Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America 1580469728, 9781580469722

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 First Steps
2 Apprentice in a Family Music Business
3 Philadelphia Debut
4 A Young Professor of Music
5 A New Leaf
6 Her Own Woman
7 Courtship and Consequences
8 Pilgrim in Progress
9 “Glad Fruition”
10 Legacy in Music
11 Legacy in Literature
12 Contributions to Music Journalism
13 A Legacy Written into History
Appendix 1: Children and Descendants of David Samuel Browne and Elizabeth Montgomery Browne
Appendix 2: Chronology of Augusta Browne’s Music and Letters
Appendix 3: List of Musical Works
Appendix 4: Selected Glossary
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

B ONNY H. MI LLER is a pianist and independent scholar who has taught at universities in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.urpress.com Cover image: Broadway, New York, 1836, by Thomas Hornor. The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

AUGUSTA BROWNE

“This book was a delight to read. Bonny Miller offers a new window into nineteenth-century American life, especially the life of a gifted and accomplished female musician.” —NOLA REED KNOUSE, editor of The Music of the Moravian Church in America

MI LLER

A

ugusta Browne’s five-decade career in music and letters reveals a gifted composer and author. Hailed as “one of the most prolific women composers in the USA before 1870,” Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–82) was also a dedicated music educator and music journalist. The Americanness of her story resounds across the decades: an earnest little girl growing up amidst a troubled family business; a young professor of music who burst onto the New York City musical scene; and an entrepreneur who resolutely sought publication of her music and prose to her final day. In Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America, author Bonny Miller presents Browne’s unfamiliar story, assesses her musical works, and describes her literary publications. Browne’s outsider status and self-agency offer a potent narrative that transcends antebellum and Victorian-era norms. She used the public arena of newspapers and magazines as conduits for her work during an era when women were ridiculed for public speaking. And yet in many ways her persona as a tenacious entrepreneur—as well as her assertion of woman’s equality with man—conflicted with her adherence to strict Christian precepts. Making use of recently digitized sheet music as well as archives of newspapers and books of the period, Miller’s narrative provides the first-ever comprehensive, nuanced account of this notable life in American music.

AUGUSTA composer and woman of letters

BROWNE in nineteenth-century america

bonny h. miller

Augusta Browne

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Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles of Interest Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler Matthew Mugmon Beyond “The Art of Finger Dexterity”: Reassessing Carl Czerny Edited by David Gramit European Music and Musicians in New York, 1840–1900 Edited by John Graziano Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn Irving Godt Edited by John A. Rice Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome Edited by Martin Brody The Music of the Moravian Church in America Nola Reed Knouse Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence Edited by Kimberly A. Francis The New York Composer’s Forum Concerts, 1935–1940 Melissa J. de Graaf Sacred Song and the Pennsylvania Dutch Daniel J. Grimminger Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin Edited by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series may be found on our website, www.urpress.com.

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Augusta Browne Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America

Bonny H. Miller

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The University of Rochester Press gratefully acknowledges the American Musicological Society and the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, for generous support of this publication. Copyright © 2020 by Bonny H. Miller All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2020 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-972-2 eISBN-13: 978-1-78744-883-4 ISSN: 1071-9989 ; v. 164 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Miller, Bonny H., author. Title: Augusta Browne : composer and woman of letters in nineteenth-century America / Bonny H. Miller. Other titles: Eastman studies in music. Description: Rochester : University of Rochester Press, 2020. | Series: Eastman studies in music, 1071-9989 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019058784 | ISBN 9781580469722 (hardback) | ISBN 9781787448834 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Browne, Augusta. | Women composers—United States— Biography. | Composers—United States—Biography. | Music—United States— 19th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.B865 M55 2020 | DDC 780.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058784

Cover image: Broadway, New York, 1836, by Tomas Hornor. Te Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Contents

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List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction

1

1

First Steps

5

2

Apprentice in a Family Music Business

27

3

Philadelphia Debut

46

4

A Young Professor of Music

66

5

A New Leaf

104

6

Her Own Woman

116

7

Courtship and Consequences

144

8

Pilgrim in Progress

160

9

“Glad Fruition”

185

10 Legacy in Music

214

11 Legacy in Literature

263

12 Contributions to Music Journalism

279

13 A Legacy Written into History

299

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Appendixes 1

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Children and Descendants of David Samuel Browne and Elizabeth Montgomery Browne

307

2

Chronology of Augusta Browne’s Music and Letters

311

3

List of Musical Works

329

4

Selected Glossary

357

List of Abbreviations

359

Notes

361

Selected Bibliography

411

Index

437

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Illustrations Figures 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 2.1. 3.1. 3.2. 4.1. 4.2. 6.1. 6.2. 7.1. 7.2. 8.1. 8.2. 9.1. 9.2.

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Logier’s patented chiroplast George Cruikshank, “A German Mountebank blowing his own Trumpet” Cruikshank, “A German Mountebank,” detail showing chiroplast in use Advertisement for music published by David Browne (1827) Charles Stimpson, “Plan of the City of Boston,” 1832 F. D. B. Richards, “St. Stephen’s Church (Episcopal),” April 1859 Browne advertisement from A. M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory for 1839 Sheet-music cover for Augusta Browne, “The Family Meeting” Franklin House, 1 to 5 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, New York Walter Libbey, Self-Portrait, ca. 1850 Walter Libbey, Alexander Brown, ca. 1848 “Paris, New York & Philadelphia fashions for spring & summer 1855” Attributed to Silas A. Holmes, Broadway, looking north from Broome Street, ca. 1855 Andrew J. Russell, “Behind stone wall, Marye’s Heights, May 4, 1863” William Henry Browne, ca. 1865 George N. Barnard, “Trinity Episcopal Church, 3rd & Ind. Ave.” Browne family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery

17 18 19 24 28 51 59 77 85 134 135 145 149 176 178 186 212

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10.1. Augusta Browne, sheet music cover, Grande marche arabique, op. 74

230

Musical Examples 1.1. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 3.7.

4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3.

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Jan Ladislav Dussek, The Plough Boy, Arranged as a Rondo, mm. 1–32 Augusta Browne, “The Voice of Spring,” mm. 58–67 Augusta Browne, “The Orange Bough,” theme and transition Augusta Browne, Air a la Suisse: (a) Alexander Lee, yodeling chorus; (b) Browne, finale Augusta Browne, Haunted Spring: (a) Samuel Lover, song; (b) Browne, introduction and theme Browne, Haunted Spring: (a) beginning of variation two; (b) conclusion of coda Augusta Browne, bel canto style in Brilliant Introduction and Variations on “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing” Browne, Brilliant Introduction and Variations on “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing”: (a) “Tema” from La Sonnambula; (b) “Aria” from Fra Diavolo Augusta Browne, “The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” themes Browne, “The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” cadenza and conclusion Augusta Browne, Fantasia and Variations on a Celebrated Air a la Russe, Vesper Hymn, recitative and cadenza Augusta Browne, “Bonnie Bessie Green,” mm. 60–70 Augusta Browne, Hear Therefore O Israel, mm. 20–48 Augusta Browne, Grand Vesper Chorus, mm. 5–20 Augusta Browne, “A Song for New England,” recitative Browne, “A Song for New England,” aria Augusta Browne, “The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” introduction and first verse Browne, “The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” fourth verse Augusta Browne, melodies compared: “Where Quair Runs Sweet” and “Mary Lyle”

8 48 50 54 56 57 61

63 74 76 79 81 87 90 94 95 118 120 127

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Melodies compared: Browne, “Mary Lyle,” and Stephen Foster, “Gentle Annie” 6.5. Augusta Browne, themes in Chant d’amour, op. 81 7.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, Lays of Caledonia, from “Auld Langsyne” to “Braes of Busby” 7.2. John Walter Benjamin Garrett, arranged by Augusta Browne Garrett, “The City of Delight” 8.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, “Stewart,” from The Book of Praise 8.2. Augusta Browne Garrett, Chant of the Sea, theme 9.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, Aurora, introduction through marziale theme 9.2. Themes compared: Felix Mendelssohn, Elijah, “Lift thine eyes,” and Browne, Aurora 9.3. Browne, Aurora, coda 9.4. Augusta Browne Garrett, “Forever Thine,” mm. 1–14 9.5. Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser, “Pilgrims’ Chorus,” mm. 1–24 9.6. Augusta Browne Garrett, “Song of the Shepherd Boy,” first verse 9.7. Augusta Browne Garrett, “I Have a Glorious Hope” 9.8. Augusta Browne Garrett, “Day of Judgment, Day of Wonders” 10.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, Aurora, pedal indications 10.2. Augusta Browne, Hibernian Bouquet, introduction 10.3. Browne, Hibernian Bouquet, five Irish themes 10.4. Augusta Browne, The Columbian Quick-Step, mm. 1–22 10.5. Augusta Browne, Grande marche arabique, introduction through A and B themes 10.6. Augusta Browne, La brise dans le feuillage, themes 10.7. Augusta Browne, “The Courier Dove,” first verse 10.8. Augusta Browne, “To Inez in Heaven,” mm. 9–32 10.9. Augusta Browne, “Once upon a Time,” mm. 9–16 10.10. Browne, “Once upon a Time,” mm. 33–44 10.11. Augusta Browne, “The Music We Love Most,” mm. 1–13 10.12. Browne, “The Music We Love Most,” mm. 42–51

ix

6.4.

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128 139 154 158 174 181 190 192 193 199 200 204 206 207 219 222 223 226 232 235 241 244 248 249 250 251

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10.13. Augusta Browne, “A Thought of the Departed,” mm. 5–14 10.14. Augusta Browne Garrett, “The Old Clock’s Warning” compared to The De Meyer Grand Waltz 10.15. Augusta Browne’s musical “signature” (melodies that begin with an ascending sixth) 10.16. Augusta Browne Garrett, “Esperanza”

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Preface “Be bravely singular,” Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–82) exhorted readers during her later years, writing with an uncommon voice that extended across five decades of publication in music and literature. Her lively musical compositions, music journalism, and prose present an engaging period voice that has been neglected for too long. Only in recent years have Browne’s creative works become available through digitization. Two centuries after her birth, it is high time to uncover the life and reassess the achievements of this versatile musician and woman of letters. I grew intrigued as I encountered Augusta Browne’s music and articles in a trove of nineteenth-century American monthlies that included the best-selling Godey’s Magazine as well as a dozen other periodical titles. In 1985 I incorporated her attractive Columbian Quick-Step, published in the Columbian Magazine, into my lecture-recitals of music by women composers. The persistent pattern of entrepreneurship—of producing, selling, and promoting her music and prose—leaped out from the magazine pages. She was a self-marketer in an era that we rarely associate with businesswomen.1 Judith Tick rediscovered Browne’s contributions in music and prose as part of her doctoral dissertation.2 Tick produced an insightful sketch of the composer and author in her seminal study of American women composers, but a comprehensive biography was never her goal. At the time of writing, she acknowledged, “Of her education and musical training we know nothing.”3 My research began with unearthing Browne’s family history, which in turn revealed her musical education and explained much of her trajectory in life. The rolls of canonic works in literature and the arts have routinely been ordered by male critics, resulting in lists of “masterworks” that privilege excellence and genius as white and male. When I attended college, none of my music courses included the name of any woman composer. During graduate school, I learned about only one, Hildegard of Bingen, in a course on medieval music. It was a joyful discovery in my research to find a world of women who contributed music to magazines published during the twentieth,

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nineteenth, eighteenth, and even the seventeenth centuries.4 Hundreds of women played, sang, performed, composed, and produced music, yet their names had been ignored or forgotten, their music assumed to be of little worth. But their exuberant, creative participation in music making was unmistakable. Augusta Browne was one of those most active in print in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. As gender studies developed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, historians such as Gerda Lerner demanded that scholarly learning include the experiences and achievements of women as well as of men.5 Knowing that they are not alone but part of a significant tradition with skilled predecessors bolsters other women as creative artists or community leaders. Writing amid the second wave of feminism during the 1970s, Tick connected strongly with Browne’s 1863 article in the New York Knickerbocker monthly, “A Woman on Women; With Reflections on the Other Sex.” The words of the essay suggested a nascent feminist, or, as Tick put it, “someone who transcended feminine prescriptions.”6 I, too, wished to embrace Augusta as a feminist, but that is not the primary narrative of her life that has emerged from the abundance of her recently digitized prose. Her writing constantly demonstrates how Protestant faith anchored her beliefs and actions. Augusta Browne’s life speaks to me as a musician’s story, as a pianist’s story, as a woman’s story, and as an American story. Browne the woman remains elusive, but I’ve come to respect her choices as practical and expedient within her era, as well as reflections of her core values of faith, music, and family. Hers is not a well-known life, but it is far from an ordinary story; indeed, this inspiring individual has enriched my own identity and experience in American music. It’s a story that I wish that I could have read as a girl, when I devoured books about lives of famous American women who offered role models in the Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans series. Her experience highlights the impetus of creative gifts, the power of individual agency, and the fabric of family—both its benefits and its drawbacks. Browne has taken on the guise of a colleague to me. She reminds me of many teachers I’ve known and valued in the Music Teachers National Association, a professional organization of music teachers established in 1876. Sadly, Browne died before she could join the new organization, but the majority of MTNA members still teach music lessons in homes or private studios, much as Augusta did in the 1840s and ’50s. She pursued the same strategies that current members utilize—networking, outreach, advertising, composing, arranging, and music publishing—but she was implementing them more than 150 years ago.

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This musician’s story is a nineteenth-century life told from nineteenthcentury materials. As additional print sources become scanned and searchable, new facts and revelations add details to her life story, but, given the absence of personal papers, Augusta’s day-to-day activities and many of her opinions remain conjecture. I know more about the day of her death than about any other day of her life. Every personal anecdote mentioned in her prose or in a review raises a host of intriguing questions that can be answered only through speculation. I tracked the life and career of every family member and descendant in the hope of locating any personal artifacts—a diary, a journal, an account book, or letters that could illuminate her thoughts and pursuits. I had to conclude that any private papers or images (daguerreotypes, photographs, paintings, or engravings) are no longer extant, or are no longer labeled by name. This Browne family branch died out decades ago, and when no descendant or friend is left who knows the name of the sitter, the identity of the portrait is lost to posterity. Several online images are misidentified as the composer, including photographs of Lady Augusta Browne Cavendish-Bentinck, 1st Baroness Bolsover (1834–93), and Dr. M[ary] Augusta Brown Girard (1836–1926), a voice teacher and medical doctor.7 Readers nevertheless want to know about Augusta’s appearance, her looks and dress, and her physicality at the piano. Abundant fashion engravings, daguerreotypes, and period photographs of women of similar social background indicate her general appearance. Newspaper reviews described the young woman as very pretty or beautiful. But one must ask whether these characteristics would be issues for comparable male pianists and composers.8 The lack of images and private papers forces us to assess Augusta Browne from her creative work in words and music. She eludes our gaze and elicits our engagement instead. When I tell people about Augusta, they light up as they recall and share their family heritage of music making by a great-grandparent or relative who played, composed, or collected sheet music. Her story reconnects Americans with their own cultural legacy. With her multifaceted success as a musician, author, and journalist, Augusta Browne’s life provides a powerful American story of a woman of her era, and her legacy of lifelong creativity offers an abiding testament to the human spirit in any era.

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Acknowledgments This study developed over more than two decades with the cooperation of many archives, institutions, and libraries. I relied regularly on the Library of Congress Music Division and the American Antiquarian Society. I owe a debt to the many individuals who aided my research efforts at these centers, including Robin Rausch (Library of Congress Music Division), Vincent Golden and Joyce Tracy (American Antiquarian Society), David Peter Coppen (Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester), Chela Scott Weber (Brooklyn Historical Society), Bynum Petty (Organ Historical Society), and Cornelia S. King (Library Company of Philadelphia). I am thankful to libraries and archives that supplied digital scans of music by Augusta Browne, including the Royal Danish Library, the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums, Washington University Gaylord Music Library, the Sibley Music Library, and the University of Oregon. I gratefully acknowledge a subvention grant by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The American Musicological Society provided additional ongoing assistance in the form of JSTOR access. I appreciate the support of continuing education grants from the Montgomery County (Maryland) Music Teachers Association and the Maryland State Music Teachers Association. The care and advice I received from series editor Ralph P. Locke and the staff at the University of Rochester Press and Boydell and Brewer enabled this book to come to fruition. I offer thanks to Sonia Kane, Julia Cook, Rio Hartwell, Tracey Engel, Jacqueline Heinzelmann, and Rosemary Shojaie. I owe much to Judith Tick, whose model of masterful scholarship never ceased to inspire me to search harder and rethink my conclusions. I am grateful to the Bethesda Tuesday Nonfiction reader-writers who reviewed and critiqued every chapter of the manuscript through several

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revisions. For their patience and assistance, I thank Cheryl J. LaRoche, Nancy Derr, Diana Parsell, Judi Moore Latta, Michael Kirkland, S. Michael Scadron, Sonja Williams, and Kenneth D. Ackerman. I am indebted to the many thoughtful colleagues and kind friends who offered assistance and support over the course of twenty-five years of the Augusta Browne project: Jerry L. Miller, Therese Ellsworth, Ronit Seter, Teri Lynn Herbert, Laura Yust, Robert Fleisher, Darsha Primich, Nancy Raabe, Alexis Colker, Lianne Curtis, Katherine Preston, Kristen Turner, Paul Covey, Jennifer Kobuskie, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk, Andrew H. Weaver, and Sue Taylor. I gratefully thank the Freedomwriters of Bethesda, Maryland, whose weekly writing support has been beneficial and invigorating: Adrienne Dern, Susan Schober, Jane Udelson, Susan Urofsky, S. Michael Scadron, Reena Bernards, Nancy Derr, Jane Tarrant, Revathi Vikram, and Julia Meeks.

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Introduction Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–82) holds a special place as one of the first successful and prolific woman composers in the United States, as she was identified in musicologist Judith Tick’s pioneering study American Women Composers before 1870. Based on the archival resources available prior to the digital revolution and access to scanned nineteenth-century sources, Tick posited that Augusta was the “first woman to become famous in the United States for her musical compositions.”1 Examples of Augusta’s sheet music not yet catalogued at the time of Tick’s dissertation, but now digitized and searchable in the Library of Congress Music of the Nation, the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, the Sheet Music Consortium, and a growing number of special collections databases, enable a more complete evaluation of the composer’s work. The rising tide of digitized nineteenth-century newspapers, books, and magazines contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the composer’s life, background, and output. Her unfamiliar story emerges as both old fashioned and strikingly modern. Augusta Browne’s outsider status and self-agency offer a potent narrative that transcends antebellum and Victorian-era norms in America. She constructed a substantial legacy in American music and journalism through talent, craft, persistence, outreach, and nineteenth-century equivalents of modern marketing strategies. The Americanness of her story resounds across the decades: an earnest little girl growing up in the context of a struggling family business; a young professor of music who burst onto the New York City musical scene with skill and flair; and an entrepreneur who resolutely sought publication of her music and prose to her final day. Her experiences amid Jacksonian democracy, waves of immigration, the divisive Civil War, and Reconstruction place Augusta in the maelstrom of US history during defining decades. She earned regional recognition in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston cultural circles and was a familiar figure to many East Coast publishers, but perseverance and productivity do not always bring fame or renown. Augusta

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Browne never achieved a great popular success or had a hit song, nor did she ever become a household name, if we judge by the frequency of references in the press and by numbers of existing copies of her music in personal anthologies of sheet music known as binder’s volumes.2 Her prose, however, circulated widely throughout the nation owing to the accepted practice of sharing or reprinting material among nineteenth-century newspapers, books, and periodicals. Augusta would not be considered a “great” or canonic composer, but to put this statement in perspective, no music by American composers of the mid-nineteenth century holds a consistent place in the current Western artmusic repertoire with the exception of a few songs by Stephen Foster and two or three piano solos by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. In style and craft, Augusta Browne’s best songs and piano pieces stand up well to music by these contemporaries. Her songwriting and sparkling piano figuration epitomize the melodious tunes and spirited keyboard music found in American homes during the nineteenth century. Contradictions abound in her life. Augusta was a ceaseless entrepreneur and musician from childhood, yet inextricably woven into the family cocoon. She was accustomed to the public gaze but always was wrapped in the mantle of modesty and respectability that was essential for antebellum women who taught the children of the bourgeois and merchant classes. She admired “higher styles” of music, such as oratorio and symphony, but stuck to publishing songs and piano solos with greater commercial possibilities in her era. She expressed progressive views in favor of women’s intellect and equality but never espoused women’s legal rights or suffrage. Augusta was far more dedicated to being a champion of Christian morality than “serving as a bold crusader for gender equality,” as she has been hailed.3 In later life she was strident as a Protestant evangelist who published Sunday-school pamphlets that decried theatergoing and card playing. Disruption and feminine transgression were not viable strategies for a Victorian-era woman who wanted to work as a music instructor and church organist. Augusta had to fulfill societal gender expectations at the same time that she cultivated a niche in the male-dominated public sphere. Her life demonstrates how one woman negotiated prevailing codes of female conduct by pushing from within rather than by confronting societal norms. But she never ceased to dare: sending her music to editors and newspapermen, seeking publication in national journals, trying different literary genres, and promoting not herself but her products. Writing became her response to episodes of loss, anxiety, rage, or joy. When other women of her

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introduction

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3

era might knit, Augusta would write. Her pen was her therapy as well as her sword. Although she wrote much, she followed the nineteenth-century social convention that women should not talk about themselves. Yet this composer-turned-author wrote herself into history through her efforts. She acted, rather than was acted on, and that agency as an entrepreneur, musician, and writer makes her modern and relevant. The strands of Augusta Browne’s career—as a teacher, composer, performer, and author—provide the structure for this biography. Chapters 1 through 9 present the sequence of Augusta’s surprising youth, professional career, and artistic achievements in the context of her times. Her remarkable path repeatedly confounds expectations with twists of fate and fortune often triggered by other family members. Chapters 10 through 12 describe and contextualize the musical and literary legacies of this “well-known and distinguished musical composer and authoress.”4 Chapter 10 considers her contributions to piano music, song, and sacred music. Chapters 11 and 12 situate Augusta’s literary publications (short fiction, humor, poetry, and essay) and music journalism within cultural trends of the period. Chapter 13 summarizes the significance of her life and contributions to American culture. Appendix 1 contains a table of Augusta’s siblings and their few descendants. Appendix 2 offers a rough timeline of the composer’s music and literary works. As of 2020, more than half of Augusta Browne Garrett’s known published scores are available in online digital collections; more will continue to be added. Appendix 3 provides publication information for each of Browne’s musical works currently known; thus this information is not duplicated in notes. Appendix 3 also cites the location of each score in digital collections, including the IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) Petrucci Music Library, the HathiTrust Digital Library, the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, and others. A glossary of selected musical terms used in the study is found in Appendix 4. The family surname “Browne” was habitually misspelled as “Brown”; this was also true of Augusta’s married name Garrett (Garrat, Garret, or Garett); the name of her friend the Brooklyn artist Walter Libbey (Libby); the names of New York colleagues, the authors Alice and Phoebe Cary (Carey); and the Logierian (Logerian, Logeirian) system of music instruction so fundamental to her musical training. These surnames have been silently corrected in most cases. Spelling and punctuation in quoted material have been updated to modern usage if doing so does not alter the writer’s meaning. The frequent nineteenth-century practice of hyphenating “New-York” has been updated,

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with the exception of the New-York Historical Society, which continues to use the traditional form. Owing to the copious references to other Browne family members, I frequently use given names to refer to Augusta Browne Garrett, her parents, her siblings, and her husband. This decision was based on simplicity and clarity, rather than informality or familiarity. The intention of this study is to describe and contextualize an American life in music in a different century. I hope that many musicians will recognize a bit of themselves in Augusta Browne’s struggles and successes. Her dedication to music resounds across the decades.

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Chapter One

First Steps Augusta Browne was a star from the start, according to the description of a “little prodigy” in Boston newspapers during October 1826.1 Bostonians were “astonished at the style in which a daughter of Mr. Browne’s, a child of little more than seven,” played a “most difficult composition of Dussek’s.” In the crush of the audience, the announcement of the piece and the little performer’s name likely went unheard, but the newspaper’s acclaim of the prodigy was not forgotten. In June 1839, the Boston Courier noted a remarkable new piece of piano music composed by “Miss Augusta Browne” with the recollection that, even as a child in Boston, she had “attracted considerable attention by her juvenile performances.”2 As a “little student of four or five years,” Augusta was learning piano pieces from her Irish-born parents, who were her principal teachers throughout her instruction.3 She would recall decades later that one of the “essays of my five-year-old fingers” was a fugue by Arcangelo Corelli, hardly a study for a beginner.4 Families of musicians often produce children who perform far beyond their years. Leopold Mozart took his precocious children, Nannerl and Wolfgang, throughout Europe to perform for crowned heads and their courts in 1763. The sublimely gifted Wolfgang was the most famous of a string of piano prodigies in the late 1700s.5 It was no different in the United States during the early years of the Republic. Audiences then as now loved to see a child perform with adult keyboard skills and musicality. In New York City, Sophia Hewitt was seven or so—like Augusta—when she performed in a public concert at the City Hotel that was arranged in 1807 by her father, the English émigré musician James Hewitt.6 America had no royal patrons to please, but musical entrepreneurs such as Hewitt and “Mr. Browne” promoted their talented offspring with the intention of translating public interest and newspaper praise into more customers for their music instruction, instruments, and sheet-music publications.

