Ameican city, capital of Massachusetts. Settled in 1630, it is the principal city of the region of the six north-eastern states called New England. Distinguished by the breadth and intensity of its musical life, Boston has long been a leading centre for composition, performance, music citicism and music education, and an important seat of music publishing and instrument manufacture. Several politically independent municipalities, among them Cambridge and Wellesley, are here considered parts of ‘Greater Boston’.
3. The Boston SO to World War I.
4. Concert life after World War I.
7. Other ensembles and performers.
8. Theatres and concert halls.
LEONARD BURKAT/PAMELA FOX (1, 5–12), JOSEPH HOROWITZ (2–4)
In 1620 separatists from the Church of England left the Netherlands and landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. They carried with them the psalter that Henry Ainsworth published in Amsterdam in 1612, which contained the psalms in English prose and verse, with the music of 39 tunes (borrowed from English, French and Dutch psalters). In 1630 a Puritan group established the Massachusetts Bay Colony at Boston and quickly organized a complex society that, within ten years, founded Harvard College and a book press. They too restricted their music to songs based on the psalms, preferring Sternhold and Hopkins (London, 1562) and music from Ravenscroft’s psalter (1621).
A group of 30 clergy from the colony devised new rhymed, metrical translations of the psalms, resulting in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, the first North American book in English. The first edition known to include music was the ninth (1698), but meanwhile this American book had also been printed in England and was in relatively wide use there. The 13 tunes in the 1698 edition are from John Playford’s A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick.
By the mid-1660s the psalm tunes originally learned by rote were performed on both sides of the Atlantic by ‘lining out’, a practice in which a precentor sang or declaimed a single line of text which the congregation then repeated in solo. After the turn of the century the feeling arose that lining out had outlived its usefulness and should be replaced by musically literate singing according to the rules of art music. New England clergy led the way toward reform through polemical tracts appearing in Boston from 1720. Singing schools were organized to teach it, and the appetite for music they created gave rise in turn to the ‘first New England School’ of American composers; chief among the Yankee tunesmiths of the later 18th century was William Billings.
The earliest documented public concert in America took place in Boston on 30 December 1731, in ‘Mr Pelham's Great Room’. Among the city's leading musicians in subsequent decades was the organist William Selby, who came from England in 1771 and directed a performance of Handel's ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus (accompanied by the 64th Regimental Band) two years later. A seminal figure was the German-born Gottlieb Graupner, who arrived in 1797 having served as oboist in Haydn's London orchestra. As conductor, publisher, and music and instrument dealer, Graupner was an entrepreneurial force. His Philo-Harmonic Society, begun in 1809 and lasting at least until 1824, resembled a club as much as a pioneering orchestra; its repertory included Haydn alongside many now forgotten composers. Graupner was also in 1815 a founding member of the Handel and Haydn Society, America's oldest enduring oratorio society. George K. Jackson, the first doctor of music to settle in America (in 1797), was another significant Boston proponent of Handel and the religious choral literature.
The centrality of sacred music, crowned by Messiah, was reinforced by Lowell Mason, Boston's leading music educator and a successful fashioner of hymns. Although Mason disdained the secular, the Boston Academy of Music (which he co-founded with George James Webb in 1833) formed an orchestra directed by Webb; it introduced Boston to seven Beethoven symphonies as well as to symphonies by Mozart and Mendelssohn. This group was succeeded, from 1839 to 1847, by a musicians' cooperative, the Boston Musical Fund Society.
The prevailing calibre of performance may be gleaned from an anecdote told by Thomas Ryan, an expert chamber musician who took part in a single abortive rehearsal of Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream overture as a member of the Musical Fund Society conducted by Webb; the work was abandoned as unplayable. An orchestra that specialized in Mendelssohn's overture was the Germania Musical Society, which first appeared in Boston in 1849 and later settled there before disbanding in 1854. This group of 25 youthful Germans not only set unprecedented performance standards throughout the USA, but dispersed influential musicians to individual American cities. In Boston the leading Germania alumnus was Carl Zerrahn, a conductor less progressive than New York's Carl Bergmann (also a former Germanian), but a constructive and inspirational force, disciplined and unflappable, as leader of the Handel and Haydn Society (1854–98).
A post-Germania landmark in orchestral performance was the 50th anniversary of the Handel and Haydn Society in 1865, for which an orchestra of 100, including former Germanians, was assembled under Zerrahn. In its wake, the Harvard Musical Association created for Zerrahn a semi-professional orchestra about half as large; begun in 1866 and discontinued in 1882, it was the primary local ensemble prior to the Boston SO. But Zerrahn's orchestra, however indispensable, was far from the polished group with which Theodore Thomas had begun to tour. An 1869 Boston visit by Thomas's orchestra was remembered by William Foster Apthorp for inflicting ‘humiliating lessons in the matter of orchestral technique’. (But Thomas brought the Handel and Haydn Society to New York in 1873 when he needed an expert chorus for Handel, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.) A jolt of another kind, also in 1869, was the five-day National Peace Jubilee and Musical Festival, for which Patrick S. Gilmore assembled an orchestra of 1000 and 10,000 choristers. The programme for the opening concert listed (in the following order): a Lutheran chorale, the Tannhäuser overture (with a ‘select orchestra of 600’), a Mozart Gloria, the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria (with ‘the violin obbligato played by two hundred violinists’), The Star-Spangled Banner (with bells and cannon), an ‘American hymn’, the William Tell overture, ‘Inflammatus’ from Rossini's Stabat mater, the Coronation March from Le prophète, the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore (with 100 anvils played by Boston firemen) and My Country 'Tis of Thee (with ‘the audience requested to join in singing the last stanza’). A popular and financial success, attended by President Grant and other dignitaries, the festival spawned a less successful sequel in 1872.
