USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV > Part 59
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Among the music schools of Boston, the Perkins Institution and Massa- chusetts School for the Blind has from the first stood high.1 In age it ranks them all. From its very infancy, in 1832, its far-seeing, philanthropic founder, Dr. S. G. Howe, felt the importance of compensation for the want of sight through finer cultivation of the sense of hearing, and knew the peculiar aptness of the blind for music. Here again we meet at the thresh- old, as first music teacher, Dr. Lowell Mason (1833). He was succeeded, about 1840, by that able and earnest musical educationist and journalist of the Academy days, Mr. Theodore Hach. Then came the lamented Joseph Keller; then for nine years Mr. Anton Werner, followed by Carl Ansorge, - all faithful, excellent instructors. But the department received a new
1 [See the chapter on " Education," in the present volume. - ED.]
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THE HISTORY OF MUSIC IN BOSTON.
impulse and expansion, and its standard was greatly raised, during the War of the Rebellion, under the administration of Mr. F. J. Campbell, himself blind from the age of three, an accomplished and intelligent musician hav- ing a genius .for organization. He made himself acquainted with all the musical activities and principal musicians of the city ; and every opportu- nity was given to the pupils of hearing the oratorio, symphony, and other high-class concerts. Their own proficiency as organists, pianists, and cho- rus singers was strikingly exhibited in their occasional concerts, or before chance visitors. Some of them were equal to the rendering of great fugues of Bach, sonatas of Beethoven, etc. Their programmes, indeed, were and have ever since been of a high and classical character. Their band of brass. and reeds has won favor wherever it has been heard. Mr. Campbell's · ambition, seconded by Dr. Howe, was to build up a complete national col- lege of music for the blind in America ; but meanwhile, travelling in Europe, he fell in with the blind physician, Dr. T. R. Armitage, in London, who had conceived a similar idea. They joined forces, and from their eloquent appeals and energetic labors sprang the Royal Normal College and Acad- emy of Music for the Blind at Upper Norwood, Surrey, near the Crystal Palace, under the patronage of Queen Victoria, the Prince and Princess of Wales, etc., and very liberally endowed. Mr. Campbell was placed at its head in 1872, and it is still carried on with signal success under his direc- tion, with a corps of teachers nearly all recruited from our Perkins Institu- tion here. Music is pursued there in the highest sense of art, as is shown by its programmes, in which such artists as Von Bülow, W. H. Cummings, etc., have sometimes participated.
Mr. Campbell's place here has been well filled by Mr. Thomas Reeves, also blind, under whom the musical department has not only held its own, but gained important ground. For a number of years the tuning of pianos has been a special study with not a few of these pupils, to whom it opens a means of livelihood. Under a highly intelligent blind instructor, Mr. J. . W. Smith, they become not only expert tuners, but can take apart and put together the mechanism of the instrument, and keep it in repair. For sev- eral years all the pianos in the public schools of Boston have been intrusted to these blind tuners.
Meanwhile, music in the University has overtaken and outrun the dream of those early founders of the Harvard Musical Association. Harvard has her chair of music, on an equal footing with the rest, worthily filled and fruitful in results. Mr. John Knowles Paine of Portland, Me., after long and earnest studies in Berlin, returned to this country in the autumn of 1861 ; gave admirable evidences of his mastery of the organ, especially in the great school of Bach; was shortly afterward employed at Harvard to succeed the lamented Levi P. Homer as college organist and musical instructor ; was appointed "Adjunct " Professor of Music in 1873, and was raised to the full professorship in 1875. His earlier functions at the Uni- versity were limited by the want of funds for such a branch; and the idea
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
itself of the true functions of a musical professor had to be gradually wrought out and defined experimentally as he went on. Yet he contrived, by his own zeal and example, to awaken an earnest interest for music in many of the students, and to increase the general faith in music by good concerts and by the new dignity and worth which he imparted to the musi- cal side of academic anniversaries, inaugurations, and memorial services. With the professorship came formal recognition of music as a branch in the curriculum, as one of the " elective " studies. Professor Paine's classes are carried through four several courses, which occupy from three to four years according to the progress of the student. These are (1) Harmony; (2) Counterpoint; (3) History of Music; and (4) Musical Form and Analysis, with exercises in Canon, Fugue, Sonatas, etc. The number of students in these four "electives" for some years has averaged thirty. It is now about twice that number. Each year has elicited several highly credit- able original compositions in some of the higher forms, by pupils of these classes. In two instances has a baccalaureate received "honors" (summos honores) on account of musical proficiency. Several young men have pur- sued their musical studies with the professor after graduation, and have, on the ground of a satisfactory examination in the same, received the degree of Master of Arts. These have stepped at once into the practice of the musi- cal profession.