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The 1826 event in Boston that raised such excitement about the “little prodigy” was not a concert per se. Augusta’s father, David Samuel Browne, organized the evening to deliver a lecture about the science of music along with performances and exercises to demonstrate a pioneering system of group musical instruction known as the Logierian method, the creation of the German-born musician Johann Bernhard Logier (1777–1846).7 Logierian academies taught music in group classes and offered demonstrations by students at varying levels of skill who played en masse at multiple instruments. At David Browne’s exhibitions, academy students performed in a “junction of two classes in full concert on several piano fortes.”8 The advertisement specified that solos would be interspersed with the “tout ensemble,” creating “a pleasing effect” by giving “each lady an opportunity of displaying her taste and expression by alternate solos.” Augusta’s outstanding solo at the 1826 event was a piece by Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812), a Bohemian musician who found favor in Paris and London as a pianist during the 1780s and ’90s. He was a clever composer who churned out a flood of agreeable keyboard sonatas, variations, and concertos. Out of his large output of piano music, what “difficult composition of Dusseks” did the little girl perform? At “little more than seven,” and possibly only six, Augusta needed a piano piece that fell within the compass of a young child’s hands. She required a selection without too many large chords or widely spaced keyboard figurations. Even if they could not yet span the eight-note octave, adept small hands can be perfect for scales, trills, and patterns based on adjacent notes. Dussek’s piano sonatas—more than forty in all—rely on chords, octaves, and patterns for adult-sized hands, but his concertos alternate virtuoso sections for the soloist with tutti passages for the orchestra or the pianist accompanying at a second instrument. By paring down large chords or rearranging figurations that exceed the reach of an undersized hand, a concerto movement can be altered to suit the physical aspects of a child pianist in the primo part while suggesting the impressive sonorous effect of an orchestral accompaniment in the secondo part. We can imagine Augusta performing the rondo as a concerto at the public exhibition: the small girl in a high-waisted dress at one piano, while a parent accompanied at another one. Listeners seated in the crowded room would have twisted and strained to catch a glimpse of the child amid ladies’ caps and coiffures. Men needed to balance their beaver top hats on their laps as they applauded the performers. As the academy head, David Browne would have announced the selections on the program, while Augusta’s mother Elizabeth—a more polished pianist than her husband, who did not

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have systematic keyboard instruction until he was an adult—could have provided the accompaniment for the concerto.9 If so, the performers presented a duo right out of a Jane Austen novel: mother and daughter in post-Regency dresses with generous sleeves, wide sashes, and flounces at the hemlines.10 The scene must have been charming, but it was Augusta’s scintillating playing that earned both father and daughter glowing words in the newspaper. Plausible evidence suggests that the “difficult composition” that Augusta played was the third-movement rondo from Dussek’s concerto, op. 15.11 Dussek based the rondo of this concerto for piano or harp on a dancelike tune popularly known as “The Plough Boy.” It was always a smart choice to pick a familiar song with strong audience appeal as the basis for a showy concert solo. The British composer William Shield’s hit song about a “flaxenheaded plough boy” told the story of a country lad who parlayed his looks and wiles to rise through the ranks from servant to steward at a stately home, and eventually to attain a title and a seat in Parliament.12 The tune was easy to recognize, remember, and whistle. Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778– 1837), touring in the 1790s as a prodigy who had studied with Mozart, delighted London audiences with his improvisations on “The Ploughboy.”13 During the 1820s, London’s leading music periodical, the Harmonicon, recalled the extreme popularity of Dussek’s treatment of the tune, noting that the composer performed it “incessantly, and those who could master it—for it was then considered fit only for first-rate players—were expected to produce it in all private parties.”14 The rondo was so popular that Augusta’s father published the sheet music in Dublin as The Plough Boy, Arranged as a Rondo, by J. L. Dussek and listed it in his publications for sale in Boston in 1827.15 If listeners liked the piece and asked for it, David Browne had copies ready to sell and could always print more. Dussek’s rondo was a proven audience pleaser, an impressive solo that was nevertheless appropriate for small hands, and the sheet music was available in the family music shop. These points offer a strong case that it was the little girl’s debut piece in Boston. The Plough Boy relies on fast finger coordination in a limited range without large leaps or stretches (ex. 1.1). The left hand often plays Alberti bass patterns that lie easily within an octave, as seen in measures 13–16. The running notes in the right hand want to fly beneath the fingers, but they can easily race out of control on the unpredictable patterns, which is why the Harmonicon noted that the rondo was “only for first-rate players.” If Augusta performed this piece, she would have practiced painstakingly to achieve the requisite dexterity and control of the notes and tempo.

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Example 1.1. Jan Ladislav Dussek, The Plough Boy, Arranged as a Rondo, mm. 1–32.

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first steps Example 1.1.—(concluded)

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The published score for The Plough Boy allows flexible performance options. It can be played as a keyboard solo by a single pianist. Near the end of the movement, there is a cadenza, which can be improvised to display the soloist’s skills. If a secondo part is added, it can be filled out with additional notes and chords to enhance the impression of an ensemble. Both soloist and accompanist play during the tutti passages, but they can take some liberties to amplify the resonance by playing the music in different octaves, as well as making minor revisions to distinguish their parts and to strengthen the overall effect. Augusta may have played the rondo as a solo, but a skillfully accompanied performance would have sounded more impressive and substantial to listeners. David Browne hoped to attract more customers to his new music academy on Washington Street when he scheduled the public exhibition in October 1826. His pupils received collective praise in newspapers for making excellent progress in the two short months that he had been teaching in Boston, but it was Augusta’s performance that conveyed the power of

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the method. The family needed and cherished the press tribute: “She is a little prodigy, and bears ample testimony to the merits of the Logierian system of instruction.”16 The event demonstrated the fundamentals of a system that employed novel means of teaching note reading, hand position, and music theory from the first lessons. The Boston Courier proclaimed that “Mr. B. can communicate more knowledge of the theory of music in four weeks, than some of our musical professors do in the same number of years.”17 However desirable, this flattering acclaim also incited ire and resentment from other music teachers in the city, and thus began the series of professional disputes that dogged David’s music academy and shaped Augusta’s childhood for the next decade. Years later, Augusta would describe herself as “a musician from earliest infancy, and daughter also of a musician of well-known standing,” yet she never cited her parents by name in her many publications, nor did she ever state that they ran a music business, nor that they were her principal music instructors.18 Although Victorian-era feminine modesty might explain her curious silence on such vital and undeniable facts, these remarkable omissions reflect the saga of struggles the Browne family music business and academy encountered during her formative years. The Logierian instruction that Augusta received from her parents and the practical lessons from the family business provided the foundation for her life as a teacher, composer, performer, and writer. To understand how she arrived in Boston, already blossoming as a “little prodigy,” the story of her parents must unfold along with her own.

Irish Roots The Boston newspaper coverage in 1826 guessed the child’s age as “little more than seven,” which suggests a birth as early as 1819, but Augusta’s death certificate implies a different date.19 If the age of sixty-one years, three months recorded on the day she died was correct, Augusta was born during autumn 1820; however, no other documents confirm this birth year. In US census returns, Augusta’s age was always reduced by two to five years, depending on the person who gave the information: herself, parent, sibling, housemaid, or neighbor.20 In 1850 she was “twenty-six” rather than around thirty; in 1860, “thirty-five”; in 1870, “forty-five”; and in 1880, “fifty-eight.”21 By contrast, the country of birth was consistent for Augusta in census after census: she came from Ireland, and her death certificate specified that she was born in

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Dublin. She was not the first or the second child of her parents, but she was their first surviving daughter, and this may explain their care in nurturing this gifted youngster (see appendix 1).22 A birth date for Augusta during autumn 1820 implies that her mother stayed in Ireland to deliver her baby after her husband departed by ship for North America. By the end of June 1820, David had arrived in St. John, a major seaport in New Brunswick, Canada, and initiated his music business.23 Any woman had reason to be fearful of unfamiliar medical care during childbirth in an unknown foreign outpost. If Elizabeth Montgomery Browne suffered nausea during her pregnancies, she would understandably have dreaded taking a sea voyage just then. She apparently chose to remain in the familiar world she knew in Dublin as she cared for her newborn daughter and two little sons, both under seven, who remained with her when their father sailed forth to fashion their future home and business in the New World. David and Elizabeth Browne were also born in Ireland, although the precise locations remain unknown. Irish vital records—both church parish and civil records—suffered tremendous damage during the political upheavals in Ireland during the early decades of the twentieth century, but documents of military service survive in British governmental papers. Augusta’s father stated unequivocally that he attained the rank of captain during his service in the Irish volunteer militia during the protracted Napoleonic Wars between England and France, 1793–1815.24 He said that “four noblemen” assisted him in purchasing his commissions—each of which cost several hundred pounds—to rise from one rank to the next.25 David’s sequence of promotions in the British army progressed from ensign to lieutenant to captain. According to listings of officers published by the British War Office, “David Browne” was named as a lieutenant from October 15, 1803, in the Leitrim volunteer militia in Carrick-on-Shannon.26 County Leitrim is located in the northwest quadrant of Ireland, not too far from the towns of Sligo and Donegal. In order to advance to lieutenant in 1803, Browne already must have spent some years in the militia. “David Browne, Musician,” was in military service with the Donegal Militia in October 1812 when he begged his commander, Nathaniel Clements, 2nd Earl of Leitrim, for release due to poor health after “nearly eighteen years of service playing wind instruments in the militia band.”27 The beseeching “David Browne, Musician” could have begun as a drum or fife boy who entered the militia around age nine or ten and matured into a respected band member with sufficient skill to able to play several instruments in the ensemble. Drum and fife boys were noncombatants

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who played to maintain spirits and pace when troops were on the march; they also enlivened singing by the soldiers.28 Such a military route from drum boy to captain would explain how Augusta’s father acquired musical experience on “twenty” instruments (“Organ, Piano Forte, Violincello, Violin, Flute, &. &c”).29 “Nearly eighteen” years of service also explains how the young man gained business expertise and education that would have been unusual for a youth from provincial Ireland who never attended university in Dublin or in England. The supposition of a connection to the Donegal militia is strengthened by “The Grand Martial Troop,” a solo for harp or piano that Augusta’s father composed and published in Dublin with a dedication to “the Right Hon. [onra]ble The Earl of Leitrim.”30 Similarly, David Browne mentioned that he had “composed and arranged ‘The Donegal Royal Patent Bugle Short Troop and Slow March’ which are the first ever produced in or dedicated to your Lordship[’]s Regiment,” in his letter to the earl of Leitrim in March 1813 when he again asked for release from service.31 The signatures in the letters from 1812 and 1813 are very similar to known signatures by Augusta’s father on documents from the 1820s and ’30s (land deeds, letters, and inscriptions on music publications). All of this evidence supports the conclusion that the composer’s father was the David Browne who was a musician in the Donegal militia. After some years of duty and several promotions, David had pressing reasons to depart from service in 1813: he was either married or soon to be, with a baby on the way. In November of that year, his son Louis Henri Browne was baptized at St. Mary’s, an Anglican church in Dublin.32 David’s bride, Elizabeth Montgomery (1794–1875), came from the upper middle ranks of society, judging from her considerable skills in art and music. She learned drawing and painting, along with singing and playing the piano, as accomplishments expected of a marriageable young lady in Georgian Dublin, a cultural center second only to London within the British Empire. But Elizabeth possessed genuine musical and artistic abilities that would enable her to continue teaching piano and drawing well into the 1840s. Her skills were more than mere achievements desirable for matrimonial prospects; they manifest innate talents that she passed on to her sons and daughters. The 1813 birth of their first child suggests that David’s marriage to Elizabeth occurred in 1812 or 1813, when she would have been around eighteen. David and Elizabeth were Protestants with Church of Ireland (Anglican) and Presbyterian affinities. Elizabeth’s family apparently lived in or around Dublin, if indeed she remained there to give birth to Augusta without her

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husband, but her ancestors were said to have been Scottish.33 A great infusion of Presbyterian Scots resettled the “plantations” on lands in the northern counties of Ireland confiscated by the English Crown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Neither David nor Elizabeth belonged to the landed gentry, who received aristocratic titles from the British government and held most of the property and political power in Ireland. Still, they were members of the Protestant ascendancy, the descendants of “planters” and British Anglicans who came to Ireland after 1690 in a continuing effort to control and disenfranchise the Catholic majority. The Protestant population enjoyed privileged advantages over Irish Catholics, who had little access to power or position during the eighteenth century. Exacting penal laws set rigorous limitations: Catholic men in Ireland could not vote, hold public office, buy land, own weapons, practice law, or serve on juries. All Protestant males over eighteen had to participate in the volunteer militia for national defense; Roman Catholics were not permitted to serve until 1793, when France declared war on Great Britain. Militia volunteers served part time—much like the US National Guard—and could be called upon at any time for home defense, especially during the Napoleonic Wars, when invasion by the French was always a fear. By 1815 David lived in Dublin, and he may have been there intermittently for several years as dictated by his militia service. Beginning in 1810, Dublin directories include a “David Browne” who worked as an “agent and public accountant,” but that business listing disappeared in 1816, at the time when “D. Brown” or “David Browne” first appeared as a “professor of music.”34 Although he already taught traditional music lessons, Augusta’s father commenced music study with his mentor Logier around 1815, which helped to compensate for a lack of keyboard study in his early years. Augusta’s father pursued Logier’s group method of instruction with the intention of implementing it one day in America. In Boston, the Irishman would call himself the “the seventh accredited Professor of the ‘New Musical System of Education.’”35 He completed his certification to teach the patented Logierian method of music education in 1816. Students of Logier were beginning to establish academies that taught his method throughout Great Britain and in British colonies as far away as India and the Caribbean. As a newly minted official professor, David Browne opened a music “saloon,” or salon, that offered sheet music, instruments, and music instruction on Sackville Street, one of Dublin’s busiest commercial avenues. Many Dublin music publishers made a prosperous business of reprinting pirated music from England, Scotland, and the Continent at a time when virtually

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no enforcement of copyright laws existed. David sold new imprints of English publications in addition to his own compositions (military music, collections of country dance tunes, and arrangements of traditional Irish and Scottish songs). With their music store and academy, the Browne family embodied Napoleon’s famous description of the British as “a nation of shopkeepers.”36 David had an interest in the law but had no opportunity for study within his milieu in Ireland. It was fortunate that he had some talent for commerce. The presence of traditional Irish melodies and Scottish tunes permeated much popular music in the British Isles during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Traditional Celtic songs appeared with Gaelic or English words, or as source material for instrumental arrangements and variations. Whether or not they spoke or understood Gaelic, David and Elizabeth heard it in provincial towns in the countryside as well as in the streets of Dublin. Their children would grow up amid the traditional melodies and Gaelic phrases that permeated Irish culture and literature. Decades later, Augusta would employ Gaelic expressions from her youth to inject Irish flavor into her fiction and essays. And it was not surprising that she turned to traditional Irish tunes in some of her compositions. The glory days of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy in Ireland faded rapidly after the 1800 Act of Union forced the dissolution of the Irish Parliament. The aristocratic families who had sponsored the arts in Dublin and at their country estates needed to reside most of the year in Britain in order for the male heads of family to attend Parliament in London. Dublin had been a venue for theater and music second only to London during the latter eighteenth century, but the market for sheet music and music lessons, as well as for concerts, theater works, and operas, dwindled after the Act of Union.37 David entered the music trade in Dublin when the downward spiral was already underway. Both Logier and David imagined greener pastures beyond the Emerald Isle. David would sail west to North America, while Logier would head east, to London and to Prussia.38

The New Logierian System Johann Bernhard Logier was a knowledgeable musician who had learned violin and flute as a child from his father in Germany.39 After his parents’ deaths he came to England with a music-loving patron. He joined the British army as a teenager, served as a military musician in Ireland, and became well respected as a band director and teacher. He developed the idea of keyboard

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pedagogy in group music classes as a means to faster, more effective instruction. Logier’s curriculum was grounded in note reading at the keyboard, rather than a vocal method based on a sight-singing system of solfège or solmization. Logier said that he conceived of his system when he wanted to teach piano quickly to his seven-year-old daughter Ellen, so that she could substitute for him as organist for church services.40 In 1817 Logier established a London music academy in partnership with the British musician Samuel Webbe (the younger) and Friedrich Kalkbrenner, a German-born pianist who had studied in Paris and concertized in England.41 The London Times chronicled their music business between 1817 and 1819 in a series of announcements, reports, and advertisements. David Browne would follow the same business plan in American newspapers in city after city.42 A business campaign for a Logierian music teacher began with a lengthy announcement that explained a little about the method and painted its successes. A constant presence in the press was integral to his business strategy. Frequent notices or advertisements always mentioned some new feature or event at the academy, such as free lectures on harmony or public exhibitions such as the Boston event in which Augusta shone. Logier’s relentless advertising and business gimmicks infuriated the staid hierarchy of London music teachers, who were relentless in denouncing him as a charlatan and his method as a fraud in a prolonged battle of words waged in the Times and in pamphlets pro and con. Despite accusations that it was a “false and ridiculous system of Musical Education,” Logier incorporated a number of valuable aspects of music pedagogy into his group method that remain familiar aspects of music instruction.43 Instruction in keys, scales, and chords from the earliest lessons brought the basics of music theory to a wide pool of Logierian students before national academies or conservatories were established in Great Britain. The Royal Academy of Music was founded in 1822 and began to offer instruction in 1823, about five years after Logierian academies sprang up around London. Previously such information was passed along within families of musicians or taught to choirboys when they learned to play the organ and harpsichord in cathedral schools. Critics denounced the teaching of harmony to children as young as six or seven as folly, yet Logier’s method instilled knowledge of chords and music theory in youngsters, especially girls, who had rarely had access to it before. The German composer Ludwig Spohr praised the playing and harmonic exercises that he heard in a class of children aged seven to ten years old, especially the “youngest girl” (Ann Mounsey), in his oft-reprinted account of a Logierian exhibition that he had attended in England.44

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The heart of Logier’s keyboard instruction was an ensemble approach in which a number of students at different levels of study participated simultaneously at several pianos. Logier created a series of music instruction books that laid out very easy melodies for the beginning students, while more advanced students played the same melodies in ever more difficult variations.45 By functioning as part of an ensemble, students developed the habit of playing in steady rhythm, a challenge for many pupils to maintain in individual practice. Friendly rivalry among students provided the motivation to master one’s individual part. Inspiration to improve came from listening to more advanced students who played demanding and impressive variants. Different variations on one simple theme were played at the same time by several students; thus students constantly heard the compositional procedures of variation in ensembles while building their own technical skills in sequential lessons. The Brownes’ little daughter grew up immersed in variation as both a keyboard technique and a compositional technique. Augusta’s development as a composer would corroborate Logier’s conviction that “a series of lessons composed on the same subject, varied each time by alternate changes in the bass and treble, will tend to create a fancy in the pupil however young, raising a desire for composing which otherwise might forever lie dormant; and whilst they are intended merely to improve the hand, may also unconsciously improve the head.”46 Logier’s pedagogical innovations have been overshadowed by the device he invented to assist in beginning keyboard instruction. This gadget, the chiroplast—meaning “hand shaper”—was a set of five connected slots to maintain the fingers in place at the keyboard and to encourage a good hand position. Two sets of slots slid on a frame above the keyboard and could be fixed above the correct keys to place one or both hands in five-finger positions for little melodies or chords (fig. 1.1). The chiroplast was intended only for the earliest stages of study, when students have difficulty maintaining arched hands with curved fingers and level wrists. The patented chiroplast could be purchased or rented to use at home so that students would not develop bad habits when teachers were not present. Logier promised that “children of the most tender years may be instructed with certain success.”47 He collected letters from more than a dozen London musicians who commended the value of such a device to assist hand position, but the musical establishment loved to damn the chiroplast as a fiendish tool that stifled true musical development.48 Although recent historians have made much of the chiroplast as a manifestion of the mechanization and industrialization typical of the early nineteenth century, it was only a minor part of Logier’s plan of instruction for beginning students.49

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Figure 1.1. Logier’s patented chiroplast. Detail from frontispiece to The First Companion to the Royal Patent Chiroplast, or Hand-Director (London: J. Green, n.d.), photograph by the author (2019).

His system of group keyboard pedagogy led to Logierian exhibitions in Great Britain that were pioneering examples of “monster” piano concerts with eight, ten, or even twenty pianists playing concurrently at multiple instruments.50 William Gardiner, an amateur music lover in England, wrote in his memoir that these mass Logierian performances had “an effect rich and curious.”51 A satirical contemporary caricature by the artist George Cruikshank, titled “A German Mountebank,” suggests that the events were pure cacophony (fig. 1.2).52 In his depiction of a group ensemble, women of various ages mix with children and even toddlers in short trousers. Pianos of all sizes are jammed together in a room crowded with performers and surrounded by audience members. Some auditors cover their ears as Logier directs from the top of a piano while blowing his own horn. Cruikshank’s pejorative print may be the only period illustration of a Logierian performance, but it nevertheless offers significant information. It is a rare surviving image of the chiroplast in use, with at least three pianos equipped with a chiroplast above the keys, seen most clearly in the girl in

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Figure 1.2. George Cruikshank, “A German Mountebank blowing his own Trumpet at a Dutch Concert of 500 Piano Fortes!! Or A natural from the ‘Scale of Nature’ according to the LOGGER-head-IAN System!!” (London: A. Sidebethem, 1818). LC-DIG-ds-01349 (digital file from original item). Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Figure 1.3. Cruikshank, “A German Mountebank,” detail showing chiroplast in use. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

the lower right corner (fig. 1.3). David Browne confirmed the use of the chiroplast during his academy exhibitions in Boston, advertising that pupils would play “elementary lessons from Logier’s first four books, as combined with the chiroplast.”53 Any performance involving so many children and inexperienced players could easily fall into confusion. Cruikshank’s depiction of Logier atop the grand piano hints that a leader conducted the piano ensembles to maintain time, keep the students together, and give cues when soloists were to play and others were to fall silent. Men with years of experience in British military bands, such as Logier and Browne, were in their element directing an ensemble, whether it was a wind band, a church choir, or a throng of keyboardists.

