How did popular music show interest in Americans in the early 1800s?

Answer 1

It was popular because they thought it was creative to sing songs out of the book of Bible.

Answer 2

Interesting question, I'll make a go of it and hope others add on.

To start with, music probably always reflects class differences, except where A) we have big pieces of the picture missing (such as the Middle Ages, when most of the music of the peasant majority wasn't written down), or B) where mass media blurs such differences, such as the "urban cowboy" phenomenon in the 1980s or the popularity of hip-hop in both the inner city and the suburbs. (I think there's also an argument to make about the tendency in the U.S. to pretend we don't have class differences, but that's another question!)

Where I would start on this question is by identifying major class/cultural shifts in the 19th century, and then looking for correlation. Two instances come to mind:

In 19th-century European Classical Music you see the continuation of the "artist-hero" template set by Beethoven--the visionary above the plane of lesser mortals. Many of the Romantic-era composers lived outside of the norms of the middle-class majority--Schubert, Paganini, Liszt, Wagner--and identified with the intellectual elite that was following the philosophers away from a traditional Christian worldview. On the other hand you had what the Germans call the "Biedermeier" (roughly equivalent to "Joe Sixpack"), the traditional middle class that listened to music to be entertained, not to be shocked or provoked or lifted into a transcendental experience.

In his book Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music, Carl Dahlhaus proposes that this explains the dichotomy in classical sacred music during the 19th century. On the one hand you have the cutting-edge compositions--Berlioz's titanic Requiem that almost needs a stadium just to hold the performers, Verdi's smaller but highly operatic Requiem, Mahler's massive 8th symphony with its texts combining the Gregorian chant "Veni creator spiritus" and the redemption scene from Goethe's Faust (!?), and even more vaguely spiritual-philosophical music such as Strauss's Death and Transfiguration or Wagner's Parsifal and Tristan.

But this isn't church music by the definition Biedermeier knew it--being performed in a church. On that side we find Felix Mendelssohn, whose oratorio Elijah is an excellent work in the Handel tradition, Bruckner, who revitalized the motet genre with an infusion of chromaticism, and a huge host of lesser-known composers writing masses, oratorios, cantatas, anthems, and hymns for churches and amateur choirs. Dahlhaus's point is that there were two different kinds of "sacred" music in the 19th century, written for very different audiences, and it isn't hard to see that there were fewer composers of the first rank writing church music for Biedermeier. (Much as it pains me to say it, because I love the Mendelssohns, I think he's right.) An exception to this might be Brahms's German Requiem, which could easily appeal to both audiences.

Another example of musical class differences in the 19th century comes from the field of sacred music in the United States. During the colonial era, isolation and lack of opportunity for formal musical training led to the cultivation of a home-grown institution, the singing-school, with its own rough-and-ready music that grew out of the English psalm-tunes and anthems but had its own rules of counterpoint and harmony.

But in the early 19th century, as the east-coast cities began to flourish and build up their own cultural institutions in imitation of European cities, many felt a sense of embarrassment over this "vulgar" tradition of church music and wanted to replace it with music written on proper European models. In Boston, the very city that had produced William Billings, a leading singing-school composer of the Revolutionary era, the new-founded Handel and Haydn Society (the name says enough!) was devoted to "elevating the public taste" in church music. The leading light of this movement was Lowell Mason, who was also essential in the introduction of music instruction into public schools in the United States. The singing-school music survived further west, however, and took solid root in the Midwest and south, where it survives in various folk traditions such as the Sacred Harp singings.

I think this was pretty clearly a matter of class distinctions; as the east-coast urbanites began to flex their economic muscle, they wanted to be culturally equal to their European associates as well, and considered the music of their less-educated ancestors something of an embarrassment. It survived on the frontier and in rural areas, however, where attachment to these traditions was a point of pride. It was an early example of one of the fundamental divides in the United States--the urban-vs.-rural paradigm--which shapes culture and politics to this day.

Answer 3

I have no ideacm c f