A portion of the result of this study was published au courant in a magazine, awakening so much attention that I have at length decided to yield to constant requests and publish the articles in more accessible form. The necessity for revising many of the opinions formed hastily and published immediately, the possibility now of taking the work of our musicians in some perspective, and the opportunity of bringing my information up to date, have meant so much revision, excision, and addition, that this book is really a new work.
The biographical data have been furnished in practically every case by the composers themselves, and are, therefore, reliable in everything except possibly the date of birth. The critical opinions gain their possibly dogmatic tone rather from a desire for brevity than from any hope—or wish—that they should be swallowed whole. No attempt to set up a standard of comparative merit or precedence has been made, though it is inevitable that certain music-makers should interest one more than certain others even more worthy in the eyes of eminent judges.
It may be that some inspectors of this book will complain of the omission of names they had expected to find here. Others will feel a sense of disproportion. To them there is no reply but a pathetic allusion to the inevitable incompleteness and asymmetry of all things human.
Many will look with skepticism at the large number of composers I have thought worthy of inclusion. I can only say that the fact that an artist has created one work of high merit makes him a good composer in my opinion, whether or no he has ever written another, and whether or no he has afterward fallen into the sere and yellow school of trash. So Gray's fame is perennial,—one poem among many banalities.
Besides, I do not concur in that most commonplace fallacy of criticism, the belief that not more than one genius is vouchsafed to any one period of an art, though this opinion can be justified, of course, by a very exclusive definition of the word genius. To the average mind, for instance, the whole literary achievement of the Elizabethan era is condensed into the name of Shakespeare. Contemporary with him, however, there were, of course, thirty or forty writers whose best works the scholar would be most unwilling to let die. There were, for instance, a dozen playwrights, like Jonson, Fletcher, Ford, Marlowe, and Greene, in whose works can be found literary and dramatic touches of the very highest order. There were poets less prolific than Spenser, and yet to be credited with a few works of the utmost beauty, minor geniuses like Ralegh, Sidney, Lodge, Shirley, Lyly, Wotton, Wither, John Donne, Bishop Hall, Drayton, Drummond, Herbert, Carew, Herrick, Breton, Allison, Byrd, Dowland, Campion—so one might run on without naming one man who had not written something the world was better for.
All periods of great art activity are similarly marked by a large number of geniuses whose ability is not disproved, because overshadowed by the presence of some titanic contemporary. It would be a mere impertinence to state such an axiom of art as this, were it not the plain truth that almost all criticism of contemporaries is based upon an arrant neglect of it; and if it were not for the fact that I am about to string out a long, long list of American music-makers whose ability I think noteworthy,—a list whose length may lead many a wiseacre to pull a longer face.
Parts of this book have been reprinted from Godey's Magazine, the Century Magazine, and the Criterion, to whose publishers I am indebted for permission. For the music reproduced here I have to thank the publishers whose copyrights were loaned for the occasion.
If the book shall only succeed in arousing in some minds an interest or a curiosity that shall set them to the study of American music (as I have studied it, with infinite pleasure), then this fine white paper and this beautiful black ink will not have been wasted.