The completion of her grand Memorial Hall, by the addition of the Sanders Theatre, gave to Harvard a well nigh perfect room for musical performances, attractive to the eye, convenient to an audience of nearly fifteen hundred persons, and excellent acoustically. The musical professor of course was not slow to avail himself of these advantages; and for sev- eral winters the Theatre has been the scene of noble concerts, both of orchestral and chamber music, in the course of which Professor Paine's two symphonies have been produced, setting the seal upon his inventive genius and learning as a true composer. His crowning achievement, however, has been in the orchestral and choral music which he has composed for the performance in the Greek, by students, of the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles,- a triumph of artistic zeal, skill, and thoroughness without ex- ample in this country, and too fresh in the minds of all who witnessed it or read of it to require more here than a mere word of mention.
And now that our old University has its musical professor, its noble theatre for music, its earnest students of the art and science, its fledgling composers even, - shall not the evolution go on until there shall be a full faculty of music, as there is of medicine, of theology, of science? Thus would be practically solved the problem of the true Conservatory, or complete school of music, with that guarantee of disinterestedness and of permanence which only an established university can give.
We should now do well, if there were time, to step down for a moment from these heights of art and watch beginnings in the very nursery. We
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THE HISTORY OF MUSIC IN BOSTON.
should look into the public schools, where singing has been taught on a progressive system, from the youngest primaries upward, both by rote and note, for at least forty years. This movement started rather vaguely, to be sure, contenting itself at first with demonstrating that all children, with a very few exceptions, only enough to "prove the rule," can be taught to sing. It was the assertion of a faith, rejected by our Puritan forefathers, in the musical nature of man. Starting in the early days of the Academy of Music, it has grown up into something which can properly be called a Boston institution ; and if its principle is sound, the germ of a musical future is contained in it. But we are compelled to omit our brief sketch of its history.
Music in the schools has gone so far that it cannot go back. Generations are growing up sensitive to musical tones, knowing concord from discord, . attentive to music when they hear it, interested in it, able to sing somewhat with pleasure to themselves and others, and to read simple music. What a contrast to the dearth of opportunity in those old Puritanic days when a child, had he the genius of a Beethoven in him, found not the slightest sympathy to call it out ! Look on that picture and on this! There pleasantness was sin, and the undying musical nature of man (as real as the religious, the in- tellectual, the social nature) was only part of the original depravity. Here you have stepped into a public school, -say in one of the poorer quarters of the city, - during the lesson by Mr. Holt or Mr. Sharland; you hear the singing and catch the quick, intelligent replies of class after class of girls of eight, nine, ten years old, whose pale complexions tell of homes of poverty in crowded lanes. This is the bright hour of their week, -the hour of higher life and consciousness, of innocent delight and sense of a new power and freedom ; and they gain more and more of this inspiring and uplifting re- source as they pass through the older Grammar and the High School classes, until they are prepared to be absorbed into the vocal clubs, and renovate the oratorio chorus with fresh voices and . more skill in music than their fathers had. Surely we have made progress ; and so long as we are faithful to our public schools, music, and music's benign influence, will not die out among us.
Here we must make an end. The story is by no means complete ; it is full of omissions of worthy names which have escaped us, and of some topics, important in the eyes of many, which have had to pass unmentioned, since it would be impossible to treat them all in less than a whole volume. But if we have in any degree succeeded in making clear the unity of move- ment from the beginning to the present in the musical development of Boston, then the history itself, imperfectly as here set forth, should furnish motive for still higher effort in the same direction. The musical past of Boston, if she will truly read it in the light of the idea which can be traced through all the stages of its progress, is to be cherished as the warrant of a providential mission, a pledge to higher duty, and the promise of a fairer future.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
RESULTS. - And now from the height that we have reached let us sur- vey the actual position. Among many good signs it is enough to note these few : -
I. Boston is self-dependent now for oratorio festivals, for symphony performances, cantatas, pianists, violin school, chamber-music, - all save opera.