A presiding influence on local musical growth, and a major factor in the evolution of musical high culture nationally, was the Transcendentalist and one-time Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight. Dwight considered great music ‘religious’ and called Beethoven ‘sacred’. He campaigned to purify ‘classical’ music of such influences as Gilmore, Gottschalk and Stephen Foster. His principal vehicles were Dwight's Journal of Music (1852–81), the leading American periodical of its kind, and the Harvard Musical Association, on whose committee he served. The Association's programming philosophy – to be ‘above all need of catering to low tastes’, to promote ‘only composers of unquestioned excellence, and … nothing vulgar, coarse, “sensational”, but only such as outlives fashion’ – embodied Dwight's severe conservatism; his enthusiasms stopped with Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin.
If the Handel and Haydn Society, which resisted Berlioz and Brahms, reinforced local purism, other important Boston influences, notably the Wagnerite conductor B.J. Lang and Thomas Ryan's Mendelssohn Quintette Club, welcomed the music of the moment. Dwight had served to refine taste and promote appreciation, but by the 1880s was a retarding force; compared to New York, Boston was slow to accept Berlioz, Brahms, Liszt and Wagner. In 1881 Dwight confessed: ‘What challenges the world as new in music fails to stir us to the same depths of soul and feeling that the old masters did and doubtless always will. Startling as the new composers are, [they] do not bring us nearer heaven’. He added: ‘We revenge ourselves with pointing to the unmistakeable fact, that in the concert-giving experience of to-day, at least in Boston, the prurient appetite for novelty … seems to have reached its first stage of satiety’. Apthorp, in a shrewd eulogy for Dwight, summed up: ‘What he was, he was genuinely and thoroughly; fashion had no hold on him.’
Boston's need for a more professionalized, cosmopolitan and focussed musical community resulted in 1881 in the formation of the Boston SO. This was the brainchild of Henry Lee Higginson, a financier whose lifelong passion was music. Resolving to give Boston a ‘full-time and permanent’ orchestra that would ‘offer the best music at low prices’, Higginson created an ensemble soon regarded as peerless in the USA and comparable to the best abroad. He paid all salaries and deficits, but conferred artistic control on his conductors. Some recent accounts of his philanthropy stress the Gilded Age plutocrat rather than the cultural democrat. It is true that Higginson forbade his musicians to form a union or to play popular music on days they rehearsed or performed (a Wednesday-to-Saturday prohibition sometimes wrongly characterized as full-time); that his own musical tastes were relatively conservative; that his orchestra was a Brahmin cultural stronghold. At the same time, he reserved ‘rush seats’ for non-subscribers and began ‘popular concerts’ – the future Boston Pops.
The Boston SO offered 20 concerts and 20 public rehearsals in its first season, 26 concerts and rehearsals a season later. The first conductor, George Henschel (1881–4), was replaced by an Austrian disciplinarian, Wilhelm Gericke, whom Higginson heard in Vienna, and it was Gericke who polished and refined Boston's orchestra (1884–9). His successor, Arthur Nikisch (1889–93), was a Romantic in outlook and temperament, and less interested in precision; his interpretative liberties in Beethoven's Fifth caused a furore. The orchestra moved to Symphony Hall, its current home, in 1900. Nikisch was replaced by Emil Paur (1893–8), after which Gericke returned (1898–1906).
Boston had by 1900 fostered a vigorous school of composers, to which the Boston SO was notably receptive. John Knowles Paine, whose professorship in music at Harvard University was unprecedented in the USA, was a father figure whose two symphonies (1875, 1879) pay homage to Beethoven and Schumann; but his late opera Azara (1883–98) is Wagnerian. Of Paine's progeny, G.W. Chadwick, whose music resonates with hymns, fiddle tunes and popular song, may be considered America's first significant nationalist composer; his works were played 78 times by the Boston SO between 1881 and 1924. Other ‘Boston boys’ (Chadwick's term) included Amy Beach, Arthur Foote and Horatio Parker. The most progressive Boston composer was the German-born Charles Martin Loeffler, whose influences included the French symbolists. A true community, influential in its day, the pre-World War I Boston composers cannot be fairly described as ‘classicists’ or Germanic clones; their worth is still not recognized. At the same time, Boston's discomfort with Dvořák's ‘New World’ Symphony and ‘American’ String Quartet, rebuked by local critics and composers (1893–4) for absorbing ‘barbaric’ plantation songs and Amerindian chants, revealed a strain of élitist conservatism not evident in New York.