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As pictured in Cruikshank’s print, women and girls far outnumbered male piano students during the early nineteenth century. Musical instruction for women was generally limited to keyboard, harp, or English guitar (a small instrument like a mandolin) during the long Georgian era. Women rarely played orchestral instruments, especially those whose physicality was considered unfeminine, either in the way they were held (e.g., cello) or the way they were played (woodwinds and brass). Thus, harp and keyboard instruments constituted women’s primary choices. Cottage pianos in England and square pianos in America proliferated in homes of the rising middle class as affordable instruments were churned out during the Industrial Revolution. Keyboard instruction flourished as instrument sales soared.54 Most advertisements for Logierian instruction offered services primarily to “ladies,” but men were invited to the lectures on the science of music, and some teachers made a point of offering an evening class for “gentlemen.”55 The Times specified that students at Logier’s London academy attended “twice in the week, for two hours each time,” on Mondays and Thursdays, or on Tuesdays and Fridays.56 Some critics claimed that the primary intention of Logier’s group method was to fatten the professor’s pocketbook by teaching many students at once.57 Others said that, in effect, the students taught one another—as in the so-called Lancasterian approach—far more than the professor taught them.58 But students of the Logierian method received individual lessons in addition to their group classes and harmony lectures. A guide for teachers of the Logierian system specified that an associate should give individual piano lessons to students in a room separate from the concert and lecture space.59 In addition, one or more colleagues assisted during the twice-weekly group classes. These individuals were often the wives or relatives of the male professors, or “preceptors.” Men delivered the public lectures on harmony because it was still deemed inappropriate for women to give speeches in public. In the Browne music academy, Elizabeth gave lessons when she could, and “Miss Browne”—Augusta—was helping by 1833.60 In another Logierian academy in Cincinnati during the 1830s, English-born William Nixon was assisted by his wife, Charity, and his sister, Miss Isabella Nixon.61 Professors of the new group system of instruction were supposed to be trained to teach this groundbreaking method. Logier taught and certified other piano teachers in his system—another innovative business strategy at the time. For the substantial fee of one hundred guineas, teachers such as David Browne became accredited in his system and opened their own franchised practices. Many of his troubles in the United States would result from

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other musicians’ disdain for his official certification in the system. Often those who purported to teach according to his system lacked any specific training in the method. Augusta Browne would recall herself as “a tiny elf, figuring away on the piano with infinite gusto” as she worked out chord progressions from a figured bass, which the future composer learned as part of the Logierian method.62 The study of harmony, figured bass, and voice leading were aspects of the “science of music,” as opposed to learning just the notes or the melody of a work. As noted earlier, Logier was derided for introducing and drilling even the youngest students in music theory, but his system provided a powerful foundation and advantage to children with musical aptitude. His method cultivated knowledge that enabled women to work as music teachers with enhanced credentials, as Augusta would do when she advertised as a “Professor of the Logierian System of Music” on her sheet music publications around 1840. Logier’s oldest daughter, Ellen, ran a successful music academy in Dublin with her husband, Edmund Christopher Allen.63 As a widow, “Mrs. E. C. Allen” continued the academy with one of her brothers, Henry Logier, until he relocated to Londonderry in 1843.64 As late as 1854, Dublin and London musical journals applauded her academy concerts, and “Mrs. and the Misses Allen” continued to run the academy successfully and even attracted patronage from nobility such as the countess of Clarendon.65

Coming to North America David Browne made preparations for emigration from Ireland over several years. He studied with Logier in Dublin, then traveled to London, where he obtained letters of recommendation, including an 1818 note from Muzio Clementi & Co., the firm of the well-known music mogul who was prominent in composition, sheet music publication, and instrument manufacture.66 David selected and purchased pianos in London from the outstanding piano builder John Broadwood as well as other makers. The accumulation of an inventory of instruments and sheet music in place for departure suggests that he had a source of ready cash, possibly money from his wife’s family.67 It seems unlikely that his music shop alone could have produced sufficient income for the preparations, which David later asserted to total some four thousand dollars, a sum that would compute to tens of thousands in twentyfirst-century dollars.68

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When David sailed from Ireland in the spring of 1820, he intended to immigrate to New York, but his plans changed abruptly when his vessel stopped in St. John, New Brunswick.69 At this crucial moment he made the acquaintance of Major General George Stracey Smyth, the lieutenant governor and commander in chief of the province of New Brunswick. The provincial governor was so favorably impressed that he pledged to procure “all the young Ladies and Gentlemen in Town as Students,” an offer that sounded too good to refuse, especially in view of a financial panic and economic depression that arose in the US during 1819.70 David Browne jumped into action by the end of June, renting a large building—formerly a hotel—for his business.71 The eager businessman maintained regular advertisements in at least three local papers: the City Gazette and the Star in St. John, and the New Brunswick Courier in Fredericton, the provincial government seat. David advertised music and instruments for sale, and he announced a public “examination” on August 19 that would demonstrate music and harmony lessons according to the Logierian system.72 He also joined the local chapter of Freemasons.73 The Masonic connection provided a reliable professional bond that he would lean on in years to come. These activities indicate that David eagerly threw himself into work as he launched his shop and music academy on King Street, the main business thoroughfare in St. John. If Elizabeth opted to stay in Ireland to carry her pregnancy to a more certain delivery in fall 1820, then she would have made the voyage to New Brunswick during the winter or spring following Augusta’s birth. She arrived before the end of April 1821, when an advertisement in the City Gazette announced that Mrs. Browne, “having been solicited by several Ladies,” would be offering drawing lessons to begin in May.74 At roughly the same time, David made a petition requesting a land grant of five hundred acres in New Brunswick.75 He stated that he had three children, Augusta and two older sons confirmed by later census records. David’s petition was successful, and he was granted three hundred acres of “wilderness land” near the Black River in New Brunswick.76 He purchased additional sections of adjoining property during the family’s sojourn in St. John. These land acquisitions would provide some financial security through sale of virgin timber, rentals as farm acreage, and, finally, land sales after the family left New Brunswick.77 Augusta never knew a time when she was not surrounded by pianos and music every day at home and in the academy. She rejoiced in the piano as her “cherished companion” and the “delight of my infancy.”78 She spent many hours engaged with her “dear old friend” in recreational playing and musical

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discovery as well as in practice. Elizabeth may have taught young Augusta her first little pieces, but David was equally involved in his daughter’s musical education. Her mother was soon occupied with two new infants born during their years in New Brunswick: Arthur, called St. John by the family, and William Henry. The Logierian method emphasized learning music through reading notation. Augusta quickly developed enough skill to sample the sheet music that her father sold at his St. John shop, which was advertised as a “London music warehouse” that sold titles published by the Clementi firm.79 One of the works that Augusta recalled studying as a child was Purcell’s Ground, a piece that her father had published in Dublin. A surviving copy of David Browne’s imprint of Purcell’s Ground includes printed fingering in the score, an addition for the student that was not as commonplace then as it is now.80 The music was built on a repeated bass pattern, or ground, that little Augusta played with hands like “cats paws” that “scrambled with infinite perplexity over its many variations.”81 She would muse decades later that “almost every association of childhood is entangled with some old dry fugue or exercise.”82 A list of sheet-music publications that David advertised in 1827 illuminates music that Augusta would have played and heard throughout her youth (fig. 1.4).83 The fifty or so titles are evenly divided between keyboard solos and songs with one or more vocal parts. The vocal numbers offered Scottish and Irish traditional songs, among them Thomas Moore’s and John Stevenson’s beloved versions of Irish airs. Music for piano included country dance tunes and arrangements or extracts of works by Dussek, Daniel Steibelt, Joseph Mazzinghi, Giovanni Battista Viotti, Ignaz Pleyel, and George Frideric Handel. The piano repertoire reflected the styles and genres of the so-called London Pianoforte School, exemplified by the pianist-composers Clementi, Dussek, Johann Baptist Cramer, and John Field.84 With brilliant finger work, late Classical forms, and early Romantic harmonies, the London Pianoforte style would have provided models for Augusta’s early keyboard compositions. St. John may have been idyllic for a precocious little girl, but it was precarious for a businessman. Although the port of St. John was accessible yearround, it was subject to wildly fluctuating tidal changes in the Bay of Fundy. The unique reversing rapids on the St. John River made inland river navigation problematic, requiring land transport around the difficult stretch that was passable during only part of each tide. Many British Loyalists had fled to St. John in 1783 during the Revolutionary War in the American colonies. The English travel writer James Silk Buckingham described St. John as

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Figure 1.4. Advertisement for music published by David Browne from Logier’s Companion to the Royal Patent Chiroplast, or Hand-Director (Boston: D. Browne, 1827). David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

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having less elegance than the old French cities of Montréal, Quebec, or even Halifax, but having instead, “an American air of equality . . . with the eager bustle and earnest pursuit of business which is so characteristic of American towns.”85 With about eighty-five hundred residents in 1824, St. John was hardly a teeming metropolis, but it did offer cultural amenities typical of provincial English towns. Shipbuilding was the main industry, followed by fishing and whaling, and cut timber was the principal export. Irish immigrants settled thickly in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland during the first decades of the nineteenth century because fares to Canada were cheaper than those to the United States. David kept an eye on the bigger prize, even as he gambled on developing a music shop and academy in St. John. As early as September 26, 1820, he wrote to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, seeking assistance to establish his business in the United States. “I have only promised to remain [in St. John] this winter,” he wrote, as he angled for attractive commercial breaks such as duty-free imports of his musical instruments.86 David also asked for help in obtaining a church position or academic post, promising to “become a good Citizen.” He included a pamphlet about the new Logierian system together with a piece of music dedicated to President James Monroe, The American Independents [sic] Grand March and Six National Waltzes, which he had composed and printed before leaving Dublin.87 We lack Adams’s response, but David noted that the statesman recommended Boston to him as a venue with “talent and judgment to appreciate and patronize” the new system.88 David initiated further outreach by corresponding with John Rowe Parker, an entrepreneur who had a music business and publishing firm in Boston. Parker printed David’s series of three “Ancient Essays on Music” during December 1820 in his weekly music journal, the Euterpeiad.89 Parker was a significant contact who would soon publish the first reference book on music in the United States, A Musical Biography, based largely on articles from the Euterpeiad.90 An announcement for David’s academy near the end of 1820 stated that the price of lessons could not be reduced as some had requested.91 The cost of lessons was four guineas per quarter, plus an entrance fee of one and a half guineas, the same as Logier’s rates in Dublin.92 In the same advertisement, Broadwood pianos were offered “at London prices—for Cash only.” This notice hints that many in St. John were not able or willing to pay these fees, and that the city was not sufficiently prosperous to support as vigorous

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a music business as the Brownes envisioned. In 1822 David announced that his pianos would hereafter be imported to Halifax, where he intended to open a business in spring 1823, but apparently nothing came of the plan.93 He revised and expanded the three essays published in the Euterpeiad and submitted them to the Lyre, a short-lived music journal in New York. John Quincy Adams’s remarks commending Bostonians as citizens who could appreciate the potential of the new Logierian system lingered in David’s mind as he weighed the future. The death of the provincial commander, Lieutenant-Governor Smyth, in 1823 further darkened the outlook for the Browne music business in St. John through the loss of the aristocrat’s patronage. A crisis in timber exports in 1824–25 exacerbated financial pressures in New Brunswick, and an enormous forest fire along the Miramichi River destroyed hundreds of acres of woodlands in October 1825. Even though the Browne land holdings were not damaged in the fire, the regional economy was in tatters. Brighter prospects beckoned across the border.

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Chapter Two

Apprentice in a Family Music Business In June 1826 David Browne finally achieved his goal of establishing a music academy in the United States. The family arrived in Boston by ship from St. John no more than a month prior to the vibrant Fourth of July festivities.1 The new nation—and especially the proud city of Boston—exploded with jubilation on the Fourth in 1826, as it celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Despite being in the city only a few weeks, Augusta’s enterprising father reached out to other military bandsmen and persuaded Mr. Kendall’s Brigade Band to perform his American Grand March in the Fourth of July procession.2 John Quincy Adams was the US president, following a rancorous election in which Andrew Jackson won a plurality—but not a majority—of both the popular and the electoral count. After the vote was decided against him in the House of Representatives, Jackson vowed to sweep the election in 1828 and usher in an era of democracy by majority rule in which ordinary men would hold as much power as those with privileged backgrounds. In a stunning coincidence, that brilliant Fourth of July in 1826 was marked by the deaths of the sages of the early Republic, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as though one tide was going out and another was coming in. It was also the birth date of the iconic American songwriter Stephen Foster. The impressive domed Massachusetts State House held pride of place in Boston above the Common on Beacon Hill, alongside the elegant homes of the foremost families. Just to the east, State Street housed bank after bank, import houses, and offices of the insurance companies that protected importers against the devastation of all too common warehouse fires or the loss of ships at sea. Washington Street was the business thoroughfare and “neck”

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Figure 2.1. Charles Stimpson, “Plan of the City of Boston,” (Stimpson’s Boston Directory, 1832). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. The Browne music academy was located one block east of the Common (toward the harbor), at Washington and Avon (approximately in line with the letter “N” in “COMMON”).

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that connected the city center with the higher land west of town (fig. 2.1). Newspapers brimmed with colorful descriptions of merchandise, foods, and luxury items offered for sale by the shops along Washington Street. Boston Common, where families strolled and children loved to cavort, ran parallel to Washington just a block to the west. Enticing urban attractions suitable for a curious little girl and her family included dioramas, automatons, and performances by jugglers and rope walkers. The Browne music academy—a “suite of elegant rooms” furnished with at least seven pianos and sometimes ten or more—was located at Washington and Avon, between Bedford and Summer streets.3 Augusta’s triumphant Boston debut of a “most difficult work” by Dussek took place at the first exhibition of the academy in mid-October. David hoped to attract the merchant class through his academy exhibitions and lectures on harmony. To the elite of Boston—the Adamses, the Appletons, and the Cabots—David sought to communicate the new system of instruction and its great advantages for learning harmony and piano from the earliest lessons.4 He followed Logier’s strategy of regular press announcements and ads. In August, the Masonic Mirror began a series of articles on the Logierian system of instruction, presumably supplied by David from Logier’s publications.5 David peppered his twice-weekly advertisements with formidablesounding phrases such as “Britannic majesty” and “all the axioms of liberal and rational science,” but the pompous style may have confounded rather than impressed his readers.6 He also ran regular notices and advertisements in the Boston Statesman, the Evening Gazette, the Courier, and the New England Galaxy. An important endorsement for David came from the Bohemianborn composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861), who visited the Washington Street academy and appraised Logier’s method with warm words in the Evening Gazette.7 “I am positive that the scholars will profit highly by the study of the ‘Logierian System,” he wrote. Although he taught piano “according to the old routine,” Heinrich was in favor of “any new scientific discoveries” in music instruction. He saw the chiroplast as a practical means of assisting beginning students to keep their hands in place and their eyes on the music as they learned the keyboard terrain. Furthermore, he knew of “no superior methods yet” to “Mr. Logier’s two volumes for the exercises of beginners.” He concluded by urging the public to favor David with “a liberal share of patronage as a brother professor.” This helpful colleague did not remain in Boston, but left within days on one of his extended trips to Britain and Europe. Augusta remembered his visit to the academy with wonderment

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at the highly unusual music that Heinrich performed from his “Log House” cantata, music inspired by the frontier flavor of his surroundings in Kentucky. She called it “one of the earliest recollections of my childhood,” and never forgot the generous spirit and imagination of the “Beethoven of America.”8 The little girl was now of an age to attend daily grammar school, or dame school, where young children of both sexes received the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion, but she spent much time at the piano. Augusta would later recall intensive practice for “five-year-old fingers,” but there were no shortcuts for “one who aspires to be a finished musician.”9 Each piece that demanded “arduous ploughing through the mazes of fugue and counterpoint” was an essential “mile-stone of the journey . . . [through] the musical Pilgrim’s Progress.” The young, impressionable girl may have had few role models of women as professional musicians, pianists, or composers, but her knowledge of British and American musicians suggests that she had read Parker’s entries in A Musical Biography, including his accounts of two outstanding women keyboard players in America: Sophia Hewitt Ostinelli (ca. 1799–1846) and Eliza Eustaphiève Peruzzi (1808–92), both of whom resided in Augusta’s Boston. Sophia was born into the Anglo-American Hewitt family of musicians in New York City, and she became a leading pianist and organist in Boston during the 1820s. Eliza was the daughter of Alexis Eustaphiève, a man of letters who served for more than forty years as the Russian consul general, first in Boston, then in New York City. Eliza was an insatiable student who played effortlessly and devoured music. Parker marveled at “Miss Eustaphiève” and compared her favorably with the young Mozart.10 Both Misses Hewitt and Eustaphiève performed to acclaim as children and continued with success in music as adults.11 The regime that Augusta followed as a youngster was likely to have exemplified Parker’s decree of “No practice short of four hours daily” for any serious “pianiste.”12 Furthermore, she would have absorbed his admonition that girls should demonstrate the humility appropriate to their sex. Parker pointedly attributed “a becoming rigor of feminine modesty” to Ostinelli, in addition to her “brilliant execution” and “intellectual dominion over the art.”13 Like many nineteenth-century music lovers, Augusta first experienced orchestral repertoire through piano transcriptions and keyboard duets during the decades before North American cities had regular symphony orchestras offering such music in concert performances. Logier’s publications included arrangements of excerpts from orchestral works by the European composers Corelli, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Handel.14 David Browne’s

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publications included keyboard concertos by Dussek, Ignaz Pleyel, and Viotti. He also published selections by Clementi, Handel, Steibelt, Giovanni Battista Martini, Luigi Cherubini, and Joseph Mazzinghi. Some of these impressive solos were featured in public exhibitions at the family music academy in Boston (1826 and 1827), Baltimore (1834), and Philadelphia (1836), in which Augusta would have been an indispensable performer. Equally important to a pianist and piano teacher of the era was music based on national songs (Scottish, Irish, etc.) and favorite selections from theatrical works on the British and American stage. Material that was recognizable was far more desirable to audiences and music consumers than pedagogical works or music in erudite forms such as fugue. In the 1827 list of music published by Augusta’s father, variations on Scottish songs featured prominently.15 David’s own compositions included arrangements of “Yellow hair’d Laddie,” “My ain kind dearie,” and other familiar songs (“God Save the King” and “Rule, Britannia”). Because her father sold music from London suppliers, British musical taste was a major stylistic influence on the young Augusta. Whether practicing on her own or participating in the Logierian group classes, David’s little daughter was contributing to the success of the music academy. Each member of the family played some role in the business. Augusta soon mastered the repertoire and the skills to assist in the keyboard classes. The variation principle embedded in Logier’s class method provided a natural bridge for an eager student like Augusta to begin to improvise and compose, starting with improvised variations. Improvisation was play for a child under ten, but she was cultivating the skills that would result in piano and song publications when she was still only a teenager. The older boys grew up moving and tuning the many pianos. They also learned to play but preferred to tinker with the instruments. The oldest son, Louis Henri Browne, became an apprentice at sixteen or seventeen with Josiah Chickering, the leading piano builder in Boston. St. John, the next born after Augusta, would also go into piano manufacture. Their mother, Elizabeth, arrived in Boston with a year-old baby, William Henry, and she gave birth to two more daughters and a son during the three years that they lived on Washington Street. Augusta ultimately served as the big sister who helped care for her six younger siblings. If David had pursued his original intention and gone to New York in 1820, he might have avoided the difficulties that soon emerged in Boston. His assertion of being “the seventh [italics original] accredited Professor of the ‘New Musical System of Education,’ and Coadjutor to ‘Mr. Logier,’” might

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have been embraced by eager customers while the system was still a novelty.16 But by 1826 musicians in New York and Boston were appplying the method whether they were genuinely accredited or not, and the public at large was satisfied with the results.17 Many music teachers saw aspects of the system that could be or already were part of their instruction, and freely advertised that they taught the Logierian system without fear of legal retribution. The Irish newcomer’s claim of exclusivity to the trademark title irritated teachers already active in Boston and the customers who thought well of their instruction. David’s claim of being the seventh teacher of the system was based on a notice published by Logier in 1816, but legions of teachers had been trained in the method across Great Britain and Germany over the previous decade. During the month of Augusta’s successful public performance, a “Musical Critic Club” attacked David in the Boston Evening Gazette, mocking his claims, labeling him a “monopolizer,” and criticizing his “National Music” as a “miserable attempt at composition.”18 He responded with a long rebuttal to his musical critics at the Gazette, noting that “the most ignorant composers are generally the most illiberal critics,” whereas “respectable teachers have all been friendly, and I have nothing to fear from them who know their business.”19 This sharp-tongued professor would never back down from a war of words in print, with near fatal consequences for his business. David again ran afoul of the Boston music establishment during summer 1827, when he warned the public of unscrupulous teachers who offered Logierian instruction without the proper study, payment, and accreditation. His primary target was Thomas Truman Spear (1803–82), who taught music and published a few compositions during the 1820s before turning successfully to painting. Spear had the approval of the musical establishment because he had studied with Dr. George K. Jackson, the foremost musician in Boston during the previous decade and the director of the Handel and Haydn Society, the premiere choral society in the city.20 Spear’s advertisements also cited instruction in the system from Peter K. Moran in New York City. Moran was an Irish musician who had taken some classes with Logier in Dublin a decade earlier, but who never completed the course or paid the certification fee of one hundred guineas, according to David, who had known Moran in Dublin.21 During the fall of 1827 the New England Galaxy ran advertisements for David Browne, ads for Spear, and David’s “Caution,” which warned of “the fraudulent pretext of using Mr. Logier’s name or system” and “the great injury of the lawfully accredited Professor” that resulted.22 Sometimes all three advertisements appeared one after the other on the same page.

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Augusta’s father leaped to defend himself when teachers in Boston and New York took issue with his contention that he was the “Coadjutor and Assign of John Bernard Logier, Esq. and the only Professor of his system in the United States.”23 Just as Logier had argued his case in London, David answered every challenge or criticism with an article in the press. In June 1828, David selfpublished a pamphlet upholding his credentials and the merits of the Logierian system, copies of which he inscribed and gave to important Boston leaders including the Adams and Appleton families.24 In this pamphlet, entitled A Self Defence, he asserted his side of the dispute with fiery bluster, writing, “Various articles of hackneyed mannerism have frequently appeared in the public prints . . . replete with the vaunting panegyrics of designing scribblers. . . . Their puny efforts were evidently intended, either as a burlesque or insult on me; being the only professor of the system (as yet) in the United States, and consequently signalized as the victim of their combined hostilities.”25 The pamphlet rejected specific charges of “monopoly,” “illiberality,” and “publishing cards, tending to injure co[n]temporaries.” A respondent named “Justice” retorted in the New England Galaxy, writing, “This is all fudge. Mr. Browne has been his only enemy,” followed by a spirited defense of Spear.26 Moran also weighed in with a stinging letter to the Galaxy that gave his side of the story and mocked David as a poor teacher and a worse pianist.27 Coincidentally, at the very time of David’s verbal sparring in the press, Lowell Mason, a music enthusiast with an interest in sacred music, settled in Boston. Mason had contributed hymn arrangements based on music by European composers to the 1822 compilation The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music. The success of the collection led to repeated job offers from Boston churches. Mason accepted a proposal from three churches and moved from Georgia in summer 1827, probably with an understanding that he would obtain the presidency of the Handel and Haydn Society. He soon became the leader of the musical establishment in Boston. Mason and his circle of associates—George F. Root, George Webb, William Bradbury, A. N. Johnson, and James C. Johnson—took prestigious positions as organists and/or choir directors at Boston’s preeminent churches, the very sort of jobs that David hoped to gain. Through his influential hymnbook publications and music teaching, Mason became the most famous American musician of the era. He is still regarded as the father of American music education for his successful initiative to add music to the Boston public school curriculum in 1838. Although he never weighed in on David’s claim to be the only legitimate Logierian professor in the United States, Mason knew about the new

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system of instruction and owned some of Logier’s method books and music publications.28 As late as 1842, the trio of colleagues A. N. Johnson, Root, and Mason advertised regular group classes “on the Logierian system” in Boston.29 Mason also taught vocal music and keyboard to students at the New England Asylum for the Blind (now the Perkins School for the Blind) from 1832 to 1836.30 Elements of the Logierian group approach were used at the school for the blind during the 1830s.31 Songs, simple piano tunes, and variations were readily taught by ear and by rote, as were the basics of harmony, chord progressions, and voice leading, while the chiroplast may have helped to cultivate hand position for unsighted students. On March 13, 1837, the Boston Courier reported, “The Logierian system has been adhered to, and the principal music-room, having five pianos, is occupied alternately by the different classes.” Another chief concern of Mason’s circle was the improvement of worship music in America. The campaign by certain “gentlemen of taste and science in this country” was officially launched with the Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music.32 Congregational singing was decried as abysmal in the early nineteenth century, and Yankee singingschool masters became scapegoats for a rising generation of church music advocates who thought European music was more advanced and “scientific,” and thus worthier of spreading through the Protestant mainstream. Ironically, several of these new leaders began their music instruction in singing schools, but “sang a new song” after studying music theory with European immigrant musicians. The music of eighteenth-century New England composers came under criticism as primitive or untutored by urban church musicians during the 1820s. Hymns and psalm settings by such eighteenth-century British hymnists as William Tans’ur and Martin Madan were considered more cultivated in harmonic style and preferable for use in worship. Mason, born to a merchant family in Massachusetts, became the most influential of these advocates after studying in Savannah with the German composer Frederick L. Abel. Mason wanted to lift the level of music sung in the church but envisioned a feeder program of musical education beginning in childhood as the ultimate solution to this need. To this end he introduced free musical training for children in Boston public schools in 1837. This was in addition to his church activities, concerts with the Handel and Haydn Society, a growing list of hymnbook publications, and, within a few years, a circuit of workshops or “normal musical institutes” to teach other music educators. His reputation has dimmed over time with the criticism that he stifled the American

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tradition of Yankee composers by favoring European composers and borrowing music wholesale from European works. Without question, Mason’s dedicated vision brought music into American public schools and shaped the field of music education in this country. His close associates carried out his methods and training, fanning out from Boston and the Northeast. However, women did not appear among his circle of associates. Mason was Presbyterian; thus, he belonged to a patriarchal hierarchy that allowed few active roles to women. He insisted that the Handel and Haydn Society dismiss Sophia Hewitt Ostinelli as organist in 1830 despite the objections of many members.33 Although they were often essential as performers in concerts, women could not be official members of the Handel and Haydn Society until 1967. No evidence documents whether Mason and his followers interacted with Augusta or her father, but their paths intersected as they pursued similar professional activities in Boston and New York. The Browne family and Mason’s circle shared many common beliefs: Music held a powerful influence for morality and good. Church music was essential to worship. Congregational singing was a form of worship, and congregational participation should be revived and utilized. Long-standing hymns and chants provided a reservoir of great music to draw on. Vulgar music should be shunned. Music’s benefits were intellectual (scientific), moral (socializing and devotional), and physical (promoting good health). Sacred music observance belonged in the home, the parlor, the schoolroom, and the concert hall, as well as in the church sanctuary. The pursuits of Mason, Webb, David Browne, and Augusta crisscrossed for years, beginning in, but not limited to, Boston. Mason delivered an oration on church music during the same month that Boston newspapers commended Augusta’s impressive performance of Dussek’s “most difficult work.” The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music was much in vogue, with new editions appearing regularly, and Mason soon branched out into an array of anthologies of songs and hymns for churches and music lovers of all ages. Mason’s background in commerce, with only occasional formal music instruction, had some parallels with David’s uneven musical training in the militia. But Mason bested David at every turn. He built support and formed cordial alliances, while David made enemies and engaged in disputes in the press. Mason made his own luck; David Browne managed to compound his own troubles. Although David later stated that in Boston he had instructed “upwards of two hundred ladies of the first respectability,” he faced growing hostility.34

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A second public exhibition of the academy to take place in early 1828 was announced during the last week of December 1827, but the event failed to capture the interest among the press that Augusta’s performance a year and a half earlier had garnered.35 In September 1828 David announced that “his Musical Seminary will close in the month of May next, as indispensable business will require his attendance elsewhere.”36 His Boston plans in ruins, he advertised music and instruments for sale in advance of the family’s departure.

