American city. It is the largest city in the USA and the cultural centre of the country. The fine natural harbour and waterways and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 quickly made New York the nation’s principal commercial centre. As the most important port until after World War II, the city has been the gateway for both visitors and immigrants to the USA, bringing a density and variety of cultural influences that have created a dynamic and varied musical life. The heart of America’s music industry is in New York, and the city is a showcase for individuals and organizations from other parts of the continent and from abroad. For the American musician a New York recital is the prerequisite of professional status.
3. Concert halls and other performance venues.
13. Associations and organizations.
14. Publishing, instrument making, broadcasting and recording.
15. Criticism and periodicals.
IRVING KOLODIN, FRANCIS D. PERKINS/SUSAN THIEMANN SOMMER/ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ (1–8, 12–16: 2 with J. SHEPARD and SARA VELEZ; 3 with J. SHEPARD; 4 with PAUL GRIFFITHS; 12 with J. SHEPARD and N. DAVIS-MILLIS; 14 with JOHN ROCKWELL and PAUL GRIFFITHS) JOHN ROCKWELL/ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ (9) EDWARD A. BERLIN, J. BRADFORD ROBINSON, JOHN ROCKWELL/ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ (10) SUSAN T. SOMMER, JOHN ROCKWELL/ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ (11)
The first documented concert in New York was given on 21 January 1736 by the German-born organist and harpsichordist C.T. Pachelbel, son of the renowned Johann, at the house of Robert Todd, a vintner, next to Fraunces Tavern; an announcement of the event refers to songs and instrumental music with harpsichord, flute and violin. Apparently the first organ was installed in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1724, followed in 1741 by an organ built by J.G. Klemm for Trinity Church. 46 concerts were advertised in New York between 1736 and 1775, more than in any other American city; they included a charity concert at City Hall after the installation of an organ in 1756 and, about 1766, the performance of a march from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus ‘accompanied with a side drum’ at the City Tavern.
Visiting musicians, usually from London, rarely remained long in New York; W.C. Hulett, who taught the violin and dancing in 1759 and was still in the city directory in 1799, was an exception. The arrival of William Tuckey in 1752 to become clerk of Trinity Church from 1 January 1753 marked a turning-point in New York’s musical life. Tuckey promptly took over the Trinity choir and became a champion of Handel’s works; he organized subscription concerts and balls in the 1760s, and on 16 January 1770 sponsored a benefit at ‘Mr Burns’ New Room’ with the first New York performance of the overture and 16 numbers from Messiah. Works by Haydn appeared on programmes after 27 April 1782.
Various groups of New York musicians sporadically announced series of subscription concerts. ‘City Concerts’ begun in 1793 by Henri Capron, James Hewitt and G.E. Saliment lasted until 1797, and included music by Pleyel, Haydn, Grétry, Gyrowetz, Hewitt and Benjamin Carr; outdoor summer concerts initiated in 1765 by James Jones in the Ranelagh Gardens continued to be popular. Vocal and instrumental music by Haydn, Arne and Stamitz, as well as popular ballads, could be heard at Ranelagh Gardens and at Joseph Delacroix’s Vauxhall Gardens in the late 1790s.
New York music organizations in the 18th century combining social and choral activities included the Harmonic (1773–4), Musical (1788–94), St Cecilia (1791–9), Harmonical (1796–9), Columbian Anacreontic (1795–?), Uranian (1793–8) and Philharmonic (1799–c1816) societies. The repertory usually consisted of hymns and, occasionally, anthems. Few societies survived their good intentions.
Theatre flourished and ballad opera was popular. Opera could be heard at the Nassau Street Theatre from 1750; The Beggar’s Opera was one of the first performed there. In 1753–4 a troupe from London directed by Lewis Hallam performed operas and plays; David Douglass reorganized it under the name of the American Company (later Old American Company), and it performed at the John Street Theatre and in other coastal cities from 1767 to 1774. During the British military occupation (1776–83) plays or ballad operas were occasionally performed, but it was not until 1785 that Lewis Hallam jr and John Henry reopened the Old American Company, which they operated more or less regularly until the turn of the century. The musical repertory consisted largely of pasticcio arrangements of such popular works as Thomas and Sally, Rosina, Love in a Village, Lionel and Clarissa, The Adopted Child, The Duenna, No Song, No Supper and The Flitch of Bacon. Operas by Grétry (Zémire et Azor) and Duni (Les deux chasseurs) also served as a basis for local adaptation. For a short time in the 1790s French immigrants performed such works as Les deux chasseurs, Audinot’s Le tonnelier and Rousseau’s Le devin du village in French.
Native musical theatre came into its own in the last quarter of the 18th century. Among the earliest examples was May Day in Town (18 May 1788) with ‘music compiled from the most eminent masters’. Hewitt’s Tammany, or The Indian Chief (from which only one song survives), the first opera on an Indian subject, was produced on 3 March 1794; the libretto, by Anna Hatton, succeeded in its intention to arouse Federalist opposition, and Tammany had only three performances. The pantomime The Fourth of July, or Temple of American Independence, with music by Victor Pelissier, had one performance (4 July 1799), as did his Edwin and Angelina, based on Goldsmith (19 December 1796). More successful was Carr’s opera The Archers (1796), from which only the introductory rondo and a single song survive.
J.J. Astor opened New York’s first music shop in 1786, before concentrating on the fur trading business. Carr and Hewitt were both important figures in the growth of music trades in the city: Carr arrived from England in 1793 and set up a music shop in Philadelphia in 1794 and in New York in 1795; he sold the latter to Hewitt in 1797. English popular music and American patriotic songs were the mainstay of their sheet music sales.
In the early 19th century concert life in New York centred on outdoor summer gardens, patterned on their London counterparts, and later on their attendant theatres. Popular establishments such as Castle Garden (1839–55) in the Battery and Niblo’s Garden (1849–95) at Broadway and Prince Street presented ballad singers and mixed programmes of instrumental music.
Economic opportunities in America and political uncertainties in Europe spurred the arrival of talented young musicians. A number of European singers, composers, conductors and impresarios arrived during the early and mid-19th century, as well as popular virtuosos such as the violinist Sivori (1846–50) and the pianists Leopold de Meyer (1845–6, 1867–8) and Henri Herz (1846–8). Jenny Lind was on the stage of Castle Garden before a cheering audience of 7000 on the evening of 11 September 1850 (see fig.1) for the first of about 20 concerts in New York, the last of which was on 24 May 1852. The significance of her tour, at first under the aegis of P.T. Barnum, lay less in her superb singing than in her impact on the box office, and the demonstration that a European artist of the first rank could find responsive audiences in America.
Virtuoso pianists such as Gottschalk, who gave 90 concerts in New York in seven seasons beginning in February 1853, and Thalberg, who played 56 concerts from November 1856 to April 1858, presented well-received programmes. Both artists, playing American Chickering pianos, concentrated almost exclusively on their own compositions, although Beethoven and Chopin were occasionally represented. Four resident pianists were active in the second half of the 19th century: Henry C. Timm (1835–92), Richard Hoffman (1847–97), Sebastian Bach Mills (1859–98) and William Mason (1855–1908). Each maintained a high standard of technical and interpretative excellence, and introduced to the American repertory works of a higher standard than the usual operatic potpourris, fantasies and variations.
The impresario and conductor Louis Jullien arrived in New York in August 1853 to give light concerts, including works by the Americans W.H. Fry and G.F. Bristow, in the Crystal Palace. Other popular performers included the violinists Ole Bull and Henry Vieuxtemps, both of whom visited for the first time in 1843, and the pianist Alfred Jaëll (1851–2). Typical programmes were mixed, usually including several arias and duets, one or two piano solos, a violin solo, an ensemble work and, if there was an orchestra, an overture. The solo recital was virtually unknown, even the most celebrated virtuosos appearing with other performers.
The quality of visiting artists steadily improved. The arrival of Anton Rubinstein and Wieniawski on 23 September 1872 brought a serious note to concert programmes of the day; a bold solo recital surprisingly brought in more money than a troupe. Bülow visited in 1875–6 and again in 1889–90. Most Europeans arrived with their reputations already established at home, but Americans made their own evaluations; for example, free tickets were given for Paderewski’s début on 17 November 1891, but it was four seasons before he became a popular success.
After 1900 New York concert life differed little from that of a large European city. With a population of about three and a half million, improved transport and an assured audience, the city’s musical life became more predictable. Solo recitals became distinct from chamber concerts and orchestral programmes, and European artists made repeated visits to the city. After 1914 both American and European musicians frequently established a New York base. By the middle of the century programmes had changed; there were fewer solo recitals and more group events, chamber music was more popular, choruses were numerous but smaller, and the concert repertory became both more varied and more specialized within individual programmes. A revitalization of the solo recital and further growth in chamber music activities took place from the 1960s, led by the city’s two largest performing arts centres, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center (see §3 below). Concert activities continued during the summer months after the founding at Lincoln Center of the Mostly Mozart Festival (1966) and the more general Lincoln Center Festival (1996).
The centre of New York’s musical life has moved steadily uptown since it began in what is now the financial district. For many years the principal musical activities were in the midtown area bounded by the Metropolitan Opera House in West 39th Street and Carnegie Hall at 57th Street and 7th Avenue. Carnegie Hall has played host to virtually every significant American or visiting musician since its opening on 5 May 1891, at which Tchaikovsky was guest of honour (fig.2). The main hall, named in 1997 Isaac Stern Auditorium, seats 2804 and is celebrated for its superb acoustics. Until the opening of Lincoln Center it was the home of the New York PO. The adjacent Carnegie Recital Hall (cap. 268, renamed Weill Recital Hall in 1986) is used for many début recitals. Threatened with demolition when plans for Lincoln Center were announced in the mid-1950s, Carnegie Hall was saved through the efforts of a citizens’ committee organized by Isaac Stern in 1960. New York City purchased the hall and leased it to the newly formed Carnegie Hall Corporation, which became responsible for programming. The regular season includes classical, jazz and popular concerts, as well as educational programmes. In support of contemporary music, the corporation commissioned 21 new works between 1986 and 1999. A permanent exhibition on the history of Carnegie Hall is on display in the hall’s Rose Museum (opened 1991).
Town Hall (cap. 1498, built 1921) in West 43rd Street was particularly popular as a concert hall in the middle decades of the 20th century. The hall was acquired by New York University in 1958 and closed temporarily in 1978; it reopened in 1984 after restoration. Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center opened in 1932. Until 1974 it had a resident ballet company, and it continues to maintain its own orchestra and the Rockettes, a troupe known since 1933 for its precision chorus-line dancing. The art déco music hall seats 5874 and houses a noted Wurlitzer theatre organ.
In the 1960s the axis of concert life moved further north with the establishment of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a complex of buildings and organizations including almost a dozen theatres and concert and lecture halls (see fig.3). Philharmonic Hall opened on 23 September 1962 to a capacity audience of 2646; it was subsequently modified to improve its acoustics. In 1973 it was renamed Avery Fisher Hall and in 1976 was completely gutted and rebuilt to a new, successful acoustical design (cap. 2742 after renovation; fig.4). The openings of the New York State Theater (1964) and the new Metropolitan Opera House (1966) (see §4 below), which also flank the main plaza, were followed in 1969 by that of Alice Tully Hall (cap. 1096), an ideal setting for solo and chamber concerts. The Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts of the New York Public Library occupy a corner position at 65th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, while the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall are across 65th Street on Broadway. Free outdoor concerts are given each summer in the plaza of Lincoln Center and in the Guggenheim Bandshell of Damrosch Park (adjacent to the opera house).
Elsewhere in the city many colleges, museums and other institutions include halls used for public concerts. Prominent among them are Merkin Concert Hall at Abraham Goodman House (opened 1978), Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, the Kaufmann Auditorium at the East 92nd Street Young Men’s–Young Women’s Hebrew Association, Kathryn Bache Miller Theater at Columbia University, Aaron Davis Hall at City College, City Center for Music and Drama, Cooper Union, the Asia Society and the Alternative Museum. Symphony Space, at Broadway and 95th Street, offers a varied programme ranging from gospel and ethnic music to marathon concerts devoted to Bach, Ives, Cage and others. Besides PS 122, the Clocktower Gallery and Franklin Furnace, the Kitchen has since 1971 been the most important centre for ‘downtown’ experimental music, dance, performance art, video and film.
Outside Manhattan the most important concert centre is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which opened in 1861 at a site in Montague Street; the present building in Lafayette Avenue opened in 1908. From the 19th century it was a cultural community and civic centre presenting opera, oratorios and plays. Since 1967 the academy has played a prominent role in sponsoring modern dance and theatre as well as music. Since its first season in 1955, the Brooklyn Philharmonia (now PO) has performed at the academy. The ‘Next Wave’ activities inaugurated in 1981 have expanded to include an annual festival and touring programme featuring both contemporary music and less familiar works from the past. Outdoor summer concerts were held at Lewisohn Stadium from 1918 to 1966. Concerts are now held in Central Park and in parks in the other boroughs. The New York PO first gave outdoor concerts in 1965, and the Metropolitan Opera has done so since 1967.
