cover image What They Heard: Music in America, 1852-1881, from the Pages of Dwight's Journal of Music

What They Heard: Music in America, 1852-1881, from the Pages of Dwight's Journal of Music

. Louisiana State University Press, $0 (317pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-1258-8

Sixty-odd articles selected from some 8000 pages of a 19th century Boston magazine here describe concert and opera life in the U.S. of that day, both in the big Eastern cities and in the hinterlandorchestras, choral societies, conservatories and the less formal music of the small towns and common folk. Grouped chronologically, well introduced and annotated, the extracts report on the era's musical thought and activity in all its diversity: concerts by Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, Ole Bull, Louis Gottschalk, Hans von Bulow and Anton Rubinstein, first performances of Gilbert and Sullivan, the songs of Stephen Foster, brass bands, minstrel shows, musical freaks and organ grinders. Readers interested in music or history will find much here to enlighten them about America's cultural past. Photos not seen by PW. (April 4)