CHAPTER 5 | HOME MUSIC MAKING AND THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY 109
if any customers, at least in Reinagle’s day. From an economic standpoint, early
American writers of composers’ music were strictly on their own, while writers
of performers’ music worked at the behest of theater managers and publishers.
By writing both kinds of music, Alexander Reinagle exercised the full range of
his artistic and economic opportunities.
The fi eld of opera offers a clear delineation between musical categories.
Although many Americans in the antebellum years took opera to their hearts,
most of them encountered operas not as integral works of art, faithful to a com-
poser’s score, but in altered form: as arrangements, pastiches, excerpts, and sin-
gle numbers. Adaptation—the tailoring of the music to suit particular audiences
and circumstances—was the key to opera’s popularity in America. Composers’
authority counted for little in the musical theater, for there the key to success lay
in capturing an audience’s attention. Opera and theatrical music in the fi rst half
of the nineteenth century, therefore, must be considered performers’ music.
Until the Civil War (1861–65), the idea of accessibility dominated the public
performance of almost all music in the United States. Indeed, perhaps no devel-
opment in musical performance was more important than the appearance in
the latter 1800s of a new attitude that valued composers above performers and
placed ultimate authority in written scores. Performers who followed such an
ideal took audience enjoyment as secondary and judged performances on their
faithfulness to the work as the composer was thought to have conceived it.
For composers, then, the major decision was between writing compos-
ers’ music, with authoritative scores, or performers’ music, intended more as a
springboard for the interpretations of singers and players. For performers, the
decision was whether to be ruled by the composer’s score or to deviate from it in
ways their audiences might fi nd appealing. For both composers and performers,
the attitude toward a work’s notation was all-important. To what extent did com-
posers ex pect deference to what they w rote dow n? Were performers more deter-
mined to seek a work’s essence in the composer’s notation or in communicatingK Reinagle’s “America,
Commerce, and Freedom,”
from The Sailor’s Landlady
(Philadelphia, 1794?) in
its original sheet music
printing.operaaccessibility and
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