Italian opera first reached New York on 29 November 1825 with a performance at the Park Theatre of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia by an Italian company led by Manuel García, the famous Spanish singer and teacher, who took the part of Count Almaviva. The ensemble of eight singers, four of them Garcías (including the 17-year-old Maria-Felicia, later Malibran), had been recruited in London by a New York vintner, Dominick Lynch. Encouraged by Lorenzo da Ponte, then a professor of Italian at Columbia College, Lynch took García’s troupe to New York for a season of 79 performances, accompanied by a local orchestra of 24; the repertory included Don Giovanni, Rossini’s Tancredi, Otello, Il turco in Italia and La Cenerentola, Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo and García’s own La figlia dell’aria. Before García’s appearance opera in New York had consisted of makeshift adaptations of comic pasticcios with spoken dialogue and popular airs inserted in place of difficult arias (see §1 above), performed by actors. No female stars performed in New York until the 1820s. After the Garcías’ departure for Mexico in November 1826, a French company from New Orleans took a two-month season of French opera to the Park Theatre, opening on 13 July 1827 with Isouard’s Cendrillon. The French repertory included at least ten operas, among them Cherubini’s Les deux journées, Auber’s La dame blanche and Boieldieu’s Le calife de Bagdad. The next opera company to appear was led by the tenor Giovanni Montresor in 1832–3; it gave about 50 performances of such works as Bellini’s Il pirata and Mercadante’s Elisa e Claudio, in addition to works of Rossini. Another French troupe from New Orleans introduced Rossini’s Le comte Ory (Park Theatre, 19 August 1833) and Herold’s Zampa.
New York’s first venue for opera, the Italian Opera House at Church and Leonard streets, opened on 18 November 1833 with Rossini’s La gazza ladra; among its backers were Lynch and Da Ponte. The second season was financially disastrous and in December 1835 the building was sold. When it reopened as the National Theater it joined other New York theatres as the home to British stars performing in the English-language repertory. The English opera was popular until the mid-1840s. On 3 February 1844 Ferdinando Palmo, a restaurateur, opened Palmo’s Opera House (cap. c800) with the New York première of Bellini’s I puritani. In four seasons Palmo introduced Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Linda di Chamounix, and Verdi’s I Lombardi. At other theatres pasticcios of opera in English by Balfe, Rooke and Benedict remained popular. While Palmo’s held sway in Chambers Street, 150 wealthy men were raising money for another opera house further uptown, and the Astor Place Opera House (cap. 1500–1800) opened on 22 November 1847 with Verdi’s Ernani. The guaranteed support lasted only five years, financial returns were slight and the house closed in 1852.
The period between 1847 and the founding of the Metropolitan Opera in 1883 was a turbulent one in New York’s operatic history, dominated by colourful impresarios, competitive prima donnas and constantly changing personnel who appeared in operatic performances in many New York theatres. After the closure of the house at Astor Place the only theatre devoted specifically to concert and opera was the Academy of Music at 14th Street and Irving Place, which opened on 2 October 1854 with a performance of Bellini’s Norma starring Giulia Grisi and Giuseppe Mario; it continued to present regular operatic seasons until 1886. When it was built (at a cost of $335,000), the house contained the largest stage in the world (21·5 × 30 metres) and seated 4600. During the first 24 years the management changed every season.
Max Maretzek, who left London in 1848 to conduct at the Astor Place Opera, was among the more prominent impresarios. A frequent lessee and conductor at the Academy of Music, he was associated with the first New York performances of many operas there. Academy audiences heard Rigoletto (19 February 1855), Il trovatore (2 May 1855), La traviata (3 December 1856), Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1 December 1865) and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (15 November 1867), the last two in Italian. The brothers Maurice and Max Strakosch were also among the operatic producers active in New York from 1857. Most important was J.H. Mapleson, who went to the Academy of Music in 1878 and directed operatic activities there and abroad until 1886. Many great singers appeared in New York; audiences in 1853, for example, heard the nine-year-old Adelina Patti, Mario, Lind, Henriette Sontag, Grisi and Marietta Alboni. Later decades saw the appearance of such singers as Christine Nilsson, Lilli Lehmann and Italo Campanini. 39 American singers, among them Lillian Nordica, Clara Kellogg, Minnie Hauk and Annie Louise Cary, sang at the Academy of Music before 1884. Local composers were not so fortunate, although Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle ran for four weeks in 1855 at Niblo’s Garden, and Fry’s Leonora was heard in March 1858, 13 years after its première in Philadelphia. The first German operas (albeit English adaptations) performed in New York were Der Freischütz (1825), Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio (both in the 1830s). The first opera by Wagner heard in the city was Tannhäuser, given on 4 April 1859 at the Stadt Theater.
The Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and 39th Street opened with Gounod’s Faust on 22 October 1883 (fig.6). Originally conceived as a social gesture by a score of millionaires who could not obtain boxes at the Academy of Music, the Metropolitan quickly achieved international eminence. The Metropolitan Opera Association has the longest uninterrupted existence of any organization of its kind in the USA: apart from 1892–3, when the house was closed because of a fire, and 1897–8, when Maurice Grau reorganized his company, a resident company has presented opera continuously at the Metropolitan since 1883. Henry Abbey, a well-known theatrical producer with little operatic experience, directed the first season and incurred a loss of $500,000. The artistic importance of the house dates from the following season when the board of directors accepted Leopold Damrosch’s proposal that he should direct a season of German opera. In the seven years after Damrosch’s death in 1885 all of Wagner’s operas from Rienzi to Götterdämmerung were conducted – five for the first time in America – by his successor, Anton Seidle. As in Europe, this was the peak period for Wagnerism, and this was particularly evident in New York. Celebrated European singers like Lehmann, Marianne Brandt, Amalie Materna and Albert Niemann were members of the company, and in effect the Metropolitan became a German opera house; even Il trovatore and Aida were given there in German. Out of 17 operas in the repertory in the 1890–91 season, eight were by Wagner.
The sobriety of the programmes eventually exhausted the patience of the box holders, and in 1891 Abbey returned as lessee, placing the management in the hands of Grau, a shrewd student of public taste. He built his company around such admirable singers as Emma Eames, the De Reszkes, Emma Albani and Jean Lassalle, at first presenting the repertory exclusively in French and Italian. It was Grau’s conviction that audiences attended opera primarily to hear fine singing, a belief he substantiated with some of the most brilliant casts Americans had ever heard. Among them were Nordica, Eames, Zélie De Lussan, Victor Maurel, Edouard De Reszke and Giuseppe Russitano in Don Giovanni; Melba, Nordica, Sofia Scalchi, the De Reszkes, Maurel and Pol Plançon in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots; and Nordica, Brema, the De Reszkes and Giuseppe Kaschmann in Tristan und Isolde when the performance of German opera in German was resumed in 1896. In many respects these paralleled performances at Covent Garden, where Grau was also the impresario during part of this period.
Grau retired in 1903 and a new producing group was organized with Heinrich Conried as manager. His theatrical experience as a producer of plays in German improved that aspect of the Metropolitan’s productions considerably. Highlights of Conried’s tenure included Caruso’s Metropolitan début (23 November 1903), a sensational Salome with Fremstad (22 January 1907), Chaliapin as an almost nude Méphistophélès (20 November 1907) and Mahler conducting Tristan und Isolde (1 January 1908).
Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the director of La Scala, was engaged as director in 1908, becoming general manager in 1910; Toscanini came to the Metropolitan with him, making his conducting début in a performance of Aida (16 November 1908). With the musical cooperation of Toscanini and the financial assistance of Otto Kahn, Gatti-Casazza established an operatic enterprise of imposing scope and efficiency. Under him the policy of presenting opera in the language of its composition became the rule of the house. Important conductors during his 27-year tenure included Mahler (1908–10), Toscanini (1908–15), Hertz (1902–15), Bodanzky (1915–39) and Serafin (1924–34). The repertory was expanded to include as many as 48 different works in a 24-week season. Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and Humperdinck’s Königskinder had their world premières at the Metropolitan in 1910. Gatti-Casazza continued to keep abreast of operatic developments in Italy and elsewhere, at the same time initiating the production of American operas, including Converse’s The Pipe of Desire (18 March 1910), Parker’s Mona (14 March 1912) and Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson (7 February 1931). Although the company prospered under Gatti-Casazza’s astute management, the 1929 stock market collapse and ensuing Depression severely depleted its reserve fund, and the season was shortened to 16 and later to 14 weeks. In 1935 Gatti-Casazza retired and was succeeded briefly by the singer Herbert Witherspoon, who died while planning his first season. His successor was the Canadian tenor Edward Johnson, long a member of the company, who managed the Metropolitan until 1950.
An experiment with a low-priced spring season featuring young American singers sponsored by the Juilliard Foundation lasted only two years (1936–7), but American singers such as Lawrence Tibbett, Eleanor Steber, Rose Bampton, Richard Crooks, Dorothy Kirsten, Leonard Warren and Risë Stevens played an increasingly important role during Johnson’s regime. Helen Traubel, Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad led a strong Germanic wing with outstanding Wagner performances in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Italian opera continued to dominate the repertory, French works being in the minority. Few modern operas were produced during Johnson’s tenure, although the Metropolitan did give Walter Damrosch’s The Man without a Country in 1937, Bernard Rogers’s The Warrior in 1947 and Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1948. The Metropolitan Opera Guild, a supporting organization founded in 1935 by Mrs August Belmont, has a national membership of over 100,000 and sponsors an educational programme and special performances for schoolchildren.
In 1950 Rudolf Bing, a Viennese impresario who had managed the Glyndebourne and Edinburgh festivals, became general manager of the Metropolitan. His tenure, which lasted until 1972, was marked by modernization of stage techniques, an increasingly international cast and the move of the company to new quarters in Lincoln Center. Although the repertory remained basically conservative, Bing introduced several American operas including Barber’s Vanessa (15 January 1958; see fig.7), Menotti’s Le dernier sauvage (23 January 1964) and Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra (17 March 1967); light operas such as Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Offenbach’s La Périchole were also added to the repertory.
The new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center opened on 16 September 1966 with the world première of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, in which Justino Díaz and Leontyne Price sang the title roles. Although the work was a spectacular failure, the house was a success. The seating capacity of the new auditorium (3788) is not much larger than that of the West 39th Street building (3625), but the inadequate staging facilities of the old house were replaced by a much larger stage and generous backstage quarters. The $46 million required for construction was raised in contributions by Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera Association. The opera orchestra has 140 members and the chorus 80 full-time members.
In addition to accommodating the regular Metropolitan season of 32 weeks, the house is used by visiting opera and dance companies from the USA and abroad. Bing resigned in 1972 and his successor, the Swedish director Göran Gentele, died before his first season. Since then the Metropolitan Opera management has undergone several reorganizations, resulting in a gradual separation of the artistic and managerial functions. Artistic control has increasingly been given to the conductor James Levine, appointed music director in 1975. His interests range from the early Mozart operas to the classics of the 20th-century repertory. Notable new productions under his tenure have included Idomeneo, Rinaldo, Lulu, Wozzeck, Mahagonny and Moses und Aron. Management of the company has been assumed by a succession of administrators: Schuyler Chapin (1972–5), Anthony Bliss (1975–85, with Levine and John Dexter, 1975–80), Bruce Crawford (1986–9), Hugh Southern (1989–90) and Joseph Volpe (from 1990). The Metropolitan has maintained its international status as a showcase for singers suited to the scale of the auditorium, a scale which also helped determine the house production style of spectacular naive realism, represented particularly by the work of Zeffirelli (see Opera, fig.50). In the 1990s the company began to use in addition more exploratory directors and designers, and to broaden its hitherto traditional repertory. Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, given its première on 19 December 1991, was the first new opera performed by the company since Antony and Cleopatra, and was followed by Glass’s The Voyage (1992) and Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (1999). During this period, too, Levine began giving concerts at Carnegie Hall with the Metropolitan orchestra.
Only two companies have challenged the hegemony of the Metropolitan on a regular basis. The first, Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company, opened in December 1906 in the Manhattan Opera House on 34th Street; Cleofonte Campanini was artistic director and conductor. Before frustrated guarantors of the Metropolitan bought him out in 1910, Hammerstein had introduced many French works to American audiences, including Thaïs (25 November 1907), Louise (3 January 1908) and Pelléas et Mélisande (19 February 1908), all with Mary Garden. He also presented such celebrated singers as Melba, Calvé, Tetrazzini, Renaud and Dalmorès, in a varied repertory including the American première of Strauss’s Elektra (1 February 1910).
