ABSTRACT

Popular, folk, and art-music idioms had provided the basic sources from which the first American art-music styles were to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The main influences in the formation of modern American music came from European classical and Romantic traditions, which had found their way to the United States in the nineteenth century, and from native American and Afro-American tunes. In the early nineteenth century, elements from these sources were absorbed already into the works of the American composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), who had studied in Paris since 1842 and had performed in various cities of Europe and the Americas. His eclectic compositional approach, which included musical quotations, as well as his use of special rhythmic techniques (syncopation, etc.), foreshadowed the music of Charles Ives and the jazz movement. Particularly striking was his absorption of the tunes of Stephen Foster, negro minstrels, and other African-influenced folk materials, which found their way into his piano and orchestral works. In the middle of the nineteenth century, another prominent musical figure, the internationally known Bohemian composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861), had also infused his classical–romantic European style with experiences he acquired from travels across the American frontier. These styles were evident in his first major publication of vocal and instrumental pieces, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature (1820), which also incorporated popular musical quotations such as Yankee Doodle into his often elaborate and complex forms. In his first orchestral piece, Pushmataha, a Venerable Chief of a Western Tribe of Indians (1831), and other works, he revealed what may be considered the earliest influences of American Indian music on the classical repertoire.