Musical Learning in the 19th Century (subtitle: How can we develop an approach and its application to the early banjo??)

[Greg Adams]

Hello,

I have so many irons-in-the-fire as of late that I haven't even picked up my banjo in a couple weeks (grrr). Yet, I finally made time to take a ridiculously brief look into something that's been on my mind A LOT, but which I've yet to investigate more fully--musical literacy in the 19th century, especially as it might pertain to amateur and non-professional early banjo players and their ability to read music and, thus, transmit music and influence others. This is something I know a number of us have gone back-and-forth on in the past.

I started going through JStor today and came a across an article from 1983 (which means that there should definitely be much more available, hopefully) that was written by Dr. Richard Crawford. Since I'm at the beginning of my literature review, I figured I'd share something with all of you that was meaningful to me.

Here's the information:
Musical Learning in Nineteenth-Century America
Author(s): Richard Crawford
Source: American Music, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 1-11
Published by: University of Illinois Press

I'm not suggesting any conclusions, just a preliminary gesture toward finding a way to substantively think about what we are gleaning from our structural understanding of the banjo books and arranging and interpreting music from other sources. FOR ME, this article began to provoke some new thoughts (probably some thoughts some of you have already considered):

I liked how Crawford presents two ends of a spectrum in which people have looked at music learning and music making. He talks about about a "chip-off-the-old-block" school of looking at European musical influences in America vs. "Americans finding their own forms and styles of musical expression, distinct from those of European musicians." Instead of looking at things exclusively from either end of this spectrum, he suggests that much can be learned about music in America by looking at both and what's in between. He says,

"My hunch is that a study of musical learning and its dissemination in nineteenth-century America could make that period more accessible to scholarly understanding than it has been. ("Musical learning" here is taken to mean musical knowledge and/or skill voluntarily acquired.) The agenda for such a study would be wide-ranging. It might seek to define the various degrees and states of learning that specific American musicians sought and achieved; it might deal with modes of learning-self-study, group instruction, private study-always within the framework of the learner's and the teacher's methods and expectations; it might also trace the geographical spread of musical learning; and it might examine the resistance or indifference to formal musical learning found in many quarters, and all that that implies."

FOR ME, THIS ARTICLE SUGGESTS THAT THERE IS A REASONABLE WAY TO CONTEXTUALIZE certain aspects of early banjo music in a way that I had not considered previously. WHAT I WANT TO KNOW is how much of what Crawford posits here has been more fully explored since 1983 (and before, for that matter) and HOW CAN IT INFORM OUR COLLECTIVE APPROACH TO THE EARLY BANJO BOOKS AND RELATED PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL?

Hope to see you all soon,
Greg

[John Masciale]

Greg, there are so many areas to look at here that I'm not sure where to begin.

First, the growth of truely American music comes from a lot of sources. If you want to get a handle around 19th century music you have to look at those sources. You have to look at how people perceived music, and to what purpose if served in their daily life.

Part of this study would have to look at the memoirs of as many people as possible to see what we can glean. We also have to try and think like the people of that era, and not be prejudiced by today's attitudes. How were people different musically back then than we are today? We live in a culture where we can press a button and hear virtually any kind of music we like, whenever, and whereever we are. This was not an option back then, and so people had to either make music, or regularly go to the music halls and theatres to get their "dose," which apparently they did.

We are also reluctant today to publicly sing or play an instrument (except for kareokee?), because we can push that button. I think it is also a matter of laziness, I can push a button and hear good musicianship, often better than my own, so why should I bother? We are also somewhat lazy; I can't tell you the number of people who have told me that they wished they could play an instrument. I have always had a fascination with the banjo, and when I got into my mid 40s I realized that if I wanted to learn, then I had better pick the instrument up and do so. No regrets :)

I guess what I am trying to get at is to question how are people's attitudes towards music today different than their attitudes in the 19th century. If I want to learn music I can apply myself to doing so. I have a lot more avenues to do this today than people had back then.

Before we can go much farther we have to ask why people were picking up banjos and playing them. It was almost certainly not to play music from Chopin and Schuman, or Bach or Mozart for that matter. People were intrigued by the popular music of the day. They wanted to sing and play that music. Is that a fair conjecture?

So, were the instructors a guide for learning the instrument, or were they the a source of banjo repetoire? Were they a little of both? For starters, these are questions I would like to see us try to answer. I don't know of too many studies that have really looked into this, and would love to find and read any that have.

[razyn]

I liked how Crawford presents two ends of a spectrum in which people have looked at music learning and music making.

I don't know Crawford personally, but I've gotten a lot of use out of his magnum opus, American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1990). This is a work begun in the 1940s as a bibliography, by Allen Britton (among the handful of musicologists Crawford names as associated with the European music, trickle-down approach to the study of American music). It was enlarged and supplemented for twenty-something years by Irving Lowens (named by Crawford in the group approaching the subject more overtly as Americanists). So its backstrip shows the authors as Britton, Lowens, Crawford. But Crawford took on the project (with the blessing and cooperation of both of the senior scholars) in 1969, and the 1990 volume as it stands is largely his work. It's also seven years newer than the article cited by Greg, and presumably affected by whatever early feedback he may have received after that was published.

I'd like to direct your attention particularly to the part of his Introduction, under heading 5 (Performers and Performing), subhead "Instrumentalists." This is really about the gradual intrusion of organs (and eventually other keyboards) into church worship in the US -- or what would shortly become the US. But in passing, Crawford drops a 1763 reference to the Banjo (as one of several inappropriate, "carnal" instruments) that I don't recall having seen before. Not to mention a reference to the Dulcimer (as an OK instrument), in the same 1763 Philadelphia publication. I realize that's probably a hammered dulcimer; but even so, it's an early use of the term, this side of the pond. Check out his footnotes 70-71, to references on p. 23. The early works cited are presumably listed in the Evans series of Early American Imprints, and thus available in microform for study at many major libraries. (There's also a digital-imagery version available, at universities that subscribe to that service.)

Not to distract you from this discussion of Crawford's serious work, I've collected older American tunebooks for about fifty years; most of them are religious, of the sort discussed in Crawford's big book (although not all that many are earlier than 1810, his cutoff date). A few are secular -- or what amounts to the same thing, designed for instruments, rather than the voice -- and therefore theologically neutral (having no words under the notes). Of the few secular ones, fewer still focus on the minstrel (ergo, for your purposes, the banjo) repertoire. It was not a universal taste. But it was very popular, in places from which much of America's printed music was issued -- most notably Boston, New York and Baltimore, I believe.

Anyway, the hit-and-miss printed record is skewed in many ways (geographically, ethnically, economically); it's just what we have. And it's valuable. But I don't think The Banjo Man (in that 1813 painting in Richmond) got his musical or textual ideas from the stage, on which mostly northern white guys were doing second hand impressions of him. Gumbo Chaff did.

Dick Hulan