The New York City Opera was founded as the City Center Opera Company in 1943. Opening at the City Center Theater in West 55th Street on 21 February 1944 with Dusolina Giannini as Tosca, the company has consistently encouraged participation by younger singers, composers and audiences. At first seasons were short, a few weeks before and after the Metropolitan, but the spring and autumn periods were later lengthened to 11 weeks each, with about 175 performances given annually. A succession of conductor-managers – Laszlo Halász (1944–51), Josef Rosenstock (1952–5), Erich Leinsdorf (1956–7) and Julius Rudel (1957–79) – produced an imaginative repertory ranging from Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges (1949), Wozzeck (1959), Handel’s Giulio Cesare (1971) and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1973), to Gilbert and Sullivan, without neglecting standard works. American opera fared particularly well at the City Opera; premières included Still’s Troubled Island (1949), Copland’s The Tender Land (1954), Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik (1958), Douglas Moore’s The Wings of the Dove (1961), Ward’s The Crucible (1961), Rorem’s Miss Julie (1965), Weisgall’s Nine Rivers from Jordan (1968) and Menotti’s La loca (1979). On 22 February 1966 the New York City Opera opened its spring season at its new home, the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center, with a performance of Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo. The house (cap. 2800) was originally designed for the New York City Ballet, and was criticized as acoustically unsuited to opera, but a renovation in 1981–2 (cap. 2737) resulted in improved acoustics for opera performances.
The City Opera has always stressed ensemble production in contrast to the international star system, and has produced some fine native singers, among them June Anderson, Patricia Brooks, Ashley Putnam, Samuel Ramey, John Reardon, Gianna Rolandi, Beverly Sills, Norman Treigle and Carol Vaness. Sills became director of the company in 1979, and Christopher Keene acted as music director (1982–6). Sills encouraged American conductors and opera in English. In 1984 the company was the first in the USA to introduce surtitles. The City Opera has continued to produce new works by American composers, among them Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, Glass’s Akhnaten, Anthony Davis’s X and Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming. Productions of Bernstein’s Candide (1982) and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1984) demonstrated Sills’s interest in forging links between opera and musical theatre. In 1984 the company received a gift of $5 million to make possible a regular spring season of musical comedy. Latterly one or two musical comedies have been performed each season along with traditional operas, new works (including Wiesgall’s Esther in the company’s 50th anniversary season) and rare 20th-century European works, such as Die Soldaten, Doktor Faust and Mathis der Maler, that became a speciality during Keene’s term as general director (1989–96). His successor, Paul Kellogg, has turned attention more to the recent American past.
Notable among the city’s smaller opera companies are the Amato Opera Theatre (founded 1948), which has presented the American premières of Boito’s Nerone and Verdi’s Alzira; the Bronx Opera Company (1967), which juxtaposes standard repertory with lesser-known works; the Opera Orchestra of New York (1966), which gives unusual works in concert form; the Village Light Opera Group (1968); the New York Grand Opera (1973), which presents popular staged performances of more familiar operas; and the Dicapo Opera (1981), which mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. Conservatories and schools combine training and performance in contemporary and standard repertory; among the most important are the Juilliard School’s American Opera Center and the Manhattan School of Music. Besides the ensembles already mentioned, over 40 organizations produce operas regularly.
The New York stage has also played host to more popular musical entertainment throughout its history. Following the success of ballad opera in the 18th century, parody burlesques, minstrel shows and extravaganzas dominated the scene in the mid-19th century. The Black Crook (music by Thomas Baker and others, 1866), Evangeline (1874) by E.E. Rice and Charles Hoyt’s A Trip to Chinatown (1890) were particularly successful productions in a developing vernacular form that eventually fused song, dance and plot into the American musical comedy.
Operettas by Offenbach were popular from the 1860s, but in the two decades after the New York première of H.M.S. Pinafore (January 1879) European light opera by Sullivan, Audran, Millöcker and others competed with local operetta by Caryll, Kerker, De Koven and Herbert. Gilbert and Sullivan, Lehár and Strauss still draw enthusiastic audiences to both opera houses and off-Broadway theatres, especially the Light Opera of Manhattan (founded 1968).
George M. Cohan’s first success, Little Johnny Jones (1904), popularized the patriotic American musical; ‘Give my regards to Broadway’ became a theme that summed up the importance of the New York stage in the vernacular musical theatre for the rest of the century. A Broadway run is a requisite for a successful musical comedy, and Broadway theatres have fostered such composers as Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and Rodgers. Blitzstein, Menotti, Bernstein and Sondheim have attempted to bridge the gap between the Broadway musical and opera with such works as Regina (1949), The Consul (1950), Candide (1956) and Sweeney Todd (1979). After the Metropolitan Opera opened its house on Broadway in 1883, lavish theatres were soon built in the district around 42nd Street, such as the Lyceum (1903), New Amsterdam (1903), Lyric (1903), Liberty (1904), Republic (later Belasco and Victory, 1907), Eltinge (later Empire, 1912), Harris (1914), Apollo (1920) and Ritz (later Walter Kerr, 1921). The area became the centre of entertainment after the brothers Shubert began to operate their theatres in 1900. By the late 1920s the Shubert Organization owned more than 100 theatres around the country; among those in the city were the Shubert Theatre, Booth Theatre (both built in 1913), the Broadhurst Theatre (1917) and the Barrymore Theatre (1928), which the organization retained until the 1990s. In the mid-1990s the Shuberts owned and operated 16 Broadway theatres. Since its arrival to Broadway, the organization has produced over 500 melodramas, comedies, operettas, musicals and reviews. The New York opening of the Walt Disney Company’s first Broadway show, Beauty and the Beast (1994), coincided with the beginning of Disney’s renovation of several theatres on 42nd Street.
Dance also plays a vital part in New York’s musical-theatrical life. Among the most prominent of the almost 100 dance companies in the city are the New York City Ballet (founded 1948), the Ballet Theatre (1939; renamed the American Ballet Theatre, 1956), the Robert Joffrey Theatre Ballet (1956–64, the Robert Joffrey Ballet since 1965), the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (1958), the Martha Graham Dance Company (1926) and the Paul Taylor Dance Company (1961).
Amateur orchestras first appeared late in the 18th century. In 1799 two of these organizations, the St Cecilia and Harmonical societies, joined forces to form the Philharmonic Society, which in that year participated in the funeral service for George Washington. This first Philharmonic ceased activity after 1816, to be followed in 1824 by a second Philharmonic Society, which played the finale of Beethoven’s Second Symphony for the first time in New York on 16 December 1824 and continued in existence until 1827. In 1825 unidentified groups essayed Beethoven’s Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus and the Egmont overture, both at City Hotel. The Euterpean Club, which gave one orchestral concert annually, existed from 1800 to 1847. The New York Musical Fund Society, an orchestra that first appeared in 1828, attempted the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony under U.C. Hill at City Hotel on 27 April 1831, but ‘the orchestra was weak [and] the instruments were frequently out of tune and out of time’. The Steyermarkische, Lombardi, Gung’l, Saxonia and Germania orchestras arrived from Europe in 1848–9, but most were notable more for their discipline and uniforms than for the quality of their programmes. The Germania Musical Society survived until 1854, giving exemplary performances of great works, but the other groups disbanded.
The Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York dates from 1842, and is the oldest orchestra in continuous existence in the USA. The impetus for its foundation came in June 1839 when a ‘musical solemnity’ in memory of Daniel Schlesinger brought together a nucleus of musicians intending to form a permanent orchestra. The first organizational meeting of the Philharmonic Society was called by Hill on 2 April 1842. The first concert was held in the Apollo Rooms on Lower Broadway on 7 December 1842: an orchestra of 63 players performed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony under Hill, Weber’s Oberon overture led by D.G. Etienne and an overture in D by Kalliwoda conducted by H.C. Timm. Hummel’s quintet arrangement of his Septet in D minor and vocal selections from Fidelio, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Rossini’s Armida, sung by C.E. Horn and Mme Otto and conducted by Timm, made up the rest of the programme. The first season consisted of three concerts; the second included the American première of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. During the next 16 seasons the orchestra gave four concerts annually; in 1859–60 they gave five, and a decade later six. During its first ten years the orchestra numbered between 50 and 67 players. Various conductors, usually members of the orchestra, shared the podium, often during the same concert; George Loder was perhaps the most outstanding. Later one or two conductors assumed the responsibility, beginning with Theodore Eisfeld who was elected director in 1848 and served until 1865. Other conductors included Carl Bergmann (1855–76), Leopold Damrosch (1876–7), Theodore Thomas (1877–91) and Anton Seidl (1891–8). Under the presidency of R.O. Doremus the number of players increased to 100 in 1867, and the orchestra moved to larger quarters at the Academy of Music. It subsequently relocated to the Metropolitan Opera House (1886), then to Carnegie Hall (1892).
The repertory of the New York Philharmonic reflected the European training of its conductors, and there was heavy emphasis on the Germanic school. On 20 May 1846 Loder led the first American performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Castle Garden before an audience of 2000; the same year saw performances of Chopin’s First Piano Concerto and several Berlioz overtures. Although the orchestra performed Bristow’s Concert Overture in 1847, European works continued to fill the programmes throughout the century. Bergmann, Thomas and Seidl were all notably progressive in the advocacy of new music. Seidl, in particular, specialized in the works of Liszt and Wagner.
The age of the Philharmonic and its 20th-century significance assure the orchestra a predominant place in New York’s musical history, but at times during the 19th century other orchestras partly eclipsed its importance. Lighter music and American works were emphasized by Jullien, who conducted an occasional orchestra at the Crystal Palace after 1853; his concerts included Fry’s programmatic symphonies A Day in the Country, The Breaking Heart and Santa Claus. In 1867 Thomas, who made his conducting début at Irving Hall in 1862, formed his own 60- to 80-piece orchestra which performed in New York and on national tours until 1891. Programmes included music from Bach to Saint-Saëns, and some concerts were devoted to Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn. The majority of Seidl’s numerous New York symphonic concerts were the orchestras other than the Philharmonic (though with overlapping personnel); his Seidl Society Orchestra performed 14 times each week in the summer at Coney Island’s Brighton Beach, offering programmes filled with Wagner. The first Brooklyn Philharmonic (1857) was similar to its New York counterpart; among its conductors were Eisfeld, Bergmann and Thomas.
The New York Symphony Society was founded in 1878 by Leopold Damrosch, who conducted the orchestra until his death in 1885 when his son Walter assumed the position. Orchestras under Damrosch and Thomas competed: in 1881 Damrosch conducted 1500 performers in Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts before an audience of 10,000, and in 1882 Thomas directed a mammoth festival with a chorus of 3200 assembled from other cities. Although the Symphony’s performances were not as well received critically as the Philharmonic’s, Damrosch’s programmes were often more adventurous, tempering the usual Germanic fare with works by Debussy and Berlioz.
Walter Damrosch reconstituted the orchestra on a cooperative basis in autumn 1903 as the New York SO; profit and loss were shared by members of the organization and a group of guarantors. This proved unsatisfactory and the Symphony Society was reorganized in 1907 with regular salaries for the musicians and a board of directors who assumed all financial responsibilities. H.H. Flagler, a supporter of the society for several years, undertook its financial backing in 1914. In 1920 he provided an estimated $250,000 for a concert tour of Europe, the first by an American orchestra. Long before then, however, Damrosch and his orchestra had been noted for their pioneering activities, bringing symphonic music to many communities in the USA for the first time. Until 1928 Damrosch conducted the majority of its concerts, although Weingartner shared the 1905–6 season with him as guest conductor. In the 1920s a number of guest conductors appeared with the Symphony Society, including d’Indy, Albert Coates, Vladimir Golschmann, Walter, Fritz Busch, Ravel, Eugene Goossens, Gabrilovich and Arbós.
From 1887 New Yorkers could also hear the Boston SO in as many concerts as were given by the local Philharmonic. Late in the 19th century Thomas returned with the Chicago SO, and the Philadelphia Orchestra made regular visits from 1903. The local Russian SO (1904–18) under Modest Altschuler introduced works by Rachmaninoff, Skryabin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov, and the American débuts of Lhévinne (1906), Elman (1908), Rachmaninoff (1909) and Prokofiev (1918) were made with them. An Italian SO conducted by Pietro Floridia appeared in 1913.
Meanwhile the Philharmonic continued a wavering but sedate course under Emil Paur (1898–1902), Walter Damrosch (1902–3), various guests (1903–6), Vasily I. Safonov (1906–9), Mahler (1909–11) and Josef Stransky (1911–23). In 1909 the orchestra, which had been operated on a cooperative basis, was reorganized as a full-time professional ensemble with a group of guarantors to ensure financial solvency. In 1921 it amalgamated with the two-year-old New/National SO which had been conducted by Varèse, Bodanzky and Mengelberg. The concert schedule had increased considerably, and it was decided that the conductor’s task was too great for one person, so the duties were shared by two or three principal conductors and various guests. During the next decade regular conductors included Mengelberg (1921–30), Willem van Hoogstraten (1923–5), Furtwängler (1925–7), Toscanini (1927–36), Molinari (1929–31), Kleiber (1930–32) and Walter (1931–3).
During this period the Philharmonic Society absorbed several other new orchestras, among them the City Symphony (1921–3), the American National Orchestra (1923) and the State SO (1923–6). The most important merger was that of the Philharmonic with Damrosch’s Symphony Society in March 1928, the orchestra being renamed the Philharmonic-Symphony Society Orchestra.
