14 - “Dear Miss Ober”: Music Management and the Interconnections of Musical Culture in the United States, 1876–1883

Summary

The papers presented at the conference “Importing Culture: European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840–1890”—and the resulting essays collected in this volume—explore in depth the impact of European music and musicians on the nineteenth-century inhabitants of New York City. Some of the chapters document the performance of European repertory (by American and European musicians and ensembles); others concentrate on the activities of European performers (both visitors and immigrants). The overall focus, however, is on the significance of an imported culture to the musical fabric of New York City during a fifty-year period. Several authors also allude to the spread of this culture to other areas in the United States, for many of the musicians or ensembles examined in various chapters mounted national tours and presented concerts of European music in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and elsewhere. My intention in this final chapter of Importing Culture is to expand upon this implied broader picture by presenting my own research within the context of the detailed composite portrait of New York that has emerged from the pages of this volume.

Some would argue that nineteenth-century New York City was the center of the American musical universe; the information presented in this collection, in fact, seems to support the commonplace assumption that the city was a hub from which everything else radiated. But a rich musical life in New York does not preclude a similarly vibrant life elsewhere in the country, and in this essay I suggest an alternative model: New York not as the center but rather one part of an intricate and extraordinarily rich web of musical activity that stretched from Boston to Charleston, from Chicago to New Orleans, and from New York to San Francisco. Anyone who has conducted research into or read much about the cultivation of music in the United States knows that each of these places—and many towns and even hamlets in between—boasted of a rich musical life in the nineteenth century. A related observation—supported by both this chapter and some of the others in this collection—is that many nineteenth-century professional performers were similarly peripatetic, sometimes even as nomadic as are twentieth- and twenty-first century musicians.