With the arrival of Carl Muck in 1906, the Boston SO obtained a world-class conductor who combined Gericke's efficiency with energy and power; his Boston recordings, the orchestra's first, document an interpretative personality more restrained than Nikisch's (as documented by the latter's recordings in Berlin). Muck was followed by Max Fiedler (1908–12), but thereafter returned, only to fall foul of anti-German war hysteria; interned as an enemy alien, he left the USA in 1918 vowing never to come back. The same year, Higginson relegated control of the orchestra to a group of nine citizens, incorporated as the Trustees of the Boston SO. Postwar Germanophobia insured that the orchestra would not have another German-born music director for decades to come; it also impugned the music of Chadwick and other German-trained local composers, whose works faded from the repertory.
Muck's successors, Henri Rabaud (1918–19) and Pierre Monteux (1920–24), presided over a transitional period. In 1920 more than 30 players who wished to affiliate with the Boston Musicians' Protective Association, the local union of the American Federation of Musicians, went on strike and were replaced by musicians of Monteux's choice. (The Boston SO was the last important American orchestra to join the union, in 1942.) The glamorous Sergey Koussevitzky (1924–49) influentially championed the music of Copland and such other postwar Americans as Barber, Bernstein, Hanson, Harris, Piston and Schuman. It was under Koussevitzky that the orchestra took over the Berkshire Music Festival, acquired Tanglewood and in 1940 opened the Berkshire Music Center (renamed the Tanglewood Music Center in 1985; see Tanglewood). In the meantime, in 1929 Arthur Fiedler, a member of the orchestra since 1915, organized the Esplanade Concerts as free, outdoor programmes of symphonic and light music in the band shell on the banks of the Charles River. In 1930 Fiedler succeeded Alfredo Casella as conductor of the Boston Pops, a position he held until his death in 1979. In 1980 he was succeeded by John Williams, who in turn was followed by Keith Lockhart in 1995. For the Boston SO's 50th anniversary season (1930–31) Koussevitzky commissioned Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, Hindemith's Konzertmusik and works by Copland, E.B. Hill, Honegger, Prokofiev, Respighi and Roussel. Koussevitzky's successors were Charles Münch (1949–62), Erich Leinsdorf (1962–9), William Steinberg (1969–72) and Seiji Ozawa (from 1973).
Puritan traditions slowed the development of theatre in Boston, but an anti-theatre law of 1750 did not prevent ‘readings’ of English ballad and comic operas. Over 150 ballad operas had been performed in Boston before 1800. In the late 1820s the resident opera company of New Orleans performed its French repertory in Boston, but Italian opera was not patronized by the upper classes in Boston to the extent that it was in New York. Therefore no serious attempts to promote Italian opera in Boston occurred before 1847, when an Italian company based in Havana played the first of two seasons in the Howard Anthenaeum. Travelling companies continued to visit during the next two decades, and opera in English opened at the new Boston Theatre in 1860. The Strakosch and Mapleson touring companies and others played in Boston, and a week-long Wagner festival in 1877 presented three early works and Die Walküre. The American première of HMS Pinafore was given in Boston in 1878, and in 1883 the new Metropolitan Opera company of New York began its annual visits to Boston. The Boston Ideal Opera Company (the Bostonians) was highly successful throughout America between 1879 and 1905.
In 1895–6 a season of opera, mostly light, French works sung in English by young Americans, was presented at the Castle Square Theatre by C.E. French. Charles A. Ellis, manager of the Boston SO, also presented an opera season early in 1899, with the New York SO in the pit and Walter Damrosch as both a business partner and conductor. Wagner enthusiasm peaked in Boston in the 1890s: Damrosch brought Wagner to the Boston Theatre, and B.J. Lang presented a concert version of Parsifal in 1891.
Increased public demand finally spurred the musical élite to push for Boston’s first permanent opera company. Henry Russell and the department-store magnate Eben D. Jordan, jr founded the city’s first important resident company, the Boston Opera Company. Jordan invested more than $1 million in the new Boston Opera House and guaranteed the company’s deficit for three years. The first season opened on 8 November 1909 with Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, starring Lillian Nordica in the title role. In 1914 a costly spring season in Paris resulted in bankruptcy in 1915. During the next two seasons Max Rabinoff mounted the Boston Grand Opera Company, but thereafter there were only annual tours by the Chicago Opera between 1917 and 1932 and later the San Carlo Opera. The building was demolished in 1958.
There was no important local opera production again until Boris Goldovsky established the New England Opera Theatre in 1946. Goldovsky’s former protégée Sarah Caldwell (with James Stagliano and Linda Cabot Black) formed a new company in 1958 first known as the Boston Opera Group and later as the Opera Company of Boston. It presented significant American and world premières.
In 1975 a number of the city’s smaller companies joined to form the Boston Lyric Opera, initially to provide performance opportunities for resident singers. In 1991 the Boston Opera Theater was formed by Caldwell’s associates, performing in the Colonial Theater, known for pre-Broadway trials of musicals. Peter Sellars and the conductor Craig Smith, working with locally based singers, rehearsed their bold, updated productions of Handel and Mozart in Boston.
The earliest choral singing in Boston was the first settlers’ congregational psalm singing, which continued through later times of controversy over the relative virtues of the old style and the cultivated new style promoted in the singing schools. Church and community choirs were formed throughout New England from the 1750s. The work of George K. Jackson, who in 1812 organized a concert of Handel’s music, was instrumental in broadening the musical repertory of Boston’s churches.
