Bound for America: Three British Composers

Preface

Preface In this book I tell the stories of three British-born composers who, although well established in their native country,decided in middle life to change their domicile and to begin a second composing career in the United States. They are William Selby (1738–98), who arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1773 and made his career in Boston; Rayner Taylor (1747–1825), who settled in Philadelphia in 1793; and George Knowil Jackson (1757–1822), who emigrated in 1796, reached New York in 1801, and moved to Boston in 1812. There were other British composers who played an equally important role in American music at this time. The ones I considered most seriously for inclusion, but finally rejected, are Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809) and Benjamin Carr (1768–1831), indisputably two of the best American composers of their age. Reinagle was a highly gifted musician of Austrian descent, born in England , who passed his early years in Glasgow and Edinburgh, visited Lisbon and Hamburg (where he met with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach), and settled in Philadelphia in 1786. There he established himself as director of the New Theater company and dominated the theater music scene for the rest of his life.He also wrote four outstanding piano sonatas that are credited with being the first sonatas composed in North America. However, his theater music is almost entirely lost,while the sonatas were never published and seem to have been unknown to contemporary Americans. The music by Reinagle that actually represents his interaction with the American public is so sparse, and on the whole so trivial, that it cannot fairly be said to represent him as an American composer.1 Carr’s case is quite different. There is no disputing his importance and influence in America, as a leading publisher, performer, and impresario, as well as composer, which very possibly exceed that of any other musician of the time.2 But in his case the problem is with the British portion of his career . Though he did compose one opera for the London stage, it is lost, and the only surviving compositions from his London period are two songs and possibly one hymn tune. The position is similar with James Hewitt (1770– 1827), by general agreement a lesser composer than Carr. Since my main object was to compare the British and American halves of a composer’s career ,I reluctantly decided to exclude all these from my principal study,though they play important secondary roles in this book. The three men finally selected were already well established in Britain when they decided to emigrate, though none had reached the highest level of achievement and reputation there. They then completed their careers in America. They left behind, largely in published form, a sufficient volume of compositions to permit a reasonable comparison of the two sections of their composing careers. That was the essential condition that led me to choose them over Reinagle and Carr. A certain parallel with my own career stimulated my interest in these men. Educated in Britain as a musician, and then as a musicologist, I moved permanently to the United States at the age of thirty-four, for a mixture of reasons ,economic,professional,and personal.There I continued my career and found that I had to modify my ideas and practices in various ways to suit my new surroundings. It is this sort of adaptation that I wished to investigate in Selby, Taylor, and Jackson. For all three of my chosen musicians, there has been a vast difference in their reputations in Britain and the United States. They barely exist in modern accounts of British musical history. American scholars have given them respectful or grudging attention, according to their own historiographical stance (this question will be tackled in the last section of the introduction), but have concentrated their interest on the American segment of their careers . The main reason for the difference is obvious. In the context of British musical history they were relatively insignificant, dwarfed by their contemporaries ; and they disappeared over the horizon. In American musical history they loomed large as early leaders and pioneers. A second reason is nationalism . I cannot fault American scholars for favoring, claiming as their own, and sometimes overrating music composed in the United States, for I have done exactly the same with music composed in Britain.But the circumstances of my career have aroused in me an equal interest in both parts of these musicians’ lives...