American Musical Life of the Late Nineteenth Century

By Katherine K. Preston

Scholars conducting research on American music of the nineteenthcentury are continually fascinated, energized, and—occasionally—somewhat dismayed by the huge amount of research that remains to be done. The as-yet unexamined manuscripts and documents in libraries, the unknown collections still awaiting discovery, the questions that have not been answered, the many more that as yet have not even been asked—all hint at the wealth of musical activity enjoyed by our forebears, and all beg to be explored. We Americanists have established the outlines of our nineteenth-century musical heritage and—thanks to recent and continuing work by scholars—know an increasing amount about ever-expanding pieces of it. The reality, however, is that because our understanding remains sketchy in many areas, we do not yet know enough about the music written by Americans of the period, or about the various important roles that music (in general) played in the lives of the people who inhabited North America during the century. The articles collected here both contribute to our expanding base of knowledge about musical cultivation during that fascinating century and acknowledge a growing and welcome interest in nineteenth-century studies within the subdiscipline of American-music scholarship.