This is a timeline of music in the United States from 1820 to 1849.
1820 Anthony Philip Heinrich publishes a set of instrumental and vocal pieces, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, his first published work in a long series that will make him the "chief composer of orchestral music" of the era.Crawford, pg. 314Chase, pg. 270 The Euterpeiad, published in Boston by the Franklin Music Warehouse (one of the first music stores in the country), becomes the first periodical entirely about music in the United States.Elson, pg. 44
Early 1820s music trendsThe Boston 'Euterpiad becomes the first American periodical devoted to the parlor song.Tawa, pg. 18 The all-black African Grove theater in Manhattan begins staging with pieces by playwright William Henry Brown and Shakespeare, sometimes with additional songs and dances designed to appeal to an African American audience. Ira Aldridge, the first renowned actor of African descent, is among the performers. He will later popularize "Opossum Up a Gum Tree", the earliest known slave song.Crawford, pg. 21 John Cromwell becomes the leading African American singing school master in Philadelphia; his students will include other prominent masters, such as Robert Johnson and Morris Brown, Jr.Southern, pg. 105
1821 The Quaker Levi Coffin gives an early account of an ancestor of African American spirituals.Darden, pg. 67 The black African Grove theater, led by Henry Brown,Southern, pg. 116 in Manhattan opens to the public, one of the earliest theaters to feature African American performers in full productions, also training the renowned Ira Aldridge. Lowell Mason publishes his first book of hymns, the Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, which quickly becomes one of the most popular tunebooks of the era.Crawford, pg. 142Burk, Meierhoff and Phillips, pg. 129Chase, pg. 132Horowitz, pg. 29 gives the year as 1822 The Army is reorganized, allowing musicians to be treated as privates in pay and allowances, and bands were officially allowed to form their own squad within each regiment.U.S. Army Bands
1822 Thomas Hastings publishes his Dissertation on Musical Taste, the "first American treatise of its kind".Crawford, pg. 151 John Cole forms an influential music publishing business with his son, located in Baltimore.Abel, pg. 255 English comedian Charles Matthews tours the United States, including a song in his act, "Possum up a Gum Tree", which he hears on his trip by African Americans at a theater in New York. His use of the song is the "first certain example of a white man borrowing (African American) material for a blackfaced act."Chase, pg. 233, quoted from
1823 Henry Rowley Bishop's Clari, or the Maid of Milan, with libretto by the American John Howard Payne, is premiered, both in London and New York. The melodrama becomes wildly popular into the 1870s, and one song, "Home! Sweet Home!", becomes one of the most popular of the 19th century.Crawford, pgs. 177–178 It will be the most popular song on both sides of the American Civil War.Clarke, pg. 19 Dancing has become such an "integral part of a gentleman's education it was incorporated into the curriculum at West Point".Abel, pg. 171 The first piece of sheet music with a lithographed cover appears; it is "The Soldier Tired".Abel, pg. 257 The first Italian opera introduced to the United States is Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville, performed in New Orleans, but in French. Pierre Egan's Tom and Jerry, or Life in London is a hit play, presented at the African Grove Theatre, that establishing a common comic convention, that of the urban city slicker and a rural visitor.Clarke, pg.20 Giacomo Beltrami collects the oldest extant Native American flute, now in the collection of the Museo Civico di Scienze Naturali in Bergamo, Italy.
1824 James Caldwell, an Englishman in New Orleans, begins to show English opera at the Camp Street Theater; this is the beginning of English opera in New Orleans. Caldwell's company became rivals of John Davis' Théâtre d'Orléans. With the composition of The Saw Mill; Or, a Yankee Trick, Micah Hawkins becomes the first American-born composer to write both the music and libretto for an opera.Kirk, pg. 385
Mid 1820s music trendsAfrican American churches begin sponsoring concerts of sacred music in Eastern cities.
1825 The Park Theatre in New York City hosts a performance of The Barber of Seville by an opera led by Manuel García and aided by exptriate Lorenzo da Ponte. The show was very successful, and helped establish a market for continental opera in the United States. Maria García, the show's female lead, became the first female star singer in New York.Crawford, pg. 180 The American piano industry begins with the patenting of a new construction for the instrument by Alpheus Babcock of Boston, which used a metal frame rather than a wooden one.Crawford, pg. 234 The Independent Band of New York becomes the then "first important independent professional band" in the country.Hansen, pg. 215 James Hill Hewitt writes the parlor song "The Minstrels Return from the War", which becomes the first internationally successful by an American songwriter",Abel, pg. 65 and remains the most popular song until the advent of Stephen Foster.Clarke, pg. 14 The song's success establishes Hewitt as the first American "compose parlor songs and market them successfully". "The Minstrels Return from the War" is the first song commonly perceived as truly American. The Forest Rose; Or, American Farmers by John Davies and Samuel Woodworth is probably the first opera with an African American female role in the country. The Army stops requiring officers to pay for the costs of forming a regimental band.
