This timeline of music in the United States covers the period from 1850 to 1879. It encompasses the California Gold Rush, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and touches on topics related to the intersections of music and law, commerce and industry, religion, race, ethnicity, politics, gender, education, historiography and academics. Subjects include folk, popular, theatrical and classical music, as well as Anglo-American, African American, Native American, Irish American, Arab American, Catholic, Swedish American, Shaker and Chinese American music.
1850
The Junius Theater of Nashville, Tennessee opens, one of the then largest stages in the country.Abel, pg. 249 The California Gold Rush brings the first major influx of European-derived music to the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada and northern California counties. and and The first American Eisteddfod, a Welsh music and art festival tradition, is held in the United States.Hansen, pg. 223 Isaac B. Woodbury publishes The Dulcimer; or, The New York Collection of Sacred Music, one of the most successful collections of Christian songs of the era.Chase, pg. 144 One of the biggest musical stars of the day, Swedish singer Jenny Lind, demands the unheard-of sum of $187,000 from promoter P.T. Barnum to go on a national concert tour. Barnum raises the money, and promotes her so successfully that an estimated thirty thousand people arrived to watch her ship land in New York Harbor,Crawford, pg. 186 and the tour is a great financial success. Lind first performs at Castle Gardens in New York.Burk, Meierhoff and Phillips, pg. 207 Louis Moreau Gottschalk composes "The Last Hope", his most popular song. It will later become a staple of film scores, often used to accompany death scenes.Clarke, pg. 57 The Luca Family performs at an abolitionist meeting in New York, then goes on to become the most prominent African American singing family of the kind inspired by the white Hutchinson Family.Southern, pg. 106 The first theater opens in San Francisco, California.Crawford, pg. 193 The Slippery Noodle opens in Indianapolis, Indiana. As of 2009, it is the oldest bar in Indiana and a prominent regional blues venue.Bird, pg. 320 Stephen Foster's "Gwine to Run All Night", or "De Camptown Races", becomes a minstrel show hit, helping to launch Foster's career; he would go on to become the most famous songwriter of the 19th century,Crawford, pg. 210 and the first "full-time popular songwriter". He also composed Angelina Baker in this year. Henry Wehrmann and his wife become the most prominent engravers in the Southern music publishing industry.Abel, pg. 258 Self-consciously old-fashioned concerts, in period dress, presenting the music of the colonial-era United States become popular; they are known as Old Folks Concerts, and are first organized by Robert Kemp.Chase, pg. 136 The San Francisco opera tradition begins in 1850 and boasts international stars and a lively set of local performers by the middle of the decade.Crawford, pgs. 191–194 Popular songs become more "haunting and mawkish, the forerunner of the modern 'hurtin' songs".Abel, pg. 136
1851
Community brass bands have spread across the country, even to rural Columbia, California, where a local brass band greets the arrival of the first white woman in the town.Abel, pg. 133 Ex-slave Elizabeth Greenfield begins performing in Buffalo, New York, under the sponsorship of the Buffalo Musical Association. She subsequently tours across North America,Crawford, pg. 427 becoming popularly known as the Black Swan, the country's first black concert singer.Southern, pg. 103 Lewis Henry Morgan conducts the first ethnographic study of the Native Americans of the Northeast United States. and Music education is first introduced into the public school systems of Cleveland, Ohio and San Francisco, California.Birge, pg. 65, citing Francis M. Dickey's The Early History of Public School Music in the United States Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" is published; it will become his most popular and remains perhaps his best-known composition.Chase, pg. 256 Theodore Eisfeld begins a series of concerts that will play a major part in introducing public chamber music concerts to New York City. The first opera performed in San Francisco is Vincenzo Bellini's La sonnambula, performed by a troupe led by an Italian tenor formerly employed in Peru and Chile.
