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- 21 - - Chapter Two 0 INTERLUDE The BMG Movement—The Sources B eginning in the early 1880s, the guitar entered a new period of popularity , this time in the carefully orchestrated company of the banjo and, eventually, the mandolin. Highlighting the similarity of playing techniques , instrument manufacturers and music publishers created a fictional family of plucked instruments, identifying them as the “trio” or “plectral” instruments . By the early years of the twentieth century, these businessmen identified themselves, their customers, and others devoted to the plectral instruments as the banjo, mandolin, and guitar (BMG) movement.1 Although dedicated in principle to musical instruments and music-making, the BMG movement—reflecting the values of America’s musical culture—was as devoted to commercial interests, fully participating in the numerous latenineteenth -century developments in America’s approach to both music and business. Among the important commercial changes that played a significant role in the BMG movement were industrialized mass production, newly invented advertising techniques, and a burgeoning magazine publishing industry. These three developments were inextricably linked in American business’s search for and creation of national mass markets. The American guitar has been profoundly influenced by these developments , becoming in the late nineteenth century not only a mass-produced and nationally distributed item but also the subject of national advertising campaigns carried to consumers on the pages of inexpensive magazines. Leaders of the BMG movement created magazines dedicated to the promotion of instruments and sheet music, overflowing with articles, editorials, instructional columns , and especially advertisements. These periodicals document a fifty-year period of significant musical and commercial activity around the trio instruments , outlining the movement’s history and confirming its commitment to America’s mainstream musical and commercial values.2 INTERLUDE: THE BMG MOVEMENT—THE SOURCES - 22 The BMG movement grew out of the activities of northeastern manufacturers and publishers, remaining rooted in that region’s metropolitan areas. The earliest BMG magazines came from Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, but in the 1890s periodicals sprouted up in the Midwest and on the West Coast. The heyday of the BMG movement extended from the late 1890s to about 1920, although BMG magazines first appeared in the early 1880s and continued to be published into the 1930s. Many of these magazines were short-lived, in some cases surviving less than a year; others ran for decades, persisting through numerous business cycles, new owners, and relocations. Several of these longrunning magazines are relatively well-known to historians of the banjo, mandolin , and guitar, in part because they have survived in nearly complete runs in public and private collections. These include S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal (Philadelphia), Cadenza (Kansas City, New York and Boston), The F.O.G. Journal (Cleveland), and Crescendo (Boston and Hartford). Others surviving in fragmentary form, sometimes in libraries but more often in private collections, include The Musical Enterprise (Philadelphia), Gatcomb’s Musical Gazette (Boston), The Chicago Trio (Chicago), The Musical Tempo (Philadelphia), The Major (Saginaw, Michigan), The Allegro (Dwight, Illinois), The Reveille (San Francisco), The Studio Journal (Philadelphia), Griffith’s (Philadelphia), and the Serenader (Sioux City, Iowa). The significance of these magazines in the history of the guitar in latenineteenth -century America rests on three points. First, despite the fact that these publications spanned approximately fifty years and were spread across the country, collectively they convey a remarkably consistent message and perspective . Even when publishers, editors, and columnists regularly attacked each other in their journals, the magazines reflect a consensus that confirms the unity of the BMG community, including its use and vision of the guitar. Second, members of the BMG community regularly described its mission in artistic and pedagogical terms, but the magazines confirm that the BMG movement was business-driven. As a result, the guitar, its music, and its use were judged as much by commercial considerations as by artistic or aesthetic. Third, although late in the twentieth century the guitar became an instrument of the social outsider, these magazines confirm that during the BMG era the guitar was a middle-class instrument used to instill and reinforce the cultural and musical values of America’s mainstream. These values include not just the primacy of commercial concerns and the importance of the banjo and mandolin , but also cultural jingoism, a faith in progressive ideals, musical literacy, privileging of European musical forms and styles, and secondary, supporting roles for women. The BMG magazines offer later readers a contemporaneous record of the movement, its instruments, and its values based...

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