Classical Mythology

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN MUSIC, DANCE, AND FILM 759


ments of jazz, blues, and ragtime to give to their works a particularly American orig-
inality and flavor.


  1. Gilbert Chase, America's Music, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1966), iden-
    tifies (in Chapters 5 and 6) these artists as emigrant professionals and gentlemen am-
    ateurs; among the best known of the latter are Thomas Jefferson, not a musician but
    an aristocratic patron; Benjamin Franklin, a practicing musician who may have com-
    posed; and Francis Hopkinson.

  2. The dedication is reprinted in The American Composer Speaks, A Historical Anthology,
    1770-1865, ed. Gilbert Chase (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966),
    pp. 39-40.

  3. Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition, Essays in
    Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 142-143.

  4. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall
    1969), p. 5.

  5. His well-known Battle of the Kegs includes a prefatory metaphor of the Trojan horse.
    "A poem of 1762 on the benefits of science opens with a Horatian tribute, making
    mention of the muses, Helicon, Maecenas (in the guise of Lieutenant-Governor Hamil-
    ton), and Aeneas, with descriptions of an ideal college curriculum"; Gummere, The
    American Colonial Mind. While admitting that Hopkinson is not a poet of great promi-
    nence, Gummere calls him "almost a cross between Horace and Petronius." See also
    George Everett Hastings, The Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson (Chicago: The Uni-
    versity of Chicago Press, 1926).

  6. Oscar Sonneck wrote the pioneering work on Hopkinson: Francis Hopkinson, the First
    American Poet-Composer (1737-1791) and James Lyon, Patriot, Preacher, Psalmodist
    (1735-1794); Two Studies in Early American Music (Washington, D.C.: H. L. McQueen,
    1905). For Sonneck the music that accompanied Hopkinson's libretto was not extant.
    Gillian B. Anderson, however, has been responsible for a realization of the score,
    which she has recorded (The Colonial Singers and Players, Gillian B. Anderson, Di-
    rector. LP Musical Heritage Society, MHS 3684). Her notes explain that she discov-
    ered documents that enabled her to identify almost all the music that Hopkinson
    chose with excellent taste, for it is beautiful and sophisticated, drawn from composers
    such as Handel and Arne. Anderson also warns that musically "we know with cer-
    tainty only the names of the tunes to which most of the words were sung," and refers
    to a performing edition of the work "for a discussion of the different choices of per-
    forming forces" that may be made: Francis Hopkinson, America Independent, or, The
    Temple of Minerva (Washington, D.C.: C.T. Wagner Music Publishers, 1977).

  7. A description of this first performance of America Independent appeared in The Free-
    man's Journal, Philadelphia, December 19,1781.

  8. Sonneck, quoted in Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theater, A Chronicle (New York:
    Oxford University Press, 1978). p. 6.

  9. Bordman, American Musical Theater, pp. 78-79.

  10. Hitchcock, Music in the United States, pp. 17-18; three versions of the anthem (from
    among the many variations) are printed as Nos. 113-115 in Music in America: An An-
    thology from the Landing of the Pilgrims to the Close of the Civil War, 1620-1865, ed.
    W.Thomas Marrocco and Harold Gleason (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1964).

  11. Converse wrote a fairy tale opera, The Pipe of Desire, the first American opera to be
    produced at the Metropolitan (1910).

Free download pdf