Porch and Playhouse, Parlor and Performance Hall: Traversing Boundaries in Gottschalk\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Banjo\u3c/i\u3e

This article reconsiders the cultural significance and historical impact of the well-known virtuosic piano composition The Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the banjo and the piano inhabited very specific and highly contrasting performance circumstances: black folk entertainment and minstrel shows for the former, white middle- and upper-class parlors and concert halls for the latter. In The Banjo, Louis Moreau Gottschalk lifted the banjo out of its familiar contexts and placed it in the spaces usually privileged for the piano. Taking its inspiration from both African American and minstrel banjo playing techniques, Gottschalk\u27s composition relaxed and muddled the boundaries among performance spaces, racial and class divisions, and two conspicuously different musical instruments in an egalitarian effort to demonstrate that, contrary to the opinions of some mid-nineteenth-century musical critics and tastemakers, both the piano and the banjo have a place in the shaping of American music culture

“Mon triste voyage”: Sentimentality and Autobiography in Gottschalk\u27s The Dying Poet

The terms sentimentalism and sensibility play a central role in contemporary scholarly discourse on literature and intellectual theory in the long nineteenth century. Often used interchangeably, these words identify developments in popular culture and philosophy in which emotions and feelings, as opposed to reason and logic, were seen as the routes to moral and social improvement. In visual, literary, and musical artworks of the era, the emphasis on feeling was frequently connected to a male archetype of the sentimental protagonist, a dying poet, marked by several common elements: great creativity, high levels of sensitivity, physical and emotional fragility, significant moments of disappointment, and early (and often self-inflicted) death. The subject of the dead or dying young man assumed critical significance during the 1860s, when so many soldiers were lost during the Civil War. For his immensely popular work The Dying Poet (1864), composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk likely drew inspiration from two French poems of the same title that employed both the dying poet trope and complex imagery of reminiscence. Although The Dying Poet was one of Gottschalk\u27s most popular and lucrative pieces, it was composed during a time of relative discontent and melancholy. In the mid-1860s, he was traveling across the Civil War-torn United States on a gruelingly unrelenting schedule. Gottschalk\u27s composition The Dying Poet can be viewed as a poignant paradox-a simultaneous example of his great sensitivity to the desires of his audience and a tantalizingly autobiographical glimpse of the profound loneliness he felt while performing for them

\u3ci\u3eOrchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise\u3c/i\u3e by Douglas W. Shadle

Review of Douglas W. Shadle\u27s Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015

\u3ci\u3eTrax on the Trail\u3c/i\u3e in the Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Classroom

Founded in 1947 by the Order of St. Augustine, Merrimack College is a private, selective liberal arts college located about twenty-five miles north of downtown Boston. In response to the school’s increased emphasis on interdisciplinarity (our fields are musicology [Pruett] and political science [Flaherty]), as well as our own shared interest in the topic, we cocreated and cotaught a new course titled Music and Politics. Course topics were based on both instructor and student interests and ranged from issues of censorship, rebellion and revolution, gender, and race to the use of music in political campaigns. We sought to incorporate a wide variety of interdisciplinary resources that included the essays and databases provided on Trax on the Trail; primary and secondary material