The Handel and Haydn Society was formed for the purpose of ‘cultivating and improving a correct taste in the performance of sacred music, and also to introduce into more general practice the works of Handel, Haydn, and other eminent composers’. It gave its first concert on 25 December 1815 and served as the prototype for similar organizations in other cities. At Christmas 1818 the society gave its first performance of the complete Messiah; on 16 February 1819 The Creation followed. The first edition of The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, anonymously edited by Lowell Mason (president of the society 1827–32), was published in 1822. Christopher Hogwood has directed the society since 1986, completing the transformation of the organization into a professional chorus accompanied by a period-instrument orchestra, expanding the group’s reputation through recordings and tours, and fostering collaborative projects with other art forms (including jazz).
Several English-style glee clubs were the ancestors of three long-lived choral societies: the Apollo Club of about 50 male voices, founded in 1871 and led by B.J. Lang; the Boylston Club, founded in 1873 as a male-voice group devoted to relatively light music and converted in 1877 into a chorus of mixed voices with a serious repertory; and the Cecilia Society, established in 1874 under Lang to perform with the orchestra of the Harvard Musical Association. In 1877 it separated from the association, and under Lang presented the Boston or American premières of 105 works. In 1889 it gave the first of more than 100 peformances with the Boston SO. Arthur Fiedler became its conductor in 1930, but the chorus declined after his departure until Donald Teeters assumed the conductorship in 1968.
The periods of greatest activity of these groups overlapped with current choral societies, many of which are affiliated with educational institutions. In 1912 A.T. Davison of the Harvard faculty took over direction of the glee club, and in 1913 he also took over the Radcliffe (College) Choral Society. In the late 1940s the Chorus Pro Musica was founded by Alfred Nash Patterson, and the New England Conservatory Chorus came under the direction of Lorna Cooke de Varon. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus was established in 1970 under John Oliver to perform with the Boston SO at Tanglewood and in Boston. Numerous other professional and amateur choral societies are currently active in Boston.
In 1844 the Harvard Musical Association began a series of six annual chamber music concerts that continued for five years. The public performance of chamber music acquired an important place in musical life with the founding of the Mendelssohn Quintette Club in 1849 under the leadership of Thomas Ryan. The German pianist and composer Otto Dresel (1826–90), a pupil of Hiller and Mendelssohn, settled in Boston in 1852 and was much admired for his tireless efforts on behalf of J.S. Bach, Schumann and Robert Franz. In 1858 B.J. Lang, who had been a member of the Liszt circle in Europe, returned to Boston to start an active career that included conducting the world première of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto (1875) at Music Hall, with Hans von Bülow as soloist. The Euterpe Society was founded in 1879 as a membership subscription scheme for the presentation of chamber concerts and recitals.
The stability and skills of the Boston SO provided a new kind of community artistic resource. Franz Kneisel, who became leader in 1885, founded the Kneisel Quartet, which made its reputation during its 20 years in Boston. The success of the Longy Club, established in 1900, developed a new taste for French wind music, which was later featured by the Boston Flute Players Club, founded in 1920 under the direction of Georges Laurent. In the late 19th century Boston led America in the popular Victorian custom of ‘at homes’, small-scale concerts in private residences.
The Boston Symphony Chamber Players were founded by the orchestra’s management in 1964. A large variety of chamber organizations and series have prospered in the 20th century. The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, a professional cooperative founded in 1978, is one of the few musician-run groups in the USA. Concert series of broad general interest are presented under various auspices.
The ‘early music movement’ has a long history in Boston. Interest in ‘original instruments’ dates back to well before 1905, when Arnold Dolmetsch began to make them for the Chickering company. Ruth Charlotte Dana introduced Gregorian chant at Boston’s Church of the Advent in the 1840s. On 22 January 1875 in Boston’s Mechanics Hall, the first of ‘Four Historical Concerts’ was presented by George Osgood and F. Boscowitz, featuring Josquin’s Tu pauperum refugium, madrigals by Le Jeune and Morley, J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto and other keyboard works by Bull, Byrd, Rameau and Kuhnau performed on a harpsichord provided by Chickering.
In 1938 a group of string players from the orchestra formed the Boston Society of Ancient Instruments under Alfred Zighera. Bodky’s Collegium Musicum, founded in 1942 and succeeded by the Cambridge Society for Early Music, established standards of performance nearer to those achieved today, and eventually the Boston Camerata, founded in 1954 by Narcissa Williamson and directed from 1968 by Joel Cohen, became one of the country’s best-known groups of this kind. Martin Pearlman’s Boston Baroque, founded in 1973 as Banchetto Musicale, has acquired an international reputation. The Boston Museum Trio plays period instruments from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Boston Early Music Festival and Exhibition, first held in 1981, has continued its highly successful biennial sessions presenting early music groups and instrument makers from Boston and around the world.
Influential contemporary music groups in Boston are Collage, founded in 1972 and drawing its players from the Boston SO; Boston Musica Viva (founded 1969), which gave the premières of 72 works written for the group in its first 20 years; Dinosaur Annex (founded 1975); and the Alea III (founded 1978).
