186 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
Of that group gathered at the Tavern Club, Chadwick stands out today as
the most notable fi gure, and in recent decades his music has enjoyed a modest
revival. Born in 1854 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Chadwick grew up in circum-
stances that were far from prosperous. He left high school short of graduation
to work for his father, a businessman who opposed his son’s musical ambitions.
While still working, Chadwick managed a part-time enrollment at the New England
Conservatory, where he studied organ, piano, and harmony, and in 1872 he added
an organist’s job to the position in his father’s company. In 1876–77 he taught at
a college in Michigan. With the money he saved, he sailed to Germany, where
he studied privately and at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1877–79, and in Munich
with Josef Rheinberger in 1879–80. In 1880 he returned to Boston, took a job as a
church organist, and then joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory,
an association that lasted from 1882 until just before his death in 1931.
Chadwick’s teachers at the Leipzig Conservatory had pegged him from the
start as an extraordinary student. In June 1879 his Rip Van Winkle Overture for
orchestra, performed on a graduation concert, was reviewed by a Leipzig critic as
“uncontestably... the best of this year’s compositions.” His professors in Leipzig
signed a report that reads in part: “Herr Chadwick possesses a completely excep-
tional talent for composition.” Chadwick’s talent for communicating in a concert
hall would help make him a leader in Boston’s musical life.
Chadwick was a “Yankee composer” in the sense that he was at home in
European genres but approached them through an American sensibility. He
developed virtuoso orchestration along European models, but many other traits
of his style separated his music from German prototypes: a fondness for pen-
tatonic and other gapped scales, African-Caribbean dance syncopations, and a
musical sensitivity to the characteristic rhythms of English lyrics. From these,
Chadwick evolved a personal approach that allowed him to write cosmopolitan
music with an American fl avor.
Recently Chadwick has been credited with creating an American sym-
phonic style. Some evidence for that may be found in the fi rst movement of his
Symphonic Sketches (1904), to which Chadwick gave the title “Jubilee.” Critic Henry
Taylor Parker, who reviewed a performance in 1908, heard echoes of “NegroK The orchestra of the
New England Conservatory
in 1915, with an inset
picturing its conductor,
George W. Chadwick
(1854–1931). The number
of women in the orchestra
testifi es to the rising
professionalism of female
musicians early in the
twentieth century.a “Yankee composer”172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 186 23/01/13 10:24 AM