An Introduction to America’s Music

146 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

the title and melody in as many different arrangements as possible. The enor-

mous outpouring of sheet music during the century’s second half testifi es that,

whatever the risks, publishing it could be lucrative.

MEN, WOMEN, AND PIANOS

By the 1820s the piano was on its way to becoming the quintessential parlor

instrument of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in varied shapes and

sizes: square pianos, uprights, spinets, consoles, and grands.

The pattern of growth in keyboard manufacturing paralleled that of the

sheet music trade. At fi rst an import and a luxury reserved for the few, key-

board instruments over the years became accessible to more and more people.

Jonas Chickering of Boston began in the 1830s to mass-produce metal-framed

instruments. By 1851 some 9,000 pianos per year were being made in the United

States, with Chickering, the leading fi rm, producing 10 percent of that total. It

has been estimated that one out of 4,800 Americans bought a new piano in

1829; in 1910, a  year in which 350,000 pianos were produced, one out of 252

bought one.

Pianos were solo as well as accompaniment instruments, and a great deal

of sheet music was published for piano alone. Between 1820 and the Civil War,

three kinds of piano pieces dominated the repertory: variation sets, based on

the melodies of popular songs, hymn tunes, or opera arias; dances, including

waltzes, polkas, galops, cotillions, marches, and quicksteps; and a small amount

of “abstract” music, especially rondos.

In the late 1700s, the activity of a prosperous household involved a mixture

of business and pleasure, including music. As business moved out of the house

and into offi ce buildings early in the nineteenth century, however, the bourgeois

home became more a center for family and cultural activity. It came to be more

common for husbands to leave home in the morning, spend their days in the

competitive marketplace, and then return in the evening to domestic sanctuar-

ies prepared by their wives. In removing their own work from the home, men

gave up their involvement in much that happened there, while domestic affairs

came to be considered women’s work. Music making in the middle-class home

was deeply infl uenced by the change.

Women in this social setting were responsible for raising children, man-

aging household affairs, and beautifying their surroundings. The sheet music

and piano trades thus came to assume that parlor piano was a female activity,

and piano music published from the 1840s on was shaped by the trade’s view of

women’s musical tastes and capacities. Was this an accurate view? It is impossible

to tell; the publishers and composers who dominated the sheet music business

were all male. But the music gives a good idea of the female sensibility that it was

tailored to please.

One book from the 1700s distinguished women from men “by that Delicacy,

express’d by Nature in their Form.” Another claimed that “natural softness and

sensibility” made women generally agreeable and disposed them toward a taste

for beauty. That theme was repeated in countless nineteenth-century writings.

An attraction to certain objects of beauty, such as fl owers, was widely held (and

not only by men) to be part of women’s nature.

Chickering pianos

music in the

middle-class home

women and domestic

music making

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