Popular entertainment music was an important feature of Boston musical life, although its influence has been played down. The popular English songwriter and entertainer Henry Russell lived in Boston for a while in the 1830s, and with the founding of Kendall’s Boston Brass Band in 1835 a continuous tradition of significant band activities was initiated. B.F. Keith’s ‘mother house of vaudeville’ opened in 1894 in Boston’s main entertainment district, Scollay Square (now Government Center). This mecca was in the Tin Pan Alley of Boston where Irving Berlin played in the basement of Woolworth’s. Fred Allen, who started as a juggler in a Scollay Square vaudeville house, called the amusement mecca ‘the hot foot applied to the high-button shoe’.
By 1915 many noted black musicians were active in area night clubs. In the 1920s the pianist Sid Reinherz contributed to the change in style from late rag to early stride, and Leo Reisman led a fine jazz-style big band in the Brunswick Hotel. Mal Hallett’s popular band had a distinguished membership that in 1933 included Gene Krupa and Jack Teagarden. The bandleader Vaughan Monroe began his career as a singer with the Jack Marshard ‘society orchestra’ in 1936. Other similar groups were led by Meyer Davis, Eddy Duchin and Ruby Newman.
Distinguished individual jazz musicians from the area included Serge Chaloff, Bobby Hackett and Max Kaminsky. George Wein, who began his career as a jazz pianist after leaving Boston University, became internationally known as a jazz impresario. Joan Baez began her career as a folksinger at Boston University. Gunther Schuller’s New England Ragtime Ensemble, with players from the New England Conservatory, was one of the principal participants in the rediscovery of ragtime music in the early 1970s. Joshua Rikfin, while a faculty member at Brandeis University, also arranged and produced recordings by Judy Collins, and, as a pianist, made some of the first recordings in the Scott Joplin revival. Boston continues to be a fertile ground for the development of rock music. The J. Geils Band (formed in 1967) and the band called Boston (1975) attained great popularity, and in the 1990s a new generation of musicians, producers and studio agents promoted numerous new groups, many of whom have been honoured at the SKC Boston Music Awards.
Early public performances of music were organized in private homes, coffee houses and religious meeting houses. A law of 1750, re-enacted in 1785, prohibited theatrical entertainments of all kinds, but it was commonly circumvented by billing such events as ‘lectures’ or ‘readings’. In 1792 the New Exhibition Room was opened for ‘lectures, moral and entertaining’ with a ‘gallery of portraits, songs, feats of tumbling, and ballet pantomine’ but it was promptly closed in 1793.
Public demand brought swift change, and in 1793, the Boston Theatre, designed by Charles Bulfinch to be one of the grandest in the USA, was opened. It was often called the Federal Street Theatre, especially after the Haymarket Theatre opened in 1796, and spoken drama and ballad opera were popular on both stages. Graupner later had a concert room in the same building as his home and shop. His Philharmonic concerts took place in Pythian Hall and later the Pantheon. The Handel and Haydn Society’s early performances were given in churches such as Stone Chapel and then Boylston Hall. From 1835 to 1843 the Boston Theatre, remodelled and renamed the Odeon, was the home of the Academy of Music.
In 1827 the Tremont Theatre was built. After a fire, it was reopened as the Baptist Tremont Temple, which survives as rebuilt in the 1870s after another fire. The Lion Theatre of 1836, built for ‘dramatic and equestrian performances’, taken over in 1839 by the Handel and Haydn Society and renamed the Melodeon, was the successor to the Odeon as Boston’s leading concert hall.
In 1845 the Millerite Tabernacle was refitted as a theatre, the Howard Athenaeum, which in 1847 saw Boston’s first important season of Italian opera. It was closed in 1953, after long years of service as the Old Howard, a famous burlesque house, and was destroyed by fire in 1961. In the 1840s the Chickering firm’s showrooms were the site of such serious musical events as the Harvard Musical Association’s chamber concerts, and by the 1850s there was a Chickering Hall. Minstrel shows played at the Adelphi (opened 1847) and the Lyceum (1848). The Harvard Musical Association raised a construction fund of $100,000 for a new hall, and on 20 November 1852 they opened the 2700-seat Music Hall, which provided a new rallying point for the city’s musical life.
In 1854 the New Boston Theatre opened, and from 1860 various operas were produced there. The Continental Theatre opened in 1866 and prospered with a long run of the musical The Black Crook. In 1876 Harvard’s Memorial Hall had appended to it the 1400-seat Sanders Theatre, which became the university’s principal auditorium and was the site of the Boston SO’s Cambridge concert series for about 80 years. In 1896 the little Steinert Hall was opened by the Steinert Piano Co.
In the spring of 1893 Henry Lee Higginson said that he would discontinue maintenance of the Boston SO unless the Music Hall, endangered by planned street and subway construction, could be replaced within little more than a year. The estimated cost of $400,000 was quickly subscribed and McKim, Mead & White designed the New Boston Music Hall, later named Symphony Hall. The collaboration of Wallace C. Sabine, then a young member of the Harvard physics department, made this the first scientifically designed auditorium.
