CHAPTER 8 | THE SECOND NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL 185
be supplied by Thomas himself. Thomas is said to have replied: “I would go to
hell if they gave me a permanent orchestra.” In response, Fay organized a group
of fi nancial backers, and in 1891 Thomas became the music director of the new
Chicago Orchestra, later renamed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which he
led until his death in 1905.
By that time, a classical sphere based on composers’ music was established
in America, and a number of cities boasted symphony orchestras. Musical life in
centers like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago seemed to be catching
up with that of European cities, where broad public interest sustained a wide
range of performing groups, concert halls, and conservatories. And succeed-
ing such earlier musicians as Heinrich, Gottschalk, Fry, and Bristow was a new
wave of American composers whose music could fully exploit these maturing
musical resources. A center of activity for many of these younger composers
was Boston.THE SECOND NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL
Whereas earlier composers such as Gottschalk and Bristow had been isolated
fi gures, in the late 1800s in and around Boston there arose the fi rst real group
of American composers since the Yankee psalmodists or the Moravians. Among
those who deserve to be remembered are John Knowles Paine, George W.
Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Horatio Parker, and Amy Cheney Beach, all native New
Englanders. In a nod to their psalmodist forebears, these composers have come to
be called the “Second New England School.” To that group may be added New
York–born Edward MacDowell, who lived and worked for a time in Boston.CHADWICK AND “THE BOYS”
A 1907 article by George W. Chadwick, looking back to the 1890s, recalled how
it felt to be part of this group. “Many a night after a Symphony concert,” he
recalled, they “gathered about the same table” in the Tavern Club, bantering in
friendly exchange, “rejoicing in each other’s successes, and working for them
too.” Chadwick portrays a community of equals who had fashioned a working
environment of “mutual respect and honest criticism.” The circle also included
Theodore Thomas, who, traveling between Chicago and his summer home in
New Hampshire, often stopped in Boston to enjoy the company of “the boys,” as
he called them. Although Amy Beach was excluded from this fraternal bonding,
after a performance of her Gaelic Symphony in 1896 Chadwick pronounced the
composition fi ne enough to make her “one of the boys” as well.
Several of the Boston composers were also skilled performers, chiefl y pia-
nists or organists, and their compositions were heard regularly in Boston on the
programs of such local ensembles as the Boston Symphony Orchestra (founded
in 1881), the Kneisel String Quartet, and the Handel and Haydn Society. Paine
was a professor of music at Harvard, Chadwick the director of the New England
Conservatory of Music, Foote organist at the First Unitarian Church and also a
piano teacher, and Parker a professor of music at Yale and organist at Boston’s
Trinity Church—a dual career demanding much commuting by train.172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 185 23/01/13 10:24 AM