New York at Last Always a man who liked to chart his course, David studied the map and decided to use the newly completed Erie Canal to move his family and goods to a town with the potential for major commercial growth—the city of Utica, New York. Transport by canal was more advanced than the infant railroad system in America at the time, but travel was easier after the winter ice had thawed on the waterways. On June 9, 1829, the Oneida Observer announced the sale of an extensive array of instruments that had been imported for the “subscriber’s Logierian Musical Academy in Boston,” along with music and “some hundreds of music plates.”37 The lengthy description concluded with the statement that “the subscriber wishes to retire from business as soon as his stock is disposed of,” suggesting that the Browne business would cut back inventory and focus on instruction. A week later, the Western Recorder announced the academy of “Mr. Browne, Professor of the Logierian System of Musical Education,” in Dr. Pomeroy’s new brick building in Utica, offering Logierian classes and “the best London Piano Fortes, Violins, Flutes, Music, &c. for sale, at unusually low prices.”38 David cultivated a new colleague at the Western Recorder, a religious newspaper written in part by Thomas Hastings, a Presbyterian musician with similar tastes for European and “scientific” music. Hastings published a collection of sacred music in 1819, Musica Sacra, and a book, Dissertation on Musical Taste; or General Principles of Taste Applied to the Art of Music, that were important markers of shifting thought about church music and hymnody in America. David later referred to the hiatus in Utica as a “vacation” necessary on account of “the health of some of my family.”39 This may have alluded to Elizabeth’s delivery of another baby in January 1829—George Washington Browne. The stay in Utica was but a short one. By November most of the instruments and music that had been proffered in Utica were advertised in

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the New York Morning Courier at “Browne’s Logieiran [sic] Musical Academy, No. 12 John street, next to the Arcade,” in New York City. Within a few months, David went on the offensive in response to an ad for “Instruction on the Logerian System” by the “Misses Cowan,” recently arrived from London to teach piano, harp, and singing.40 The sisters may have studied with one of the many Logierian professors in London, but later advertisements that cited “Miss C., having studied under the celebrated Mr. Logier,” drew particular fury from Augusta’s father.41 By the first of May 1830, Mr. Browne’s Musical Academy was operating at 414 Broadway in New York, and a public exhibition would soon feature no less than eight different concertos.42 Which concerto Augusta performed on this occasion is not recorded, but there can be little doubt that her keyboard skills were prominently displayed. David’s precipitous actions propelled the family from the frying pan into the fire. The Traveller, a Boston newspaper, alighted on the burgeoning story with glee: One David Browne, who made a wonderful swell and flourish here, a year or two since, as the “exclusive” Logierian Professor; and who, after filling his pockets and vainly attempting to involve one or two of our most popular teachers in a quarrel with him, dismissed his school for a short vacation, which has not yet expired—has made his debut in New York, in character. But he pitched his tune a note too high. He attempted to injure the reputation of two accomplished young ladies, instructing on the Logierian system, and spread his scandal so basely, that their friends could no longer endure the aspersions of the impudent foreigner.43

A lawyer for the Cowans sent a letter in February 1830 that demanded an apology and a retraction from David. In March he printed a challenge in the New York Commercial Advertiser that questioned the Logierian credentials of Miss Anna Cowan and her sister. On April 13 Anna Cowan sued David for damage to her reputation with his assertions that she was “an imposter, and that she never learned the system of Mr. Logier.”44 David carried on as though nothing had happened. He was acquainted with Charles Dingley, a teacher and music printer who was the editor of a struggling music and arts magazine, The Euterpeiad: An Album of Music, Poetry, and Prose. Dingley had been associated with the Euterpeiad in Boston, where he took over the title from John Rowe Parker. He was sympathetic to David and printed his insistent announcements for the new academy in almost every issue, as well as printing David’s American Military Bugle

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Andante, dedicated to President Andrew Jackson.45 With this music and its dedication to the commander in chief, Browne emphasized patriotic American feelings as he nurtured his business in New York. Meanwhile, the lawsuit simmered through the summer, summarized by an inquiry to the Euterpeiad, dated September 15, 1830, as to “how the ‘Law Suit’ has terminated.”46 The writer had heard that Mr. Browne was “twice arrested and lodged in prison—however, the damages were trifling, being only ten thousand dollars!” and that the trial date was posted for July “in the Superior Court, for the said illegal offence” against Cowan. But no answer was forthcoming to the reader’s query. At the end of September, Dingley departed as editor and the Euterpeiad declined to write anything more about the lawsuit, except to mention that Mr. Browne was preparing a statement of the facts for the press.47 The press release was presumably the article published in the Masonic Mirror on October 9, 1830, and is evidence that David turned to his Masonic brothers for assistance when the Euterpeiad would no longer print his announcements.48 David’s mentor in Dublin now became his liberator. The Masonic Mirror published a deposition made to the Dublin police by Logier himself, a document that confirmed that the Misses Cowans were unknown to him.49 Although the civil case brought by the Cowan sisters was dismissed as a result of the deposition, David was hardly vindicated. He wrote later, “[T] he action was nullified, and I committed my inveterate persecutors to their own propensities, and awful was the result,” yet the Cowans continued to advertise that they taught according to the Logierian method and had studied with Logier.50 David had right on his side, at least from the point of view of Logier’s British patent, but the American public and legal courts were not sympathetic. The acceptance and understanding of a franchise or trademark such as the “Logierian system” was simply not commonplace then as it is today in the United States. His family believed in David Browne’s Dublin credentials, but they had to learn to modify their tone in view of public perception and reaction in Boston and New York. Ten-year-old Augusta would have been all too cognizant of her father’s difficulties during the months of the ordeal. The trauma induced by the accusation and imprisonment of a parent is a searing experience for any child. She and her siblings would have felt despair, fear, and anger at their father’s accusers. The collapse of their businesses in both Boston and New York must have engulfed Augusta in emotions and experiences that colored her childhood and shaped her adult years. For the rest of her life, she would never refer to these painful episodes in her writing. Her silence speaks of the enormous

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toll that the family suffered in these ordeals. Right or wrong, the patriarch and the patented method resonated powerfully in the lives and professional choices of each of his children. One positive outcome was the little pianist’s commitment to succeed in her beloved profession—not least, perhaps, to prove her father’s reputation as a knowledgeable, “scientific” musician. David’s loyalty to Logier’s vision cost him dearly. Whether he continued to teach music in New York City after the Cowan affair is unclear. He no longer advertised and was not listed in city directories in New York or other major cities for several years. During this time David may have fallen back on his skills as an agent or business representative, and he had income from his New Brunswick land holdings. It was a frightening and difficult period for all of the family. Elizabeth’s final baby, Alexander Hamilton Browne, was born in June 1830 in the midst of the legal snafu. Evidence that the family remained in New York City after the Cowan lawsuit comes from Augusta’s memoir of young Hamilton, as the boy was called. She mentioned him as a child in an anecdote that featured Aaron Burr, who was still a lawyer in New York following the fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton and the failure of his grandiose political schemes. According to Augusta’s telling: [Burr] called at our house one day when Hamilton was a little creature, just beginning to run about. He happened to take some notice of the child, when my father, without the least reflection, called him to him, and presented him to the duelist with, “This is Alexander Hamilton, sir!” At the name of his victim, Burr started violently, but papa, not seeming to observe his perturbation, immediately added that his son had been named after some relatives.51

The account implies that the family still resided in New York City in 1832 or so, when Hamilton would have been an active toddler “just beginning to run about.” How David became acquainted with Burr is not known, but he was never shy about writing to or introducing himself to prominent figures. The challenges to the “patented” Logierian title presented plenty of matter for discussion. Stymied in New York City, David decided to give Canada another try with the hope that his British credentials would hold greater authority than in the United States. He aimed for Toronto—then known as York—as a potential venue, again using the Erie Canal and ferry boats on Lake Ontario for transport. The Toronto population in 1833–34 totaled some 9,500 residents. British Anglicans formed the ruling class in Upper Canada, but

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frustration and anger at the upper crust—culminating in the Rebellion of 1837—increased just at the time that the Brownes moved there. Once again David found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the family’s tenure in Toronto was a year or less. In August 1833, the local newspaper advertised “A house and shop to let, in an eligible situation on King-street, lately occupied as the Music Saloon, by Mr. Brown.”52 Augusta would nevertheless look back with fondness for Toronto in her memoir, Hamilton. She cited the day schools, the cathedral church of St. James, and the beautiful shores of Lake Ontario.53 More revealing is what she omitted from the memoir. She made no allusion to the family music business in any way. She did not speak of their early sojourns in St. John and Boston. Their residence in New York City was noted solely as the birthplace of her brother Hamilton. Through this selective retelling, Augusta wrote her father’s problems and setbacks out of the family narrative. Like an illegitimate child or insanity in the family, the matter was simply never mentioned. In her two books and dozens of articles, Augusta rarely spoke directly about her family. When she did, her words were carefully chosen to suggest a certain genteel lifestyle, omitting mention of sensitive subjects and painful memories. She maintained complete silence about the shop and music academy. Augusta may have loved and hated her father in equal parts, admiring him yet deploring his verbal outbursts, which led to such trouble. She chose to leave him out of the family narrative rather than reopen the wounds from the traumatic odyssey of her childhood years. Both parents taught Augusta, and they were her primary music instructors, but her father was foremost in her professional evolution. The situation bears some resemblance to the childhood of the German pianist Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–96), who was the most respected and influential woman pianist in Europe during the nineteenth century. The two women were born within a year or two of each other. Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873), dictated every aspect of his daughter’s musical development, although he was only a middling pianist himself, and his wife was a better performer. Wieck was even a follower of the Logierian group method of instruction for a few years, and began his daughter’s instruction in a small class with two other little girls when she was four or five years old.54 He studied Logier’s instruction methods and has been called “Logier’s leading exponent in Germany,” although he gradually evolved his own approach to piano pedagogy.55 Clara’s father was her principal teacher, taskmaster, and promoter. Wieck micromanaged every detail of her life, down to writing “her” diary.56 After

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age ten or so Clara was touring European capitals from Dresden to Paris with substantial success under her father’s watchful eye. Performing pianists in the 1830s were expected to present virtuoso pieces that they composed or improvised on the spot. Clara began to compose as a child to meet such audience expectations. Her musicality and careful training led to success for the young pianist and her father. His reputation soared, and hopeful piano students came to him for instruction, including the young Robert Schumann, already a university student in Heidelberg. The rest of their story has been told in many biographies: the stormy way to marriage, a few blissful years before physical symptoms and mental illness necessitated an asylum for Robert, while Clara struggled to raise their seven surviving children on her own through concertizing and teaching. Her life course continues to inspire women today who seek a career in music as a performer or composer. Augusta’s life and Clara Schumann’s reveal intriguing parallels. The girls’ fathers were Enlightenment men who soaked up new theories and technologies. Both men, neither one a polished pianist, taught keyboard using a similar system of instruction. The girls became child performers who received positive comments in the press. Neither daughter experienced a normal childhood before being propelled into professional status while barely a teenager. But their lives moved into different trajectories in response to where they lived and the musicians they knew. Clara was fortunate enough to meet and learn from important composers and pianists in Germany and France; Augusta did not record encounters with musical personalities other than Anthony Philip Heinrich when she was a child. Musical patronage took very different forms in antebellum America, where the commercial marketplace ruled, unlike the urban centers of Europe, where opera houses and cultured salons still had aristocratic or noble patrons. As adults, the two women maintained lifelong careers in music as performers and teachers, and each composed songs and piano music. They never met, but Augusta may have read about Clara in music journals of the era. Although her concert career was never as stellar as Clara’s, Augusta was an equally committed professional.

Boston and Beyond Seemingly at another dead end in Toronto, the Brownes returned from Upper Canada to Boston in 1833 to open a Logierian Musical Academy at

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6 Sewall Place.57 David undoubtedly hoped that the storm from their previous residence in Boston had blown over. And there was a significant recent development: the Boston Academy of Music was established during the early months of 1833.58 Lowell Mason and George Root were involved with the new academy, but the man in charge was William Channing Woodbridge, a prominent Bostonian who believed as passionately in reason and science as in Christian faith and evangelism. Newspapers in Boston and New York City maintained coverage on the stages of incorporation and initial class offerings at the Boston Academy in early 1833. These announcements may have encouraged David to consider whether the “musical science” taught in the Logierian system might fit into the Boston Academy initiative. The Browne family could not depart from Toronto until the spring thaw made steamship travel possible on Lake Ontario and the Erie Canal. By the end of July 1833, Boston newspapers announced that “Mr. Browne, professor of the Logierian system of instruction on the piano forte, has taken up his residence in this city, and will open his school in a few days.”59 Despite Woodbridge’s leadership, Mason already had a firm hand on the character and makeup of the organization, and his associates became its principal teachers. No position would materialize for David at the Boston Academy of Music. The family head proceeded to establish and conduct his Logierian academy in the usual manner. Elizabeth was busy with their large circle of young children. Between 1825 and 1830, she had given birth to five children, all of whom survived. Augusta was old enough to be called on as a babysitter, but the blossoming pianist was more valuable as a member of the family teaching team. An ad ran during March 1834 for the Logierian Musical Academy, Sewall Place, Milk Street, in which the young teenager was specified: Mr., Mrs., and Miss Browne continue to give instruction on the most perfect “System” of acquiring an accurate performance on “the Piano Forte” and “Organ.” Lectures on the various styles of National Music, Laws of Harmony, Composition, Singing and Accompaniment, &c. &c. Students may be attended at their own residence, or at the Academy, either on the “Logierian System,” or on the common mode of teaching.60

As a junior member of staff, Augusta was able to help with the group classes at the Academy. At only thirteen or fourteen, she was too young to call on students “at their own residence” by herself, although she may have gone with her mother or father in order to accompany a student or to play the

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secondo part of a duet. She also studied organ in Boston, a city with an abundance of fine churches and organists, but it is unknown whether she received instruction from anyone other than her father. At this time David inscribed a number of his published compositions to “Miss Cabot,” the sole child of the prestigious Boston couple Henry and Anna Cabot. Instructing the only daughter of this city leader would have been a coup for any teacher. Anna Sophia Cabot, later Mrs. Lodge (1821– 1900), was very close in age to Augusta. It is quite possible that the two girls played duos or concertos (with Augusta as accompanist) as part of the individualized instruction that Anna received. Presenting David’s gifted daughter in the Cabot home on Summer Street was invaluable advertising for the teacher. David also gave this desirable pupil many piano solos and a few songs—many his own imprints—that were retained in the Cabot family’s bound music volumes, now in the Boston Athenaeum.61 David inscribed various pieces “With Mr. Browne’s best Respects to Miss Cabot,” “With the Publisher’s best Respects to Miss Cabot,” and also “With the author’s most respectful compliments to Mrs. H. Cabot.” During the nineteenth century, music, rather than flowers or chocolates, was often a gift, but David, and later Augusta, gave music to families of stature in part as a form of advertising in which their names and music would be seen in the homes of the elite. Some of Miss Cabot’s pieces contain penciled fingerings and additional keyboard ornaments such as turns. The technical level of the music in her bound volumes varied from intermediate to advanced and thus required a pianist who has studied for at least several years. Many teenage students today would struggle to master solos such as Pleyel’s Concertante from her volume of “Marches.” A few selections promised more entertainment than study, such as the “much admired variations” on “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?”62 Other music volumes once owned by Boston-area girls contain music composed or published by David Browne. A few music imprints exhibit David’s undated inscriptions of music to “Miss M. Scott” and “Miss [Ellen] Bigelow.”63 The presence of so much of his own music—often prominently placed at the beginning of the volume—suggests that not only did David teach these young women and assign some of this music for study but he also may have been responsible for collecting their loose sheet-music imprints to be bound together into a single collation, a practice now known as binder’s volumes.64 Kinloch of Kinloch, a pleasant set of keyboard variations based on a Scottish tune, is one of his own works that turns up in several binder’s volumes under the grandiose title Browne’s Selection of Rondos Waltzes and Airs

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with Variations and Military Pieces for the Piano Forte. The variations featured a charming cover illustration of a young woman with her harp, an emblem often used to symbolize Ireland and its legendary songs.65 David’s Kinloch of Kinloch was included in binder’s volumes that belonged to Anna Cabot, Ellen Bigelow, and Gertrude V[ark] Field. Despite these efforts, David’s success in Boston was insufficient or unsatisfactory. A letter dated July 9, 1834, from the rector at Christ’s Church, Boston, introduced David to the rector of St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore, and recommended “his own and his daughter’s services on the Organ.”66 The letter noted “his talent in this department” and commended Augusta as an “accomplished performer [who] executes with skill and science.” The family relocated to Baltimore during the summer and opened their academy where “Mr. Browne . . . will be constantly assisted by Mrs. and Miss Browne” in a location “a few doors from St. Paul’s Church.”67 At an age when teenage girls of bourgeois and upper-class families might attend seminary or boarding school, Augusta already worked in the academy as a regular teacher. Despite the flattering account in the Boston press when Augusta performed as a little girl, there is no evidence that David and Elizabeth ever promoted her as a child prodigy on the concert stage. Her parents do not seem to have pushed their daughter to perform outside of the normal activities of the music academy and the church. She may have performed more than scattered newspaper holdings indicate, but the family music business always came first. In Baltimore David proceeded with the usual train of press releases and advertisements for the Logierian system in the local papers. But just as in Boston and New York, issues soon arose. A letter to the editor of the Baltimore Gazette from “Memnon” criticized the newspaper for its positive reception of the new professor, writing “merit needs not foreign aids,” and “the profession fears neither Browne nor Logier’s system.”68 David responded in his typical prolix style, calling Memnon’s anonymity “the surest sign of the expiring whispers of a departed enemy.”69 Questions continued to plague David, who adhered to his usual overzealous defense of himself and the system.70 He retold his account of the Cowan case in New York City and included Logier’s deposition from 1830. In February 1835 the academy announced an upcoming examination of students. In addition to harmony drills and ensemble performances by combined classes, the list of upcoming solos included Steibelt’s Grand Storm Concerto and other “grand Concertos” by Viotti, Corelli, Logier, and Dussek.71 Although Augusta would have known all of these piano solos, no additional press coverage recorded whether she presented one at this event. A few months later, the

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academy moved to a different street near St. Paul’s with a tone that conveyed eagerness to accommodate potential customers, “as the Logierian system has excited so much ill-will and ‘wilful misrepresentation.’”72 The ad continued, “Mrs. & Miss Browne will give Lessons” in the “usual way, either at the Pupil’s own residence, or at the Academy on such days as may not interfere with the Logierian Students.” Clearly, there was greater demand in Baltimore for individual lessons than for Logierian group classes. David remained the Logierian professor in chief, but Augusta, just fifteen or so, and her mother visited the homes of some students to teach traditional lessons. Was David Browne an eternal optimist with unrealistic dreams for his music academy? Was he a somewhat shady businessman? Or was he simply unlucky in old rumors being unearthed wherever he went? His self-confident assertions in print were belied by a consistent pattern of disputes and legal problems. He always seemed to make enemies, and many unanswered questions remain about his troubling behavior and actions. David’s feverish spurts of activity suggest a manic side, while his problems with other musicians may indicate paranoia. He picked up and started anew elsewhere but reenacted the same sequence of events: bold advertisements, offended parties, accusations or legal proceedings, a business that never flourished as envisioned, followed by relocation. His interest in each new venue dwindled as his prospects grew less bright and his mood altered to depression. These symptoms suggest a psychiatric issue, such as borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder, that resulted in his bursts of activity in a new city, his obsessive compulsion to defend his side of a perceived injustice, and his final cessation of interest in that location. Recognition and diagnosis of mental illness were scant during the Victorian era; treatment was even more limited. Treatment for the afflicted consisted of prayer, persuasion, and tranquilizers based on opiates. The Browne home and business was a single fabric into which each family member was interwoven. Aspects of mental illness would explain why the Browne family stayed so tightly linked, as they tried to handle David’s psychiatric problems by maintaining a family cocoon. Elizabeth and her children experienced harrowing years of odyssey. Augusta spent her formative years from six to sixteen between Boston, Utica, New York, Toronto, and Baltimore. She was still a child but played the role of a miniature adult in the dayto-day proceedings of the academy. Her father’s tribulations in Boston and New York would have sown chronic fears about rejection and failure due to diminishing clientele in the community. Her own zeal to succeed was rooted in a youth plagued by anxiety and insecurity.

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Chapter Three

Philadelphia Debut As early as July 1836, advertisements for the Browne Logierian Academy began to appear in the Philadelphia press.1 The family had left Baltimore behind. During November, the Browne music seminary announced a public event in which lectures would be “interspersed with various performances, as Solos, Duets, and concert playing.”2 The publicity in the Episcopal Recorder promised that “Miss Browne will perform miscellaneous compositions of her own, now in the press in London, under a high patronage; she will also play some pieces now publishing in this city of her compositions.” This announcement demonstrates that Augusta had been composing for some time, even if the assertions of British patronage or publication remain unsubstantiated. She soon had a numbered series of songs and keyboard solos in print with the Philadelphia music publisher George E. Blake. Her father was an experienced music publisher and businessman who could function as her agent and negotiate terms at a time when Augusta was not yet of legal age. Blake gave more details of her ongoing activity in March 1837, when the Philadelphia Inquirer announced that he had “just published several pieces . . . by Miss Augusta Browne, a young lady who promises to attain an enviable reputation as a composer.”3 Blake specifically mentioned three pieces: a song, “The Voice of Spring”; variations on an aria from opera of Lo Zangara [sic]; and variations on a “beautiful air after the manner of the Swiss.”4 These may be Augusta’s earliest surviving works, yet the three imprints bear numbers 9, 11, and 12 on their title pages. Appendix 2 presents a rough sequence of the composer’s music and prose titles. The gaps between numbered music scores in the series demonstrate twice as many publications as known titles during her five years of residence in Philadelphia, from 1836 to 1841. Blake numbered her compositions on the title page but did not usually add a copyright date, making

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it difficult to determine the exact year of publication. It was not uncommon for composers or publishers to reissue the same piece of sheet music in a later year, with a different title or with a different dedication.5 Before the teenager ever published a note of music, she had absorbed a large repertoire of keyboard music through study and performance. In later essays on music, Augusta referred with reverence to “the golden meshes of Bach’s fugues,” “the glittering beauties of Mozart,” “the tender fragrance of Haydn,” and “the classical grandeur of Beethoven.”6 She mentioned keyboard music by eminent Europeans: the baroque masters Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, and Purcell; the classical triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; and their later protégés Czerny, Dussek, Clementi, Cramer, Moscheles, Weber, Pleyel, Hummel, and František Kotžwara. Among Augusta’s early publications were keyboard or harp variations on familiar tunes and songs adapted to melodies by celebrated composers such as Handel and George Alexander Lee. Basing one’s first publication efforts on old favorites or well-known themes by prominent composers was a safe strategy for a young newcomer. “The Voice of Spring” may be her earliest music publication to survive. This composition is based on a melody from Daniel Steibelt’s well-known “Storm” Concerto, a work that Augusta’s father published in Dublin and Boston. Every aspiring pianist struggled to play Steibelt’s showpiece, in which, as in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, a summery day is interrupted by a mighty storm in thunderous music. Augusta extracted the lyrical “Dance of the Villagers” from the concerto for the tune in “The Voice of Spring.” She found lyrics that fit the rhythm and meter of the pastorale melody from a leading English poet of the period, Dorothea Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), whose sentimental verses found a place in every periodical and paper of the 1830s.7 With Mrs. Hemans’s poetry and Steibelt’s “Storm” Concerto fully acknowledged on the title page, Augusta could attract buyers before she had built a reputation or name recognition. The sheet music cover also displayed a dedication of the work to Miss Emily Warren, the daughter of an elite Boston family; this detail added social status to her new publication.8 Augusta had already absorbed the technique of dedications and references to upper-crust families that her father used in his music publications. “The Voice of Spring” was more elaborate than many songs of the 1830s, with a cadenza for the pianist in measure 59 and a cadenza for the vocalist in measure 66 (ex. 3.1). Both singer and pianist—or self-accompanied vocalist— needed to be skillful and well-instructed to perform this number.