Jordan Hall (cap. 1019), built in 1908 at the New England Conservatory, is well suited to solo recitals and performances by smaller groups. In 1909 the 2700-seat Boston Opera House opened, its acoustic design also by Sabine. A theatre-building boom occurred in Boston at the opening of the 20th century; in 25 years eight new playhouses and 16 movie theatres were constructed, with most theatres featuring live orchestras. The Metropolitan Theatre, opened in 1926 as a splendid vaudeville and movie palace and later used as an opera and ballet house (sometimes called the Music Hall or the Metropolitan Center), was closed in 1982. The Hatch Memorial Shell was built in 1940 for free outdoor concerts given on the Charles River Esplanade by Arthur Fiedler and members of the Boston SO. Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened its fine 1238-seat, general-purpose Kresge Auditorium in 1955.
Before American independence almost all musical instruments used in Boston had been imported from England and later from the Continent; but by the mid-19th century Boston was exporting instruments to Europe and South America. Collections are owned by the Boston Public Library, the Boston SO, Boston University, Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts and the New England Conservatory.
The first organ in New England, probably the second in the Colonies, was installed in the home of Thomas Brattle by 1711, and the first locally built organ was left unfinished by Edward Bromfield. A contemporary report of the period 1810–15 said that only six Boston churches then had organs. Among early organ builders were William Goodrich, the firms of Hayts, Babcock & Appleton and Hook & Hastings, and John Rowe. In 1854 a successful organ business was begun by Henry L. Mason and Emmons Hamlin, with financial backing from Lowell Mason and Oliver Ditson. Its products became well known in Europe, and its profits helped to finance the manufacture of the fine Mason & Hamlin pianos, begun in 1883, which eventually outweighed the reed-organ business in importance and resulted in its sale in 1911.
In 1855 a committee of citizens raised $10,000 to build an organ in the Music Hall. Ordered from the German firm of Walcker in Ludwigsburg, the organ was finally dedicated on 2 November 1863 by John Knowles Paine, B.J. Lang and others. It was the largest organ in North America and one of the three or four largest in the world. It had fallen into disrepair by the early 1880s, however, and was eventually removed.
A spinet built by John Harris in 1769 was probably the first keyboard string instrument made in the Colonies. Benjamin Crehore, originally a cabinet maker, was building harpsichords and string instruments by 1792, and by 1797 he had begun to make pianos. Jonas Chickering made his first piano in 1823 and took out several important patents during the 1840s. The prospering Chickering company opened its new factory in 1855 as the second largest building in the country, exceeded in size only by the US Capitol. In 1927 the company moved to East Rochester, New York, as part the American Piano Company. In addition to Mason & Hamlin, several other Boston makers produced good pianos for home and school use, most of them ultimately absorbed by the Aeolian Corporation. Boston continues to support makers of fine harpsichords and other early keyboard instruments. William Dowd and Frank Hubbard, who established a joint workshop in 1949, worked independently from 1958. The Eric Herz workshop began operations in 1954. Jeremy Adams, who worked with Dowd, became an independent maker, restorer and rebuilder in 1968.
A few early 17th-century settlers are believed to have brought viols to America. Within 50 years prosperous individuals were importing string instruments; Benjamin Crehore began to make them in Boston during the 18th century. George Gemunder, who trained in Paris under Vuillaume, and his brother August opened their shop in Boston in 1847, but moved to New York in 1851. The firm of J.B. Squier, established in 1886, was later remembered principally as a manufacturer of strings.
William Callender began to make wind instruments in 1796, and others continued the trade through the 19th century, though with little distinction until William S. Haynes started his flute company in 1900. Haynes and his foreman Verne Q. Powell were influential in establishing the silver flute in the USA. Powell started his own firm in 1926 and made Boston a leading centre of flute making; in 1961 he sold it to a group of his employees. Brannen Brothers, founded in 1977, was joined in 1978 by the English flute maker Albert K. Cooper. In 1901 Cundy-Bettoney started to build woodwind instruments that were destined for the educational market, and in 1925 the firm began to produce what were said to be the first metal clarinets.
Boston became a centre of brass-instrument manufacture after the establishment of Edward Kendall’s Boston Brass Band in 1835. The firms of E.G. Wright and Graves & Co. combined about 1869 to form the Boston Musical Instrument Manufactory, known for its fine band instruments during the late 1880s. In 1884 Thompson and Odell founded the Standard Brass Instrument Co., which also made guitars and banjos; it was later taken over by the Vega company. George B. Stone started his business in percussion instruments in 1890. The Zildjian family’s cymbal business, founded in Constantinople in 1623, moved to the Boston area in 1929.
Early settlers were concerned with musical education, and devotional singing is said to have had a place in the original curriculum at Harvard College, founded in 1636. The first published musical teaching material is the ‘admonition to the reader’, in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, and the instructive introductions to 18th-century tune books extended this practice. By 1720 the traditional ‘old way of singing’ came under attack from those who favoured musically literate ‘regular singing’, and singing schools were established. A century of Yankee tunesmiths wrote and published the psalm settings and hymns that were their teaching pieces, but early 19th-century hymnodic reformers sought to replace earlier American psalmody with ‘scientific’ European models.
Lowell Mason studied the methods of Swiss educational theorist Pestalozzi and applied them to the children’s music classes that he taught in churches and private schools. In the Boston Academy of Music he held teacher-training classes in addition to its concerts. In 1837 he introduced music to the curriculum in the Boston public schools at his own expense, and in the following year the Boston school board created the first programme of free, public-school instruction in music under his direction.
