An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 6 | THE SHEET MUSIC INDUSTRY AND PARLOR SONGS 147

In the nineteenth-century parlor, music’s purpose was more social than

artistic, and touching the heart was among the highest social purposes of all.

Composers and arrangers, fully allied with the popular sphere’s credo of acces-

sibility, were far more concerned with the feelings of players and listeners than

with any concept of artistic originality or integrity. With the help of the piano

industry, they tailored a growing repertory of sheet music for what they took to

be the taste of female amateur pianists.

Yet for all the piano’s prominence, the singing voice was the favorite home

instrument of all, and the heart of the sheet music trade lay in the solo song with

keyboard accompaniment. From early in the century through the Civil War,

songs written for domestic performance—parlor songs—provide insight into the

way Americans viewed themselves.

SONGS OF COURTSHIP AND SEPARATION IN

ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

Then as now, a central topic of popular song lyrics was love and courtship. Rep-

resentations of love relationships, however, have changed dramatically over the

generations, as later chapters w ill bear out. In the nineteenth centur y, one favor-

ite song genre in the home circle was centered on a mythic view of love harking

back to the Middle Ages, when love between knights and ladies was ruled by a

courtly code. Songs inspired by the lore of medieval chivalry began to appear

early in the 1800s. John Hill Hewitt, born in New York in 1801 to a family of immi-

grant musicians, took this approach in “The Minstrel Return’d from the War,”

composed in 1825 in Greenville, South Carolina, and published around 1833

in New York. Choosing as his main character a minstrel-knight of yore (a min-

strel was a medieval entertainer; blackface performers appropriated the name),

Hewitt wrote a text that seems to have been inspired by the Christian crusades.

His music begins like a march, then becomes more serenade-like as the knight

woos his fair lady. In the fourth stanza, the hero lies mortally wounded on the

battlefi eld.

By the mid-1830s song writers were matching another kind of music to the

imagery of archaic romance: an Anglo-Italian style similar to Henry R. Bish-

op’s in “Home, Sweet Home.” The infl uence of Italian opera brought to Anglo-

American song a new source of grace and intensity, as well as a higher (but still

accessible) tone. The gently arched shape of its melodies, as well as turns, trills,

and other kinds of ornamentation, lent themselves well to cultivated vocal

production.

Why would songs portraying brave knights and protected damsels have such

appeal for Americans? Part of the answer is that both medieval courtly love and

nineteenth-century courtship were based on separation of the sexes. Within

courtly love’s idealized realm, men and women acted as virtually different spe-

cies, each governed by its own rules. In fact, chivalric courtship songs grew pop-

ular in America at a time when business was separating itself from home life.

The distancing of men from women and the redefi ning of their roles made an

impact on the language and decorum of romance. It now became possible to

imagine men as gladiators who jousted in the public arena by day, then returned

to domestic “bowers,” where they sang and were sung to.

chivalric love

infl uence of opera

changing gender roles

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