Music

Music is perhaps the least place-specific of all the arts, and a study of “Connecticut music” could be a bit artificial. But there are ways to give the study a local focus. One good way to begin is to organize the research around Connecticut composers, a list of eighty of whom, organized alphabetically, is found in Lewis Carlisle Granniss, Connecticut Composers (New Haven: Connecticut State Federation of Music Clubs, 1935). Granniss points out, “Few realize that Connecticut was the pioneer state to develop music in this country.” (p. 1) Much music was written and published in New Haven in the early years of the Republic, and Richard Crawford has compiled a list of “Connecticut Sacred Music Imprints, 1778-1810,” Music Library Association Notes 27 (1971). The first music school in the United States, established in Salem, Connecticut, in 1835, enjoyed forty years of great success. That story is told by Frances Hall Johnson in Tercentenary pamphlet XXVII (1934), Music Vale Seminary, 1835-1876.

There is an unpublished comprehensive history of music in Connecticut available only in a photocopy of the author’s script at the Watkinson Library, Trinity College. It is Nathan H. Allen, “Music in a New England State: From Psalmody to Symphony in Connecticut, with Some Happenings Along the Way, 1636-1900.” Allen was a composer and organist in Hartford, not a musicologist, and his manuscript contains no citations or bibliography. Typical chapters deal with the history of the contention over “rule or rote,” psalmodists of Connecticut, early organs, secular and sacred music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biographical sketches, and the Yale school of music. Allen copied hundreds of notices of concerts, musicales, operas, minstrel shows, and so on from nineteenth-century Hartford newspapers. Two folders contain material for his supplementary footnotes. Allen published some of his material in a four-part series, “Old-Time Music and Musicians,” in Connecticut Quarterly. In these articles, Allen discusses New England music generally, though there is a heavy Connecticut focus, especially on Hartford. The issues in which the articles appear are 1 (1895) 3:274-79; 2 (1896) 1:54-58, 2:153-55; 3 (1897) 1:66-68,2:286-89; 4 (1898) 3:319-28.

Other works focusing on music in Connecticut:

Bushnell, Vinson C. “Daniel Read of New Haven (1757-1836): The Man and His Musical Activities.” Doctoral dissertation, Harvard, 1978. Read was a musician, composer, and partner of Amos Doolittle in publishing music. He was author of The American Singing Book (1785) and editor of America’s first journal in the field, The American Musical Magazine, which he launched with others in 1786.

Coote, Albert N. Four Vintage Decades: The Performing Arts in Hartford, 1930-1970. Hartford: Huntington, 1970. “Symphony music, opera, ballet, theater, both professional and amateur, chamber music, the popular concert, the travel lecture...all are given copious attention.... This book depicts the long cavalcade of men who have played important roles on the artistic scene” in Bushnell Hall, the focus of the work. The quotation is from Raymond E. Baldwin’s introduction.

Crawford, Richard. Andrew Law, American Psalmodist. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969. This is a 424-page scholarly study of Law (1749-1821).

Gay, Julius. “Church Music,” in Gay’s Farmington Papers. Farmington, Conn., 1929. Includes some hard-to-find information about the seventeenth century. The essay continues down to the 1840s.

Hoxie, Frances Alida. “Five Decades of Concerts in Hartford, 1800-1850.” CHS Bulletin 41 (October, 1976) 4:119-28. A nice sketch about popular music.

Johnson, Francis Hall. Musical Memories of Hartford. Hartford, 1931. Coote, cited above, calls this work “detailed and authoritative,” drawn from “voluminous private records and her long experience as teacher and musician.” It comes down to 1930.

Murray, Sterling. “Timothy Swan and Yankee Psalmody.” The Musical Quarterly 61 (1975). Swan (1758-1842) was a composer and compiler who lived in Suffield for about thirty years.

Peck, Esther. See under “Society and Daily Life.”

Steel, David Warren. “Sacred Music in Early Winchester.” CHS Bulletin 45 (April, 1980) 2:33-44. A scholar traces the background of psalmody in eighteenth-century Connecticut.

--“Truman S. Wetmore of Winchester and his ‘Republican Harmony.’” CHS Bulletin 45 (July, 1980) 3:75-89. “Eighteenth-century Connecticut supported a lively musical life, even in the most isolated areas. If keyboard instruments and concerts were rare, sacred music was still a matter of community concern, and singing schools flourished.” (p. 75) Wetmore wrote words and music for church use during the late 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century. His best known piece is “Florida.”

Stoeckel, Carl. Music and Poetry at Norfolk. N.P., priv. printed. 1898. A marginal little item of sixty-three pages.

Webb, Guy B. “Timothy Swan, Yankee Tunesmith.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1972.

Williams, Emily. “Spirituality as Experienced in Song.” Connecticut Magazine 9 (1905) 4:745-49. A detailed description of the sacred music and dancing of the Enfield Shakers, with illustrations.

Wilson, Ruth Mack, and Keller, Kate Van Winkle. Connecticut Music in the Revolutionary, Era. Bicentennial pamphlet XXXI (1979). This is an excellent tract on the sacred, military, and recreational music of eighteenth-century Connecticut. It is the best published work on music in the state, despite its limited temporal scope. The bibliography will prove quite helpful.