The growth of the USA, the cosmopolitan nature of its social order and a new prosperity demanded more consistent bases for its performing organizations than personal whim, private philanthropy or musicians’ profit sharing. All aspects of the business of music in the USA were now centred in New York: concert management, publishing, radio broadcasting, phonograph recording and musicians’ unions. The merger of the two competing orchestras under a single board of trustees was a logical development, but a subsequent plan to unite the orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera was discarded. The new season lasted 28 weeks and included 103 concerts. Toscanini became the principal conductor, sharing the 1928–9 season with Mengelberg and Molinari. A European tour in spring 1930 offered 23 concerts in five weeks. Toscanini’s tenure has become legendary, and many accounts describe the glamour of the years 1929–36.
After Toscanini’s retirement regular conductors of the Philharmonic included Barbirolli (1936–43), Rodziński (1943–7), Walter (1947–9), Mitropoulos (1949–58), Bernstein (1958–69), Szell (music advisor and senior guest conductor, 1969–70), Boulez (1971–7), Mehta (1978–91) and Masur (1991–2002). Bernstein, the first American-born conductor to direct the orchestra, brought an eager showmanship that did not earn universal approval but undeniably produced vital interpretations both of the standard repertory and of lesser-known works. Although his programmes were generally conservative he gave the world première of Ives’s Second Symphony (1902) in 1951, and included works of living American composers from Randall Thompson to Copland and Schuman. He maintained his association with Broadway theatre and continued to compose during his tenure as conductor.
Boulez, by contrast, emphasized unfamiliar repertory both of 20th-century composers and of such earlier composers as Liszt, Schumann and Haydn. He instituted a series of informal ‘rug concerts’ and presented programmes in less important auditoriums, with the intention of drawing a wider public than the subscription audience. Mehta, who had previously led the Los Angeles PO, returned to a more conventional repertory, though he commissioned Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’Au-delà: his greatest affinity was with Romantic literature. Masur restored the orchestra’s solidity in the classic Austro-German repertory.
In 1964 the Philharmonic became the first American orchestra to offer year-round contracts to its members, which led to expanded programming. In the 1990s the orchestra gave nearly 200 concerts each year. The principal season runs from late September to June with four subscription concerts weekly in Avery Fisher Hall. In late spring and summer there have been various festivals, tours and parks concerts.
Orchestral concerts for children were presented by Thomas as early as 1883, but their continuous history begins with the establishment of the Young People’s Symphony Concerts of New York by Frank Damrosch in 1898, with the Symphony Society’s orchestra. Walter Damrosch, succeeding his brother, added a series for younger children. The Philharmonic Society launched its own children's concerts in January 1924 under the direction of Ernest Schelling, who continued to conduct the programme until his death in 1939. The society has maintained the Young People’s Concerts. Between 1958 and 1969 Bernstein conceived, wrote, narrated and conducted 47 televised shows before audiences of children. Radio broadcasting of the orchestra’s concerts began in 1922 and continued until 1967; it was resumed in 1975.
Throughout the 20th century New York has been rich in orchestras. From 1940 to 1943 a New York City Symphony supported by government funds was conducted by Klemperer, Beecham and others. In 1944 a new orchestra under Stokowski was formed with the same name; the final season was conducted by Bernstein in 1947. Radio broadcasting networks have often formed their own orchestras in the city. One sponsored by CBS and conducted by Bernard Herrmann and Howard Barlow was active from 1927 to 1950, and Alfred Wallenstein led an orchestra for the Mutual network from 1933 to 1943. Probably the most famous was the NBC SO, formed in 1937 specifically for Toscanini, who conducted it until 1954 when he retired; the ensemble disbanded soon afterwards.
In the 1990s some 40 symphony orchestras were active in New York and its environs, some of which were amateur or community ensembles, others fully professional; most offer between three and six concerts each season. The Brooklyn PO, under its artistic directors Lukas Foss (1971–90), Dennis Russell Davies (1990–95) and Robert Spano (1996–), has been notable for its adventurous programming. The Little Orchestra Society, conducted from 1947 to 1975 by Thomas Scherman, and Newell Jenkins’s Clarion Concerts (founded 1958) have been active in reviving neglected repertory. Other orchestras include the American SO, an ensemble of young professionals founded in 1962 by Stokowski and reorganized in 1973 as a cooperative orchestra; the American Composers Orchestra, founded in 1977 to promote American orchestral music, with Dennis Russell Davies as principal conductor; and the New York Chamber SO, founded in 1977 with Gerard Schwarz as conductor. The National Orchestra of New York (formerly the National Orchestral Association), conducted by Leon Barzin from 1930 to 1976 and a training ground for young musicians seeking orchestral experience, has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1984. The Orchestra of St Luke’s evolved in 1979 from the St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, founded by Michael Feldman. Under its later music directors Roger Norrington (1990–94) and Charles Mackerras (1998–) the orchestra developed a diverse repertory ranging from the Baroque to contemporary music. The New York Pops Orchestra specializes in popular orchestral repertory. Other New York orchestras include the Queens SO, the Bronx SO, the New York City SO, the Julius Grossman Symphony, and the suburban Long Island PO (Melville), the Westchester PO (Hartsdale), the Massapequa PO and the Nassau SO.
Bands in New York were frequently affiliated with military regiments, but played public concerts in the parks and at Manhattan and Brighton beaches. Among the most famous bandmasters in New York were the Dodworth family, Claudio S. Grafulla, Carlo Alberto Cappa, Patrick S. Gilmore and, later, Edwin Franko Goldman and his son Richard. The tradition of military bands in the city inspired founding of professional brass bands in the early to mid-19th century, the first of them being Thomas Dilka’s Independent Band of New York formed in 1825. In 1835 Allen Dodworth took some of its members and formed the National Brass Band which became the most successful and influential band in the city. In 1860 the bandmasters lived in the city: Harvey Dodworth led the Dodworth Band and the 13th Regiment Band of the New York National Guard, Claudio S. Grafulla and David L. Downing led the 9th Regiment Band, Patrick S. Gilmore assumed in 1873 leadership of the 22nd Regiment Band, known from then as Gilmore’s Band. After Gilmore’s death in 1892, 19 musicians from the band joined the ensemble of J.P. Sousa, which became nationally renowned. Edwin Franko Goldman formed his own band in 1911, and it performed continuously from 1918 to 1979 (from 1956 it was directed by Richard Franko Goldman). Since 1980 the group has continued under the direction of Ainslee Cox as the Goldman Memorial Band.
Few concerts devoted to chamber music were given publicly in New York before 1850. In 1851 Theodor Eisfeld initiated a series of quartet concerts including works by Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn; these were succeeded in 1855 by the renowned Mason and Thomas Chamber Music Soirées, which continued until 1868. Their fine programmes included music by Schubert, Schumann and Bach. On 27 November 1855 William Mason, Theodore Thomas and Carl Bergmann gave the first performance of Brahms’s Trio op.8. The New York Trio, founded about 1867 by Bernardus Boekelman, was active until 1888. The Kneisel Quartet (1885–1917) and the Flonzaley Quartet (1903–29), founded by the New Yorker Edward J. De Coppet, played frequently in private homes and at public concerts. The People’s Symphony Concerts, a series of public chamber music concerts, were inaugurated in 1902. In 1914 the pianist Carolyn Beebe founded the New York Chamber Music Society, a group of about 12 musicians who gave regular concerts at the Plaza Hotel and elsewhere for about 25 years. The Society of the Friends of Music (1913–31) was chiefly a sponsoring organization that introduced many unfamiliar works to New York, among them Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony op.9 and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (April 1916). The Barrère Ensemble, a wind group organized in 1910 by the flautist Georges Barrère, expanded in 1915 to become the Little Symphony.
In 1936 the New Friends of Music began an annual series of 16 concerts with a repertory ranging from solo sonatas to works for chamber orchestra, carefully selected to review certain eras or specific composers; the series lasted until 1953. While groups like the New Friends of Music concentrated on 18th- and 19th-century music, contemporary music was presented in regular concerts sponsored by the League of Composers and the American section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (both founded in 1923; they merged in 1954) and the National Association for American Composers and Conductors (1933). The music of young composers was heard in the Composers’ Forum, active in New York until 1940 from its foundation in 1935 by Ashley Pettis; it was revived and sponsored jointly by the New York Public Library and Columbia University from 1947 to 1980, when it was reorganized independently. Early music became popular in performances by the New York Pro Musica (1952–74), founded by the conductor Noah Greenberg; the 13th-century Play of Daniel was performed in costume in 1958 and aroused an interest in period performance.
In 1925 40 chamber groups were identified as resident or as annual visitors; 50 years later at least 70 were resident and the number of visitors had increased. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, founded in 1968 by Charles Wadsworth with the support of Alice Tully, gives a series of programmes emphasizing unfamiliar repertory performed by outstanding musicians. Other mixed professional ensembles include the New York Chamber Soloists (1957), Tashi (1974), the New York Philharmonia Virtuosi, the Bronx Arts Ensemble and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (1972). The Juilliard (1946), Galimir, Guarneri (1964), Composers, American (1974), Concord, Emerson (1976) and Orion (1987) string quartets are based in New York, as are the American Brass Quintet and the New York (1947) and Dorian woodwind quintets. Ensembles specializing in contemporary music have included the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble (founded in 1960 by Arthur Weisberg), the Group for Contemporary Music (founded in 1962 by Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen), Continuum (founded in 1967 by Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs as the Performers’ Committee for 20th-Century Music), Speculum Musicae (1971), Parnassus, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and the New York New Music Ensemble, as well as several professional associations (see §§9 and 13 below). Professional ensembles specializing in early music include the Waverly Consort, the Ensemble for Early Music, the Western Wind, Music for a While, Pomerium Musices, the New York Renaissance Band, Calliope, Concert Royal, Anonymous 4 and the New York Cornet and Sackbut Ensemble. The Bach Aria Group (1946), the New York Collegium (founded in 1998 under the direction of Gustav Leonhardt) and the Neue Bach Band are the leading specialist Baroque ensembles.
The earliest choral societies included a Handel and Haydn Society, which sang the first part of The Creation on 10 June 1818 at St Paul’s (in Trinity Parish), and the New York Choral Society, under James Swindells, which sang there before Lafayette during his visit in July 1824. The first established group on record is the Sacred Music Society (1823–49), which sang Messiah (using Mozart’s accompaniments) under U.C. Hill in November 1831; the society had a chorus of 73 and an orchestra of 38 at that time, and the receipts of $900 imply a large audience. In 1838 the society performed Mendelssohn’s St Paul and Mozart’s Requiem. The first serious rival to the Sacred Music Society was the Musical Institute, founded in 1844 and directed by H.C. Timm. In 1849 the two groups merged to form the New York Harmonic Society, their first concert being a performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah (June 1851) in Tripler Hall. The society lasted until 1868 and its conductors included Timm, Eisfeld, Bristow, Bergmann, F.L. Ritter and James Peck. An ambitious splinter group, the Mendelssohn Society, formed in 1863, was short-lived. In 1869 Peck directed the socially orientated Church Music Association; in 1873 Thomas imported a Boston chorus for a festival concert, an action considered an insult to the vocal and choral forces of New York.
New York’s German population had two prominent men's choruses: the Deutscher Liederkranz, which gave its first concert on 17 May 1847 in the Apollo Rooms, and the Männergesangverein Arion, an offshoot formed in 1854. The Liederkranz numbered Thomas, Bergmann, van der Stucken and Leopold Damrosch among its conductors before 1895, while the Arion rose to prominence after getting Damrosch from Breslau to be its director in 1871. The two societies united in 1918 and celebrated a centenary in 1947. In 1866 a professional men’s chorus, the Mendelssohn Glee Club, was formed, which also survived for a century. Its first permanent conductor (from 1867) was the violinist Joseph Mosenthal, a pupil of Spohr and one of the city’s leading church musicians; he died in 1896 while conducting a rehearsal of the group. MacDowell then led the club until 1898; his successors were Arthur Mees, Frank Damrosch, Clarence Dickinson, Nelson Coffin, Ralph Baldwin, Cesare Sodero and Ladislas Helfenbein. During the 20th century the membership shifted from professional to amateur singers, mainly businessmen, who sang popular favourites at private entertainments. Other men’s clubs cultivating light music included the Downtown and University glee clubs, both conducted for many years by Channing Lefebvre and George Mead.
The longest-lived serious choral organization is the Oratorio Society of New York, founded in 1873 by Leopold Damrosch. Its first concert (3 December 1873) included works by Bach, Mozart, Palestrina and Handel sung by a choir of about 50. In May 1874 the society gave Handel’s Samson with orchestra, inaugurating the tradition of oratorio and large choral works that has continued to characterize the society’s repertory. An annual Christmas performance of Messiah was inherited from the late Harmonic Society in 1874 and has continued to be a feature of the group’s programme. Late in the 19th century choruses of 400 to 600 sang Brahms’s German Requiem (1877), Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts (1881), Liszt’s Christus (1887) and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1892), and introduced Parsifal to the USA in concert form (1886). After Leopold Damrosch’s death in 1885 conductors of the Oratorio Society included his sons Walter (1885–98 and 1917–21) and Frank (1898–1912), Albert Stoessel (1921–43), William Strickland (1955–9), T. Charles Lee (1960–73) and Lyndon Woodside (from 1974).
