128 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
steady beat and the four-bar phrases carry listeners comfortably ahead. And the
music is at once familiar-sounding (the pentatonic tune), novel (the banjo imita-
tion), and ingenious enough (the variety of banjo sounds) to hold their attention.
Finally, the contrast between the piece’s last roar and the delicacy of its “picking”
sections dramatizes the vastly different capabilities of the grand piano—a tech-
nological marvel of the age—and the banjo itself, still in some quarters a home-
made instrument in 1855.GOTTSCHALK AND THE CLASSICS
Gottschalk’s artistry was rooted in the sound of the piano. Explaining why he
favored instruments made at the Boston factory of Jonas Chickering, he wrote:
“I like their tone, fi ne and delicate, tender and poetic,” adding that Chickering
pianos allowed him to achieve “tints more varied than those of other instru-
ments.” These words point to the heart of Gottschalk’s musical philosophy, which
held timbre to be as important to a piece of music as were colors to a painting.
Technique, though essential, was never enough. “Many pianists whose thunder-
ing execution astonishes us still do not move us,” he wrote, because “they are
ignorant of sound”—the surest means of touching listeners’ hearts. With hard
work, painters could learn to draw and musicians to play the right notes, but a
command of timbre, which carried music’s spiritual side, depended on intui-
tion. “Color and sound are born in us,” Gottschalk believed; they were “the out-
ward expression of our sensibility and of our souls.”
Gottschalk’s belief in the primacy of timbre distanced him from the more
Germanic outlook of John Sullivan Dwight, who once advised performers to
play with “no show or effect” so that “the composition is before you, pure and
clear... as a musician hears it in his mind in reading it from the notes.” In other
words, music is a composer’s art; it should be judged by the way the composer
has conceived it on paper. Though performance always involves interpretation,
Dwight’s outlook directed performers to look to the score, not their personal
whims or the mood of the audience, for interpretive guidelines.
In this clash of priorities, Gottschalk knew exactly where he stood. In 1862
he wrote, “Music is a thing eminently sensuous. Certain combinations move
us, not because they are ingenious, but because they move our nervous systems
in a certain way.” In other words, for all the ingenuity preserved in composers’
scores, music does its work in performance, occasion by occasion. Performers
and composers can have no worthier goal than to form emotional links with
their listeners.
From his New York debut in 1853 until early 1857, Gottschalk traveled the
United States, establishing himself as a charismatic presence in concert life and
a prominent American composer. Complaints in his journal, however, suggest
the price he and other stars paid for the rewards that came their way, includ-
ing schedules crammed too full of concerts and train rides; hotels that roused
guests with alarm bells and served indigestible food; bizarre audience behavior;
and demands that popular numbers be endlessly repeated. But these were haz-
ards of the profession. More frustrating to Gottschalk was the disparagement he
received for performing his own compositions. Whatever his detractors might
say, however, composing was fundamental to Gottschalk’s musical nature. Beingprimacy of timbretouringprimacy of
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