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A
mericans make music in all sorts of settings, from concert halls to back
porches. The kinds of music they make may vary according to place; a
tavern song is out of place in church, like a string quartet at a football
game. In some cases, however, music migrates easily from one social sphere to
another, as when a song heard in the theater becomes a favorite to sing at home.
This chapter examines various kinds of music Americans made in the decades
before the American Revolution and during the early decades of the republic,
looking at both private and public sites for music making. At this historical stage,
the categories of public and private, professional and amateur, overlap in com-
plex and revealing ways.SONG, DANCE, AND HOME MUSIC MAKING
A key difference between music making in the Old and New Worlds lay in their
systems of economic support. In Europe, society’s ruling institutions—the
church and the nobility—required music for their own purposes, and they paid
musicians to supply it. In America, however, no national church existed, nor did
any political structure with aristocratic continuity and clout. Lacking such spon-
sorship, musicians either made music their avocation or, if they aspired to be
professionals, depended on their own entrepreneurial skills for the support and
promotion of their art. The creation of a diverse musical life on these shores has
largely been the work of musicians seeking to sell their services as performers,
composers, teachers, instrument makers, or dealers of musical merchandise.
In music, as in other walks of American life, the profi t motive has been a vital
source of creative energy, for better and for worse.
The number of customers for music grew during the 1700s as the popula-
tion increased. But professional activity was concentrated in a few cities on the
Eastern Seaboard—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston—
where immigrant musicians practiced what they had learned in Europe. And
that fact points to something basic in America’s musical life: from the start of
European settlement, musicians here have been able to take for granted theCHAPTER
2
“OLD, SIMPLE DITTIES”
Secular Music in the Colonies and
Early Republic
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