Two organizations encouraging popular participation in music were the People’s Choral Union and Singing Classes, organized in the city’s lower East Side by Frank Damrosch in 1892 and continuing into the 1930s, and the People’s Chorus of New York, founded and from 1916 to 1954 conducted by Lorenzo Camilieri. Both groups sometimes assembled choirs of 1000 voices.
Musical life was enriched by the Musical Art Society, a professional mixed chorus conducted by Frank Damrosch for 26 years from 1894, which performed Palestrina, Bach, and the a cappella repertory. Contemporary choral music including Pfitzner’s Von deutscher Seele (1923) and Honegger’s Le roi David (1925) was presented by the Society of the Friends of Music (1913–31).
The Schola Cantorum grew out of a women’s chorus established by Kurt Schindler in 1909, which became a mixed ensemble in 1910 and adopted its later name in 1912. Schindler conducted the choir until 1926, when Hugh Ross began a long tenure ending only with the group's final concert in 1971. The Schola Cantorum’s programmes often included unfamiliar works; Schindler introduced traditional and religious music from the Basque region and Catalonia, and Ross conducted the New York premières of such works as Bloch’s Sacred Service (1934), Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1935), Stravinsky’s Perséphone (1936) and Delius’s Mass of Life (1938).
Baroque music performed in period style characterized the programmes of the Cantata Singers, founded in 1934 by Paul Boepple, remaining active until 1969; later conductors of the ensemble – Arthur Mendel (1936–53), Alfred Mann (1953–9), Thomas Dunn (1959–67) and Robert Hickok (1968–9) – were also noted for their scholarship. The Dessoff Choirs grew out of Margarete Dessoff’s Adesdi Chorus of women’s voices organized in 1924; a mixed choir was begun in 1928, and from 1930 the combined ensembles directed by Dessoff performed under the present name. Boepple conducted the groups (which merged in 1942) from 1937 to 1968; subsequent conductors have been Thomas Sokol (1969–72), Michael Hammond (1973–82), Amy Kaiser (1983–95) and Kent Tritle (from 1996). The Dessoff Choirs perform mixed programmes ranging from Baroque to contemporary music. The Collegiate Chorale was founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw and conducted by him until 1954 with assistance (1949–52) from Margaret Hillis and William Jonson. Later conductors were Mark Orton (1953–4), Ralph Hunter (1954–60), Abraham Kaplan (1961–73), Richard Westenburg (1973–9) and Robert Bass (from 1979); this amateur ensemble has performed both large standard works and contemporary pieces.
Musica Sacra, organized by Westenburg in 1970 at the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church, has become the most prominent professional choral ensemble in New York. Organizations employing professional choral singers are the National Chorale (founded 1959) led by Martin Josman, the Amor Artis Chorus and Orchestra (1961) led by Johannes Somary, the Gregg Smith Singers (1961), Musica Aeterna (1969), Musica Viva of New York (1977) led by Walter Klauss, Musicians of Melodious Accord (1984) and the New York Concert Singers (1988). The amateur St Cecilia Chorus, formed in 1906 by Victor Harris as a women’s chorus, was expanded to a mixed ensemble in 1964. Other choruses are the Canterbury Choral Society (1952), Masterwork Chorus (1955), the New York Choral Society (1959), Canby Singers (1960), the New Amsterdam Singers (1968–72 as the Master Institute Chorus), the Canticum Novum Singers (1972), the Sine Nomine Singers (1973), the Cappella Nova (1975), the New Calliope Singers (1976), the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus (1980), the Riverside Choral Society (1980) and the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York (1985). The Boys Choir of Harlem (1968) has achieved international renown.
Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street (fig.11) became the first important centre of music in New York through the activity of William Tuckey (see §1 above), and the church continued to exert a powerful influence over sacred music in the city for over two centuries. The first organist, John Clemm (1741–4), was probably the son of Johann Gottlob Klemm, the builder of the organ. After a fallow period, during which George K. Jackson's Te Deum in F was sung weekly for over two decades, the newly rebuilt Trinity Church was consecrated in 1846, with the English musician Edward Hodges as its music director and organist. He introduced a boys’ choir and a new repertory close to that of an English cathedral. 18,000 people attended a two-day inauguration of a new organ by Henry Erben, installed in the rebuilt church in 1846. Later organists there included H.S. Cutler, A.H. Messiter, Victor Baier, Channing Lefebvre, George Mead and Larry King, the last four of whom maintained the popular tradition of midday concerts.
One of the first examples of psalmody published in New York was Psalms of David for the Dutch Reformed Church (1767); a later important collection of psalm settings was A Selection of Psalm Tunes for Use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York (1812), revised in 1828 to include the works of five American composers. Thomas Hastings held various positions in New York from 1832 to 1872 and was an influential force in the city’s musical development.
During the 19th century many churches developed extensive musical programmes. Large mixed choirs, led by quartets of highly paid professional singers, and organs with several manuals became standard. Many distinguished organists, who often shared the duties of choir director, composer and teacher, served in the city, among them Samuel Prowse Warren at Grace Episcopal (1867–94), George William Warren at St Thomas’s (1870–1900) and Harry Rowe Shelley at the Church of the Pilgrims and Central Congregational in Brooklyn and at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church (1878–1936). G.W. Warren’s son Richard held positions in various city churches for 50 years from 1880. William Crane Carl was at the First Presbyterian from 1892 to 1936, and Walter Henry Hall was active in New York from 1896 to 1935 at several churches, among them the Cathedral of St John the Divine. Ives served at Central Presbyterian (1900–02), and in Brooklyn Raymond Huntington Woodman was at the First Presbyterian (1880–1941), John Hyatt Brewer in several positions from 1871 to 1930 and Dudley Buck at Holy Trinity (1877–1901).
Pietro Yon at St Francis Xavier (1908–26) and St Patrick (1927–43), Clarence Dickinson at Brick Presbyterian (1909–59), and Tertius Noble at St Thomas’s (1912–47) had long, distinguished careers. Like many of their colleagues they published anthems and larger choral works, the octavo editions of which sold millions of copies. Seth Bingham at Madison Avenue Presbyterian (1912–51), Samuel A. Baldwin (active 1895–1932), and W. Lynnwood Farnam at the Church of the Holy Communion (1920–30) were especially fine organists.
Although choirs have become smaller, many churches maintain the practice of performing large-scale sacred works, often on Sunday afternoons or evenings. Among these musically active churches are St Bartholomew, the Church of the Ascension, Riverside, St Thomas, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, the Church of our Saviour, Holy Trinity Lutheran, St Patrick’s Cathedral, St Ignatius Loyola, First Presbyterian, the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, St Mary the Virgin, Corpus Christi, and St Peter Lutheran (noted for its jazz and choral programmes). In the tower of the Riverside Church is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon, which with its 74 bells is the largest in the world. Significant music ensembles are also supported by the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St Nicholas and the Armenian St Vartan Cathedral. Synagogues notable for their music are the Temple Emanu-El, Central Synagogue and the Ashkenazi synagogue B’nai Jeshurun.
The conscious cultivation of experimental musical activity in New York dates from the 1920s, and was the result of the convergence of several trends. One was the nascent self-awareness of American composers. Another was the rise of New York as the capital of American culture and its music business. A third was the sudden internationalism forced upon American artists and intellectuals by the country’s involvement in World War I. The timing meant that avant-garde activities in New York had a distinctively French cast: most of the composers active in New York between the world wars had studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (above all Copland and Thomson) or were part of Varèse’s circle. Organizations sponsoring new music included the League of Composers (founded 1923), with which Copland was deeply involved (its journal Modern Music, 1924–46, was particularly influential), the American section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), and two organizations founded by Varèse – the International Composers’ Guild (1921–7) and the Pan American Association of Composers (1928–34). Cowell’s series of scores (New Music), begun in 1927, was also important. The Composers' Forum, founded in 1935, carried on the sponsorship of new-music concerts.
The arrival in New York of many important European composers, notably Bartók and Wolpe, reinforced internationalist tendencies and fostered a younger generation of American composers who came to dominate new music after World War II. Beginning in the 1950s New York avant gardism became marked by a division of sensibilities that was subsequently labelled ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’. More visible at first was the ‘uptown’ serialist school (and its non-serialist but equally rationalist allies), linked with the academy. This group not only controlled the concerts of the combined League of Composers and ISCM, but later founded new performance groups that specialized in dense, highly dissonant, chromatic music: the Group for Contemporary Music, Speculum Musicae (1971) and the New York New Music Ensemble (1975).
The rationalist sensibility was also active in the first American experiments in electronic music, which centred on New York. Landmark events included the creation by Cage of the tape work Imaginary Landscape no.5 (1951–2) and the first American tape-music concert, which Luening and Ussachevsky produced on 28 October 1952 at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959 the RCA Mark II synthesizer was installed at Columbia University and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, directed by Babbitt, Luening, Ussachevsky and Sessions, was founded.
Cage’s work became the focus of ‘downtown’ new-music activity in the 1950s. His closest disciples were Christian Wolff, David Tudor, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown; their work was paralleled by the New York activities of Fluxus (fig.12), which prefigured the varied forms of mixed-media experimentation of the 1960s and beyond. Allan Kaprow, the inventor of ‘happenings’, was part of the Cage circle, as were Toshi Ichiyanagi, Jackson Mac Low, Nam June Paik and La Monte Young.
Experimental concerts were held at night clubs such as the Electric Circus and at the major New York art museums (the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art) long before they were accepted by the more conservative midtown musical organizations. But the bulk of experimental activity since the 1970s has taken place under the auspices of new organizations located in the lofts of lower Manhattan. Chief among them are the Kitchen, the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Roulette and the Alternative Museum.
Some performers have succeeded in expanding their audiences by appearing in rock clubs, notably Glass, Reich, Laura Dean and Laurie Anderson. By the early 1980s experimental music in New York had begun to overlap with avant-garde jazz and rock. Composers such as Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Peter Gordon, and bands including Sonic Youth, moved freely between experimental performance spaces and rock clubs; avant-garde rock musicians, among them Arto Lindsay, Elliot Sharp and John Zorn, have attracted some attention from new-music circles, and jazz composers such as Henry Threadgill and Joseph Jarman play both at jazz clubs and in Weill Recital Hall.
Experimental music has long been a limited offering at the city’s major halls. By the 1980s, however, signs were pointing to the acceptance of experimental music in more traditional locations. The Brooklyn Academy of Music became an important sponsor of new-music activities with its ‘Next Wave’ events and festivals (fig.13). At Lincoln Center, Horizons festivals in 1983 and 1984, sponsored by the New York PO under the direction of composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman, offered a dramatic midtown showcase for a wide variety of new music. Other performing groups – the American Composers Orchestra, the Composers’ Showcase and Continuum – perform contemporary music while steering a course between the various new-music factions.
New York’s role in jazz history has always been significant, and from the mid-1920s decisive: it has attracted the best musicians, provided the most favourable opportunities for performing, hearing, broadcasting and recording the music, and has been the home of most important innovations. It was the seat of the ragtime craze early in the 20th century: elements of the pioneering ‘classic’ Missouri school, including ragtime king Scott Joplin and his publisher Stark, transferred to New York in the first decade, and New York’s own school of ragtime was by far the country’s most active, and certainly the most published. Much of the style was taken over into the Harlem school of stride pianists, the earliest true jazz pianists, who performed and entertained at clubs and private social functions; they were frequently recorded, and their high technical standards and inventive improvisation influenced most later jazz pianists.
Small- and large-band jazz were slower to develop, but the point of departure was again ragtime, especially as performed (and as early as 1898 recorded) by Sousa’s Band and those of his rivals Arthur Pryor and Charles Prince. Later bands played orchestral ragtime well into the 1920s on a scale indicated by the names of groups like the Fifty Merry Moguls, whose leader Fred Bryan was known as ‘the jazz Sousa’. These and more importantly New York’s dance bands, which proliferated in the many large dance halls founded during Prohibition, became the basis of the city’s remarkable orchestral jazz in the 1920s. Thus the success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band on their appearance in New York in 1917 is not surprising; other white groups playing a similar bowdlerization of New Orleans style had already appeared in New York, but without the combination of showmanship and shrewd publicity that allowed the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to bring jazz in quick succession to the city’s, the nation’s and Europe’s attention (fig.14). In January 1917 they made the first jazz recording; their second, made in February, had sold two million copies by the end of the year. Their success spawned hundreds of similarly named white jazz groups in the city, of which the much recorded Original Memphis Five was the most important.
Jazz features were also taken over by many of the city’s dance bands, particularly that of Paul Whiteman, whose name became a byword for jazz in the 1920s. Although Whiteman’s ‘symphonic jazz’ was later discredited as a vitiated form of the music, he hired true jazz performers such as Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, and his performances set standards of musicianship that were emulated by large jazz ensembles throughout the country.
