Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, 1836-1875Volume 1: Resonances 1836-1850 (Strong on Music, Vol 1)

Resonances is the first volume of Strong on Music, Vera Brodsky Lawrence's comprehensive, three-volume chronicle of the little-known New York music scene from 1836 to 1875, based on the superb private journal of George Templeton Strong, one of the great primary records of nineteenth-century America. Over this forty-year period, Strong, an avid and articulate music lover, attended a great number and variety of musical events and recorded his responses to them in his journal. Taking these comments--few of them previously published--as a point of departure, Lawrence has rounded out the scene with a fully documented account of the many worlds of music outside Strong's circle, culled from music criticism, editorial comment, gossip, and advertising found in the New York daily and periodical press. Resonances immerses us in the deluge of music that from the early 1830s through 1849 descended upon the New York public, vividly portraying concerts, oratorios, and operas, as well as an amazing profusion of musicals, burlettas, melodramas, opera travesties, blackface minstrel shows, and other forms of popular music. We meet glamorous opera stars and spectacular instrumental virtuosos from abroad, feuding Italian opera companies, the New York Philharmonic Society, and the vicious breed of music critics who agreed only in their antagonism toward emerging American composers. A blend of meticulous scholarship and witty commentary, Resonances informatively and entertainingly reveals for the first time a fascinating and important area of our cultural past.