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Example 3.1. Augusta Browne, “The Voice of Spring,” mm. 58–67.

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phil adelphia debut

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49

It was a shrewd strategy to display famous names prominently on sheet music covers to attract customers. In “The Orange Bough,” identified as “no. 15,” the title page announced poetry by Mrs. Hemans and a melody by Handel. The theme from the chorus in Judas Maccabaeus, “See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes,” hardly seems appropriate for the maudlin sentiments of Hemans’s poem, but it was a famous tune that many people would have recognized. Composers of the era routinely used melodies by other musicians as airs for variations or material for arrangements. Obtaining permission to use the work of another was not yet a legal concern. Despite borrowing from Handel and Hemans, Augusta gave the song her own distinctive touch with a transition from a phrase in E-flat major to a phrase that modulates to C minor (ex. 3.2). The odd interlude in the piano in measures 17–18, marked ad lib: sym. [phony], uses a descending bass line (E♭–D♭–C♭–B♭) that is not part of Handel’s music. The two measures give the singer time to breathe between phrases, but the interlude also demonstrates Augusta’s command of harmony. She inserts a chromatic chord progression that provides tangible demonstration of her “scientific” musical training. The ad lib tag indicates that the music could be embellished, or, if the “symphony” did not please the performer(s), it could be omitted. The chord occurring on C♭ in the bass (C♭–E♭–G♭–B♭♭) is an augmented-sixth chord that resolves correctly to a B-flat-major chord, the dominant chord for the key of E-flat in measure 19, before modulation to C minor in measure 20. Logier’s harmony textbook covered augmented-sixth chords (“chords of the sharp sixth”) and their use in modulation.9 The prominent placement of augmented-sixth chords would become a favorite device with which Augusta infused her songs and piano solos with expressive chromatic harmony. In “The Orange Bough,” the chord progression asserts Augusta’s mark within the familiar oratorio melody. The insertion is an inventive touch, even if it sounds odd in the midst of Handel’s well-known tune. Business looked promising for the Browne academy in Philadelphia, where taste and style were more elegant than in New York City. After a year or two at 36 Filbert Street, the family moved to Tenth Street, just a few doors away from St. Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church. The Brownes were faithful Episcopalians, and Augusta fondly recalled that her little siblings attended Sunday school at St. Stephen’s.10 As shown in figure 3.1, the residences near St. Stephen’s were four-story brick townhouses, in which the family could have run the music academy on the ground floor while residing above.

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Figure 3.1. F. D. B. Richards, “St. Stephen’s Church (Episcopal),” April 1859, Frederick De Bourg Richards Collection (3) 2526.F.49, The Library Company of Philadelphia. St. Stephen’s was located at 19 South Tenth Street; the Browne family lived at 29 South Tenth. www.librarycompany.org

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52

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The Church of England was officially established in the United States in 1784 as the Protestant Episcopal Church. Augusta’s family participated in traditional parish Episcopalian worship, in which the entire congregation sang, accompanied by an organ in churches with sufficient means. Lowchurch worship favored “emphasis on personal experience, Scripture, and sermon, whereas the high churchmen concentrated instead on doctrine, authority, and tradition.”11 Episcopalians like the Brownes were tolerant of, but avoided, excesses of evangelism. On the other hand, spiritual evangelism was far preferable to “high church” rituals borrowed from the “Romish” practices of the Catholic Church. Immediate neighbors residing near St. Stephen’s included merchants and tradesmen. Affluent professionals and civic leaders lived along elegant streets within easy walking distance. David and Augusta developed contacts with prominent Philadelphians, and some children from those families became students. Like her father, Augusta used dedications to cultivate relationships with community leaders. She honored Frederica McClellan—whose brother would become General George B. McClellan in the Union army—with Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara (The Gypsie’s Wild Chant), no. 11. Mrs. Samuel McClellan (aunt of the siblings) was named as the dedicatee for “Song of the Skylark,” no. 16. Susan J. M. Wylie, daughter of a prominent Presbyterian minister and University of Pennsylvania professor, received the dedication for Angels Whisper, no. 26. Margaret Keen Burtis, daughter of another Presbyterian divine, was the dedicatee of Brilliant Introduction and Variations on the Favorite Air, “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing,” no. 23. These dedications linked Augusta to families with high standing in Philadelphia society. A notable mother-daughter pair figured among the dedicatees: Mrs. William Swaim, wife of a patent-medicine mogul, and Eliza Swaim, her daughter. William Swaim was originally a bookbinder who marketed the quack formula that made the family’s wealth.12 “Swaim’s Panacea” promised miracle cures from its mixture of sarsaparilla-root syrup, wintergreen, and alcohol in a concoction that continued to be sold for most of the nineteenth century. To “her friend” Mrs. Swaim, Augusta dedicated a long, filigreed set of piano variations, Air a la Suisse with Impromptu Variations, no. 12, to George Alexander Lee’s light-hearted tune “By the Margins of Fair Zurich’s Waters.” This comedic song relates the timidity of a Swiss lad who is so overcome with shyness that he is struck wordless and can only yodel when he sees the girl of his dreams. Tyrolean or Bavarian flavor was typical in yodeling or echo songs popularized by touring vocal ensembles, such as

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phil adelphia debut

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53

the four-member Swiss Rainer family, who concertized in the United States in 1839. Lee’s simple tune was built with just tonic and dominant chords, while the characteristic yodeling syllables “ai-u” outlined a skipping broken chord in the phrase that concludes each verse. Augusta dressed up the bare bones of this simple tune with torrents of notes in varied figurations: arpeggios, broken chords, different accompaniments, melodic ornaments, showy scales, and rapid running notes. The finale includes a cadenza that grows out of Lee’s yodeling figure (ex. 3.3). Although the title word impromptu suggests that piano improvisation was the source of this work, the variations are meticulously worked out and notated. Another variation set was dedicated to Mrs. Swaim’s daughter, Elise, possibly a student of the composer.13 The theme was Frédéric Bérat’s “Ma Normandie,” a song with French lyrics that is considered the regional anthem of the British island of Jersey. This set of variations was less difficult and thus more appropriate for a young student at the keyboard. An unusual addition to the score was metronome markings—rare in Augusta’s publications—that suggest that the little girl needed a metronome to keep steady time. Her mother was a far more advanced pianist if she was able to play the Air a la suisse that Augusta dedicated to her. The enterprising composer soon extended her dedications to include European aristocrats and celebrities such as Lady Emma Colebrook, the marchioness of Waterford, and the virtuoso pianist Leopold De Meyer. A dedication “with permission” to a European celebrity, whether an artist or an aristocrat, added marketable luster to the title pages of Augusta’s music, although the gesture was purely ceremonial. With the allure of such names dropped alongside her own on the cover, she would have hoped to attract buyers in the upper, and upwardly mobile, tiers of society. The young composer also received dedications of musical works by friends or colleagues. Mrs. William Nixon of Cincinnati, a Logierian teacher herself, dedicated an air with variations, The Victoria Waltz, to her young colleague, and Augusta reciprocated the honor.14 Exchanging dedications was a common gesture of courtesy among music colleagues.15 Another dedication came from a New York minister, hymnist, and religious journalist, Rev. George Coles, who dedicated a song “by permission” to Augusta in 1841.16 In 1845 she would respond with a sacred setting, “Song of the Redeemed,” dedicated to this Episcopal clergyman. When she was not yet twenty, Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post announced, “Mr. Osbourn has published in a neat manner, a piece of music entitled ‘The Haunted Spring,’ with variations for the piano forte, composed by Miss

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phil adelphia debut

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55

Augusta Browne, teacher of the Logierian system of music.”17 The Haunted Spring, no. 21, was based on a sprightly song by the popular Irish composer and author Samuel Lover. The Irishman’s song describes the scene of a hunter who chases a white deer through the forest. After he spies a lovely damsel by a haunted spring, the hunter is never seen again. Despite the ghoulish tale, Lover’s melody is a rollicking hunting song. Augusta’s piano arrangement is better suited to the keyboard than Lover’s original is suited to the voice. She begins with an introduction that runs up and down the keyboard with arpeggios, scales, and flourishes before presenting a straightforward statement of Lover’s bouncing song (ex. 3.4). In the variations that follow, she aptly reinterprets the rhythm of the song from 42 into a lilting 86 rhythm, like a horse at the canter instead of the steady, staccato trot suggested by the theme (ex. 3.5). The quicker 86 pace leads into a coda that brings the music to a galloping close. The Merry Mountain Horn, no. 19, exhibits a similar plan of introduction, variations, and coda based on a yodeling song “composed in imitation of the Swiss style” by the British composer Sir Henry R. Bishop.18 Augusta’s variations imitated the effect of a yodel, “yhu-ei-o,” ricocheting off the alpine mountain faces by placing the echoing figure in a higher octave each time it occurred, sometimes crossing the right hand over the left to widen the separation between melodic phrase and echo. The blossoming composer continued to publish keyboard variations and songs in rapid succession, soon reaching some thirty in all. In addition to Blake, the Philadelphia musician James G. Osbourn published a few of her pieces. Osbourn was a valuable contact because he selected or supplied music for Godey’s Magazine for several years around 1840. Two of Augusta’s songs already in print were chosen for Godey’s in 1841: “Bird of the Gentle Wing” and “The Stranger’s Heart.” Publication in Godey’s—the best-selling American household monthly at the time—presented an unparalleled opportunity for Augusta to place her name and music in homes across the country. “Bird of the Gentle Wing” was crowded from three into two pages in the magazine, and the keyboard introduction and postlude “Symphonies” were cut from “The Stranger’s Heart” for Godey’s. From these experiences Augusta would have learned to keep her magazine numbers short and less elaborate than regular sheet-music titles. Songs published in nineteenth-century American household magazines tended to be simple in style and rarely longer than two pages. Augusta would continue to publish songs in family magazines regularly during the 1840s. For composers both male and female, household

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magazines provided a national venue that did not require a concert tour.19 Godey’s, however, had a reputation for not paying contributors, which suggests why the young composer soon turned to other periodicals. Despite indications of success, the music academy suffered a major jolt during a national economic downturn. The financial Panic of 1837 began barely a year after the family established their Logierian academy in Philadelphia. This crisis resulted from overreliance on credit and speculation in lands out west, followed by bank failures and recession. Widespread depression and indebtedness in all of the New England states led to an outbreak of fires, some set by desperate business owners to gain insurance payouts, and others set by thieves to plunder goods. The pinched economy affected the Brownes’ clientele, but David Browne had an enviable fallback. Provincial land deeds show that he sold a portion of his property in New Brunswick in 1825, before the move to Boston; again, when he relocated his family from New York to Toronto in 1832; and in Philadelphia at the time of the fiscal panic in 1837. More than once, his land acquisitions in New Brunswick offered some cushion against the ups and downs of the business cycle. The Brownes ran a full-page advertisement for their academy on South Tenth Street in the Philadelphia city directory in 1839 (fig. 3.2). Most directory ads were brief and enticing, with large, varied typefaces or illustrations. The Browne page was the wordiest piece of advertising in the publication, devoting pompous paragraphs to the “Logierian System of Musical Education,” whereas a single sentence noted that Augusta held an organ position at St. John’s Lutheran Church in addition to teaching and composing.20 Similarly, one sentence announced that her brother Louis Henri Browne worked in the business as a builder of “the most perfect piano fortes.” Although David Browne held sway as the American apostle of the Logierian method, Augusta used the title “Professor of Music” by 1840 in city directories. Many of her sheet music title pages listed her as “Logierian Professor,” indicating that she had risen to a professional rank approaching her father’s.

Echoes from the Opera While she still lived in Philadelphia as a young adult, Augusta turned from composing variations to trying her hand at an operatic fantasy. Her Brilliant Introduction and Variations on the Favorite Air, “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing” was based on an aria from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula. Opera

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Figure 3.2. Browne advertisement from A. M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory for 1839 (Philadelphia: printed by Isaac Ashmead & Co., 1839). Dir Phila 1839 114102.O, The Library Company of Philadelphia. www.librarycompany.org

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tunes were whistled and sung on urban streets and played and warbled in antebellum parlors.21 Augusta would describe the street musicians of her neighborhood in New York City at length in 1848/49.22 She heard Italian arias from the bel canto operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Other stage works that she mentioned in her essays or quoted in her music compositions were by the British composers Lee and William Shield, translations of French productions by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, and translated German operas by Carl Maria von Weber. Augusta praised the sensuous melodies in Italian operas of the era, but she never composed any music specifically for the theater. The lack of music for the stage is hardly surprising, given her religious conviction—common to many Protestants—that the theater harbored plays and operas that were antithetical to Christian morals. Years later she would publish Can I Attend the Theatre?, a tiny pocket tract that argued against theatergoing for dedicated Christians. Instead of composing operas, she conveyed operatic style into domestic parlor performance in manageable degrees, such as brief but flowery cadenzas in elegant melodic style in her piano music and songs. Composers arranged operatic tunes for every conceivable musical ensemble and venue during the antebellum period, but Augusta’s Brilliant Introduction and Variations is a notably early operatic fantasy or paraphrase for piano by an American composer and a rare example by a woman. Furthermore, her Bellini fantasy was published several years before the American tours of the celebrated piano virtuosi Leopold de Meyer (1816– 83), Henri Herz, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Her keyboard writing in Brilliant Introduction and Variations borrowed such staples of operatic paraphrases as crashing chords at the extremes of the instrument and menacing tremoli in the bass. Augusta absorbed the lyrical style of early nineteenth-century operas by Gaetano Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor), Vincenzo Bellini (Norma), and Gioachino Rossini (La Cenerentola) even though only a few of her works were based directly on music from European operas. Frédéric Chopin famously admired the legato, ornamented vocal style of bel canto singing and emulated this melodic writing in his own piano nocturnes. Like Chopin, Augusta relished “the exquisitely tender and pathetic moonlight strains of Bellini or Donizetti,” and sought a bel canto melodic style in her keyboard fantasy based on La Sonnambula, as shown in an excerpt from the third variation in this work (ex. 3.6).23 The plot of La Sonnambula relates the trials of the virtuous heroine, Amina, who is accused of a dalliance with a man when she was merely sleepwalking. After torments and trials, Amina’s innocence is proven, and

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Example 3.6. Augusta Browne, bel canto style in Brilliant Introduction and Variations on “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing,” mm. 69–76.

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her purity is rewarded with marriage. The moral resolution made the subject an especially suitable choice for material for a single, young, professional woman like Augusta, who needed to maintain an impeccable reputation if she hoped to teach the children—especially the daughters—of well-placed families in the community. Throughout her life, she remained scrupulous about her professional conduct and her public persona. In an era when actresses were generally suspected of low moral character, female singers on the stage faced the same need to assert the highest standards of morality. Augusta could have chosen a familiar melody from other currently popular

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operas, but La Sonnambula conveyed a special sanctity that was desirable for reinforcing her public image. The sentimental plot and its mistreated heroine entertained the public at the same time that it emphasized womanly virtue. La Sonnambula was a hit from its first New York City performance in 1835 by Mr. and Mrs. Wood (Joseph Wood and Mary Anne Paton Wood) and enjoyed equal success in Philadelphia. Augusta’s Brilliant Introduction and Variations on the Favorite Air, “Still So Gently O’er Me Stealing” was based on the cabaletta of the aria “Ah! Perchè non posso odiarti,” sung in act 2 by the tenor lead, Elvino (ex. 3.7; “Tema”). Petra Meyer-Frazier noted that the “Englished” aria, “Still So Gently O’er Me Stealing,” was a frequent selection in the women’s binder’s volumes that she studied, and that without the context of the story, the lyrics were “almost gender-neutral.”24 The evident popularity of this excerpt as a woman’s parlor song explains why Augusta chose “Still So Gently O’er Me Stealing” for a melodic theme rather than Amina’s aria from act 2, “Ah! Non credea mirarti.” Italian operas presented in English in the United States by touring troupes were subject to liberal changes in plot and insertions of unrelated songs. Aria substitutions were common in stage shows and operas, and Augusta’s fantasy incorporated an extra theme interpolated near the end: “On Yonder Rock Reclining” [“Voyez sur cette roche”], from Auber’s opera Fra Diavolo, another blockbuster performed by Mr. and Mrs. Wood.25 The Auber number may have been a “trunk aria” sung by Mr. Wood during their American tour or simply a favorite encore.26 Augusta reinterpreted the tune to make it similar in style to Elvino’s “Still So Gently O’er Me Stealing” (see ex. 3.7, “Aria”). She made an intriguing choice in this operatic fantasy by integrating not one, but two melodic themes from men’s arias sung by Mr. Wood. Combining several themes from a single opera occurred in keyboard paraphrases or fantasies such as Franz Liszt’s Réminiscenses de Don Juan (1841), based on themes from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but mixing arias from different productions and composers was less common. Hearing and recognizing Mr. Wood’s second aria in Augusta’s fantasy would have amused a sophisticated music lover. An anonymous review of her Brilliant Introduction and Variations in the United States Gazette cited Augusta’s “elegant, chaste, and distinct style,” and “graceful and powerful blending of melody and harmony.”27 The newspaper review described each variation in Augusta’s fantasy and concluded, “The science of the harmony, and the brilliancy of style are both ‘super-excellent,’ and contribute much to the Art. Her productions are truly enviable, and place her at the very summit of her profession.” “Powerful” was a notable

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Example 3.7. Browne, Brilliant Introduction and Variations on “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing”: (a) “Tema” from La Sonnambula, mm. 21—28; (b) “Aria” from Fra Diavolo, mm. 114—21. D

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word choice to use in connection with music by a woman. Performances or compositions by men were far likelier to be described with words such as “impressive,” “strong,” or “heroic.” The inference of strength and power in Augusta’s music “productions” was a significant tribute. Augusta was not quite twenty when she received acclaim in the press for The Haunted Spring and Brilliant Introduction and Variations. During the same year, Clara Wieck, also about twenty, despaired in her diary, “I once

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believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there was never one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that.”28 Despite her flood of gifts as a pianist, performer, and composer, Clara had absorbed the stricture that a woman was not the creative equal of a man. Insecurity about her compositional skills and ideas, or “authorial anxiety,” is an undercurrent throughout her music. Knowledge of empowering female role models might have reinforced her path forward as a composer, but she accepted a status secondary to that of her husband, the composer and critic Robert Schumann. The year after her marriage in 1840, Clara lamented, “with the composing there is nothing any more—all poetry has vanished from me.”29 Augusta showed no evidence of such an internal struggle. She shared the womanly virtue of modesty with Clara, but her music is suffused with confidence and joyful creativity. During her twenties, she threw herself into composition and publication of music and, before long, prose as well. Con molto spirito, a tempo mark that Augusta often indicated, offers an apt description of her early music publications. Despite the young pianist-composer’s success in the city, the Brownes left Philadelphia in 1841. There was no question that New York promised superior teaching, performance, and publishing opportunities for Augusta, who was now an adult of about twenty-one. New York City also offered more opportunities for ten-year-old Hamilton, who had begun to evince extraordinary artistic talent. Around the same time, David lost his technical backup to move, repair, and tune a flock of pianos when Augusta’s brother Louis Henri returned to Boston, the brother next to him in age died in some unexplained mishap at sea, and her next younger sibling St. John became an apprentice piano builder.30 In future, David’s advertisements would mention sheet music, paper, and drawing supplies for sale, but not musical instruments. As they approached departure from Philadelphia, Augusta obtained a letter of recommendation signed by fourteen members of St. John’s Church. The endorsement offered every assurance of her job performance during the previous two years. The church members praised the “skill and address with which she managed our large and powerful instrument . . . [the] regularity of her attendance, and her attention to all the duties of her situation.”31 The letter also stated that Augusta “resigned her situation in expectation of going to Europe,” a dream that was never to take place. The alleged plan for study abroad may have been a tactful way to leave the Philadelphia congregation when New York City was the family’s actual objective.

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Despite troubling indications of her father’s psychiatric instability during the years of dislocation from one city to another, Augusta never doubted his loving devotion to his children. She watched David nurture four sons and two daughters younger than herself. Although his business disputes displayed a personality that prickled with shortcomings and obsessions, her father had a paternal nature and was a born teacher. Shaped by the Enlightenment, he believed in the fusion of music and science. It was a matter of survival that his children had to participate in the family enterprise, but David listened to their dreams and delivered as best he could. Augusta Browne’s life unfolded around her relationship with her father. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit and dependence, in which the father received luster from her talents and gifts, while the daughter developed precociously within the security of the family home and music business. Since David was not a skilled pianist himself, Augusta became valuable not just as an instructor and performer, but—like Clara was to Friedrich Wieck—she was the proof of her father’s teaching. The lessons she learned, as well as the enduring anxieties from her father’s Logierian academy, shaped Augusta’s life as a musician. Compelled by her distinctive upbringing, Augusta strove to succeed as a pianist, performer, writer, and teacher. She was also motivated by the desire to validate her father and his teaching method. The history that emerges is an American story filled with setbacks and distress, the chronicle of a family struggling to maintain their business and to hold on to their middling status. Ultimately Augusta became the public face of the business, while her father receded into the role of a silent partner.

