172 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
going night and day.” In Sousa’s view, the change was bad for the art of music, which
ought to develop “from the people.” “If you do not make the people executants,” he
told the congressmen, “you make them dependent on the machines.”
Near the end of his life (he died at age seventy-seven in 1932), Sousa could
look back on his active years as a time of robust growth for amateur performance
in America. Music teaching was widespread, and a vast range of music and musi-
cal information was published. The instrument business, from pianos to winds
and strings, was booming. Choral societies existed in virtually every sizable city.
Glee clubs, choruses, and banjo and mandolin clubs fl ourished on college cam-
puses. The piano was the parlor instrument par excellence, and many could play
it. And amateur bands fl ourished. The growing appetite for music was being fed
chiefl y by amateur singers and players for their own delight and edifi cation. But
Sousa worried that the phonograph’s encouragement of consumption without
participation threatened the base of amateur performers whose love of music
sustained the work of professionals.
By the time the United States entered World War I, tours by Sousa, other
professional outfi ts, and circus bands, plus the growing circulation of phono-
graph records, had brought the sound of polished wind ensemble playing to more
and more listeners. And bands were only part of the tide of professional music
making that swept across the nation at the dawn of the twentieth century. The-
aters were built where audiences could gather to watch and listen. Railroads now
linked communities large and small, creating a national market for records and
other consumer goods. Entrepreneurs, centered increasingly in New York City,
used that transportation network to bring musical entertainment to more and
more customers. By the early 1900s, popular entertainment was well on its way
to becoming modern “show business.” The workings of this new entertainment
industry depended on a new approach to creating and marketing popular songs.POPULAR SONGS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
In the years following the Civil War, the sheet music trade seems to have lost
interest in the central issues of the day. The hardships of war widows and ex-
slaves, the bitterness of Southern whites, and the travails of American Indians
may have been acute social realities, but they were not the stuff from which song
hits were fashioned. Songwriters returned instead to subjects popular in the
1820s and 1830s: nostalgic or cautionary dramas or vignettes.
The verse-and-chorus form of Stephen Foster and his contemporaries
remained as prominent after the war as it had been before. The key to popular
song composition still lay in inventing a brief, catchy musical statement, usu-
ally four bars long, and then repeating it: the main statement was heard in the
introduction, the verse (usually more than once), the chorus, and the piano tag,
if there was one. Formal ingenuity thus counted for little; redundancy was wel-
comed and embraced.
“Silver Threads among the Gold” (1873), with words by Eben Rexford and
music by Hart P. Danks, is a good example of the standard recipe. The grace-
ful, legato (smooth) melody fi ts the sentimental subject—the ripeness of married
love. The verse outlines an aaba structure, with each section four bars in length.participation versus
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