1852
The first Cantonese opera performed in the United States premiers in San Francisco, performed by the Hong Fook Tong Chinese Dramatic Company. A fire destroys the Boston factory of Chickering and Sons, the market leader in the American piano manufacturing industry, it will be rebuilt to be the largest building in the country after the United States Capitol building.Crawford, pg. 235 Dwight's Journal of Music, an influential periodical, is first published in Boston. One of its contributors is Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who will go on to become the first North American "scholar to undertake studies of music history based on criticism of primary sources".Blum, Stephen. "Sources, Scholarship and Historiography" in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, pgs. 21–37 The Bostonian Eliza Biscaccianti and the Irishborn Catherine Hayes are the first in a series of star singers to make the fledgling San Francisco opera tradition among the most prominent in the country. The melody for the song that would eventually be known as "John Brown's Body" is composed by William Steffe. It will become the unofficial theme song for African American servicemen during the Civil War.Southern, pg. 210 The song is spread by the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment.Elson, University Musical Encyclopedia, pg. 102 Music education is first introduced into the public school system of St. Louis, Missouri. A Sacred Repository of Anthems and Hymns, the first Shaker hymnal to feature tunes, is published in Canterbury, New Hampshire.Chase, pg. 204
1853
Brooks K. Mould releases "Garden City Polka", the first copyrighted music published in Chicago. This is the beginning of that city's publishing industry. Firth, Pond & Company publish The Brass Band Journal, which includes the first band music to use the saxhorn. Frederick Law Olmsted gives one of the earliest depictions of an African American field holler, describing it as "a long, loud musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into a crescendo... like a bugle call".Darden, pg. 44 George F. Root, William Bradbury and Lowell Mason organize the first Normal Musical Institute, a school offering training for music teachers, located in New York.Chase, pg. 143 Root and Bradbury, with Thomas Hastings and Timothy Mason, collaborate on The Shawm, a popular collection of church music which they advertise as selling more in its first year of release than "any previous similar publication".Chase, pg. 142; Chase cites an advertisement from 1855. Louis Antoine Jullien, a French conductor, forms an orchestra in New York, to great acclaim; his prominent use of the quadrille helps to spur the development of sheet music for that dance.Crawford, pgs. 285–286 Louis Gottschalk begins his concert career in the United States, already a renowned composer from his work in Europe.Chase, pg. 291 The first opera performed in Chicago is Lucia de Lammermoor.Burk, Meierhoff and Phillips, pg. 163 Virtuoso Norwegian violinist Ole Bull attracts an unprecedented 10,000 people to a concert in Memphis, Tennessee. Phillip Werlein enters the music publishing business in New Orleans. He will go on to become one of the principal publishers of that city in the mid-19th century.Abel, pg. 267 Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night" represents a radical shift in his approach to composition, abandoning the use of dialect and imparting a "blatant message (that) undoubtedly affect(s) working-class minstrel show audiences (who) would soon be called on to shed their blood to bring about the end of slavery in the United States". William Henry Fry's Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony is first performed. It is a controversial piece, and is probably the first American composition to use the saxophone. It also uses special effects that will not become common elements in such pieces until the following century, including a toy trumpet, sleigh bells, a whip, and the use of a double bass to make the sound of howling wind and a dying traveler.Chase, pg. 312
Mid 1850s music trendsMinstrel shows begin their second decade of popularity growing towards a "more limited, stereotyped portrayal of black characters."Crawford, pg. 217 Saxhorns come to dominate the music of military bands.Crawford, pg. 274
1854
The English singer Anna Thillon stars in a series of opera performances in San Francisco, in the city's first professional season. A local Italian opera company forms as well, performing fourteen operas, half of them by the rising composer Giuseppe Verdi. A Syrian settling in Brooklyn is apocryphally said to be the first Arab to permanently move to the United States, thus beginning the Arab American musical tradition. Twelve-year-old Augustus Meyers enlists in the Army. His account of the School of Practice for Army bandsmen on Governors Island in New York, published in Ten Years in the Ranks, U.S. Army, is the first description of that School.U.S. Army Bands Members of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, led by a young man named Forest Savage, form a band in Lawrence, Kansas. This is said to be the beginning of the documented music history of Kansas.Burk, Meierhoff and Phillips, pg. 181 Victor-Eugene McCarty, one of the first of several prominent free black composers in New Orleans, publishes Fleurs de salon: 2 Favorite Polkas. William A. Hodgdon moves to St. Louis, Missouri, where he will pioneer the use of music in that area's public schools.Burk, Meierhoff and Phillips, pg. 152Birge, pg. 80
1855
The Board of Music Trade of the United States, a trade cartel, is formed by the twenty-five biggest music publishing companies in the country, instituting price controls on sheet music for European classical music, which will remain in place until 1885. The Board will also fight music teachers, who sell sheet music to their students.Clarke, pg. 251 George F. Bristow's Rip Van Winkle is said to be the first successful opera on an American subject, Washington Irving's short story Rip Van Winkle.Chase, pg. 310 It is also the first American opera based on a subject by a contemporaneous author.Kirk, pg. 386
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes a long poem called The Song of Hiawatha, which sparks a surge of interest in Native American culture; this helps to inspire many later attempts at fusing elements of Native American and European-derived musics.Crawford, pg. 393 Longfellow's work inspires many composers like Charles Crozat Converse's "The Death of Minnehaha".Cornelius, pg. 9 Louis Grunewald, one of the major music publishers of the Civil War era in New Orleans, enters the business for the first time.Abel, pg. 268 William Joseph Hardee publishes a two volume manual Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics: For the Exercise and Manoeuvres of Troops When Acting as Light Infantry or Riflemen. It contains the "General Calls" that will signal all the important events in daily military camp life for both the Confederate and Union armies in the coming Civil War.Abel, pg. 145
1856
W.C. Peters and Son, a music publishing company, releases a collection of hymns that is the first such collection published in the American Midwest.Snell and Kelley, pg. 31, citing Wetzel, pgs. 203–230
1857
Edmond Dédé is possibly the first black North American to graduate from the Paris Conservatory. Joseph William Postlewaite, a free African American, begins leading bands in the St. Louis area, also composing several pieces, including the popular "St. Louis Greys Quick Step". Louisville, Kentucky becomes the first city in the country to include music education in the primary grades.Birge, pg. 79