2. For two years the whole musical community has been engrossed in " the orchestral problem," - how to have a permanent orchestra, - now in a fair way of immediate solution through the noble enterprise of Mr. Hig- ginson, in addition to the earlier societies.
3. It is matter of common remark, that, during the past social season musical parties and reunions - often of a high and classical character, em- ploying a Beethoven Quartet Club, etc. - have been on the whole the most frequent form of "society."
4. The vocal clubs (Apollo, Boylston, Cecilia), which began with part- song singing, find more delight in giving larger works - cantatas and the like - in their integrity, with orchestra.
5. Boston has outgrown apparently the childish ambition for " monster" musical festivals on an unprecedented scale of magnitude, and has settled down upon the more musical, artistic, satisfying plan of periodical oratorio festivals as an institution, within the limits of true art and common-sense.
6. We have now our own composers, in whom we can take pride; the chief of whom, as musical professor, represents music at last accepted among the branches of higher culture in our ancient University, and one chief aspiration of the Harvard Musical Association realized.
7. The very marked improvement in the tone of musical literature and criticism, particularly in the daily and the weekly press, rendering the strug- gling musical journals, as such, almost superfluous, unless on some more comprehensive plan of means and men.
8. And meanwhile the nursery, down in our youngest schools and upward, where instruction in the rudiments of vocal music has become a nearly uniform, progressive institution which there is every motive to de- velop and perfect, - this, should all else fail, contains for us the seed of " music of the future."
John S. Dwight
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CHAPTER VIII.
ARCHITECTURE IN BOSTON.
BY CHARLES A. CUMMINGS.
T HE interest which attaches to the early houses and other buildings of the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay comes, it must be confessed, rather from association than from any intrinsic quality as of beauty or pict- uresqueness in the buildings themselves. The Puritan was no lover of beauty in any form; and in his sombre memories the greater or lesser glories of that English architecture with which his eyes had been familiar in his earlier home were but the blazonry of " low ambition and the pride of kings." He was, however, a lover of good and comfortable living; and as soon as the immediate pressure of poverty was lifted, he began to provide himself, in place of the log-houses with which for a time he had been fain to content himself, with dwellings in which as much as possible of the old English comfort might be had, and which wore both within and without an air of characteristic neatness, order, and substantial thrift.
Of these early dwellings the materials for illustration are extremely scanty. In the towns, they were promptly destroyed one after another by the frequently recurring conflagrations which the great house-fires, burning in chimneys of logs rudely plastered with mud or clay, invited, and which the thatched roofs rendered nearly impossible to arrest. In the account of Dankers and Sluyter, who travelled through the colony as late as 1680, we read : "All the houses are made of small, thin, cedar shingles, nailed against frames, and then filled in with brick and other stuff; and so are their churches. For this reason these towns are so liable to fires, as have already happened several times; and the wonder to me is that the whole city has not been burnt down, so light and dry are the materials." This danger was not unappreciated at the outset, as may be seen by a passage in a letter of Governor Dudley written as early as 1631, shortly after the burning of Mr. Sharp's house in Boston.1 Having spoken of the liability to quick
1 " About noon the chimney of Mr. Sharpe's house in Boston took fire (the splinters not be- ing clayed at the top), and taking the thatch, burnt it down; and the wind being northwest VOL. IV. - 59.
