-
Chapter Five: Transitions: From the Parlor to the Concert Hall
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
- 77 - - Chapter five 0 TRANSITIONS From the Parlor to the Concert Hall F ollowing S. S. Stewart’s unexpected death in 1898, his heirs and business partners succeeded in keeping the business, including his Journal, afloat for several years into the new century. But conflicts arose among the different parties (at one point leading to the publication of both a New York and a Philadelphia Stewart’s Journal), and the business and periodical eventually expired. In some ways, Stewart’s had outlived its original purpose, for beginning in the early 1890s the BMG community underwent a dramatic change in its musical and commercial focus. By the turn of the new century, the mandolin had replaced the banjo as the primary instrument in the BMG ensembles. Not merely a replacement of one instrument for another, this shift from the banjo to the mandolin affected the constitution and repertoire of America’s plectral ensembles through the first quarter of the new century. This shift to the mandolin was accomplished in part by the invention of new instruments, a development that had a direct impact not just on the guitar’s role in the ensembles but on the instrument’s physical design, too. Coupled with the appearance of a coterie of players, teachers, and advocates in the BMG community who asserted the guitar’s role as a refined solo instrument, these changes redefined the guitar’s place in the BMG movement and pointed the way to a redefinition of the instrument, its repertoire, and its role in America’s musical culture. At the same time that Stewart was laying the foundation for his manufacturing and publishing business in Philadelphia, New York’s theater audiences witnessed the beginnings of the new musical fad that was to dominate the BMG movement. In 1880, an ensemble of Spanish musicians disembarked from the S. S. France in New York harbor. The New York Times identified them as a “Spanish student troupe” that had garnered significant attention two years earlier at the international Paris Exposition. Numbering somewhere between fifteen TRANSITIONS: FROM THE PARLOR TO THE CONCERT HALL - 78 and twenty-five players, the Figaro Spanish Students created a sensation in a nearly four-month run at Booth’s Theater. This ensemble, playing strictly from memory, featured nine bandurrias and five guitars in a repertoire ranging from traditional Spanish folk songs and dances to Beethoven sonatas. From all accounts, the Spanish Students were an immediate hit. The ensemble was built around the bandurria, a wire-strung plucked instrument that carried the melody and countermelodies while the guitars provided harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment. To nonmusicians, the bandurria resembles the round-backed mandolin, with a teardrop-shaped body, courses rather than individual strings, and an aggressively bright sound. Reports differ as to what happened to the troupe after their run in New York, but it hardly matters. Their initial success inspired imitators, and new Spanish student ensembles immediately sprang up in their wake. Playing on the racial stereotypes of the day and assuming (correctly) that no one knew the difference, Italian musicians called themselves Spaniards, pretended to be students, and substituted the round-backed “potato bug” or Neapolitan mandolin for the bandurria.1 Many of these early mandolin ensembles were professional or semiprofessional and because the mandolin and violin share the same tuning, many of the Italian pretenders were musically literate violinists. The “new” Spanish student ensembles followed the lead of the “Original Spanish Students” (as the real Spaniards came to be known), playing arranged folk and popular songs, but the musical literacy of the new ensembles allowed them to tackle more sophisticated light classical works, as well. Banjos were not, of course, used by the Spaniards, but banjo ensembles like the Boston Ideals felt the pressure and added mandolins to their performances, though early on the instruments were not played together. Ethnic costumes and music remained popular through the 1890s, but after the turn of the century most BMG ensembles eventually reserved such musical posing only for special concerts.2 As had happened with the banjo ensembles, amateur mandolin clubs grew up in the wake of the professionals. And although mandolin playing and mandolin ensembles eventually became a craze, it was a craze that had to percolate for nearly twenty years before boiling over. Through the 1880s and much of the 1890s, banjos and mandolins participated as equals in these clubs (always with the harmonic support of the guitar, of course), but by the turn of the century , the mandolin...