Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, Volume 2: Reverber

In this second volume of Strong on Music, Vera Brodsky Lawrence carries into the 1850s her landmark account of the nineteenth-century New York music scene. Using music entries from George Templeton Strong's famous journals--most published here for the first time--as a point of departure, Lawrence provides a vivid portrait of a vibrant musical culture.

Each chapter presents one year in the musical life of New York City, with Lawrence's extensive commentary enriched both by excerpts from Strong's diaries and a lavish selection of little-known music criticism and comment from the period. The reviews, written by an often truculent, sometimes venal tribe of music journalists, cover the entire world of music--from opera to barrel organ, salon to saloon.

In this New York, operas performed by renowned artists are parodied by blackface minstrels; performances of the Philharmonic Society are drowned by the raucous chatter of flirtatious adolescents, who turn concerts into a noisy singles' hangout; and irate critics trash the first performances of Verdi operas, calling the plots indecent and the scores noisy and unmelodic. In this volatile atmosphere, a native musical culture is born; its whose first faltering efforts are dubiously received, and the first American composers begin to emerge.