Among the important black New York bands to profit from Whiteman’s example were those of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Each of these leaders hired first-rate jazz soloists as early as 1924, notably Louis Armstrong (with Henderson) and Sidney Bechet (with Ellington). Henderson’s arranger Don Redman was among the first to transform Armstrong’s ‘hot’ style into an orchestral idiom, developing a repertory that determined much of the swing-band music of the following decade. Less influential, though of greater artistic merit, were the experiments of Ellington, who from the mid-1920s combined commercial dance music with ingenious idiomatic arrangements and later produced what are widely regarded as the most significant jazz compositions.
By the end of the 1920s New York had become the centre of the American jazz scene. Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Red Allen, the leading musicians in the late New Orleans style, all lived there, as did most of the important musicians of the Chicago school following the suppression of that city’s underground ‘speakeasy’ culture. ‘Red’ Nichols and ‘Miff’ Mole had created an indigenous New York style of small-combo jazz characterized by well-integrated ensembles and comparatively advanced arrangements, while Beiderbecke, in many recordings with various ad hoc studio groups, was producing some of the greatest improvised solos of early jazz. Big bands on the Henderson model proliferated: bandleaders such as Henderson, Ellington, Luis Russell, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman and Charlie Barnet, all performed, broadcast and recorded in New York in the 1930s, and Count Basie’s group, the most important jazz orchestra of the competing Kansas City tradition, was based in New York from 1937. The recognition of jazz by the country’s established musical institutions was marked in 1938 by Goodman’s concert at Carnegie Hall, and the country’s historical interest in the genre was demonstrated there the same year by John Hammond’s retrospective ‘Spirituals to Swing’ concerts.
Small-ensemble jazz was generally not popular in the 1930s, but the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment had led to the establishment of numerous small clubs in New York, at some of which small jazz ensembles played. A number of clubs in 52nd Street (Onyx, Famous Door and Kelly’s Stable) promoted advanced swing jazz in small combinations. Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House, both in Harlem, were later indispensable to the bop school, which originated in New York in the early 1940s and was almost exclusively a small-group form. Café Society, Birdland, Half Note, Five Spot, Village Vanguard and Village Gate were all clubs that presented the most creative modern jazz of the 1940s and 50s. The Five Spot in particular fostered avant-garde jazz; the origins of free jazz are often dated from the appearance there of Cecil Taylor in 1957 and Ornette Coleman in 1959. Although developments in this genre also took place in Europe, New York shared with Chicago the leadership of the free-jazz scene and saw the origins in the 1960s of free-jazz groups like the New York Contemporary Five with John Tchicai and Don Cherry, the New York Art Quartet, the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and the musicians associated with LeRoi Jones’s Black Arts Repertory Theater-School. Two developments of the late 1960s and early 70s had a lasting effect on New York’s jazz culture: the ascendance of rock music, which made it difficult for jazz musicians to find employment or recording opportunities, and a deep economic crisis which caused many clubs to close and many musicians to prefer other cities (particularly New Orleans and Los Angeles). In emulation of visual artists and experimental classical musicians, some jazz players organized and performed in ‘lofts’, abandoned upper-storey warehouses available at relatively low rents. The loft scenes in SoHo (South of Houston Street) and Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal Street) witnesses highly interesting developments in avant-garde jazz in the work of such musicians as Sam Rivers, David Murray, Henry Threadgill and Julius Hemphill, and groups such as the World Saxophone Quartet. Many of their stylistic innovations later found their way into the post-modern aesthetic and ‘world music’ of the late 1980s.
With the city’s economic recovery from the late 1970s New York regained much of its former influence as a jazz capital. The revival of bebop brought many older musicians back to the USA from self-imposed European exile, and several excellent repertoire orchestras were founded with the object of cultivating the historical styles of the jazz tradition. Among these ensembles were the American Jazz Orchestra, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra. Equally important was the recognition of mainstream jazz in the curriculum of the Juilliard and other music schools, ensuring a continuous influx of talented and highly trained young musicians into the jazz scene. Avant-garde jazz continued to flourish in the Knitting Factory (founded in 1987), where experimentation and crossovers with ethnic musics, notably klezmer, were systematically cultivated. The Newport Jazz Festival, which relocated to New York in 1972, remains one of the most active and prestigious festivals in the country under its present name of ‘JVC Jazz Festival New York’.
Today New York’s jazz scene is no longer confined to Manhattan but can also be found in the city’s other boroughs, particularly Brooklyn. Although many of its jazz musicians are financially dependent on regular European tours for their livelihood, New York’s concentration of media and creative artists is sufficient ot ensure that the city remains the nerve centre of America’s jazz culture.
German singing societies made an important contribution to the city’s choral life in the 19th century (see §7 above); in the last decades of the century many Irish and Italian immigrants brought their traditional music to New York, as did the Hungarians, Czechs, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks and others. In the early 20th century especially, Jewish actors and dramatists from Russia made downtown Second Avenue a centre of the Yiddish stage; operettas and musical revues presented there had a further influence on popular songwriters, many of whom were of Jewish origin. The 1960s and 70s saw a constant flux of folk and ethnic styles, including a wide range of Latin styles, Greek, Middle Eastern and Asian music, reggae, and Brazilian jazz and bossa nova.
After 1950 rock and roll became firmly established in New York, owing in part to the extension of Tin Pan Alley’s institutional structures into the rock field. Songwriters, including Carole King, Ellie Greenwich and Doc Pomus, many of whom worked in teams in the Brill Building on Broadway, turned out rock songs with the same facility as songwriters of the big-band era. New York was also a centre of doo-wop, which was largely a product of black and Italian American communities of the East Coast.
In the early 1960s musicians who played in such Greenwich Village clubs as the Bitter End and Folk City forged a creative union between rock and folk music. The most famous figure to emerge was Bob Dylan; others included Peter, Paul and Mary, the Lovin’ Spoonful and Simon and Garfunkel. Folk music of this sort lost its commercial cachet after Dylan took up electric instruments in 1965, but it continued to produce fresh, young talent into the 1980s.
Beginning in the late 1960s Velvet Underground inspired the worldwide punk rock and new-wave movements, encouraging a return to the basics of rock music after the romanticized inflation of rock of the late 1960s and early 70s. A number of striking performers emerged in the late 1970s, among them Talking Heads, whose cool rock minimalism proved most enduring. New York rock evolved in the late 1970s and early 80s into an often deliberately primitive art rock, fostered by such musicians as Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Arto Lindsay and Elliot Sharp. The New York area was also the spawning ground of popular heavy-metal groups; of ‘noise rock’, highly animated, extremely loud improvisations full of exotic sound effects and propelled by an almost visceral energy; and of rap, the cadenced, rapid-fire chanting of lyrics, which often reflect social concerns, over a pounding funk beat.
Music schools offering professional training became important in New York in the second half of the 19th century. One of the longest lived was the New York College of Music, founded in 1878. Having absorbed the German Conservatory in 1920 and the American Conservatory in 1923, it was itself incorporated into New York University in 1968. The National Conservatory of Music in America, founded by Jeanette Thurber in 1885, was granted a national charter in 1891, and Dvořák was director from 1892 to 1895. Although by 1910 the conservatory’s reputation rivalled that of the Peabody, Cincinnati and New England conservatories, it fell far behind these private institutions in funding and ultimately succumbed to public apathy. A Metropolitan Conservatory, begun as a school of singing in 1886, became the Metropolitan College of Music in 1891 and the American Institute of Applied Music in 1900. It survived some 40 years but eventually succumbed to financial troubles. Settlement schools founded to provide musical training for underprivileged children fared better. The Henry Street Settlement (1893), Third Street Music School Settlement (1894), Greenwich House Music School (1906) and Turtle Bay Music School (1925) are among those that survive. In 1899 William C. Carl, a former student of Guilmant, founded at the First Presbyterian Church the Guilmant Organ School, the first American school devoted exclusively to the training of organists and choirmasters.
The Juilliard School, a conservatory of international reputation, was begun by Frank Damrosch in 1905 as the Institute of Musical Art. In 1924 the Juilliard Musical Foundation bestowed an endowment of approximately $23 million on a graduate school, which subsequently with the institute became known as the Juilliard School of Music. Later presidents have been John Erskine (1928–37), Ernest Hutcheson (1937–45), William Schuman (1945–62), Peter Mennin (1962–83) and Joseph W. Polisi (from 1984). Before moving to Lincoln Center in 1968 the school incorporated a drama division, raised the dance department to divisional status and changed the name to the Juilliard School.
The Mannes College of Music was founded in 1916 by David Mannes and his wife Clara Damrosch. First known as the David Mannes School, the college became a degree-granting institution in 1953; it was the first school of music in the USA to offer a degree in the performance of early music. Leopold Mannes was director from 1940 until his death in 1964. The Manhattan School of Music, a conservatory founded by Janet Schenck in 1917, offers undergraduate and graduate degrees. Its programme in orchestral performance, founded in 1991, was the first of its kind in the USA. John Brownlee, president from 1966 to 1969, expanded the school’s opera department, and in 1969 George Schick became president and the school moved to the Claremont Avenue building vacated by the Juilliard School. He was succeeded by John Crosby (1976–91) and Marta Istomin (1992–). The New School of Social Research added music to its curriculum in the 1920s. After 1933 it became a sanctuary for Jewish and socialist scholars who greatly influenced academic music education in the USA.
Two private universities in the city have strong academic courses in music. Columbia received its first endowment for the study of music in 1896. The first professor of music was MacDowell. Paul Henry Lang was appointed professor of musicology at Columbia in 1939, and in 1944 Otto Leuning, a co-founder of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, became professor of the music department at Barnard College, then Columbia’s women’s affiliate. The university’s Teachers College, devoted to graduate study in education, also maintains an active music department. New York University offers advanced degrees in musicology and education. Union Theological Seminary’s School of Sacred Music (1923–73) was absorbed by Yale University in 1974.
The City University of New York consists of a graduate centre and many four- and two-year colleges, most of which offer both academic and practical instruction in music. Hunter, Queens, Brooklyn and City colleges have traditionally strong music departments. In 1981 the Brooklyn and Queens departments were renamed respectively the Conservatory of Music and the Aaron Copland School of Music; the former is the seat of the Institute for Studies in American Music (founded 1971). A doctoral programme at the CUNY Graduate Center in 365 Fifth Avenue was established in 1968 by Barry S. Brook. Since 1987 it has also had a programme in performance. The institution is the home of two bibliographical projects, the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) and the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM).
State schools offered sporadic music education from 1856 but no clear course until 1898. In 1976 nearly 1700 music teachers served in elementary and secondary schools. The High School of Music and Art, from 1984 combined with the High School of the Performing Arts as the Fiorello LaGuardia High School, provides an opportunity for students to specialize in music theory, history and performance, along with regular academic subjects. In addition to the settlement schools, instruction is available at such schools as the Harlem School of the Arts, the Dalcroze and Diller-Quaile schools and the Bloomingdale House of Music.
One of the first associations organized to promote the works of local composers was the Manuscript Society, founded in 1889 and reorganized in 1899 as the Society of American Musicians and Composers. In 1914 a group of men concerned principally with popular music, including Victor Herbert, formed the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), later the foremost American association for the protection of copyright musical works. ASCAP is a non-profit-making organization, representing both serious and popular music, that collects and distributes licensing fees for public performance. Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), established in 1940, performs a similar function. The American Composers Alliance (ACA), founded in 1937 by Copland and others, was later affiliated with BMI. National in scope, these organizations have their headquarters in New York. Organized labour is represented in New York by Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which includes instrumental ensemble musicians in all spheres, and the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), which has represented opera and concert artists since its formation in 1936.
Other non-profit-making organizations in the city have been actively concerned with the promotion of music and the welfare of musicians. The Beethoven Association (1918–40) under its president Harold Bauer was an important force in sponsoring concerts, publications and charitable works. The National Federation of Music Clubs (founded 1898) encourages young musicians throughout the country. The American Music Center (1939) has served as a reference and information centre in New York, encouraging the performance of contemporary American music. The League of Composers, Composers’ Forum, ACA and National Association for American Composers and Conductors (1933) have sponsored many concerts locally.
The principal musicians’ club in New York is the Bohemians, a service and social organization founded in 1907 by Rafael Joseffy. More specialized societies have included the Composers Collective of New York (1932–6), the New York Music Critics’ Circle (1941–65), the American Guild of Organists, the headquarters of which have been in New York since its formation in 1896, and the Charles Ives Society, active from 1973. In 1983 the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music (founded 1962) opened its research centre.
New York is also the national centre for concert management. In the 1980s over half the serious artists’ representatives and concert managers, including the influential Columbia Artists Management, were in New York.
