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FRANKLIN BRUNO on 19th century musicking

and SARA JAFFE on punk’s racial politics.

First Appearance of Jenny Lind in America, September 11, 1850

FRANKLIN BRUNO

Gilded Age Fan Club

Daniel Cavicchi
Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum
Wesleyan University Press, November 2011. 256 pp.

In 1869, Patrick Gilmore, the former Union army bandleader, who wrote the lyrics to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” organized the National Peace Jubilee and Grand Music Festival on the model of “monster concerts” introduced in Europe 15 years earlier. (Think of it as a kind of postbellum Bonaroo.) Around 30,000 Bostonians — over a tenth of the city’s population at the time — flocked to a makeshift coliseum for several days of concerts by a thousand-member orchestra and massive choral groups of up to 10 times that size. Three years later, the same city’s “World Peace Jubilee” doubled the number of singers and musicians, and more than trebled the audience. For the later event, Gilmore imported Johann Strauss, no less, to conduct his own global hits. “Now just conceive of my position face to face with a public of four hundred thousand Americans,” the Waltz King later wrote:

Suddenly, a cannon-shot rang out, a gentle hint for us twenty thousand to begin playing the Blue Danube. I gave the signal, my hundred assistant conductors followed me as quickly as they could, and then there broke out an unholy row such as I shall never forget.

The performance was more satisfying to Yankees like 15-year-old Helen Atkins, who reported in her diary that she “enjoyed it ever so much. Strauss played ‘the Blue Danube’ perfectly mag[nificient] – !!!!! All went off very finely.”

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