Harvard University, in Cambridge, was the first college in the USA, founded to train young men for the ministry. Its evolution into a secular university was slow, and music at first had a place there only in connection with religion. As early as 1808 there was interest enough in music among Harvard undergraduates for them to form the Pierian Sodality, whose members formed the basis of the Harvard Musical Association in 1837 (though the name was not assumed until 1840). It had no formal connection with the college but acted as a alumni advisory group, and in 1838 recommended that instruction in music be added to the curriculum. Its efforts had no effect, however, until 1862, when Harvard appointed John Knowles Paine to the post of college organist and instructor in music. In 1875 he became a full professor of music. During his long tenure (until his death in 1906), Paine taught many important composers and music historians during the height of the ‘Second New England School’ of composers. Walter Piston taught several generations of composers at Harvard until his retirement in 1960.
The Perkins Institute and Massachusetts School for the Blind (founded in 1832) added music to its programme in 1833, with Mason as teacher. Two new music schools opened in February 1867: the Boston Conservatory (founded under the direction of violinist and composer Julius Eichberg) and the New England Conservatory (founded by Eben Tourjée). The College of Music at Boston University was founded by Tourjée in 1872. In 1916 Georges Longy opened the school bearing his name, to offer instruction in solfege and theoretical subjects as taught in France. Schoenberg taught for one year at the Malkin Conservatory, which functioned from 1933 to 1954. The Berklee College of Music was founded by Lawrence Berk in 1945 to train professional musicians for work in jazz and other non-classical traditions. Among its graduates are Keith Jarrett, Quincy Jones and Branford Marsalis.
There are many other institutions of higher education in which music has an important place, including Brandies University (in nearby Waltham, founded in 1948 as the only non-religious Jewish-sponsored university in the USA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Tufts University and Wellesley College.
There is a long-standing tradition of community music schools in the Boston area. The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts is a highly valued institution in the black community, and earlier music schools were maintained by the city’s Italian, Jewish and Lithuanian communities.
The principal music libraries in Boston proper are the collection (begun in 1859) at the Boston Public Library, whose enormous archival value can hardly be assessed from the admirable published catalogues (of 1910 and 1972), and those at Boston University, the Harvard Musical Association, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Conservatory of Music and the Boston Athenaeum. In Cambridge, Harvard’s holdings are principally in the Houghton Library, the Isham Memorial Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. Wellesley College also has a fine music library. At some distance from the city but of great importance for their collections of Americana are the Essex Institute in Salem and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. A librarians’ informal discussion group that first met in 1974 became a productive consortium of 16 institutions called Boston Area Music Libraries, which in 1983 issued the monumental publication The Boston Composers Project.
The first book-length work of general musical literature published in the USA was probably John Rowe Parker’s A Musical Biography or Sketches of the Lives and Writings of Eminent Musical Characters, Interspersed with an Epitome of Interesting Musical Matter (Boston, 1824). His The Euterpiad, or Musical Intelligencer (1820–23) was the city’s first musical periodical. Dwight’s Journal of Music (1852–81) covered local, national and international musical issues. Dwight and other early 19th-century Boston-based writers promoted abstract instrumental music’s elevation from mere entertainment to a vehicle of moral enrichment and led America in establishing high-art idealism and the classical canon.
The Ditson firm, which published Dwight’s Journal from 1868 and then several lesser journals, also published important books. Near the end of the 19th century L.C. Page began to publish some handsome editions of books by the Elsons, Lahee and Rupert Hughes. From 1872 Boston’s first woman journalist to write on musical issues, Sallie White, regularly reported in the Boston Post.
William Foster Apthorp, who began publishing musical criticism in the Atlantic Monthly in 1872, became the programme annotator for the Boston SO in 1892, an influential position in forming public opinion. His successors have included Philip Hale, John N. Burk, Michael Steinberg and Steven Ledbetter. Among the Boston newspaper critics were Olin Downes, H.T. Parker and Richard Dyer. Recent scholars at Harvard, Boston University, Wellesley College and Brandeis have made important contributions to music scholarship, while William Schwann began publishing his authoritative catalogues of recordings in 1949.
The first music known to have been printed and published in North America appeared in the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book (Boston, 1698), in which 13 tunes are printed from woodblocks. The next appeared in two instruction books, one by John Tufts (1721 or earlier), the other by Thomas Walter (also 1721), which was probably the first North American music printed from engraved metal plates. Two collections by Josiah Flagg (1764 and 1766) and at least part of William Billings’s The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770) were engraved by Paul Revere. The first American set of type for printing music was cast in Boston by William (or possibly John) Norman, first used in the Boston Magazine in 1783.
Between 1798 and 1804 P.A. von Hagen (father and son) issued about 100 publications. Graupner was Boston’s principal music publisher for about 25 years, beginning in 1802. The Handel and Haydn Society, which he helped form, paid him five cents per page, then a considerable sum, for the music of Haydn’s The Creation. James Hewitt published in Boston from about 1812 to 1817. There were many other firms, and Ditson expanded and absorbed dozens before being absorbed itself by Theodore Presser in 1931.