1827 The first black newspaper in the country, Freedom's Journal, is founded, containing, among other topics, announcements and advertisements for concerts and singing schools, and music editorials.Southern, pgs. 101–102 New Orleans' Théâtre d'Orléans begins touring the major cities of the Northeast with non-English operas. Yale and Harvard University found the first collegiate bands in the United States. The seven-note "do-re-mi" system of musical notation is introduced, though it does not become common until after the Civil War.Malone and Stricklin, pg. 8
1828
The Allentown Band is founded. It will become the oldest American band in continuous existence. Elizabeth Austin, a famed English singer from London, begins traveling across the eastern half of the United States. She becomes a major singing sensation.Crawford, pg. 185 Street vendor Henry Anderson, also known as The Hominy Man, becomes a local legend in Philadelphia for his "strong, resonant 'tenor robusto' and the fact that his were 'the most musical of all cries'."Southern, pg. 125Hester, pg. 48 St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Philadelphia becomes the first black church in the country to purchase a pipe organ,Southern, pg. 128 and the first to hire a black female organist, Ann Appo.Southern, pg. 603 Thomas D. Rice, an actor, creates a stage character called Jim Crow, based on a crippled African American stable groom's singing and dancing. Jim Crow became a stock character in blackface minstrel shows.Crawford, pg. 201 Rice publishes "Jump Jim Crow", a fantastically popular song whose status will endure for decades.Peretti, pg. 22
Late 1820s music trendsThe banjo spreads from African Americans to whites, with the first documentation coming from Joel Walker Sweeney in Virginia.Crawford, pg. 205 Sweeney will change the body of the banjo from the traditional gourd to a European drum shell.Wondrich, pg. 22 Showboats begin traveling along the Chattahoochee River, bringing the first professional entertainers to Columbus, Georgia and other towns along the river.Abel, pg. 244 Marches have become the most prominent part of military and other large band repertories throughout the United States. These are commonly characterized as using "fanfare-like melodies and a characteristic dotted rhythm motive.Crawford, pg. 277
1829 George Washington Dixon, a blackface performer, introduces a popular song, "Coal Black Rose", which is said to be the first blackface comic love song.Chase, pg. 233 Henry E. Moore leads the first singing school conventions, for singing masters, in Concord, New Hampshire and other areas.Birge, pg. 18
1830 Approximate: Lowell Mason forms the earliest known formal singing school for children. The school is free.Crawford, pg. 147 The first documented reference to a performance that is a "definitive account" of spirituals. General Winfield Scott heads a board to prepare a tactics manual, which provides a place for musicians in the regimental order of battle. The manual also contains the musical signals used by Army musicians.U.S. Army Bands
1831 Anthony Philip Heinrich composes Pushmataha, a Venerable Chief of a Western Tribe of Indians; this has been called the influential composer's artistic peak, and is also when Heinrich became the first "American composer to celebrate the customs of North America's native peoples".Crawford, pg. 317 American copyright law recognizes music "as a form of culture that required systemic protection".Sanjek, David and Will Straw, "The Music Industry", pgs. 256–267, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Elizabeth Austin, an English singing star, stars in the premier of Michael Rophino Lacy's Cinderella, or the Fairy and the Little Glass Slipper, which made her a household name across much of the United States.Crawford, pg. 185–186 Joshua Leavitt, a Congregationalist minister (and later a prominent abolitionist publisher), publishes The Christian Lyre, the "first American tunebook to take the form of a modern hymnal, with music for every hymn (melody and bass only) and the multistanza hymns printed in full, under or beside the music. The Christian Lyre and this year's Spiritual Songs for Social Worship, compiled by Thomas Hastings and Lowell Mason, were widely adopted tunebooks in the 1830s New England Revivalism movement.Crawford, pg. 169 Nat Turner's slave rebellion fails; the song "Steal Away", which may have been written by Turner himself, is sung during the rebellion, and it becomes one of the major songs of the spiritual tradition. Only much later does mainstream American discover that the song contains coded references to secret religious meetings.Darden, pgs. 81–82
Early 1830s music trendsQuicksteps begin to replace marches as the most prominent music of the military and other large band repertory. This is, in part, spurred by the development of brass instruments, whose aptitude for playing melodies is reflected in the sprightly and flowing melodic style of quicksteps. Marches remain common in country dancing, as accompaniment for dances like the cotillion and the quadrille.
1832 Changes to Army regulations make bandsmen regular soldiers, required to serve in battle if needed, establishes a position for bandmasters, and limits the size of regimental bands.
1833 José de la Rosa, a guitarist, composer and printer, moves to California, where he will document the oldest-known transcription of Mexican-Californian song lyrics. Lorenzo Da Ponte and others back the building of New York City's first opera house.Crawford, pg. 181 Lowell Mason and George James Webb found the Boston Academy of Music, which would teach both secular and religious music. This is the first music pedagogical institution in the country.Birge, pgs. 25–26 The Mexican government secularizes the Roman Catholic missions of California and sends the local priests back to Spain. The music of these missions had been rooted in plainsong and polyphonic singing.Crawford, pg. 18 The first building intended exclusively for the performance of opera in the United States is opened, in New York.Elson, pg. 102
1834 Mid 1830s music trendsThe Boston Academy of Music moves from education and sacred song into the cultivation of instrumental music by recognized European masters.Crawford, pgs. 302–303