From Psalm to Symphony: A History of Music in New England (review)

From Psalm to Symphony: A History of Music in New England. By Nicholas E. Tawa. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001. [xvi, 466 p. ISBN 1-55553-491-0. $35.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

From Psalm to Symphony: A History of Music in New England is professor emeritus (University of Masssachusetts, Boston) Nicholas E. Tawa's latest addition to music literature. In this book, he surveys the contributions the six northeasternmost states have made to American musical culture, concentrating on the region's major art music composers and giving less space to the histories of organizations and institutions. The work is divided into fifteen chapters, the first few covering the expected early psalm-singing traditions and singing schools before venturing into the world of Lowell Mason, sophisticated musical undertakings, and music as an element in cultural uplift that became a constant thread in the region.

The book is short on illustrations and lacks music examples, yet it is rich in detail, and perhaps in some cases too rich. The picture that emerges is one in which great achievements and well-received compositions have suddenly or gradually (and in many cases undeservedly) fallen by the wayside. For example, the chapter on John Knowles Paine and George Whitefield Chadwick provides numerous reports of fine works and glowingly received first performances, yet pieces such as Chadwick's opera The Padrone remain unperformed and in manuscript, while the bulk of Paine's orchestral works and Chadwick's more than 125 songs are so rarely heard on current concert programs that their presence as living music verges on extinction. Tawa's descriptions of many works are evocative, making the reader anxious to hear the scores or at least to view a music example. The author demonstrates tremendous breadth and depth in reading, research, and intimate familiarity with countless musical works throughout the book, and is unafraid of making assessments of the many works he surveys.

While From Psalm to Symphony's concentration on a single region enables Tawa to cover many subjects and individuals in more detail than is found in the many published surveys of American music, many of the subjects treated here have already been the focus of separate monographs. Tawa's new book thus finds itself straddling well-known topics such as William Billings, Lowell Mason, George Whitefield Chadwick, Horatio Parker, Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Handel and Haydn Society, while less successfully conveying a sense of the content of New England musical life and music education in general. Emphasizing the roles of the city of Boston and Harvard University may be well-nigh inevitable in treating this subject, yet other stories, such as the establishment and growing pains of the Yale University School of Music and the departments of music at New England's other major universities (Brown, for example) escape mention.

Seven composers, all productive during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are given special prominence: chapter 6 surveys the work of John Knowles Paine and George Whitefield Chadwick; chapter 7, the music of Horatio Parker, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell; and chapter 8, that of Amy Beach and Charles Ives. Of these, Edward MacDowell has the most tenuous connection to New England, being a native New Yorker who lived in Boston only eight years, later summering in New Hampshire during his appointment at Columbia University. Including him here commemorates his most productive loci and the high esteem his music enjoyed in Boston. The chapter on Beach and Ives begins with a short essay on women composers in New England, providing thumbnail sketches of the work of Margaret Ruthven Lang and Mabel Daniels, among others. The overall treatment of women composers (Beach included) is too brief to be satisfying and is unfortunately marred by a small error: Daniels's "first consequential work" (p. 207) is titled The Desolate City rather than The Desolate Cry. Beach and Ives keep...