Taking the Private Public: Amateur Music-making and the Musical Audience in 1860s New York

By Christopher Bruhn

A crucial component of our understanding of the musical life of America in the nineteenth century is what we know about the audience. We are interested not only in who they were and what musical events they attended, but also what music they made in the home. This is especially significant in an age when music, in order to be experienced, had to be heard live, performed either by amateurs or professionals. The availability of sheet music, playbills, and newspaper accounts of public performances provides us with valuable information concerning nineteenth-century musical life in America. Privately penned firsthand accounts, however, offer additional insights that are especially helpful to our understanding of amateur music-making activities that went on beneath the radar of the critics. Observations made in personal diaries illuminate avenues of music-making that are revealed through no other available sources. This investigation focuses on the amateur music-making activities described in the diaries of four New Yorkers during the 1860s: Gertrude Kellogg, who became a prominent actress on the New York stage in the 1870s; John Ward, a polymath who held degrees in law and medicine; William Steinway, the driving force behind the Steinway & Sons piano manufacturing company from the 1860s until his death in 1896; and George Templeton Strong, the lawyer and socialite.