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Chapter Four

A Young Professor of Music People, carts, horses, and wagons clogged the urban streets as hundreds of families simultaneously tried to transport their belongings to new rental lodgings, yet many New Yorkers moved yearly in quest of better quarters or lower rents. “Moving Day,” or the first day of May, was the date when annual rental leases traditionally began in the city and in Brooklyn. Walt Whitman called it “the annual hegira of householders,” and many authors described the crazy custom that was as much holiday as ordeal.1 An anonymous song deemed it “this City’s curse,” and asked, “Is there a day on the records of the universe / More blent [blended] with smashing, crashing, breaking, and delay?”2 The chaos of Moving Day demanded weeks to restore order to people’s lives and homes. The Brownes apparently braved the tidal surge of the event in 1841. A few weeks after Moving Day, the New York Tribune announced that on June 17, Mr. Browne, Mrs. Browne, and “Miss Browne” would begin “Music Tuition on Broadway.”3 During the same month, Augusta Browne confidently advertised her services in the Protestant Vindicator “to churches inclined to engage a scientific Organist,” and printed the warm words of recommendation she had received from St. John’s Lutheran Church in Philadelphia.4 Such a solicitation for a position as church organist was unique in the Vindicator, although announcements of musicians in search of church positions became commonplace in urban music periodicals during the 1850s. The Vindicator added, “This lady comes among us, recommended by the most distinguished amateurs of music in the City,” a notable endorsement after so short a time. Newspaper advertisements during summer 1841 proclaimed the family’s return to New York with a tone of upscale gentility:

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Mr. and Mrs. Browne (with their daughter, Miss Augusta Browne), beg leave to announce to the Ladies of New York and its vicinity that, after several years’ absence, they have returned to this city to resume their Professional Practice, and have a taken a house at No. 700 Broadway, corner of Fourth street.5

An entry in Longworth’s New York directory for 1841/42 included a lengthy listing: “Browne, Augusta, organist, pianoforte, composition, and singing, 700 Broadway,” while her father was simply “Browne, David S., prof. of music.”6 Other musicians listed themselves as “music teacher,” “organist,” or “teacher [of ] piano.” Hers was the most elaborate description of any musician in this annual directory. The inclusive entry embodied the great hopes that the family had for their gifted daughter, based on her recent success in Philadelphia. By November her future looked so bright that an ad in the New York Tribune focused solely on Augusta’s teaching: Miss Augusta Browne, Composer and Professor of Music, and Teacher of the Piano Forte, Organ and Singing, wishes to acquaint the Ladies of New York with her recent arrival in this city, and that she will give lessons at the residence of her pupils, or at the house of her father, D. S. Browne, Professor of Music, 700 Broadway, where all her Compositions are for sale. Miss Browne will give finishing lessons as usual.7

The advertisement stressed the sophistication of the young professor who could offer “finishing lessons”—musical coaching to polish repertoire—yet remain respectably close to her father’s watchful eye. Many Victorian-era parents in Great Britain and America regarded music as no more than a desirable “accomplishment” that enabled their daughters to entertain themselves and others, and perhaps to attract a male suitor, yet Mrs. Sarah J. Hale’s Ladies’ Magazine declared, “The art of playing upon the Piano Forte has become almost a necessary part of female education.”8 As the century progressed, music study was so widespread and expected, that “[e]very girl played the piano. Not to play was a stigma of poverty.”9 The Brownes continued to offer music instruction “either on the system of the celebrated Logier, or by the common manner, [and] may be attended at their residence, or at the academy, 700 Broadway. References are numerous, and of the very highest respectability.”10 Promising both convenient home lessons and assurance of respectability, the advertisement was aimed at the upwardly mobile middle class, especially families of the merchant aristocracy. In 1841 this part of Broadway was a residential neighborhood inhabited by

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businessmen, shopkeepers, and widows—in short, the sort of customer base that might seek piano lessons for their children. The ad concluded with the statement, “All Miss Augusta Browne’s Musical Compositions for sale.” The New York Herald ran a flattering notice for Augusta’s sheet music on August 6, 1841: We have received four new pieces of Music thus entitled—“Le Henri,” gallope brilliante; the “American Bouquet”; “Two Favorite Airs, arranged as a Divertisement” [sic]; and “Bird of the Gentle Wing.” The music of these four pleasing pieces is by Miss Augusta Browne, professor of the Logierian System of Music, 700 Broadway.11

Even though the sheet music had been published in Philadelphia months earlier, it was arguably new to New York. The positive mention of “four pleasing pieces” in the Herald was a small but notable triumph to inaugurate the young composer in the city. The advertisement urged, “We cannot render our female readers greater service than by advising them to call on Miss B. and purchase the above.” Augusta initiated this energetic publicity campaign, presumably with her father’s counsel, by delivering the “four new pieces of Music” to the New York Herald. It was customary for music publishers to circulate their newest sheet music to newspapers, but less typical for individuals to proffer music to the press. For the Herald, Augusta made a point of choosing her American Boquet (or American Bouquet, spelled interchangeably even on the music pages), a piece that would appeal to the nationalism of the public and highlight her personal allegiance, just as her father had published the American Military Bugle Andante, dedicated to President Andrew Jackson, when the family arrived in New York in 1830.12 Augusta substituted a feminine floral image for her father’s masculine military theme and appropriated the image as her own brand. She soon had produced a series of five “national bouquets”— a pretty name for her medleys of national songs. The American Bouquet, Caledonian Bouquet, and French Bouquet received copyrights in 1841, followed by the English and Hibernian bouquets in 1842. The American Bouquet was the shortest and simplest of the series, calculated to appeal to a wide domestic market, and it remained in print for decades. Without introduction, the work plunged into a straightforward rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A short segue led into “Hail Columbia,” the usual choice for official national occasions during the nineteenth century, followed by a variation. The work concluded with “Yankee

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Doodle,” in which Augusta indicated “Fifes and Drums” when “Yankee Doodle” was played high on the piano accompanied by low, rolled chords. The other bouquets used more impressive keyboard figuration and ornaments but were similarly constructed from traditional or national songs set in lively medleys of contrasting tempi and characters. In September 1841 the New York Mirror commended another new publication that was clearly sent by the composer: ‘I would I were a fairy, or bright thoughts for dark hours,’ is the title of a new song . . . [by] Miss Augusta Browne. The music is pretty and fairy-like, and gives us a good opinion of the talents and accomplishments of the young lady to whom we are indebted for the copy upon our desk. The words are well worth the honor of being transferred to the columns of the Mirror.13

The Mirror routinely included brief music numbers in its weekly issues, although not Augusta’s “I Would I Were a Fairy.” Even if the paper only printed the words of the song, it boosted the composer’s name recognition. She had already earned several marks of distinction as the family settled in on Broadway.

Protocol for the Professor and Performer Waves of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization were reshaping America during the 1840s. Advice manuals and conduct books, such as Mrs. Farrar’s Young Lady’s Friend, described female deportment to manage interactions in public with refined propriety.14 Augusta had presented a public persona since childhood as a performer, but now she was often teaching in people’s homes, which necessitated additional skills in Victorian-era manners and communication. She faced the tricky interaction in which “a single professional woman occupied a social position midway between the working class woman and the socially and economically secure matron.”15 A music instructor emanated higher culture and more refinement than a tradesman, but that did not lift her to social equality with the parents of her students. Moreover, there was no room for error for an unmarried young woman who aspired to teach the cream of the community. Such a teacher’s reputation had to be beyond reproach. It was an era when young male urban clerks were required to attend church, and female textile workers in Massachusetts mills had to observe a 10:00 p.m. curfew. Any hint of inappropriate behavior

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would have meant immediate damage to Augusta’s career as teacher, as well as lingering gossip that would undermine her future prospects. Strictures of female modesty permeated the discourse for Victorian women’s conduct. Manifestations of decorum and humility were expected of women when they performed, no less for professionals than for young girls at home. Thus John Rowe Parker lauded the “feminine modesty” shown by Sophia Hewitt Ostinelli, the Boston keyboardist.16 Women were expected to please and entertain when they performed but should not overwhelm an audience with an immodest display of technique or tax listeners with overly serious music. According to the Young Lady’s Friend, “Music is an accomplishment, chiefly valuable as a home enjoyment, as rallying round the piano the various members of a family, and harmonizing their hearts as well as voices, particularly in devotional strains.”17 Although “one’s virtuosity must never outshadow one’s virtue,” one exception for women was the battle piece, which had a long tradition in European keyboard music, especially during the Napoleonic era.18 Barnstorming solos such as František Kotžwara’s Battle of Prague—which Augusta called “that test piece of skill which once claimed so prominent a station in the repertoire of every pianist”—permitted girls to play loud and fast, with brilliant fingers and noisy effects, without censure for immodesty, because they were enacting an expression of patriotism.19 Women singers and actresses had long been obliged to demonstrate that they were virtuous wives and daughters rather than fallen women.20 Parker bestowed high commendation when he applied the phrase “purity of mind and character correspondent to her professional manner” to the pianist Sophia Hewitt Ostinelli and the singer Catherine Stephens.21 When the English sopranos Mrs. Wood and Jane Shirreff toured American theaters during the 1830s, newspaper columns stressed their virtue, morality, and charity.22 Jenny Lind conquered America in 1850 after she abandoned the operatic stage in London in 1849, lamenting the immoral actions that drove the plots of so many European operas. She was already well known in America through flattering press coverage, but her manager, P. T. Barnum, further publicized Lind as a model of morality and a woman from a humble family situation, two tropes that resonated with middle-brow and workingclass Americans.23 Like these performers, Augusta had to negotiate the tightrope between professional musician and virtuous young woman as she cultivated a New York clientele. She molded her public persona in accord with what has been called the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood,” with its attributes

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of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.24 Piety and purity came easily to Augusta as a faithful Christian. She maneuvered carefully to demonstrate respectability and submissiveness, and sidestepped issues of domesticity altogether. The Browne family had always employed a housemaid or two, but this was but a small expense during decades when immigrant domestic help cost pennies. Augusta’s time was far more valuable as a professor of music. Augusta had acquired almost all of her musical training and business sense from the family academy. She had absorbed the best of her father’s regimen, as well as examples of what not to do, such as challenging the credentials of colleagues. Nevertheless, for many purposes, Augusta operated as her father’s daughter, even during her twenties. Although she was of legal age by 1841, advertisements for her services usually cited David Browne in some conspicuous way, for example, “at the house of her father” (November 1841); “Mr. and Mrs. Browne, and their daughter” (May 1842); or “for sale at her father’s house” (November 1844).25 As late as 1845, she advertised her music as being “for sale at all the respectable Music Stores, and at her father’s residence.”26 In addition to providing respectability, David could act as Augusta’s agent with music publishers in New York City, calling with manuscripts, delivering messages, and negotiating contracts, in which he had far more experience than his daughter. By this time he was fifty-five or so. He advertised a new Logierian class at the academy as late as 1846, but demand for the method had waned.27 Augusta spent her days teaching at the academy or going parlor to parlor to give piano and voice instruction to children. To the older daughters between female academies and marriage, she offered “finishing lessons” on their songs and piano solos. She also spent many hours preparing her new compositions and maintaining fluent skills at the piano in advance of selected concert performances that could enhance her reputation as a young professional. Her activities demonstrate a personality that was disciplined and dedicated, but also lively and optimistic. By autumn 1841 plans were in place to introduce Augusta to the public as a performer. In early December, a weekly arts newspaper, the New World, announced an upcoming concert “for the benefit of the widows and orphans of Brooklyn. Mr. Braham will sing some of his best songs; and Miss Augusta Browne, a young lady of great talent, will preside at the piano-forte, and perform several pieces.”28 This probably constituted her introduction as a performer in the city, and the description of “a young lady of great talent” suggests the first appearance of an ingénue.

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John Braham (1774–1856) had been England’s leading tenor soloist in oratorio and opera in English or Italian for decades. He never flagged as he pursued concert tours to New York and New England in the early 1840s with the goal of enriching his imminent retirement years. In New York City, he sang three or four times a week, or as often as he could attract an audience to the Society Library, Tabernacle, Lyceum, Rutgers Female Institute, or Gothic Hall. Even in his seventh decade, Braham’s voice could impress an audience with expressive nuances, although he relied increasingly on histrionic stage effects to bolster his performance. When he could not find an accompanist, he played for himself in programs of his favorite numbers from stage and oratorio works, songs of his own composition, and traditional airs. Advertisements only occasionally specified an accompanist at Braham’s “numberless concerts.”29 Vera Brodsky Lawrence thought that Augusta “most probably” played for Braham on November 27, 1841, an evening that the diarist George Templeton Strong asserted needed “a better accompaniment than the piano.”30 No direct evidence confirms Lawrence’s supposition. Only a handful of dates when Augusta was Braham’s collaborator can be verified by press ads or reviews: December 7, 1841, at Gothic (formerly Masonic) Hall; December 31, 1841, at the Tabernacle; April 6, 1842, at the New York Society Library; April 14, 1842, at the Brooklyn Lyceum; April 15, 1842, at the New York Society Library; December 6, 1842, at the New York Society Library; December 10, 1842, at the New York Society Library; December 20, 1842, at Niblo’s Gardens; and December 26, 1842, at Niblo’s.31 On December 7, 1841, the first documented date when Augusta accompanied Braham, Strong was in attendance and wrote cryptically in his diary, “the womankind were greatly delectified,” without further clarification.32 Strong could well have been referring to Miss Browne’s performance as the aspect of the concert that so delighted the “womankind,” rather than the short, graying, “very rotund Braham,” who had already sung in a dozen New York recitals that season.33 The performers enjoyed sufficient success that they soon announced another concert for charity, in which “Miss Augusta Browne, the celebrated composer and performer . . . will accompany Mr. Braham on the piano forte and the organ.”34 Augusta later asserted that she received no payment for these initial concerts.35 It cost nothing for Braham to include her, but to appear alongside this vocal star was a coup for the young keyboardist. The prestige and free publicity were ample compensation. Just as Augusta’s first published sheet music linked her name on the title pages to well-known poets (Hemans) or composers (Handel, Lee, Steibelt), her New York concert debut in 1841 proceeded in tandem with a famous

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and beloved performer. It was an effective strategy, a tactic possibly engineered by her father, who was never shy about introducing himself and cultivating a potentially valuable acquaintance. Augusta continued to perform occasionally with the senior Braham and his son Charles during the 1842 fall season, after they returned to New York City from a summer tour through the United States and Canada. The young composer typically played at least one big solo number on the program, such as a keyboard fantasy or one of her national bouquets. In one program she performed both the English Bouquet, a fitting tribute to Braham father and son, and the American Bouquet, to acknowledge the New York audience.36 Augusta received praise for brilliant execution and fine taste in her playing and was named “one of the most scientific and tasteful pianists in this city.”37 The New York Herald described Augusta as “young, very pretty, very modest, and by no means a small attraction in a concert room,” one of the few surviving indications of her physical appearance.38 The words “small attraction” presumably referred to her petite stature, especially beside the elder Braham, a corpulent celebrity who was a large stage presence in every sense.39 During autumn 1842, Augusta published “The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” a work gauged for the Braham father-son duo.40 Not only were the subject and the persona unquestionably male, the duet demanded the virtuosity of skilled vocalists. In this ABA-form song, the A section is a square, jaunty march that celebrates the “dark blue sea”; the second voice joins in the B section, with a lyrical phrase in 86 that sets the words, “I love along its breast to ride” (ex. 4.1). The theme of the B section comes from a melody by an English composer that Augusta acknowledged on the title page, “Part of the subject from Cipriani Potter.”41 The duet provides opportunities for counterpoint and imitation between the two voices. The leisurely B section culminates in a cadenza for the duo before a succinct conclusion with a much-abbreviated A section (ex. 4.2). Augusta also dedicated a solo song to Braham, “The Family Meeting,” which the tenor included in a concert on December 6, 1842.42 The title page for this number illustrates a domestic interior with a loving family gathered in the parlor (fig. 4.1). Although the scene appears to depict a stereotypical happy family, the lyrics mourn those who are deceased. The returning phrase in each verse, “We are all here, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother,” emphasizes the vision of them gathered once more in the hereafter. The Christian promise of joyful reunion with loved ones in heaven redefined death as the “ultimate homecoming in nineteenth-century America.”43 It was a poignant

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Example 4.1. Augusta Browne, “The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” theme of A section, mm. 13–20; theme of B section, mm. 21–28.

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sentiment for Augusta, who had already lost an older brother and a younger sister before relocating to New York City, and another sister soon after the move. The song is written in the less common key of A-flat major and uses a modified strophic form. The Protestant Vindicator described the song as “a sort of a Sacred Drama . . . [T]he modulations are not common, and the entire effect is beautiful.”44 Other concert opportunities soon arose for Augusta, including “sacred concerts” by the short-lived Brooklyn Mozart Association.45 These April 1842 programs provided Augusta the opportunity to perform her most impressive compositions: the operatic Brilliant Introduction and Variations, based on Bellini’s La Sonnambula, and the more recent Fantasia and Variations on a Celebrated Air a la Russe, Vesper Hymn, “performed by the Authoress at Mr. Braham’s concerts.” The fantasia was dedicated “by permission” to “Madame Eliza de Peruzzi (de Paris) née Eustaphiève,” the Russian consul’s talented daughter, who provided a role model of excellence in piano performance to little Augusta in Boston. The fantasy on the Russian “Vesper Hymn” was described as “fourteen pages of the most splendid, brilliant, and original composition of powerful execution.”46 “Original” and “powerful” constitute significant acclaim during an era of gendered language about women’s music making. Augusta aimed to impress audiences with this solo, her longest keyboard work. The figuration in the fantasia calls for a fluent technique capable of brillante fingers, rippling arpeggios, rapid-fire repeated notes, and cascades of octaves, feats comparable to those in works by such European virtuoso pianists of the era as Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849), Ignaz Moscheles, and Henri Herz.

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Example 4.2. Browne, “The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” cadenza and conclusion, mm. 43–51.

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Figure 4.1. Sheet-music cover for Augusta Browne, “The Family Meeting,” (New York: Firth & Hall, 1842). Courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

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The “air a la Russe,” or “Vesper Hymn,” was circulated by the Irish poet Sir Thomas Moore and the musical arranger Sir John Stevenson in their 1818 Selection of Popular National Airs.47 Augusta’s fantasia followed the pattern of rhapsodic introduction, statement of the theme, and a series of distinctive variations, but the finale introduced an entirely unrelated theme from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The act 2 canzonetta,“Deh vieni alla finestra”—sung beneath Donna Elvira’s window by Don Giovanni in Leporello’s cloak and hat—seems an extraordinary interpolation into variations on the “Vesper Hymn.” The composer uses a recitative and cadenza as a transition from a filigreed variation on the “Russian” tune to the tribute “Aria par Mozart” (ex. 4.3). A scherzo and cadenza lead from the aria back to the theme of the “Vesper Hymn” in the coda. The introduction of a completely unrelated but well-known melody into the midst of variations or a fantasia on a specific theme was not common in scores for these antebellum genres.48 Touring piano virtuosi such as Hummel, Moscheles, and Liszt extemporaneously added a national melody or familiar favorite into improvised fantasies in order to delight audiences during concerts.49 In Browne’s fantasy, the addition of the unrelated aria was likely intended as a gesture to delight the dedicatee.50 This well-known serenade in Italian may have alluded to Miss Eustaphiève’s 1833 marriage to Simone Luigi Peruzzi, a Tuscan diplomat from one of the patrician banking families of Florence. The use of Mozart’s aria also recalls the favorable comparison of the twelve-year-old Miss Eustaphiève to the child prodigy Mozart, made by John Rowe Parker in 1820 in the Euterpeiad.51 Parker concluded his remarks on Miss Eustaphiève by wondering, “[W] as Mozart, as a performer on the piano, equal at the age of twelve, to the young lady of the same age, whom we are describing? We answer without hesitation, no: not even at a far more advanced period of life. . . . [A]s a performer, she has never yet been excelled or even equaled by any of the same age.”52 Augusta may never have forgotten these extraordinary statements. Eustaphiève Peruzzi may well have been the finest pianist to have emerged in the United States up to that time. The positive account in the Vindicator of Augusta’s “splendid, brilliant, and original” fantasia on the Russian “Vesper Hymn” was especially welcome, following a provocative review in January 1842 that was disturbing to the aspiring composer. On January 8, an anonymous review in the New World offered faint praise to Augusta’s newly published song “Bonnie Bessie Green”:

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A very pretty Poem set to a beautiful old melody, with new symphonies and accompaniments by Miss Browne. This young lady is fast improving, and her faults are those of a young writer whose style has not been strictly cultivated, nor her errors corrected by example. We shall take an opportunity of speaking of this young lady, at more length, in a short time.53

Although the critic’s words would have signaled kind attention to an amateur songwriter, they connoted a serious critique of a trained musician who was just establishing a reputation as a thoroughly schooled and “scientific” composer. The unspecified “errors” may have referred to aspects of voiceleading, or to the doubling of the vocal line simultaneously in octaves in the right hand of the piano part. “Bonnie Bessie Green” delivered a sonorous arrangement of a traditional Scottish reel in response to the fashionable vogue for pseudo-Scottish ballads, as seen in the conclusion of the third verse (ex. 4.4). The musical setting employed the Scotch snap, the distinctive dotted rhythm often used in Scottish songs for such words as “laddie” and “lassie.” Augusta used the Scotch snap to convey the crucial word “bonnie” every time it occurs in the text of “Bonnie Bessie Green.” Far from untutored, it was an attractive piece of music without obvious flaws. A tempest ensued, rather than a discussion of “this young lady, at more length, in a short time.” The critic was revealed to be Henry C. Watson (1816–75), a British musician who had performed as a boy on the London stage before immigrating to America in 1840. He found his niche as an arts reviewer in New York

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City, but his elitist opinions angered many musicians.54 Augusta did not respond to Watson herself, but her case was taken up by Anthony Philip Heinrich, one of America’s most serious, if eccentric, composers. Heinrich, the creator of elaborate symphonies and sprawling keyboard works, had been an acquaintance of the Browne family since their first sojourn in Boston. Augusta revered the senior composer and recalled, “One of the earliest recollections of my childhood is the wonder which he awakened in my mind, when, a small elf, I stole into the room to [hear] his cantata, The Log House.”55 In a lengthy, sarcastic response to the critic, Heinrich ranted about the accounts of performers and composers in Watson’s recent reviews. Heinrich advocated for Augusta as well as for her recent concert colleague: To cap the climax of your daring, you vituperate the pride of England, Mr. Braham. Next you throw innuendoes of affected criticism on the compositions of Miss Augusta Browne. I have known this young lady almost from her infancy, and witnessed the progress of her talent. Her effusions are in my humble estimation, far superior in melody and harmony, to any of your works, which I have had as yet the honor of becoming acquainted with.56

Heinrich had many bones to pick with Watson. Two weeks earlier, Heinrich had labeled the critic a humbug and a “quack reviewer” in the New York Herald.57 The whole embarrassing episode resulted in a wary silence between Watson and Augusta. She could ill afford the kind of damage that she had seen resulting from her father’s verbal wars in the press. Watson’s musical background exceeded that of many music critics, but his own song publications were quite similar to Augusta’s. He composed in many of the same genres: sentimental songs performed by his wife, ballads in pseudo-Scottish styles, dances for solo piano, and sacred numbers. During 1843 Augusta performed as an organist with the Brooklyn Mozart Association.58 After playing for a number of events, she announced, “Miss Browne begs leave to state, that although, at the recent charitable Concerts, she never, directly or indirectly, received any remuneration—her terms for performance at other Concerts are $30, for which she will perform Organ or Pianoforte Concertos, Fantasias, Accompaniments, &c. &c.”59 After setting a definite fee, Augusta may have received fewer invitations to participate in concerts, but she had accomplished her goal of establishing a solid reputation as a keyboardist. Concert reviews commended her taste, science, clean execution, and modesty as a performer, but they never mentioned theatricality or showmanship. As late as 1846, when she played in a concert at the Brooklyn

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Institute, she was pronounced “a very clever pianist.”60 However admirable, the qualities noted in reviews were not exciting crowd pleasers. Once Augusta stepped away from the concert stage, there is no indication that she yearned to return to it. And she was not the only bright young performer in town. An English family of musicians, the Slomans, received excellent reviews in the New York papers during the early 1840s, after arriving in 1838 or 1839. The father, John, was an actor, vocalist, and theater manager, and his daughters Jane, Elizabeth, and Anne each played harp or piano and sang.61 Jane Sloman (1824–1906) enjoyed particular notice when she performed a program on July 16, 1841, at Niblo’s Gardens—only a few weeks after the Browne family made their move to New York City—and she continued to perform at Niblo’s during the summer season. Before emigrating as a teenager, Jane had studied with the noted British concert pianist Louise Dulcken. Jane was a polished pianist, perhaps more so than Augusta. When Augusta began to play in concerts with Braham later that fall, newspaper advertisements publicized her as “the celebrated composer and performer on the piano and organ,” rather than describing her strictly as a pianist.62 Thus she avoided any direct challenge or comparison to the young Miss Sloman, who was concurrently receiving accolades (“the best female pianist ever in our country”) in New York and Boston papers.63 Composition had advantages over the concert stage: more control, less expense, and fewer things to go wrong with unpredictable aspects of venue, performers, ticket sales, and press coverage. Public scrutiny was less intense. A successful imprint of sheet music at area music stores or in a monthly magazine had the potential to enhance Augusta’s celebrity more than an isolated event on the concert stage. Accordingly, she placed her efforts where they would generate the greatest return.