Early music publishers were often also dealers. James Hewitt (active 1793–1819) and his son James Lang Hewitt (1830–47) had a music shop and published music, as did John Paff from 1798 to 1817 and Joseph Atwill from 1833 to 1850. William Dubois (1813–54) also dealt in pianos, and Edward Riley (1806–50) taught music. In 1815 Firth & Hall, joined in 1832 by Sylvanus Billings Pond, began an important association that lasted under various names until 1884 (see fig.15). Sheet music in the form of patriotic songs, simple operatic selections and piano pieces dominated the repertory. In the second part of the 19th century Harvey B. Dodworth (1845–87) and the Schuberths, Julius and Edward (from 1858), achieved prominence. Of 27 firms belonging to the Board of Music Trade, however, only six were from New York. The introduction of the octave anthem by Novello in 1870 infused new strength into serious music publishing, especially by the firms of G. Schirmer (set up as Beer & Schirmer in 1861 by Gustav Schirmer) and Carl Fischer (established in 1872). The 1880s saw the founding of two important popular publishers, Harms (in 1875) and M. Witmark (in 1885); both are now subsidiaries of larger organizations. From the 1890s a large part of the popular songwriting and music-publishing industry was in New York, its centre moving gradually uptown on Broadway. Leading music publishers in New York after 1945 included G. Schirmer, Carl Fischer, Boosey & Hawkes, Belwin-Mills, Associated Music Publishers (a division of Schirmer), C.F. Peters, Peer-Southern and Chappell. Since the 1980s many independent houses have been acquired by conglomerates. This has particularly affected the popular field, although by the 1990s the only important publishers of classical music left in New York were Boosey & Hawkes and G. Schirmer.
The manufacture of lutes and violins was reported in New York as early as the 1690s. 21 instrument makers were active in the city in the 1790s, among whom Christian Claus (1789–99), Thomas Dodds (1785–99) and Archibald Whaites (1793–1816) frequently advertised in papers their abilities to make a dozen kinds of instruments. By the 1820s instrument making was the city’s fifth-largest industry. A census of 1855 listed 836 instrument makers, among them 553 immigrants, mostly from Germany. In the 1890 census, there were 131 instrument firms employing 5958 craftsmen.
John Geib, an organ builder from 1798, was joined by his brothers Adam and William in a firm that manufactured pianos until 1872. The firm Dubois & Stodart made pianos from 1819 to the 1850s. Among the many piano-making firms active in the latter part of the century were Weber (founded 1852), Steck (1857), Hardman (1842), Bacon (1841), Haines (1851), Mathusek (1857), Behning (1861), Doll (1871), Sohmer (1872) and Behr (1881). The first three were absorbed by the Aeolian Corporation, which maintained its headquarters in New York into the 1970s. Most important among the city’s piano makers has been Steinway & Sons, founded by Heinrich E. Steinweg in 1853. Some later publishers also dealt in instruments. E. Riley made flutes, and Firth, Pond & Co. made woodwind instruments from 1848 to 1865. A.G. Badger was an important flute maker from 1845, the business being absorbed by the Penzel & Mueller Co. after the turn of the century. Among brass instrument makers the Schreiber Cornet Co. (from 1867) and John F. Stratton (from 1859) were significant, the latter turning to guitar manufacture in 1890. August and George Gemunder and family arrived in the city from Germany before 1850 and made prizewinning violins for over 75 years. Rembert Wurlitzer Inc. was noted for the restoration and sale of rare violins from 1949 to 1974. By the mid-1990s Steinway remained the only piano maker in the city. A few small ateliers make high-quality instruments, notably the Gael Français Violin Workshop, Matt Umanov Guitars and the string instrument makers Ruting and Oster.
New York became the national centre of radio broadcasting with the founding of the first American radio networks – NBC in 1926 and CBS in 1927. For a while, before the impact of populist aesthetics and, later, television was felt, the networks attempted to emulate state-supported European broadcasters by sponsoring their own studio orchestras. The best-known of these was the NBC SO (see §5 above). New York PO has presented regular radio broadcasts since 1930, and more occasional telecasts and concerts for young people. The Saturday matinée performances of the Metropolitan Opera have been broadcast since 1931. Since the 1970s performances at the Metropolitan and other Lincoln Center venues have been telecast on the Public Broadcasting Service network. New York has several classical music FM stations, as well as a variety of stations which broadcast jazz, country music, rock, rap and other pop genres.
New York was a centre for the recording industry from its earliest days. Recordings of all musical genres were dominated by RCA Victor and Columbia, located in New York. After the rise of rock and the penetration of country music into the commercial mainstream, however, New York was successfully challenged by Los Angeles (for pop) and Nashville (for country) as a national recording centre. But with the corporate headquarters of CBS, RCA, BMG, Sony, Angel/EMI, Polygram Classics and Warner Communications, as well as specialized labels such as CRI, New World and Nonesuch (now part of Elektra/Warner), and with ample recording facilities and an active musical community, New York has retained its leading position in the recording industry, especially for classical music, contemporary music and jazz. The Recording Industries Association of America (RIAA), a trade organization formed in 1952, is also based in the city.
Early reviews of public performances were unsigned. In the mid-19th century two literary figures, Walt Whitman in the Brooklyn Eagle (1841–5) and Margaret Fuller in Horace Greeley’s Tribune (1844–6), included music in their critical writing. The city’s first prominent music critic was the composer William Henry Fry, who wrote for the New York Tribune from 1852 to 1863. In 1880 Henry Krehbiel joined the paper, for which he wrote distinguished critical commentary until 1923. Henry Finck contributed to the Evening Post from 1881 to 1924, and J.G. Huneker’s columns appeared in various publications from 1891 to 1921. W.J. Henderson in the New York Times (1887–1902) and the New York Sun (1902–20, 1924–37) and the New York Herald (1920–24), and Richard Aldrich in the New York Times (1902–37) were particularly influential. These men were all cultivated university graduates with extensive musical training, as well as editors, lecturers, teachers and authors; they were given free rein by their newspapers, and their judgments have in the main stood the test of time.
The tradition of fine critical writing was continued by Lawrence Gilman (active from 1901, with the New York Tribune 1923–39), Deems Taylor in the New York World (1921–5) and Olin Downes in the New York Times (1924–55). Virgil Thomson added his strongly individual voice to the Herald-Tribune from 1940 to 1954, followed by Paul Henry Lang from 1954 to 1963. Chief music critics at the New York Times were H. Howard Taubman (1955–60), Harold C. Schonberg (1960–80), Donal Henahan (1980–91), Edward Rothstein (1991–5) and Bernard Holland (since 1995). The paper, which is the most influential reviewing medium in the city, had in 1999 five critics for classical and four critics for popular music, who are supplemented by freelance writers. Weekly periodicals also provide a forum for music critics, notably the Village Voice which focusses on contemporary and popular music; New Yorker was elevated to become a dominant force of music during the tenure of Andrew Porter (1972–92), who was succeeded by Paul Griffiths (1992–7) and Alex Ross (since 1996); Rolling Stones (1977) is a primary source for rock criticism; and Billboard (1894) for popular music in general.
New York has long been a centre of publishing activity of many kinds; 82 music periodicals appeared in the city between 1850 and 1900. Notable among them were the Choral Advocate and Singing-Class Journal (1850–73), what was eventually called Watson’s Art Journal (1864–1905), the Music Trade Journal (from 1879) and Music Trades (from 1890); Musical America was founded in 1898 and merged with High Fidelity in 1965. General periodicals such as Scribner’s Magazine (1887–1900) and Harpers (from 1850) have also carried articles of musical interest. The Musical Observer (1907–31) and Modern Music (1924–46) were influential. The Musical Quarterly, established in 1915, is a leading scholarly journal. Its editors have included Oscar Sonneck (1915–28), Carl Engel (1929–44), Gustav Reese (1944–5), P.H. Lang (1945–73), Christopher Hatch (1973–6), Joan Peyser (1977–84), Eric Salzman (1984–91), Paul Wittke (1992) and Leon Botstein (from 1993). Three important journals for organists, Church Music Review (1901–35), American Organist (1918–70), and the journal of the American Guild of Organists, Music AGO/RCCO Magazine (founded in 1967 and in 1980 renamed The American Organist) were published in New York. Metronome (1885–1961), devoted to bands and jazz, has been superseded by a variety of magazines on jazz, pop, rock, salsa, rap, hip hop and other genres of popular music. A thorough listing of music and other events held in the city can be found in Time Out New York. Opera News, published since 1936 by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, features regular commentaries on the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.
The New York Public Library, formed in 1895 by the amalgamation of the Astor (1849) and Lenox (1870) libraries with the Tilden Foundation (1887), includes one of the world’s outstanding research collections. The Music Division (with nearly 700,000 titles as well as programmes, clippings, photographs and letters) is in the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound there include over 450,000 recordings of all kinds; in the same building the library maintains a circulating collection of over 150,000 scores, books and recordings. Another division of the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, collects materials on jazz and the music of black musicians. In other parts of the city the Queensborough and Brooklyn public libraries maintain large music collections, and there are additional centres for circulating recordings in Manhattan and the Bronx. Theatre life on 42nd Street is documented at the archives of the Shubert Organization on 45th Street, and the history of the Metropolitan Opera at the opera’s archives in Lincoln Center. The American Music Center (founded 1940) has a collection of scores and sound recordings of contemporary American music, and the library of the Archive of Contemporary Music specializes in collecting pop, jazz and rock and roll.
Each of the educational institutions offering advanced degrees has a good working collection to support its courses. Columbia, whose first music librarian, Richard Angell, was appointed in 1934, is one of the oldest. The Juilliard library has a collection of 50,000 books and scores. The Pierpont Morgan Library houses many valuable music manuscripts, and several distinguished private collectors live in New York, notably James J. Fuld. The Department of Musical Instruments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose origins go back to 1889, has a renowned collection of approximately 4500 Western and non-Western instruments, which are on display in the André Martens Galleries, opened in 1971. The curators of the collection have included Emanuel Winternitz and Laurence Libin. Collections of historical pictures of musical life can be found at the Research Center for Music Iconography at the City University of New York, and news photos of 20th-century musical life at the Battmann Archive. The Dance Notation Bureau (founded 1940) is one of the world’s most important centres for research in dance notation. The collection of the Museum of Television & Radio in 52nd Street preserves recordings of about 75,000 radio and television programmes, a large number of them featuring music events.
A General. B Opera and vocal music. C Orchestras. D Sacred music. E Musical theatre. F Jazz and popular music. G Ethnic music.