drove the fire to Colburn's house, being rods off, and burnt that down also; yet they saved most of their goods."- Winthrop's Your- nal, vol. i.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
and disastrous fires, he continues thus : "For the prevention whereof in our new town, intended this Summer to be builded, we have ordered that no man there shall build his chimney with wood, nor cover his house with thatch, which was readily assented to."1 The order had, however, little more than the force of a recommendation, and, though "assented to," was not generally obeyed. We do not, indeed, after a little time hear further of wooden chimneys; but the roofs of the commoner houses continued for many years to be covered with thatch.2
The earliest houses were naturally of a single story, and of the simplest plan, construction, and design. When the dignity of an additional story was attained, the backward slope of the roof was carried down to a height of eight or ten feet from the ground, generally covering the kitchen; and this feature afforded the one touch of unconscious picturesqueness which re- deems the prosaic ugliness of the Puritan houses. The view of the Curtis homestead in Roxbury, given in Vol. I. p. 406, will serve to remind the reader of the effect of this familiar form of roof. Now and then the back- ward slope was broken at the level of the front eaves, and carried down at a lower pitch, as in the Aspinwall house in Brookline (Vol I. p. 221), or the Pierce and Tolman houses in Dorchester (Vol. I. pp. 431-434).
When greater accommodation was required without enlargement of the area within the walls, the roof, hitherto of low pitch, changed its form radi- cally, starting from the walls at a pitch of sixty degrees or more, and chang- ing at mid-height to a slope of half that angle. This is the gambrel-roof, so called, identical in profile with the mansard roof which prevailed in the French architecture of the seventeenth century, but differing from the man- sard in that the ends were always gabled. Occasionally the lower slope of the gambrel was carried down a story lower on the back, -as in the Yeaman house in Revere (Vol. I. p. 448), or the house in Willow Court, Dorchester (Vol. II. p. 361). In rare instances the slope of the roof is broken up by gables, as in the Aspinwall house (Vol. I. p. 221).
Whatever variety is discoverable among the houses of this neighborhood during the first fifty years after the establishment of the colony, arises from the adoption of one or another of these forms of roof. The material was the same in all, -a heavy timber frame, generally of oak, smoothly boarded over and covered with clapboards, so that although there was frequently in fact great massiveness and solidity of construction, there was none in appear- ance.3 Below the eaves there was no variation from the simple rectangular
1 Winthrop's Journal, vol. i.
2 The great fire of 1679, which destroyed one hundred and fifty buildings, convinced the citizens of the dangerous character of the prevailing con- struction, and the General Court then passed the first Building Act in the history of the town. See Mr. Smith's chapter in Vol. I. p. 231.
8 A letter from Samuel Symonds to John Winthrop, Jr., in 1637, gives particular directions concerning the plan and construction of a house
he was about building at Ipswich : "I would have wood chimnyes at each end, the frames of the chimnyes to be stronger than ordinary, to beare good heavy load of clay for security against fire. You may let the chimnyes be all the breadth of the howse, if you think good; the 2 lower dores to be in the middle of the howse, one opposite to the other. Be sure that all the dorewaies in every place be soe high that any man may goe vpright vnder. It makes noe great matter
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ARCHITECTURE IN BOSTON.
mass. There were no accessory features, - no spacious porches, veran- das, balconies, to give individuality to the dwelling. In the closely built streets of the towns occasional variations from this rigid simplicity are to be observed, - as the multiplication of gables, the overhang of the second story,1 and the occasional use of rough-cast on the exterior wall, - feat- ures which were all combined in the quaint old building in Dock Square, built in 1680, of which a view is given in Vol. I. p. 547. The internal plan was nearly invariable, - a narrow entry, opening from the middle of the front, giving access to square rooms on either hand. In the smaller houses this entry was just deep enough to allow space for the doors to the front rooms between the outside door and the square-framed staircase leading to the bed-rooms above. Behind the stairs a great chimney, with cavernous fireplaces back to back, opened to each room, and rose in square and simple dignity from the middle of the roof. In houses of greater preten- sion the entry was broader and ran through the house from front to rear, the stairs having a straight run on one side, and the great central chimney being replaced by two smaller ones between the front and back rooms on either side, or by single stacks on the side walls. The stateliest mansions of the colonial period did not get beyond this simple plan.2
But as wealth increased and the grimness of Puritan life relaxed, and the social life of Boston took on the aspect of a little court around the royal governors, the pride of the wealthy found expression in a class of houses of which some few examples still remain, though the best of them have long since fallen before the march of trade, or, with less reason, through the indifference of their owners. The work for the most part of English artifi- cers, these houses followed, so far as the ornamental features were concerned, the fashion of the day in England.3 The English renaissance, which had received the impress of such men as Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, was therefore the source from which sprang the modest architecture of New England. Its richness and stateliness were beyond the reach of the
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though there be noe particion vpon the first flore; if there be, make one biger than the other. For windows, let them not be overlarge in any room, and as few as conveniently may be ; let all have current shutting draw-windows, hav- ing respect both to present and future use. . . . In the garett noe particion, but let there be one or two lucome windows, - if two, both on one side. ... I would have the howse stronge în timber, though plaine and well brased. I would have it covered with very good oak-hart, inch board for the present, to be tacked on only for the present, as you tould me. Let the frame begin from the bottom of the sellar and soe in the ordinary way vpright, for I can hereafter, to save the timber within ground, run vp a thin brick- work without . . . "- 4 Mass. Hist. Coll, vii. [For other notes on early buildings see Shurt- leff's Description of Boston, ch. xlviii. - ED.]
