130 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
published. With the composer no longer alive to perform it, his music sustained
a life of its own. Editions of his works were published in North and South Amer-
ica, Europe, and Cuba. But in the twentieth century his music dropped out of the
concert repertory, and Gottschalk was gradually forgotten. In the 1970s, when
dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein suggested that the New York City Ballet stage
a work called Cakewalk using Gottschalk’s music, the only one in the company
who had even heard of the composer was George Balanchine, the great choreog-
rapher, who recalled hearing Gottschalk’s music in his native Russia.
Gottschalk poses a challenge for historians and students of American
music. On the one hand, there is no denying the wide swath that he cut in the
international musical life of the 1850s and 1860s and later. Acknowledged as a
superior pianist, he also won praise as a composer from both critics and listen-
ers in Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and North America. His music
delighted and moved audiences then, and it still sounds original today. On the
other hand, Gottschalk is not widely performed nowadays, when the repertory
of the concert hall and the teaching studio is often assumed to render the true
verdict on musical quality. According to this line of thinking, whatever may be
admired in Gottschalk’s personality or approach to composition, the music has
simply not been good enough to survive.
A case could also be made, however, that Gottschalk’s eclipse has had more to
do with historical fashion than with the worth of his music. His artistic pedigree
is unique, blending the grassroots fl avor of New World rhythms and melodies
with the elegant sounds and textures of French pianism. That blend, however,
went unappreciated by those who shared the Germanic outlook that gained
strength after the Civil War. Once Gottschalk was no longer around to play it, his
staunchly non-Germanic music lost its place in an American concert hall wary
of music that, in the composer’s own words, was “not yet consecrated.” The prod-
uct of a nation just beginning to develop cultivated musical tastes, Gottschalk’s
music would not survive subsequent changes in those tastes.QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW
- W hat are the differences between “composers’ music” and “performers’
music”? How do different types of music embody the contrasting ideals of
transcendence, accessibility, and continuity? - Italian opera introduced Americans to the phenomenon of the star per-
former. How did stardom in the nineteenth century resemble or differ from
the present-day cult of celebrity? - What social forces may have contributed to the fashion for opera in antebel-
lum San Francisco, at that time a comparatively small and remote city? - How did nineteenth-century bands differ from present-day high school, uni-
versity, and military bands? What social functions do bands serve today, and
how are those functions related to the role of bands in nineteenth- century
life? - Contrast the origins, structure, and function of the Handel and Haydn Soci-
ety, the Boston Academy of Music, and the New York Philharmonic Society.
What goals did they have in common, and how did they go about achieving
those goals in different ways?
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