The Organ Loft The young professional showed initiative before the end of her first autumn in New York by volunteering where her skills would be on display to leading clergymen of the city. “Miss Augusta Browne, the celebrated composer, has kindly consented to preside at the Organ,” the New York Tribune advertised prior to the Protestant Reformation Society’s first lecture on December 30, 1841.64 The weekly lectures were delivered by well-known Episcopal and Presbyterian reverends. Augusta knew at least one of them: Dr. Samuel Wylie of Philadelphia, whose daughter had been the dedicatee of “The Sun

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Has Set.” Another scheduled speaker was Dr. Cox, the minister of Brooklyn’s First Presbyterian Church. These voluntary performances for the Protestant Reformation Society, plus her positive record as an organist in Philadelphia and recommendations from acquaintances in the clergy, bore fruit when Augusta was hired to serve as organist at First Presbyterian, often called “Dr. Cox’s Church,” in early 1842. The organ at First Presbyterian had two manuals and one and a half octaves of pedals.65 It was a prestigious position for a young professional, but the icy weather was too brutal for her to take the ferry from Manhattan back and forth across the river to First Presybterian Church, whose minister was the prominent abolitionist Samuel Hanson Cox (1793–1880). The Browne family supported Augusta’s successful job search by moving to “Hicks Street near Fulton” in Brooklyn.66 David Browne’s “New Music Store,” offering “articles in the Music and Stationery line of business,” subsequently opened in May on Fulton Street, the commercial thoroughfare of Brooklyn.67 The Franklin House, a hotel completed in 1839, commanded the foot of Fulton Street opposite the ferry (fig. 4.2). Multistory buildings with large windows on the ground level stretched for blocks. At the Browne shop at 254 Fulton, multiple pianos, the academy, and the music store took up the ground floor, while the family presumably resided upstairs. Space would have been tight when they gathered around the table that served as the dining area, the reading/writing/handiwork venue, and the center for family devotions. Like many New Yorkers in search of a better location and more square footage, the Browne family moved each year to a different Brooklyn address: from Fulton Street to Orange Street—closer to the church on Cranberry Street—in 1843, and then to Pineapple Street in 1844. The family music shop stocked drawing materials that provided Augusta’s youngest brother, Hamilton, with the paper and supplies that he needed for his burgeoning life as an artist. The children’s mother, Elizabeth, had sufficient skills to offer drawing classes twenty years earlier in St. John, and she had begun to teach her insistent son when he was six or seven. In 1841 he petitioned the National Academy of Design in New York City to allow him to participate in classes, although he was only eleven years old.68 His talent and skills convinced the National Academy faculty to admit him to some evening classes. After the family relocated to Fulton Street in 1842, Hamilton attended the Brooklyn Institute, where he won prize after prize in drawing, watercolor, and essay.69

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Figure 4.2. Franklin House, 1 to 5 Fulton Street, northeast corner of Water Street, Brooklyn, New York, 1922. Photographic print, 5 × 7 in. Eugene L. Armbruster Photograph Collection, 1894–1939, nyhs_PR081_b-07–f-02_154-2-01, New-York Historical Society. Reproduced with permission. www.nyhistory.org

Augusta began at First Presbyterian Church with zeal. In past centuries in Europe, applicants for important church positions had to compose a sacred piece as one requirement for the job. Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann were but two of the illustrious composers who faced this hurdle. This test of an organist as composer was not typical for churches in the United States. Whether or not First Presbyterian asked Augusta for an anthem, she soon published a work that demonstrated her knowledge of sacred music and harmony. Hear Therefore O Israel, for soloists, choir, and organ, was a significant work in her output and a rare example of a church anthem composed by a woman in antebellum America. The score noted, “Words selected by the Rev. J. M. Mathews, D.D.,” which suggests that local clergy had some role in its creation.70 The choral anthem remained in the holdings of the church choir and was performed at their centennial celebration in 1922.71 Hear Therefore O Israel was a practical, well-crafted effort that uses a bass solo recitative to set off contrasting sections performed by a duo of higher

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voices. The full chorus joins at the end for a satisfying finale in four parts. The contrasting sections are set apart by changing time signatures as well as by different performers. The second section for bass solo contains an unusual excursion from E-flat major to B-flat minor through the introduction of a single dramatic note, G♭, to invoke God in measure 27. The composer made sure to include a learned, “scientific” harmonic progression using chromatic chords and an augmented-sixth chord on the fortissimo phrase “and with all” in measure 44 (ex. 4.5). The new organist divided her focus between Dr. Cox’s church and her music publications, which had increased to fifty by the end of 1842.72 The church position paid seventy-five dollars per quarter—good pay when laborers might earn one dollar a day and women at textile mills were paid two dollars a week—but the affiliation was as valuable as the money to Augusta.73 She regularly advertised with obvious pride using her title, “Organist of Dr. Cox’s Church, Brooklyn.” She relished the organ and the power of its use in worship, yet she did not publish any solo organ music, which sold in tiny numbers compared with parlor songs. The organ was nevertheless present in her anthems Hear Therefore O Israel and Grand Vesper Chorus. A Scottish bookkeeper and draftsman named Andrew McIlwraith wrote in his diary on March 5, 1860, “Spent the evening copying Grand Vesper Chorus music for Mrs. Renfrew.”74 McIlwraith was arduously writing out Augusta’s Grand Vesper Chorus for the household that employed his sister as a housekeeper. That a bookkeeper was copying the music by hand demonstrates that this church anthem found success through its accessibility for chorus and audience. Grand Vesper Chorus was first published in 1842, advertised in 1844–45, reprinted in 1846 in the serial Library of Sacred Music, and reissued in 1851 or later. This jubilant choral anthem is no more than a hymn writ large. The composition uses four-part, homophonic texture for the full choir with organ accompaniment (ex. 4.6). The anthem did not require soloists, but the range of the voices and intervals of the melody demanded competent music readers among the choir. By her own admission, Augusta noted, “The Authoress is Indebted for part of the Melody to a foreign Composer.” The second phrase of her melody (mm. 13–16) resembles part of Handel’s “See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes,” from Judas Maccabaeus, a melody that she also used in an earlier song, “The Orange Bough.” This buoyant choral piece exemplifies Augusta’s pronouncement, “The gift of music was to bless, and to raise the soul in outpourings of joy and thanksgiving to its Almighty donor, and not to be made the vehicle of a sour and morose misanthropy.”75

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92

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chapter four

A church position was ideal for a thoughtful musician and reverent Christian like Augusta. She took pleasure in friendships at Dr. Cox’s church, including with the minister’s daughter, Elizabeth R. Cox, to whom she dedicated a spirited piano solo, the Ethereal Grand Waltz, and a song of mourning, “Requiem” or “A Thought of the Departed,” presumably after the loss of a sweetheart or fiancé. But something went amiss at First Presbyterian. In May 1844 Augusta’s salary was cut in half, to $37.50 per quarter, whereas the vocal soloists continued to receive fifty dollars per quarter.76 The reason for the reduction is uncertain, whether church politics or some aspect of Augusta’s professional role. During the 1830s, flourishing urban Protestant churches began to add a quartet of paid soloists who could perform more elaborate music than congregational hymns without the long process of building and training a strong choir. Years later Augusta would write an essay on church music that complained about the preference given to the vocal soloists. “I have frequently been in organ-lofts where the leading vocalists were scarcely competent to read three consecutive notes correctly,” she scoffed, and inveighed against the “thousand-and-one amateuring ladies and gentlemen, who, although laying no claim to the title of professional, accept a remuneration that would amply meet the views of those whose just rights they usurp.”77 The key element in her diminution, then dismissal, from First Presbyterian Church may have been the ongoing construction of a new church. Selling the old building, discharging the organist, and disposing of the organ were just steps towards the goal of a great new facility, which opened in 1847 at 124 Henry Street, where First Presbyterian still stands.78 Being downsized was an alarming jolt, but Augusta nevertheless continued at the church for another year while weighing future options. Even after leaving the job, she sometimes advertised as “Late Organist, Dr. Cox’s Church.”79 But the departure was not free of acrimony, and Augusta felt compelled to publicize her side of the story. In May 1845 Augusta advised Brooklynites that she would “attend to her Pupils in Brooklyn as formerly,” even though she had “resigned the office of Organist” and was living in Manhattan.80 By October, she wrote in the press that she had been treated badly by First Presbyterian and cited charges of underpayment, being locked out of the organ loft, lack of response to her entreaties to the church, loss of her Brooklyn pupils, and the aggravation of an instrument that was not tuned and repaired until after her dismissal.81 With the situation deteriorating in Brooklyn, Augusta made overtures in Boston, where two of her brothers worked in the piano-building trade. St.

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a young professor of music

ᆥ

93

John Browne was just finishing his apprentice years, but Louis Henri Browne was well established in the city, working for other manufacturers while producing his own line of pianos at Winter and Washington streets.82 Railway lines, which tripled in miles during the 1840s, permitted ready transport for Augusta to visit Boston. From 1844 to 1846 Augusta published sheet music with various Boston firms (E. H. Wade, William H. Oakes, Charles Bradlee, Henry Prentiss, and Keith’s Music Publishing House), while simultaneously continuing with other New York publishers. At this time she composed a number of pieces that incorporated dedications to so-called Boston Brahmins, the city’s elite business and cultural leaders from a network of intermarried families with names that included Adams, Cabot, Lawrence, Lodge, and Warren.83 We can imagine Augusta renewing her acquaintance with the former Miss Emily Warren, to whom she had dedicated “The Voice of Spring” during the 1830s. Miss Warren, now Mrs. William Appleton, would have received her as an old acquaintance, if not quite as a friend of the same social standing. Mrs. John Ellerton Lodge received the dedication to Augusta’s song, “Once upon a Time” in 1845; Mrs. Lodge was the former Anna Sophia Cabot, David Browne’s onetime piano student. “The Chieftain’s Halls” (1844) was dedicated to Mrs. J[ohn] D[avis] W[eld] Williams. Born Ellen Bigelow, she had also studied with David, as her surviving binder’s volumes indicate. By far the most elaborate of Augusta Browne’s Boston dedications was “A Song for New England” (1844). Mrs. Abbott Lawrence was the dedicatee of this elaborate vocal setting that celebrated the recently completed Bunker Hill Monument at the site of the first important battle for independence in 1775. Abbott Lawrence was a major Boston industrialist and textile manufacturer, as well as the son of a Minuteman who fought at Bunker Hill. Augusta used the formal oratorio style with recitative and strophic aria to suggest a ceremonial occasion in this tribute to Boston and its environs.84 The eye-catching sheet music cover featured an engraving of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown surrounded by the seals of the six New England states. The song was suitable for a salon setting, a public meeting, or the concert stage. The New York Herald noted “the music [is] of a superior description,” and predicted, “There is every probability of this becoming one of the most popular songs in the Union, which it is worthy of.”85 The composer fashioned a laudatory piece with formal style and elaborate details for a public venue or civic event in “A Song for New England.” The lustrous recitative (“Bright Edenland of nations”) begins a rolling litany of praise (ex. 4.7). A stubborn repeated pitch, f1, invokes “New England, New

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England” as the strophic air begins, before the melody soars upward as the beauties of place are extolled (ex. 4.8). The lilting air in 86 makes a surprising modulation from the key of F to A-flat and back to B-flat (“Where lone the nightbird chanteth,” mm. 46–50). A double cadenza (m. 49), in which the birdlike flourishes of the singer are echoed an octave higher by the pianist, marks the climactic return to the key of B-flat and the theme of “New England, New England.” Augusta’s efforts in Boston notwithstanding, her networking and dedications did not lead to relocation. She paid tribute to Boston as a cultural capital but remained in the commercial nucleus of Manhattan. Her two brothers, employed in piano manufacturing in Boston, achieved a permanent family base in the “Athens of America,” although their social plane was blue collar rather than Blue Book. The void created by losing her church job was a blessing in disguise, because it provided time for Augusta to undertake serious literary pursuits in monthly magazines beginning in 1845. But the First Presbyterian Church

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episode was not yet closed. Augusta filed a suit against the church, claiming that the committee never fully paid her as promised. Her father’s litigious inclination probably played some role in this undertaking. If Augusta acted because he guided or goaded her into the suit, she paid a high price. The New York circuit court heard the case in April 1847 and declared a “nonsuit” because she had “agreed to play for $150” and “always gave receipts in full.”86 The trial was covered in mortifying detail by the newspapers: The fair plaintiff in this case sues the deacons, elders, trustees, &c. of this church for an alleged balance of $485 due her as organist. The first witness called for plaintiff was David S. Browne, her father, who being pressed upon his voir dire to state whether the plaintiff was twenty-one at the time of her making the engagement with the church, took fire at this invasion, as he considered it, of family privacy, and in open court, much to the amusement of the bar and the bench, tendered the defendant counsel his card, with an intimation that he was ready to meet all such questions elsewhere. The plaintiff’s engagement was with Cyrus P. Smith, ex-Mayor, for $300 a year with 50 or $100 in addition, if it was allowed by the trustees. The receipts were given for $75 quarterly in full, and so the defendant alleged the payments to have been made, the trustees never having assented to more. Dr. Cox was called to establish the claim for additional compensation, but he denied all knowledge of the matter; he making it, as the Rev. Dr. phrased it, a question of morality not to interfere in the secular arrangements of the church. The Court directed the plaintiff to be non-suited on the construction of the contract.87

The fact that her father would not assert her age in the court of law injected an unintended jest into the trial. Dr. Cox’s refusal to enter the “secular” dispute may have seemed humorous as well. The Brooklyn Eagle, formerly her advocate, reported the case as “Want of Harmony in the Payment of Harmony,” a title and coverage that were humiliating to Augusta. She broadcast her side of the story in the New York Tribune, where she asserted the “strongest assurance of the justice and validity of my claim” of nonpayment. She stated that “my father, as my agent” made the initial contract through “Mr. C[yrus] P. Smith, then Mayor of Brooklyn.” This assertion offers proof that Augusta’s father acted as her agent in New York. Receipts exhibited at the trial by the Trustees “were sent, written by themselves, for the amount paid in full, but never in full of all demands or arrears, and other times no receipts; and no other genuine receipt can be produced.” Many church members, she noted further, “disliked an organ,” which added to her diminishing status at the church.88

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Even if Augusta had won the suit, her future employment chances would have been placed at risk, because the story would have weighed against her as she sought another church job. One month after the trial, she was fortunate to begin as organist at the South Reformed Dutch Church on Murray Street in New York City, where Rev. J. M. Mathews had some influence.89 She served until that institution closed for relocation in 1848. As in the case of First Presbyterian, Augusta was not rehired when the new church was completed at Fifth Avenue and 21st Street. She must have continued to play and substitute in other churches, but never at so prominent a church as First Presbyterian. Women organists faced frequent prejudice during the nineteenth century, as the historian Judith Barger documents in her study of Augusta’s British counterpart, the organist and composer Elizabeth Stirling (1819–95).90

From Brooklyn to Broadway Following Augusta’s departure from Dr. Cox’s church in Brooklyn, the Brownes moved back to Manhattan to a “house and lot” at the corner of Market and Henry Streets.91 Augusta resumed teaching in the city, but she took the ferry to Brooklyn for a few remaining students. Lesson fees provided the most reliable earnings for music professionals during the nineteenth century. Far too little income resulted from sheet-music sales, and even less from concert performances. Piano lessons were the financial mainstay for even the most gifted European performers and composers, from Mozart to Chopin. Like these two giants, Augusta sought upscale families for her student base. She relied on demonstrating her skills, education, faith, and refinement to cultivate the merchant bourgeois. It seems curious that an art considered both feminine and feminizing should have been so problematic for a woman to participate in fully. She faced daily issues about respectability, morality, gender, social roles, and class. Augusta’s professional activities nevertheless gave her a measure of emancipation from home, where she continued to live with her parents and teenage brothers. She would have found breathing room and stimulation as she traversed the city to teach and transact errands. David Browne seemed to enjoy real estate buying and selling, as he had done earlier in St. John, New Brunswick. Whether due to her father’s restless nature or the endless search for an ideal situation, the Browne household moved several times to nearby streets along the Broadway nexus.

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Augusta had begun to publish short songs in 1844 in the Columbian Magazine, a fashionable New York monthly aimed primarily at women. Magazines presented an ingenious and effective way to increase her name recognition to a widespread audience. Augusta used the medium of music publication in household magazines steadily through the 1840s, reaching a peak in 1848 with six songs split evenly between the Columbian Magazine and the Union Magazine. These light, unassuming numbers, no more than two magazine pages, evidently came easily to her. Once purchased by the magazines, these songs were often not published elsewhere. At the same time, she was active in placing other songs and piano pieces with the New York music publishers Firth and Hall, Charles Holt, Jr., and William Dubois, as well as Augustus Fiot of Philadelphia. Augusta never achieved a popular hit among this steady stream of publications. Archived collections of binder’s volumes typically contain music by Augusta Browne in only 1 or 2 percent out of hundreds of such volumes. For example, the Bound Music Collection, circa 1800–1970, at the College of William and Mary’s Swem Library Special Collections, contains sheet music by Augusta in only three out of more than two hundred volumes. In the John Carbonell collection of binder’s volumes at the American Research Center of the University of Colorado, just five volumes out of some six hundred contain works by Augusta. These personal collections of sheet music provide scrapbooks of musical life of their time. Sometimes the name of the owner was imprinted on the outer cover of these volumes or written on individual pieces among the contents. Investigating these names reveals the identities of girls who owned Augusta’s music in Virginia, Ohio, and New York State. Even if her sheet-music imprints never sold in huge numbers, they nonetheless traveled toward the frontier as well as up and down the East Coast. Lists of music for sale in scattered city papers demonstrate that her scores were available throughout the states. Music stores often stamped their business names on their sheet music inventory; thus we know that her music was sold in Nashville, Richmond, Baltimore, and Louisville. As early as 1840, a young law student took note of one of her songs performed by “Miss Julia” at a dinner party in Lafayette, Indiana.92 Miss Julia could have purchased her music from a nearby shop or received a package of sheet music selections by mail from an East Coast publisher. This service was provided by enterprising music stores for customers residing far from cities. Sometimes the music imprints were gathered into a volume, as in the case of Musical Gems Bound by J[ohn] Sage, a volume of thirty-three pieces bound in Buffalo that contained Augusta’s French Bouquet.93

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The best of her early works deserved reintroduction during the 1840s, as the aspiring composer became better known. Augusta took the initiative in republishing a few of her own titles, an unusual step for a woman composer of the period. Her father had printed sheet music in Dublin and in Boston, so he knew the ins and outs of the trade, even if he was no longer active in publishing. George Blake had acquired Augusta’s music when he published her titles during the 1830s, unambiguously printing “Property of Publisher” on sheet music such as the “Angels Whisper” with Variations.94 Composers made money by selling a work outright to a publisher or by earning a royalty of 5 to 10 percent on sheet-music copies sold by the original publisher.95 In order to republish her works legally, Augusta needed to obtain or purchase the publisher’s plates. That she did this is clear from her piano solo L’Henri Galloppe, to which was added a telling phrase in the imprint information: “Published by G. E. Blake . . . and by the Authoress, 254 Fulton St. Brooklyn New York.” She used Blake’s engraved and typeset plates, after procuring them from the publisher and adding her 1842 address. Blake never transferred his library of plates to another publisher, as was common at retirement from the music trade. His firm’s plates were not sold off until a posthumous auction in 1872.96 The auction catalog lists a dozen of Augusta’s titles, but not L’Henri Galloppe, since she had already “bought back” the rights to this music.97 L’Henri was special to Augusta since it could reference the famed European virtuoso Henri Herz as well as her brother Louis Henri. In addition to reprinting the L’Henri in Brooklyn, she published a “Second Edition” and a duet version in Boston. The four-hand version reflected the merry tradition of playing duets with her siblings, and she dedicated the galop to the son and daughter of her friend Mrs. William Nixon of Cincinnati. Augusta seems to have emerged as a full-blown entrepreneur by age twenty-one in New York, but her business acumen had developed through her father’s counsel and her years in the family music academy. She was indefatigable in a vigorous music industry, but always within cultural parameters suitable for a woman of her time, place, and social class. Her songs were invariably genteel or “polite,” that is, the lyrics were never vulgar or unseemly, and often embodied a moral message of Christian belief. The division between Augusta’s enterprising professional life and conservative personal behavior is apparent. This musician was no romantic rebel; she could not afford to be a maverick as long as she wished to work as a teacher of children and young women within the prevailing social precepts of the era. Yet Augusta’s assertive entrepreneurial activities were exceptional,

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especially compared with those of the female musicians Clara Wieck Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, who were reluctant to submit their compositions for publication. They were hindered by feelings of inferiority, as women composers, and experienced “authorial anxiety” about the merit of their works.98 Augusta matured as a confident composer during the 1840s, soon moving beyond songs or piano variations based on preexisting melodies to wholly original songs and piano fantasies. Nevertheless, she generally remained within the genres of song and piano pieces considered suitable for women to compose and perform. Every aspect of Augusta’s professional life entailed gender considerations within the culture of her era: gender was the elephant in the room. Genre and gender were implicitly connected by composers, publishers, teachers, parents, and audiences, and held true for women’s work in art and literature as well as music. Women were believed to have finer perceptions and discrimination than men, plus a natural inclination to grace and detail that made them effective performers and skillful miniaturists, but not creators of works that exemplified heroic genius, such as operas, symphonies, or chamber music. The modern author Margaret Atwood summarized the situation with a dose of humor when she observed, “Women writers weren’t included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them. . . . [T]he kind of eccentricity expected of male ‘geniuses’ would simply result in the label ‘crazy,’ should it be practiced by a woman.”99 The sense of what was acceptable was as crucial to Augusta’s compositions as it was to her public behavior. Gender constructs undeniably limited what she could attempt to publish during her era. Women writers, artists, and composers had to work within expected and established conventions if they wanted to work at all. Breaking out of genre meant breaching social decorum. Musicians like Augusta risked being discounted if they wrote in “women’s” genres yet were admonished as “unfeminine” if they wrote outside of them. The practical outcome of this double bind meant composing in genres that are often belittled in retrospect. Even if sonatas were regarded as masculine works and parlor songs as feminine, composers of both sexes understood which genre was more marketable. Male composers also had to face the reality of what antebellum Americans would buy. Songs and piano dances were commercial products in a brisk, competitive marketplace that had little interest in sonatas or fugues. The year 1847 exemplifies the disparate impulses in Augusta’s music publications. Several songs responded to recent events: in one case, the death of a friend, Mrs. Luther Wyman, honored in “Fairest Flower so Palely Drooping”;

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in another case, the national thirst to go to war against Mexico (Mexican Volunteers Quick Step and “The Volunteer’s War Song”). Other works were obviously commercial in intent: “Babes in the Woods”—based on a simple harmonized arrangement of the old English ballad—was a sure seller for youngsters to perform. “The Family Bible” was a barnstormer with tearjerking words and a brightly illustrated cover, but the “music arranged by Miss Augusta Browne” was barely more than the substitution of a sentimental text by the New York newspaperman George Pope Morris to a preexisting song by George Alexander Hodson.100 Songs with cover illustrations in color such as “The Family Bible” incorporated new printing technologies that enabled brilliant illustrations in red, green, blue, and gold. These chromolithographed sheet music covers enticed the consumers who purchased them as well as the antiquarians who later collected them. Enthusiasts of Americana often saved the tinted sheet music covers but discarded the pages of music. The composer’s imaginative piano solo Grand marche arabique, “Oeuvre 74,” intertwined elements of musical exoticism in a hybrid genre that mixed fantasy and rondo (see chapter 10). On the title page, a bold illustration of a mustached and turbaned grandee announced the Oriental subject to the customer. Augusta assigned opus numbers to only a few of her larger works, and she incorporated French for the titles of a few of her most impressive piano solos. The Grand marche arabique displayed more thought and sophistication than the De Meyer Grand Waltz, “Oeuvre 73,” published one year earlier. The De Meyer Grand Waltz was built from mundane themes that outlined the tonic chord and major scale, but it drew in buyers with a cover portrait and facsimile autograph of the famous Austrian concert pianist Leopold de Meyer, then touring America.101 The New York Tribune helpfully opined that the music “was evidently written under the influence of the great master’s playing, and is alive with power, brilliancy, and audacity. We think it the best original waltz published in New York for a long time.”102 Indeed, Augusta had many occasions to hear de Meyer perform between his October 1845 debut and ten subsequent concerts in New York City during the next six months. Her tribute waltz makes use of many arpeggios and octaves in what is advanced, but not intimidating, piano writing. She recognized this virtuoso’s hold on the public and capitalized on it. The piece sold well enough to go into a second edition. The De Meyer Grand Waltz (1846) and the Grande marche arabique (1847) bear adjacent opus numbers, 73 and 74. The Christian Advocate mentioned both pieces in a single notice, commenting, “when performed as Miss Browne herself performs it, [the waltz] produces an effect as much like De

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Meyer’s performance as can well be imagined,” while the Grande marche arabique was “more difficult, very unlike ordinary music; but when executed in Miss Browne’s own brilliant style is exceedingly beautiful.”103 These two pieces demonstrate the realities of the nineteenth-century music marketplace. The publications appealed to distinctly different buyers: someone seeking a stylish piano piece associated with a fashionable celebrity; the other, a music lover curious to try something fresh and unfamiliar. The De Meyer Grand Waltz far outsold the inventive Grande marche arabique and found a place in more nineteenth-century binder’s volumes and twentieth-century archives. The response of antebellum music customers was unambiguous.