1 [See picture of the old house in Vol. I. p. 55I .- ED.]
2 [Other samples of early colonial houses may be noted in the Cradock house in Medford, built in 1639, delineated in Brooks's History of Medford, 1855; in Bryant and Gay's Popular History of the United States, ii. 382; in S. A. Drake's History of Middlesex County, ii. 162; and in Whitefield's Homes of our Forefathers, 1879. Also Governor Bradstreet's house, in New Eng- land Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 75; houses in Pal- frey's History of New England, ii. 59-62; and still others in Bryant and Gay's United States, i. 522; ii. 31, 37, 46; iii. 122, and in various local histories. - ED.]
8 John Dunton, in his Letters from New Eng- land, in 1686, says : ... "And when any new houses are built they are made conformable to our new buildings in London since the fire."
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
colonists, but its characteristic elegance and grace of ornament were not unworthily represented in many of the details, both exterior and interior, of the dwellings, the churches, and the public buildings of the principal New England towns. The illustrations given in previous volumes of this work of the Province house, built as early as 1679, the Clark, or Frankland house, built about 1735, the Hancock house, in 1737, and the mansion of Governor Shirley in Roxbury, in 1748 (all illustrated in earlier chapters of this work,), will serve as well as more numerous examples to express the outward char- acter of these old mansions.1 There was really not much architecture about them, but what there was was unobtrusive and simple, and worn with a cer- tain dignity which is perhaps more charming to us from its contrast to the ambitious and fidgety performances of later and more learned generations. Their interior decoration was commonly confined to one or two of the prin- cipal rooms and to the main staircase. A low wainscoting with square panels and with due cap and base, a light classic cornice of plaster or wood, often with dentils or modillions, a broad and high mantel of wood enclosing the ample fireplace, the chimney-breast above faced with a large panel, very simple dressings to doors and windows, - this was generally the ex- tent of the elaboration bestowed on the finish of the best rooms. Now and then, as in the Frankland and Hancock houses, the panelled wainscot- ing was carried to the ceiling. More rarely the panelling on the chimney- breast was enriched by an attenuated order of pilasters. However much or little decoration was afforded, the details were almost invariably delicate and refined; the errors were all on the side of smallness and reserve, never on the side of coarseness. The great staircase was sure to be the object of as much elaborateness of ornament as could be afforded. The carved and panelled ends of the steps, the panelled soffits, the ingeniously twisted new- els and balusters of many of these old staircases are favorite subjects for the sketch-books of architectural draughtsmen, and are copied with scrupulous exactness in the most carefully studied work of the present day.2
In the first churches of the Puritan settlers in Boston it is impossible to feel any other interest than that of an antiquarian or a descendant.3 If the earliest dwellings were bare, prosaic, and ugly, these were more so in pro- portion to their greater size and conspicuousness. Less attractive buildings, perhaps, never cumbered the ground. They recall the saying of Thoreau concerning the houses of Cape Cod: " They are little removed from lum- ber; only Eastern stuff disguised with white paint, -the least interesting kind of drift-wood." It is then not a matter of poignant regret that no rep- resentations exist of the two wooden meeting-houses which stood, the one
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