Music in Boston

Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 18521918 is a history of the citys classical-music culture in the period that begins a decade before the American Civil War and extends to the close of the Great War. The book provides insights into the intellectual foundation of Boston's musical development as revealed in the writings of its significant critics and thinkers, including John Sullivan Dwight, John Knowles Paine, William Foster Apthorp, and others. It also examines the influence of outsidersPatrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, Richard Wagner, New Yorks Metropolitan Opera, and Richard Strausson Bostons performance and composition scene while also considering events that affected music in Boston, such as the building of the Music Hall, the acquisition of its Great Organ, the National Peace Jubilee, Chicagos Columbian Exposition, Bostons first Wagner Festival, and the rise and fall of the Boston Opera Company. Music in Boston also accounts for the ascent of the Second New England School of composersJohn Knowles Paine, Edward MacDowell, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach and othersand discusses their key compositions and legacy. Finally, the book explores Boston itself: its transformations via immigration, its ever-changing topography, and its economy.