In 1876 Arthur P. Schmidt founded a new firm that energetically published works by many American composers, including Beach, Bird, Chadwick, Foote, Hadley, MacDowell, Paine and others. The Schmidt catalogue is now owned by Summy-Birchard. Cundy-Bettoney, dating back to 1868 and specializing in wind music, is now part of Carl Fischer; the Wa-Wan Press, founded in 1901 by Arthur Farwell, was acquired by G. Schirmer in 1912. Specialist publishers include the firm of Robert King (established 1940), which was devoted to brass music until its expansion in 1982. Two remaining older firms are the Boston Music Company (founded 1885) and E.C. Schirmer (founded 1921), which is especially strong in choral music.
G. Hood: A History of Music in New England (Boston, 1846/R)
The Great Organ in the Boston Music Hall, being a Brief History of the Enterprise (Boston, 1865)
J.S. Dwight: ‘Music in Boston’, The Memorial History of Boston, ed. J. Winsor, iv (Boston, 1881–3), 415–64
C.C. Perkins and others: History of the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston, 1883/R)
M.A. de W. Howe: The Boston Symphony Orchestra: an Historical Sketch (Boston,1914, enlarged 2/1931/R with J.N. Burk as The Boston Symphony Orchestra 1881–1931)
W.A. Fisher: Notes on Music in Old Boston (Boston, 1918/R)
J.H. Railey: The New England Conservatory of Music, 1867–1927 (Boston,1927)
W.R. Spaulding: Music at Harvard: a Historial Review of Men and Events (New York, 1935/R)
C.M. Ayars: Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston, 1640 to 1936 (New York, 1937/R)
A. Foote: ‘A Bostonian Remembers’, MQ, xxiii (1937), 37–44
H.C. McCusker: Fifty Years of Music in Boston, Based on Hitherto Unpublished Letters in the Boston Public Library (Boston, 1938)
H.W. Foote: ‘Musical Life in Boston in the Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, new ser., xlix (1939), 293–313
H.E. Johnson: ‘Early New England Periodicals Devoted to Music’,MQ, xxvi (1940), 153–61
H.E. Johnson: Musical Interludes in Boston 1795–1830 (New York,1943/R)
L. Burkat: ‘Music in the Berkshires’, Tempo, no.5 (1947), 18–21
L. Burkat: ‘Current Chronicle United States: Boston’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 249–52
H.E. Johnson: Symphony Hall, Boston (Boston, 1950/R)
L. Burkat: ‘Boston Symphony Orchestra’, ReM, no.212 (1952), 43–6
J.W. Thompson: Music and Musical Activities in New England, 1800–1838 (diss., Peabody College for Teachers, 1962)
Q. Eaton: The Boston Opera Company (New York, 1965/R)
H.E. Johnson: Hallelujah, Amen: the Story of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (Boston, 1965/R)
B. Owen: The Organs and Music of King’s Chapel, 1713–1964 (Boston, 1966)
P.E. Paige: Musical Organizations in Boston, 1830–1850 (diss., Boston U., 1967)
C.R. Nutter: History of the Harvard Musical Association, 1837–1962 (Boston, 1968)
H.E. Dickson: ‘Gentlemen, More Dolce Please!’: an Irreverent Memoir of Thirty Years in the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Boston, 1969)
Dictionary Catalog of the Music Collection (Boston, 1972–) [pubn of Boston Public Library]
L.J. Clarke: Music in Trinity Church, Boston, 1890–1900: a Case Study in the Relationship between Worship and Culture (diss., Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1973)
B.D. Wilson: A Documentary History of Music in the Public Schools of the City of Boston, 1830–1850 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1973)
J. Baker-Carr: Evening at Symphony: a Portrait of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Boston, 1977)
L. Snyder: Community of Sound: Boston Symphony and its World of Players (Boston, 1979)
B. Owen: The Organ in New England (Raleigh, NC, 1980)
D.A. Wood: Music in Harvard Libraries: a Catalogue of Early Printed Music and Books on Music in the Houghton Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library (Cambridge, MA, 1980)
B. Lambert, ed.: Music in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630–1820 (Boston, 1980–85)
P. DiMaggio: ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston’, Media, Culture and Society, iv (1982), 33–50, 303–22
The Boston Composers Project: a Bibliography of Contemporary Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983)
S. Ledbetter: 100 Years of the Boston Pops (Boston, 1985)
D. McKay: ‘Opera in Colonial Boston’, American Music, iii/2 (1985), 133–42
A.W. Hepner: Pro bonum artium musicarum: the Harvard Musical Association, 1837–1987 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1987)
O.F. Saloman: ‘Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841–46’, American Music, vi (1988), 428–41
D. Whitwell: The Longy Club: a Professional Wind Ensemble in Boston (1900–1917) (Northridge, CA, 1988)
M. Broyles: ‘Music of the Highest Class’: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, CT, 1992)
J. Wright: ‘Black Women in Classical Music in Boston during the Late Nineteenth Century: Profiles in Leadership’, New Perspectives in Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. J. Wright and S.A. Floyd (Warren, MI, 1992), 373–408
P. Fox: ‘Rebellious Tradition and Boston’s Musical Spirit of Place: Elitism, Populism, and Lives Apart’, MQ, lxxx (1994), 220–45
B. McPherson and J. Klein: ‘Measure by Measure: a History of New England Conservatory from 1867 (Boston, 1995)