H.E. Krehbiel: Review of the New York Musical Season (New York, 1886–90)
W.S.B. Matthews, ed.: A Hundred Years of Music in America (Chicago, 1889/R)
O.G. Sonneck: Early Concert-Life in America (1731–1800) (Leipzig, 1907)
H.C. Lahee: Annals of Music in America (Boston, 1922)
J.T. Howard: Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of it (New York, 1931, enlarged 4/1965 as Our American Music: a Comprehensive History from 1620 to the Present)
H. Cowell, ed.: American Composers on American Music: a Symposium (Stanford, CA, 1933/R)
F. Damrosch: Institute of Musical Art, 1905–1926 (New York, 1936)
E.R. Peyser: The House that Music Built: Carnegie Hall (New York, 1936)
V.L. Redway: ‘A New York Concert in 1736’, MQ, xxii (1936), 170–77
N. Slonimsky: Music since 1900 (New York, 1937, 5/1994)
R. Aldrich: Concert Life in New York, 1902–1923 (New York, 1941)
V.L. Redway: Music Directory of Early New York City (New York, 1941)
G. Chase: America’s Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955, 3/1987)
H.W. Schwartz: Bands of America (Garden City, NY, 1957)
R. Schickel: The World of Carnegie Hall (New York, 1960)
D.D. Rogers: Nineteenth Century Music in New York City as Reflected in the Career of George Frederick Bristow (diss., U. of Michigan, 1967)
V. Thomson: Music Reviewed 1940–1954 (New York, 1967)
M. Goldin: The Music Merchants (New York, 1969)
C. Gillett: The Sound of the City (New York, 1970, 2/1983)
D.D. Rogers: ‘Public Music Performances in New York City from 1800 to 1850’, Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research, vi (1970), 5–50
M.M. Lowens: The New York Years of Edward MacDowell (diss., U. of Michigan, 1971)
R.G. Martin: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971)
J. Ogasapian: Organ Building in New York City: 1700–1900 (Braintree, MA, 1977)
A. Aaron: ‘William Tuckey, a Choirmaster in Colonial New York’, MQ, lxiv (1978), 79–97
A. Porter: Music of Three Seasons, 1974–1977 (New York, 1978) [Reviews originally pubd in The New Yorker; see also Music of Three More Seasons, 1977–1980 (New York, 1981) and Musical Events: a Chronicle, 1980–1983 (New York, 1987)]
C.J. Oja: ‘The Copland-Sessions Concerts and their Reception in the Contemporary Press’, MQ, lxv (1979), 212–19
L.A. Erenberg: Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT, 1981)
R.A. Moog: ‘The Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center: Thirty Years of Explorations in Sound’, Contemporary Keyboard, vii/5 (1981), 22–4
R.A. Lott: ‘New Music for New Ears: the International Composers' Guild’, JAMS, xxxvi/2 (1983), 266–87
G.W. Martin: The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music (Boston, 1983)
J. Rockwell: All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York, 1983)
B. Kellner, ed.: The Harlem Renaissance: a Historical Dictionary for the Era (Westport, CT, 1984)
J.W. Wagner: ‘New York City Concert Life, 1801–5’, American Music, ii/2 (1984), 53–70
R. Holz: Heralds of Victory: a History Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the New York Staff Band and Male Chorus, 1887–c1986 (New York, 1986)
G.B. Anderson: Music in New York during the American Revolution: an Inventory of Musical References in Rivington’s ‘New York Gazette’ (Boston, 1987)
A. Dümling: ‘Massenlieder, Kollektivismus und Gebrauchsmusik: zum Einfluss deutscher Exil-Komponisten auf die Arbeitermusikbewegung und das Musikleben in der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika der dreissiger Jahre’, Verdrängte Musik: Berliner Komponisten im Exil, ed. H. Traber and E. Weingarten (Berlin, 1987), 141–64
M. McKnight: ‘Wagner and the New York Press, 1855–1876’, American Music, v/2 (1987), 145–55
V.B. Lawrence, ed.: Strong on Music: the New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, 1836–1875 (New York, 1988)
O.F. Saloman: ‘Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841–1846’, American Music, vi/4 (1988), 428–41
T. Johnson: The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972–1982: a Collection of Articles Originally Published in ‘The Village Voice’ (Eindhoven, 1989)
D.-R. de Lerma: ‘Bibliography of the Music: the Concert Music of the Harlem Renaissance Composers, 1919–1935’, Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. S.A. Floyd (Westport, CT, 1990), 175–217
T.J. Dox: ‘George Frederick Bristow and the New York Public Schools’, American Music, ix/4 (1991), 339–52
N. Groce: Musical Instrument Makers of New York: a Directory of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Urban Craftsmen (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991)
B. Parisi: A History of Brooklyn’s Three Major Performing Arts Institutions: the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and St. Ann’s Center for Restoration and the Arts, Inc. (diss., New York U., 1991)
J. Graziano: ‘Music in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal’, Notes, xlviii (1991–2), 383–424
J. Horowitz: ‘Anton Seidl and America's Wagner Cult’, Wagner in Performance, ed. B. Millington and S. Spencer (New Haven, CT, 1992), 168–81
R. Lee: The Composers Collective of New York City and the Attempt to Articulate the Nature of Proleterian Music in the Writings of Charles Seeger, Marc Blitzstein and Elie Siegmeister in the 1930s (diss., U. of Keele, 1992)
A.M. Pescatello: Charles Seeger: a Life in American Music (Pittsburgh, 1992)
D.A. Day: The New York Musical World, 1852–1860 (Ann Arbor, 1993)
M. Epstein: The New York Hippodrome: a Complete Chronology of Performances, from 1905 to 1939 (New York, 1993)
E.M. Graff: Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (diss., New York U., 1993)
W. Grünzweig: ‘“Bargain and Charity”? Aspekte der Aufnahme exilierter Musiker an der Ostküste der Vereinigten Staaten’, Musik im Exil: Folgen des Nazismus für die internationale Musikkultur, ed. H.-W. Heister, C.M. Zenck and P. Petersen (Frankfurt, 1993), 297–310
E. Lott: Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993)
D. Metzer: The Ascendancy of Musical Modernism in New York City, 1915–1929 (diss., Yale U., 1993)
R. Breuer: New Yorker Musik-Kaleidoskop, 1962–1990 (Trier, 1995)
L.P. Farrar: ‘The American Fife and its Makers: an Historical Examination’, Woodwind Quarterly, no.11 (1995), 84–96; no.12 (1996), 76–91
L.P. Farrar: ‘Pat Cooperman: Friend to Fifers and Bastion Against Losing our Martial Music Heritage’, Woodwind Quarterly, no.10 (1995), 92–9
K.J. Jackson: The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995)
O.F. Saloman: Beethoven’s Symphonies and J.S. Dwight: the Birth of American Music Criticism (Boston, 1995)
M.J. Pagano: The History of the Third Street Music School Settlement, 1891–1984: Music School and Social Settlement – the Dual Identity of the Original Music School Settlement (DMA diss., Manhattan School of Music, 1996)
M.N. Grant: Maestros of the Pen: a History of Classical Music Criticism in America (Boston, 1998)
J. Horowitz: ‘The Imp of the Perverse: Mahler, New York, and a Question of “Moral Aesthetics”’, Times Literary Supplement (8 Jan 1999)
E. Singleton: ‘History of the Opera in New York from 1750 to 1898’, Musical Courier, xxxvii/23 (1898), [10–24]
G. von Skal: History of the New York Arion, 1854–1904 (New York, 1904)
H.E. Krehbiel: Chapters of Opera (New York, 1908, 3/1911)
An Historical Sketch of 37 Seasons of the Oratorio Society of New York, 1873/74–1908/09 (New York, 1909)
F. Rogers: ‘America's First Grand Opera Season’, MQ, i (1915), 93–101
O.G. Sonneck: Early Opera in America (New York, 1915)
J. Mattfeld: A Hundred Years of Grand Opera in New York, 1825–1925 (New York, 1927)
G.C.D. Odell: Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927–49, 2/1970)
I. Kolodin: The Metropolitan Opera (New York, 1936, enlarged 4/1966)
W.H. Seltsam: Metropolitan Opera Annals (New York, 1947, 2/1949; suppls., 1957, 1968, 1978)
J.F. Cone: Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company (Norman, OK, 1966)
M. Nelson: The First Italian Opera Season in New York City: 1825–1826 (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1976)
M.L. Sokol: The New York City Opera (New York, 1981)
J.F. Cone: First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 1983)
M. Mayer: The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera (New York and London, 1983)
Q. Eaton: The Miracle of the Met: an Informal History of the Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1967 (New York, 1984)
P. Eisler: The Metropolitan Opera: the First Twenty-Five Years, 1883–1908 (Croton-on-Hudson, NY, 1984)
G.W. Martin: ‘New York's Smaller Opera Companies’, Opera, xxxvi (1985), 1001–7
B. McConachie: ‘New York Operagoing, 1825–50: Creating an Elite Social Ritual’, American Music, vi/2 (1988), 181–92
G. Fitzgerald, ed.: Annals of the Metropolitan Opera (Boston and New York, 1989)
H.-L. de La Grange: ‘Mahler and the Metropolitan Opera’, SMH, xxxi (1989), 253–70
R. Allen: Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City (Philadelphia, 1991)
J. Dizikes: Opera in America: a Cultural History (New Haven, CT, 1993)
J. Horowitz: Wagner Nights: an American History (Berkeley, 1994)
J.C. Ottenberg: Opera Odyssey: Toward a History of Opera in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, CT, 1994)
K. Ahlquist: Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater and Culture in New York City, 1815–60 (Urbana, IL, 1997)
H.E. Krehbiel: The Philharmonic Society of New York (New York, 1892)
J.G. Huneker: The Philharmonic Society of New York and its Seventy-Fifth Anniversary: a Retrospect (New York, ?1917)
J. Erskine: The Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York (New York, 1943)
H. Shanet: Philharmonic: a History of New York’s Orchestra (New York, 1975)
B. Bial: Focus on the Philharmonic: in Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the New York Philharmonic (New York, 1992)
D.C. Meyer: The NBC Symphony Orchestra (diss., U. of California, Davis, 1994)
A.H. Messiter: A History of the Choir and Music of Trinity Church (New York, 1906)
L. Ellinwood: The History of American Church Music (New York, 1953)
S. Cornelius: The Convergence of Power: an Investigation into the Music Liturgy of Santería in New York City (diss., U. of California, Los Angeles, 1989)
D.A. Weadon: Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) and the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (1928–1973) (diss., Drew U., 1993)
J. Ogasapian: English Cathedral Music in New York: Edward Hodges of Trinity Church (Richmond, VA, 1994)
C. Smith: Musical Comedy in America (New York, 1950, 2/1981)
G.M. Bordman: American Musical Theatre: a Chronicle (New York, 1978)
T.L. Riis: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1981)
K.A. Kanter: The Jews on Tin Pan Alley (New York, 1982)
I. Heskes: ‘Music as Social History: American Yiddish Theater Music, 1882–1920’, American Music, ii/4 (1984), 73–87
J. Schiffman: Harlem Heyday: a Pictorial History of Modern Black Show Business and the Apollo Theatre (New York, 1984)
R.C. Lynch: Broadway on Record: a Directory of New York Cast Recordings and Musical Shows, 1931–1986 (New York, 1987)
T.L. Riis: Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915 (Washington DC, 1989)
B. McNamara: The Shuberts of Broadway: a History Drawn from the Collections of the Shubert Archive (New York, 1990)
H. Alpert: Broadway! 125 Years of Musical Theater (New York, 1991)
J. Gavin: Intimate Nights: the Golden Age of New York Cabaret (New York, 1991)
M. Gottfried: More Broadway Musicals: Since 1980 (New York, 1991)
M.E. Dorf: Knitting Music: a Five-Year History of the Knitting Factory (New York, 1992)
M. Lasser: ‘The Glorifier: Florenz Ziegfeld and the Creation of the American Showgirl’, American Scholar, lxiii (1994), 441–8
D. Sheward: It’s a Hit! The Black Stage Book of Longest-Running Broadway Shows, 1884 to the Present (New York, 1994)
S. Nelson: ‘Broadway and the Beast: Disney Comes to Times Square’, Drama Review, xxxix/2 (1995), 71–85
S.B. Charters and L. Kunstadt: Jazz: a History of the New York Scene (Garden City, NY, 1962)
M. Williams: ‘Jazz Clubs, Jazz Business, Jazz Styles in New York: a Brief History and a Cultural Lag’, Jazz Masters in Transition, 1957–69 (New York, 1970/R), 89–93
J. Schiffman: Uptown: the Story of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre (New York, 1971)
A. Shaw: The Street that Never Slept: New York’s Fabled 52nd Street (New York, 1971/R1983 as 52nd Street: the Street of Jazz)
J. Haskins: The Cotton Club (New York, 1977)
L. Ostransky: Jazz City (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979), 179–230
T. Fox: Showtime at the Apollo (New York, 1983)
S.B. Charters and L. Kunstadt: Jazz: a History of the New York Scene (New York, 1984)
D. Such: Music, Metaphor and Values among Avant-Garde Jazz Musicians Living in New York City (diss., U. of California, Los Angeles, 1985)
E. Berlin: Reflections and Research on Ragtime (Brooklyn, NY, 1987)
E. Koskoff: ‘The Sound of a Woman's Voice: Gender and Music in a New York Hasidic Community’, Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York, 1987), 213–24
D. Jasen: Tin Pan Alley: the Composers, the Songs, the Performers and their Times: the Golden Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956 (New York, 1988)
E. Pessen: ‘The Kingdom of Swing: New York City in the Late 1930s’, New York History, lxx (1989), 276–308
S. Harrison-Pepper: Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New York’s Washington Square Park (Jackson, MI, 1990)
L.C. Gay: Commitment, Cohesion and Creative Process: a Study of New York City Rock Bands (diss., Columbia U., 1991)
P. Chevigny: Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City (New York, 1992)
C.H. Roell: ‘The Development of Tin Pan Alley’, America’s Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-Century Society, ed. K.J. Bindas (Westport, CT, 1992), 113–21
H.A. Spring: Changes in Jazz Performance and Arranging in New York, 1929–1932 (diss., U. of Illinois, 1993)
E.A. Berlin: King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era (New York, 1994)
R. Woliver: Hoot! A Twenty-Five Year History of the Greenwich Village Music Scene (New York, 1994)
R. Kostelanetz: The Fillmore East: Recollections of Rock Theater (New York and London, 1995)
S.J. Tanenbaum: Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York (Ithaca, NY, 1995)
K.K. Shelemay: ‘A Study of Syrian-Jewish Music in Brooklyn’, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Newsletter, viii (1986), 24–5
A.R. Schramm: ‘From Refugee to Immigrant: the Music of Vietnamese in the New York–New Jersey Metropolitan Area’, New Perspectives on Vietnamese Music, ed. P.T. Nguyen (New Haven, CT, 1991), 90–102
L.E. Wilcken: Music Folklore among Haitians in New York: Stage Representations and the Negotiation of Identity (diss., Columbia U., 1991)
V.W. Boggs, ed.: Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City (Westport, CT, 1992)
Zheng Su De San: Immigrant Music and Transnational Discourse: Chinese American Music Culture in New York City (diss., Wesleyan U., 1993)
F.M. Figueroa: Encyclopedia of Latin American Music in New York (St Petersburg, FL, 1994)
D.R. Hill: ‘A History of West Indian Carnival in New York City to 1978’, New York Folklore, xx (1994), 47–66
L. Waxer: ‘Of Mambo Kings and Songs of Love: Dance Music in Havana and New York from the 1930s to the 1950s’, Latin American Music Review, xv (1994), 139–76
R. Glasser: My Music is my Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and their New York Communities, 1917–1940 (Berkeley, 1995)
M.M. Vega: ‘The Yoruba Orisha Tradition Comes to New York City’, African American Review, xxix (1995), 201–6