New York clearly possessed an enormous hunger for all art forms, Graziano says, "commerce did feed how it functioned as a city of entertainment."
Music in Gotham had its origins in the work of music historian Vera Brodsky Lawrence, who was extracting references to musical events from the diaries of George Templeton Strong, a lawyer who wrote daily of his life in New York City before, during, and after the Civil War. She tapped Graziano to carry the project through to completion. Shortly thereafter, Graziano and Block co-taught a seminar at The Graduate Center on "Music in New York City, 1860–1880." Each student was asked to create a chronology of musical events in a single year based on a survey of newspapers. (Today the project draws from fourteen newspapers, including The New York Herald which, according to Graziano, is the best source because of its populist nature.) Funding was acquired in the form of grants from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, and the project was under way.
Though Music in Gotham has since produced two major conferences, a book, and a host of dissertations by participating graduate students, its primary goal is the creation of a comprehensive, searchable database that will be available online, free to scholars and non-scholars alike. In terms of gathering data, the first half of the chronology (September 1862 through August 1869) is complete. Six months worth of material has been entered into the database, and testing will begin shortly. Recalling the handwritten notes of Vera Brodsky Lawrence when she first tackled Strong's diaries in 1975, Graziano says, "Unless you're going to have a whole house filled with index cards, collecting and manipulating this volume of information just isn't possible without computers."
Additional funding will be required to begin work on the second half of the chronology (September 1869 through August 1875). The project will, inevitably, reach an official conclusion, and its wealth of information will be made available to music scholars, theater historians, cultural historians, and everyone who is interested in the period. But even then, the project will not be "closed" in the strictest sense. Says Graziano, "At this stage, if we tried to hunt down programs, we wouldn't even get through 1862. There's an endless amount of ephemera out there, and we want the people who use the website to send us what's missing." These submissions would be evaluated by a moderator and, if appropriate, added to the database. "Even as the project in its basic form ends, the website will continue to grow," he says. "But the real emphasis now is to get what we have up and running so that people can start contributing to it."
—Gail Goldberg
For additional information about Music in Gotham, contact Professor Emeritus John Graziano at "jgraziano@gc.cuny.edu or (212) 817-8604.
