An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 5 | HOME MUSIC MAKING AND THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY 107

order in which refi nement and gentility could have a place. But home music

making had been a business from the start, built around sheet music: not costly

to publish or purchase, tailored to the skills and tastes of buyers, and hence an

ideal artifact for a democracy.

The sheet music trade required several agents: composers and arrangers to

create the music; publishers to produce and circulate it; teachers to give lessons

in performing it (and also to sell it to their students); and manufacturers of musi-

cal instruments to play it. Each fi lled a necessary role, but publishers were the

trade’s chief architects.

ALEXANDER REINAGLE AND THE MUSIC BUSINESS

The beginnings of the sheet music trade in the United States can be traced to the

year 1787 in the life of one immigrant musician: the English-born composer and

performer Alexander Reinagle. W hen the thirty-year-old Reinagle arrived in the

New World in the spring of 1786, no such thing as an American music publisher

existed. Virtually all the composers then working in America were psalmodists

whose music reached the public in tunebooks brought out by book publish-

ers. Until 1787 all secular sheet music was imported. In that year, however, the

fi rst American-published sheet music was issued from the Philadelphia shop of

engraver and metalsmith John Aitken. During the next fi ve years, Aitken pub-

lished sixteen items and had no competitors. But in 1793 musical artisans in New

York, Boston, and Baltimore began to publish sheet music, and the United States

from then on had its own music publishing trade.

Signs point to Alexander Reinagle as the instigating partner in Aitkin’s

publishing venture. For one thing, twelve of Aitkin’s sixteen publications were

composed by, arranged by, or printed for Reinagle. For another, when Reinagle

took the post of music director for the New Theater in Philadelphia’s Chestnut

Street in 1793, Aitken stopped publishing sheet music. Reinagle’s interest in the

music business had surfaced soon after he landed in the New World. A news-

paper notice from mid-1786 advertised for pupils “in Singing, on the Harpsichord,

Piano Forte, and Violin” and proclaimed Reinagle’s readiness “to supply his

Friends and Scholars with the best instruments and music printed in London.”

Within a year, Reinagle had begun to take part in four distinct but interrelated

aspects of the music profession: he composed and arranged music for home use,

gave lessons to singers and players, involved himself in the distribution of music,

and plugged the work of London instrument builders. His activity indicates that

the American music business in the mid-1780s was still so rudimentary that one

musician could take on almost the whole enterprise himself.

Two of Reinagle’s works show that by the early 1790s he was already distin-

guishing music that could be sold to home buyers from music that could not.

The fi rst is a piano sonata he composed in Philadelphia, probably between 1786

and 1794. This work, most likely written for Reinagle himself to play in public

concerts, reveals a command of the keyboard idiom of eighteenth-century Euro-

pean masters such as C. P. E. Bach and Joseph Haydn. The second piece, a song

called “America, Commerce, and Freedom,” was sung in The Sailor’s Landlady,

a stage work of 1794.

Reinagle’s song was published soon after it was composed, while nearly two

centuries elapsed before the piano sonata saw publication. Why would a song

sheet music publishing

songs and sonatas

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