Listening to the Progressives?

Derek Vaillant. Sounds of Reform: Progressivism & Music in Chicago, 1873-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

"The chief value of music," stated the Manual of the Boston Academy of Music in the 1830s, "will be social and moral." No one knew this better than the generation of American musicians who lived in the midst of the multiple reform movements in the years prior to the Civil War. Popular performers lit up antebellum stages not only with fiery temperance tunes and antislavery anthems but also with songs on behalf of Native Americans and asylum inmates. This "moral" music tradition, derived largely from the music and spectacle of religious revivalism, stood in contrast to the depraved songs promoted by blackface minstrels. From the singing of enslaved African Americans, the contested offerings of blackface minstrels, and the sacred hymns of Lowell Mason to the symphonies of Beethoven and the abolitionist songs of the Hutchinson Family Singers, music in antebellum America represented the varied and often divided nation. Music could signify gentility and at the same time, such as in the hands of reformers, it could signify rebellion—"You can sing what would be death to speak," alleged one antislavery songbook. Nearly thirty years later, progressive reformers tried to bring a different kind of "social and moral" music to the parks and the immigrant enclaves of Chicago. They met an unexpected reaction. Working for and against the reformers, an ethnically and racially diverse working class struggled to find their own identity through a musical medium in Chicago. Sounds of Reform is Derek Vaillant's exploration of this vibrant musical culture, with all its contradictions and triumphs, from 1873 until 1935.¹

The history of American reform music is filled with composers, performers, and others who tried to use sound in one way or another to better society. Today, the mention of reform music often conjures up images of Phil Ochs, a youthful Bob Dylan, or the Weavers. The figure most often associated with social reform and music during the sixty-year span of Vaillant's book is, of course, the I.W.W. songster Joe Hill. Jane Addams and Eleanor Smith are names not usually associated with music, but Vaillant wastes no time in establishing how music and reform worked together for these two women. Smith, who headed the Hull House Music School, collaborated with Addams on a song they called "A House Stands on a Busy Street": "Some hours they sit 'neath music's spell,/ and when the air is rife,/ With all the magic of sweet sound,/ It heals the pang of life" (p. 1).

Vaillant starts in 1873, providing context for the musical world that the progressives soon would inherit. There were three ways to control the "outlets of expression and public culture": to cater to the public's musical tastes, to absorb local musical impulses into public events, and to impose what was deemed the "best" music for the public's consumption (p. 11). Conductor Patrick Gilmore, a crowd-pleasing favorite who was quite fond of loud canon blasts, led a large orchestra and chorus for the 1873 Jubilee in Chicago. The Jubilee exhibited a public consensus that later musical events did not because, according to Vaillant, Gilmore's "eclectic" program—one which featured opera, choral music, German lieder, Russian folk songs, and popular American tunes—"guaranteed crowds" with its "proven formula" (pp. 13-4). Chicagoans recovering from the Great Fire of 1871 were not moved by Gilmore's critics who wanted a strict fare of European art music to predominate and who did not want to see one of Gilmore's memorable finishes that included firemen in full regalia striking anvils.

The Jubilee, according to Vaillant, "celebrated a kind of ersatz democratic unity that used popular music and Patrick Gilmore to construct a mass audience" (p. 17). What the Jubilee lacked—what would have made the Jubilee's unity authentic&#8212...