Charlotte Le Pelletier's Journal of Musick (1810): A New Look at French Culture in Early America

In February of 1810, a New York literary magazine, Journal des Dames, published the following notice in its regular monthly issue:

Les cinq premièrs numéros de ce Journal sont déjà publiés, et notre opinion se trouve pleinement confirmée en effet le talent et le goût ne pouvoient manquer de présider à l'entreprise de Madame le Pelletier. . . . Nous ne pouvons douter que ce Journal ne soit de plus en plus encouragé par tous les amateurs de la bonne musique, soit utilité est incontestable surtout pour les jeunes personnel qui étudient le forté-piano. ¹

[The first five issues of this journal have already been published and our opinion is totally confirmed. Indeed talent and good taste could not fail to mark Madame le Pelletier's undertaking. . . . We cannot doubt that this journal should be increasingly supported by all fans of good music and that its usefulness is indisputable, especially for young people who study the fortepiano.]

When Charlotte Le Pelletier arrived in the United States earlier that decade, women composers were rare, and for a woman to compose, arrange, and publish her own works, as well as those of others, was virtually unheard of. And yet Charlotte Le Pelletier's ambitious Journal of Musick, published in Baltimore in 1810, managed to reach out to an American public thirsty for music to be played not only in the concert hall, but on the family square piano at home—music for students, for amateurs, and for all who knew only live music before the age of radio and modern recording technology. Use of the harpsichord was fading, and the piano, growing steadily in popularity, rapidly became a fad. By the turn of the nineteenth century, American pianos were being built by Charles Albrecht, William Bent, and Thomas Dodds, among others, and the nation's great demand for playable tunes was being filled by a flood of publishers in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. ² Most of these selections were reprints of English publications, and virtually all were composed or transcribed by male musicians. Through her French background and American contacts, Charlotte Le Pelletier brought not only a fresh repertoire to the American cultural scene, but a vital new perspective of the historic role that women played in early American culture.

For the American woman of the early nineteenth century, music was primarily a social art. Her role was to focus on her husband and her household, which often included entertaining her family on the pianoforte. If women wrote music, Judith Tick observed, their "range of composition was narrower than men, such as Alexander Reinagle and Benjamin Carr. Music written by women—parlor dances and the like—was rarely published and had more of a kinship with American popular crafts than to serious cultivated music." ³ Many were also anonymous "ladies" and, like "Madame Le Pelletier" in her Journal of Musick, they used only their husbands' names. Attitudes toward creative women in America, moreover, reflected those of eighteenth-century Europe. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "the education of women should always be relative to men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them . . . these are the duties of women at all times and what they should be taught in their infancy." ⁴

During the era of the Revolution, however, women in France discovered many new opportunities to redefine themselves. Their instincts, feeling, and imagination were not only valued as necessary for composing, but also, as Letzer and Adelson attest: "Theatrical women and women of letters embraced the Revolution's egalitarian and libertarian principles and enthusiastically entered the male-dominated field of opera." ⁵ Between 1770 and 1820 at least fifty-four operas by twenty-three women were composed, including works by Julie Candeille, Isabelle de Charrière, Lucile Grétry, and others. Many of these women preferred to write in the opéra comique style, largely because in its simplicity and accessible melodic flow it reflected the common human spirit. ⁶ In other...