Music in the Chautauqua Movement: From 1874 to the 1930s by Paige Lush (review)

Paige Lush’s Music in the Chautauqua Movement: From 1874 to the 1930s is notable for being the first full-length study of the role of music within Chautauqua, a major force in American culture in the early twentieth century. The institution of Chautauqua touched the lives of millions of Americans during the three decades that its performers traveled across the country, making summer appearances in tents in rural regions, typically in towns with populations of under 10,000. In the opening chapter of her book, Lush presents a detailed historical background for Chautauqua, beginning with the summer retreat in Chautauqua, New York, originally founded for the education of Sunday school teachers in 1874, from which the movement takes its name. The term was subsequently applied to regional Chautauquas, locally run assemblies with religious and educational missions, that sprang up to supply lectures and cultural events and to sponsor study groups. However, the author’s primary focus is the Chautauqua tent circuit, which was a commercial venture with “talent” supplied by regional entertainment bureaus; it lasted from approximately 1904 into the early 1930s. Chapter 1 also briefly considers the relationship of the Chautauqua system to the lyceum lecture bureaus, created in the mid-nineteenth century to supply speakers and, later, various entertainments during the winter season. Commercial Chautauqua flourished with the creation of the “circuit” system, well established in the Midwest and beyond by 1910. Chautauqua managers booked five to seven days’ worth of lectures and entertainments for each town, supplying a platform and tent, and advance advertising, with the financial support for the week being guaranteed by the town hosting it. The entertainment provided for small communities was presented to them as “culture,” an educational and moral good that would enrich rural lives.

Music was an essential component of Chautauqua, and although there have been numerous dissertations, articles, and monographs about the political content of its oratory and the nature of its dramatic entertainments, many of which inform Lush’s work, its music has received little or no scholarly consideration. The difficulties in researching Chautauqua are manifold. For example, its sheer size has resulted in a voluminous amount of primary source material: bureau publications, correspondence, periodical literature, publicity fliers for thousands of individual acts, managers’ and performers’ memoirs, not to mention local press reports. (The largest Chautauqua collection is held at the Special Collections of the University of Iowa Libraries; performers’ fliers are available at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/tc/.) During its peak years, Chautauqua had some twenty-one managing companies and, by the author’s calculation, 250 musical acts were touring in the early 1920s, including chamber groups, vocal quartets, bands, jubilee ensembles of African American singers, opera companies, novelty acts, and various “exotic” groups such as Hawaiian musicians (all of which are listed in a helpful appendix). Yet, as Lush acknowledges, the most useful records for determining what music was actually heard in tent performances across the country often do not exist: most concerts were given without printed programs. Lush copes with these challenges as well as can be expected, drawing on the few extant programs available and the musical scores that have been preserved in the records of the managing bureaus.

Music in the Chautauqua Movement is attractively illustrated with numerous photographs of Chautauqua performers and cartoons from the movement’s professional publications. Lush’s approach to her topic is multifaceted and for the most part well balanced. Yet her attempts to include independent Chautauquas and, occasionally, the “mother” institution in New York State in her book, while admirable, sometimes cause slight organizational problems, interrupting a narrative grounded in commercial Chautauqua with brief sections about the other variants. Lush considers music within the larger social context of Chautauqua, integrating current scholarship into the book as needed. Occasionally she misses a primary source that might have been useful, such as some of the publications of...