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Chapter Five

A New Leaf “Music, divine music, celestial visitant, what were life without thee?”1 With this invocation, Augusta Browne made a formal literary debut under her full name in the Columbian Magazine in January 1845. The opening words codified her ardent belief in the uplifting power of music and her faith in its heavenly origin. Every opinion that she voiced in this essay would return many times in her later prose: the presence of music in Scripture; the power of sacred music and oratorio; the potency of congregational singing; the empowering vigor of national airs; the connection between music and memory; and the degrading lyrics of songs performed in minstrel shows. The composer had already made a minor journalistic debut in the New York press. A tribute in the Christian Intelligencer signed “A.B.” gave an account of her departed sister’s embrace of faith in the certainty of death.2 Augusta’s fourteen-year-old sister Elizabeth Browne had succumbed to an unidentified infection—the symptoms suggest encephalitis—during the family’s first autumn in New York City in 1841. The obituary essay borrowed timeworn phrases of confidence in resurrection from psalms and hymns, but Augusta found her own poetic voice to proclaim, “The bright morning star, harbinger of approaching day, was shining above her inanimate clay, but upon her astonished soul was bursting the morning of a glorious eternity.”3 Evident from these earliest articles is the prominence of Christian faith in her prose. Protestant faith and its practice were pillars of her worldview, as they were for many antebellum Americans. Augusta lived amid the nineteenth-century wave of Protestant spiritual renewal known as the Second Great Awakening, or the Great Revival, a movement that swept through America during the first half of the nineteenth century following the eighteenth-century First Great Awakening. The process of conversion and spiritual rebirth constituted the heart of this movement, also described as “revivalist Protestantism.” The older Calvinist tradition threatened hellfire

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and damnation, but the Great Revival movement invited sinners to repent and embrace the promise of salvation. The Puritan God of Wrath was supplanted by a loving Jesus in nineteenth-century denominations. This gentler approach attracted, rather than terrified, converts, and this tendency has been described as the “feminization” of religion and culture in antebellum America.4 Furthermore, the idea of universal salvation represented the democratization of religion in the United States; as the historian David S. Reynolds writes, “If politics was embracing average people, so salvation was no longer reserved for a chosen elect. Anyone could attain it.”5 Huge outdoor camp meetings that aroused a frenzy for conversion and salvation became a characteristic feature of rural America after 1800. Congregational hymns and songs with attractive refrains that were easily learned with a few repetitions suited the large crowds at mass gatherings. Augusta did not allude to camp meetings or record any participation in them. She more likely experienced urban revivals, such as the Fulton Street (or Layman’s) Revival, which instituted Wednesday noontime prayer meetings for citizens and businessmen in 1857. Her spiritual guidance came from mainstream Protestant clergy, including Samuel Tyng and George Coles in New York City and Benjamin Cutler in Brooklyn. During the same decades that revival meetings flourished in the United States, the Ecclesiological Movement, born at Cambridge University, promoted a style of worship that restored such medieval church practices as the sung liturgy and the revival of Gregorian chant in worship services. The Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement became a major trend in Anglican cathedrals in England and gradually entered upscale American Protestant Episcopal churches, such as Trinity Church in Manhattan.6 This movement was the campaign of High Church Anglicans, many associated with Oxford University, who conceived of the Anglican Church as one of three branches of the Catholic Church. High Church Anglicans wanted robed boy sopranos and male choristers to replace the community choir that sang in less elevated churches. Ritual and decoration characterized Anglo-Catholicism in America, but Augusta was opposed to anything that suggested “Romish” ceremony or rituals. She believed that the use of Latin and grandiose worship music obscured the transmission of the Gospel, whereas congregational hymn singing was an essential element of worship. The composer’s leanings were evangelical and Low Church, even though she enjoyed the chimes and organ music at services at Trinity Church.7 Her sentiments were reinforced by strident anti-Catholic spokesmen in New York City, including Rev. William Craig Brownlee, publisher of the Protestant Vindicator, Samuel Morse of the

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National Academy of Design, and his brothers Sidney and Richard Morse, the founders and editors at the New York Observer (see chapter 11). Brownlee and the Morse brothers had assisted the Browne family ever since their arrival in Manhattan in 1841, and thus their opinions were well known to Augusta. John Inman, editor of the Columbian Magazine, was the brother of Henry Inman, a leading portrait painter and, like Samuel Morse, a founding member of the National Academy of Design. As we saw earlier, Augusta’s youngest sibling, Hamilton Browne, received permission for special study at the National Academy at the tender age of eleven. Acquaintance with the Inman brothers suggests one reason that the composer became affiliated with the magazine. During 1845 alone, she published poetry, fiction, and essays in the Columbian, in addition to a song and German Air, with Variations for piano. The poem, “Music from Heaven,” continued the thread of “divine music” from her January essay, “Musical Thoughts.” In “The Musician’s Adventure,” an anecdote from the life of her father’s mentor, Johann Bernhard Logier, provided the grist for a humorous short story. The comical sketch of Logier terrified by a bat as he practiced the organ in a dark church would become one of her most frequently reprinted tales.8 A serialized article, “The Divine Origin of Music,” traced historical citations that drew connections between music and faith. The composer upheld music as a moralizing force with the power to elevate and refine the human soul. She disparaged minstrel numbers that denigrated African Americans with crude, insulting stereotypes. This view was voiced frequently among educated, urban Protestants as minstrelsy soared in popularity during the 1840s. Another essay was “The Music of America,” a call to action for students and music educators to improve musical culture through better music education. These items circulated around the nation as other newspapers and journals reprinted items from the Columbian Magazine. With so many items of prose in print in just twelve months, Augusta left behind the silence, isolation, passivity, and powerlessness suffered by many Victorian-era women. “Writing is a pleasure to me,” she stated, and the novice author seized language during a decade when literary authorship and publication became viable avenues for women.9 Augusta was one of thousands of Americans who participated in supplying the enormous demand for literature and journalism in print during the nineteenth century. Increasing numbers of women worked from the security of home while they earned money for their poems and stories. An anonymous observer opined, “This Lady Literature embraces . . . the popular magazines of poetry and fiction,

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which are probably read every month by at least one-eighth of the population of the country.”10 Augusta was poised on the upsweep of a literary wave, as magazines and newspapers multiplied each decade. Even the most famous writers of the age worked in conjunction with periodical publications. During her lifetime, women advanced in journalism beyond merely submitting poetry or stories to local newspapers or journals. A few women served as editors (Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, Godey’s Magazine; Mrs. Ann Stephens, Portland Magazine and Ladies’ Companion; Lucy Stone, Woman’s Journal; Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, Union Magazine); columnists and correspondents (Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood); and, ultimately, publishers (Mrs. Frank Leslie, who successfully published her husband’s magazines after his death). In 1867, the newspaper columnist Fanny Fern wrote that a woman author was no longer considered as “a sort of monster”; in fact, “it is difficult to find [a woman] who does not write, or has not written, or who has not, at least, a strong desire to do so.”11 Some of these occasional or hobbyist writers were known as “scribblers,” a term used lightheartedly by Augusta herself and venomously by Nathaniel Hawthorne (“a damned mob of scribbling women”).12 The young composer became involved with the magazine world even before the family left Philadelphia. Two songs published in Godey’s in 1840 and 1841 led to her appointment in New York as the musical editor for the extremely short-lived Lady’s and Gentleman’s Athenaeum in 1842. The prospectus listed Augusta as in charge of the “Musical Department,” and the first—perhaps only—issue contained “Music by Miss Augusta Brown,” according to the Boston Daily Atlas.13 The 1845 Columbian Magazine launched Augusta as a fully fledged author in the nonfiction, poetry, and short story genres. Her writing belonged in the realm of what was termed “polite literature,” meaning essays, fiction, and poetry that were suitable for the domestic audience. Like her prolific contemporary Lydia Maria Child (1802–80), Augusta tested a variety of literary forms. Child published newspaper columns, household how-to books, sentimental poetry, groundbreaking novels, children’s books, and significant abolitionist materials, “refusing to privilege any class of texts.”14 But the musician-turned-author avoided the commonplaces of domestic advice and prescriptive conduct books issued by even such educated, idealistic women as Child and Catharine Beecher. Augusta managed to elude categorization as either a literary angel of the household or as a madwoman in the attic.15 The emerging authoress sought to elevate, amuse, and educate in her prose.

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Emotion was nonetheless always close to the surface in the prevailing sentimental language of the Victorian era. Exalted language was customary and expected in nineteenth-century poetry, rhetoric, and preaching. To a modern ear, Augusta’s writing often veers toward purple prose: wordiness, overwrought expression, strained syntax, and obscure vocabulary. As one scholar of American song observes, “A striking characteristic of the midcentury repertoire, to our ears, is its sentimentality and elaborateness of rhetoric.”16 The well-read musician delighted in archaic vocabulary, often dropping into her prose such expressions as mayhap, perchance, bedights, e’erwhile, yclept, methinks, quoth, wot of, haply, romaunt, chaunt, sooth to say, burthened, and well-a-day. The intentional use of such antiquated phrases suggests an aspect of the neo-Gothic revival in art and architecture so favored during the Victorian era. Augusta could have been describing herself when she wrote: “To the rescue! To the rescue! oh, ye lovers of antiquity, all ye stout champions for ancient usages.”17 If Augusta’s writing was sentimental, it was no more so than that of her contemporaries in the same magazines. Sentiment sold, whether in songs or poems. And rare was the antebellum story without a moral. Augusta’s fiction and nonfiction anecdotes were no exceptions. She would ultimately embrace a role as a moral messenger removed from “petticoat news” or “lady literature”—patronizing descriptions that were all too common in print during the antebellum period. Gender was nevertheless manifest in her writing through the societal codes of modesty, piety, and decorum that had been instilled into her psyche. Domestic literature such as novels, poetry, household manuals, and children’s books enabled women writers, even those outside of major cities, to participate in the commercial mainstream of print culture in an era when “female inferiority [was] an unquestioned cultural assumption.”18 Most antebellum women dreaded the “opprobrium still heaped upon the woman who so far departed from her sphere as to speak in public.”19 Only radical evangelists and reformers dared to deliver public addresses, but women could wield words in print. Some used language as a social mirror, others as a social agent. Augusta never lectured in public as such; Sunday-school classes and church-related meetings presented her only acceptable platforms for oratory. But the successful composer developed into a woman of letters amid “the most numerous reading public the world had yet known.”20 By coincidence, Lydia Child and Augusta Browne each relocated to New York in 1841, when the former began writing a regular column, “Letters from New York,” in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Both women made

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their authorial debut in the Columbian Magazine during January 1845. They were soon submitting work to the Union Magazine, where Caroline Kirkland, a colleague from the Columbian, was the editor. After John Sartain bought the Union Magazine in 1848, Augusta’s work appeared less often in this publication. Sartain recalled that he paid similar contributors from five to twelve dollars per poem, and from four dollars per page for prose.21 Access to publication through women’s serials was easy, but Augusta was already seeking less gendered magazines for her writing. In 1849, she began an association with the Home Journal, a “high-toned and brilliant Literary and Artistic Journal” in New York City, edited by Nathaniel P. Willis and George Pope Morris.22 Sartain’s Union Magazine had published the first part of Augusta’s “The Music of Our Neighborhood, Morning,” but the Home Journal published the conclusion, “Our Neighborhood, Evening.” Newspapers meanwhile circulated her essays and stories according to the common practice of republication among periodicals. The newspaper industry seized the writing of legions of authors and disseminated their work from coast to heartland to coast through a network of printer’s exchanges.23 Editors, printers, or publishers were permitted to mail an issue of their newspaper or magazine publication for free to their “exchange list” of fellow editors and printers nationwide. Other serials could then reprint content from exchange publications without permission or charge. Antebellum journals described as “eclectic” were mainly compilations of reprinted material drawn from other publications. Proper credit was supposed to be given to the source and author of the material, but a full attribution was often missing. The free circulation of content among publishers conveyed vital news throughout the United States—even to very small communities—during the decades before the telegraph changed the way that news reached the press and the nation. The system of exchanges operated until 1873, when the Senate revoked such franking privileges. In addition, American literature enjoyed effectively unlimited transnational input because imprints from Great Britain were republished freely in the States without any obligation to pay British authors or publishers. American publishers vied to get new British books printed by their presses within a few weeks of their first appearance in Britain. As an aspiring author, Augusta aimed high within market-driven genres (e.g., poems, stories, essays) and print products (newspapers, magazines, gift books). Every choice reflected not only the time and place but also her gender, social class, race, religion, and education. Her opinions usually fell along conventional lines rather than transcending them. She exhibited typical social prejudices of nineteenth-century Protestants toward Catholics and Jews, and

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she was patronizing—but never insulting—toward African Americans. She was faithful to traditions but had her own voice, sometimes leaning democratic and populist, on other occasions educated and elitist. In antebellum literature, as in music, women were expected to confine their work to certain genres, as an anonymous critic, using the editorial “we,” lectured in the American Literary Magazine: We think that there are things which women may not write. . . . We should take no delight in a great epic poem written by a woman, if it were possible for a woman to write one. We should consider its author unsexed. It would require sympathies of an unwomanly character. . . . Even in fiction, we like to see a female author keep within certain boundaries.24

But Augusta was used to negotiating boundaries. Once she had begun, she never stopped writing and submitting her prose for publication. From a dual career as teacher and composer, Augusta successfully added a third professional outlet to her life. In 1846 the new author published less prose but focused on fiction. A fanciful tale of Irish magic, “The Enchanted Piper,” in the Columbian was her sole literary publication of the year. She was at work on a longer story, “Kate Darlington,” that came out the following year in London in Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine. Placing a story in a British periodical may have seemed a worthy goal that offered prestige to the author, but Augusta soon learned firsthand about the lack of copyright enforcement between Great Britain and the United States. She may or may not have been paid by Blackwood’s, but she did not earn a cent for the many reprints of her story, which immediately turned up in one American newspaper after another. It was her first and last intentional foray into London publications, although a few of her later essays were reprinted in British sources. She focused on the American magazine market in New York City, especially new periodicals, such as the Message Bird, that emphasized the fine arts. The Message Bird, established in 1849, continued for years under various titles including the Journal of the Fine Arts, and merged with other publications to become the Musical World and New York Musical Times (running title, Musical World and Times), Musical World, New York Musical World, Musical Review and Musical World, and later the New York Weekly Review. Augusta published poetry, fiction, essays, and music in all of them. The Browne family continued the pattern of moving every year or two within the city, but stayed close to the Broadway commercial hub. In 1847

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they left 469 Broadway for the nearby 428 Broome Street but moved around the corner to 42 Crosby Street the following year. The area was in the Fourteenth Ward, where the average number of families was 3.5, or 16.8 people, per four- or five-story brick building, according to the New York state census of 1855.25 Commercial businesses lined the ground floor, while upstairs lived grocers, skilled laborers, merchants, and makers of mirrors, wheels, straw goods, pencil cases, boots, and gas fixtures.26 Living at home did not suppress Augusta; if anything, the security of the family cocoon freed her to write by diminishing the monetary worry of supporting herself completely. The housework had long been done by domestic help. Everyday life for the young professional was a fabric of music, family, and faith. She maintained her creative stride through the 1840s, even when serious crises arose in the family. As the sole surviving daughter of the household, it was Augusta’s duty to assume the role of caregiver for her parents and younger siblings. The gifted Hamilton was a frail teenager who was largely homeschooled. He and his sturdier brother George Washington Browne, born just one year earlier, were on the verge of adulthood, taking on small jobs and planning their futures. The revolutions that shook Europe in 1848–49 moved Augusta to compose songs of admiration for those fighting for liberty in France (“Vive le Republique!!”) and Poland (“Wake, Poland, Awake!”). She seemed less aware of the revolution brewing among countrywomen in her own backyard at the first Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York in 1848. Women would not win the vote for decades, but, by virtue of living in New York, Augusta fell in the small but lucky percentile of American women who enjoyed equal property rights, a condition passed that year by the Empire State. The women’s rights movement was not a topic that resonated with this music teacher’s bourgeois clientele. The composer-turned-author did not mention suffrage or women’s rights, nor did she allude to the escalating national divide over slavery and its evils, codified in the Compromise of 1850 with its Fugitive Slave Act. Whatever her personal beliefs may have been, Augusta avoided political issues in her prose and focused on the arts, history, and religion. Unfortunately, nothing remains of diaries or journals that might have recorded her inner thoughts and opinions. There were many literary women at work during Augusta’s lifetime, but only a few of their stories are widely known: Margaret Fuller, a decade older, gained celebrity for her progressive social views before her untimely death by drowning in 1850. Louisa May Alcott, a decade younger, gained fame and commercial success for her writing, but only when she found a

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lucrative niche in children’s literature after the Civil War. Literary women, especially unmarried ones with time to write, held a special place as experts within the cult of domesticity. Such authorities as Catharine Beecher and the British icon, Mrs. Isabella Beeton, marketed domesticity in their books, but practiced it quite differently in their own lives.27 Augusta knew many literary women now relegated to obscurity, such as Alice Cary (1820–71) and Phoebe Cary (1824–71), sisters who were dedicated to poetry and fiction and maintained a social circle of New York literati. Mary Balmanno (1802–75) was a Scottish illustrator and poet who authored lyrics for several of Augusta’s songs. Fanny Fern (pen name of Sara Willis Parton, 1811–72) and Grace Greenwood (pseudonym for Sara Jane Lippincott, 1823–1904) broke paths as pioneering journalists who published in some of the same New York periodicals as Augusta. Using the name “Grace Greenwood,” Lippincott, a reporter, wrote regularly for the Home Journal. She was more radical than Augusta, lecturing as an abolitionist, for example, while she covered the US Congress for the Journal. Augusta contributed to some of the same periodicals as Fanny Fern, who began selling her writing to newspapers to support herself and her children after the death of her husband. Her brother Nathaniel Willis, the founder and coeditor of the Home Journal, scorned women writers and had a policy of not paying for their submissions. He refused to publish his sister’s 1854 novel Ruth Hall, calling it vulgar and indecent. Fern turned to the Musical World and Times, coedited by another sibling, Richard Storrs Willis (1819– 1900). Her columns soon found an eager audience, and, by 1856 Fern was providing for all of her family’s needs, but the experience left its mark. She protested that the low-paying work available to women enforced their economic dependence on men. Entrepreneurial women were not encouraged, as Fern noted in 1861, writing, “There are few people who speak approbatively of a woman who has a smart business talent or capability . . . which, in a man so situated, would be applauded as exceedingly praiseworthy.”28 Her popular columns at the New York Ledger made Fern the highest-paid newspaper columnist in the United States. In New York City, Augusta interacted with talented writers and journalists in addition to the women authors whom she knew or read. Her editorial contacts George P. Morris (often called “General” Morris) and Richard S. Willis were key acquaintances. Walt Whitman was an exact contemporary with many career parallels prior to the Civil War. Whitman was writing for city newspapers during the same years that Browne lived and worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In particular he edited the Brooklyn Eagle between

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1846 and 1848, years when Augusta was occasionally noted in the paper as a composer or author. Despite living in the bosom of her family, Augusta rejected the idea that a woman’s place was limited to the home. She had maintained a public persona since youth, albeit within the bounds of middle-class propriety. She found domestic serials aimed primarily at the women’s market to be a safe but marginalized venue. After 1850 she no longer submitted her work to magazines that Edgar Allan Poe famously characterized as “namby-pamby,” with “contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales.”29 Augusta instead sought out serials that promoted literature, music, and the arts as venues for her prose. An intriguing parallel to Augusta is her contemporary, American painter Lilly Martin Spencer (1822–1902), who was born in England and came to the United States as a child. She painted and showed her work in Cincinnati before moving in the early 1850s to New York City, where she exhibited often at the National Academy of Design. Lacking systematic access to advanced art training, Spencer supported her family by painting sentimental domestic scenes, often with a touch of humor.30 These genre paintings became familiar and ubiquitous as engraved illustrations or prints for which the artist received little payment. Spencer and Augusta resided in the same neighborhoods near Broadway and certainly crossed paths many times over in New York City streets and art galleries; thus they probably knew each other. Each had to negotiate the trajectory of a professional woman marketing her craft within the prevailing styles and social codes of the era. As Augusta advanced through her twenties, she was passing the prime years when women were expected to marry. Once again, no personal documents reveal any sweethearts, but it is likely that this “very beautiful and intelligent young lady” enjoyed her share of suitors.31 Through her students, brothers, and church circles, she knew many families with eligible young men; nevertheless, her commitment to a professional life in music took precedence during this decade. She had been fostered as a musician since childhood and hesitated to settle for less. Augusta had seen her mother bear one baby after another. She chose instead to delay the domestic and child-rearing responsibilities that she would assume as a wife. The decision to forego marriage altogether was not uncommon among urban antebellum women who hungered for a profession outside of the home.32 Augusta did not harp on love and courtship in her parlor songs, but romance had its place in her fiction. In her 1846 tale, “Kate Darlington,” a spirited young woman disguises herself in men’s clothing to elope with her beloved and to avoid her

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father’s less congenial choice for a husband. This fictional stratagem mirrored Augusta’s own manner of circumventing rather than confronting issues and difficulties. Like her heroines, she used her wits and perseverance to attain what had seemed only marginally possible. Like many antebellum readers, Augusta toured the world through travel literature of the period. Education and lifelong reading fed her curiosity. Her interest in other cultures was reflected in such music titles as “Persian Lover’s Song” (1847), Grande marche arabique (1847), and Arietta Napolitana (1849). Dreams of foreign travel captivated her imagination, and she wrote that she and her brother Hamilton planned to journey to “other lands across the great waters,” where they would visit “the queen cities, London and Rome, in order to study their gems of art.”33 But their projected expeditions abroad would never take place. Hamilton’s physical fragility was apparent even before he began to display symptoms of tuberculosis. The spring of 1849 began with promise. Augusta’s younger brother St. John Browne had married in 1847; his wife, Phoebe, gave birth to a son in March 1849. The child was named Henri Montgomery Browne, a tribute to Augusta’s oldest brother Louis Henri Browne and their mother’s Montgomery clan. Phoebe Browne died a few days after the birth, and St. John was unable to care for the newborn by himself. His in-laws, the Freeman Howes family of fishermen from Swampscott, Massachusetts, raised the baby, whom they called Harry, from infancy to adulthood.34 The Browne grandparents in New York may have wanted to take the child, but a household with consumption was no place for an infant. An appalling tragedy occurred in May 1849, when Augusta’s brother Washington was killed by a fatal bullet during the Astor Place Riot in New York. The so-called “Shakespeare riots” occurred when a rowdy crowd of working-class supporters of the American actor Edwin Forrest gathered outside the Astor Place Opera House while, inside the theater, the British actor William Macready was onstage in the role of Macbeth.35 Both actors had toured widely in the same Shakespearean roles; each had volatile advocates for his interpretations. Some touted Macready’s subdued refinement of delivery; others preferred Forrest’s impassioned physicality. The Astor Place Opera House offered elitist, European fare at higher prices than venues in the Bowery, where Forrest played to admiring audiences filled with laborers and immigrants. The protest against perceived British favoritism began with a crowd heckling and disrupting Macready’s performance on May 7, and escalated into a melee of shouting, shoving, and brick throwing on May 10. More than twenty bystanders died in

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the chaos that accompanied gunfire as the militia appealed for calm, first shooting into the air without effect, then firing into the mob, said to number ten thousand. Washington, just twenty years old, was watching from the sidelines as the drama played out in the street. A bullet tore through his chest and the young man died during the next hour while he begged in vain to be carried home.36 Strict Presbyterian and Episcopal denominations had long denounced theatergoing because so many dramatic plots turned on immoral or sinful actions. As an earnest Christian, Augusta categorically rejected the theater, despite a great love of Shakespeare, whose plays she frequently quoted in her prose. The horror of the riot that killed her brother confirmed to her the danger of the theater and the passions that it could arouse. She would never drop her opposition to the theater as a menace to individual virtue and public good. These tragic deaths in Augusta’s family coincided with the development of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, established in 1838 as a great green space of nature and solace, like Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. David Browne purchased a family plot in Green-Wood, where, in November 1849, he relocated the graves of the siblings George Washington Browne and Elizabeth Browne, the fourteen-year-old who had died in 1841. It was all too apparent that Hamilton would soon join them. Over time, most of Augusta’s siblings and their spouses were buried in Green-Wood, along with her parents. Just as her 1842 song, “The Family Meeting,” eerily foretold, they eventually were gathered “all here, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother.” The impetus to seek meaning in sorrow became a source of comfort and consolation to Augusta. With each family loss, she fostered creative impulse in poetry or song. Her systematic self-examination and self-expression would yield a rich crop of music and prose in years to come.

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Chapter Six

Her Own Woman In New York City advertisements during the 1840s, Augusta Browne usually described herself as a “Composer and Professor of Music,” and her sheet music covers often identified her as “Professor of the Theory and Practice of Music.” By 1845 she had the reputation and name recognition to identify herself simply as “Miss Augusta Browne” and increasingly she dropped the “Miss.” By the end of the decade, she was her own woman and an independent musician, no longer in any business partnership with her father. As Augusta entered her thirties, she had eluded such familiar tropes as the amateur “piano girl” in the typical middle-class home, the artistic muse of a (more) talented man, or the financial patron of other musicians. She enjoyed professional connections, a social circle of friends in the arts, and plenty of publications in music and prose. Augusta received national recognition in 1854 in the Lady’s Almanac as one of America’s outstanding female authors.1 Eighty years before the British author Virginia Woolf declared that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write,” Augusta was earning an income and had a room of her own, even if—like Emily Dickinson—it was in her parent’s residence.2 While her income would have supported living on her own in some manner, she chose not to leave the family home.3 Her younger sibling William Henry Browne was not quite twenty-one in May 1846, when the dispute between the United States and Mexico became a formal conflict. In December he signed up for service in the New York Volunteers as a second lieutenant. He departed for the battlefield with a send-off from Augusta entitled the Mexican Volunteers Quickstep, which was applauded in the local papers with the plug, “We advise all our female readers to purchase this and see how sweet a tribute a patriotic sister can render to a gallant and beloved brother.”4 This lively piece was a note-fornote duplication of her Columbian Quick-Step with an updated title, but it

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made a splash in the Brooklyn papers as “brilliant, yet easy” and “spirited.”5 William Henry’s service lasted a year before he returned home safely and entered law studies at the University of the City of New-York (now New York University). The tales of the fighting and suffering that he had witnessed inspired Augusta to compose a musical elegy, “The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” a song in the style of a funeral march for the fallen combatants, published in early 1848. The young man was deeply affected by his experiences in Mexico. He brought back artifacts and a ceremonial sword that were donated to the National Museum (today the Smithsonian Museum of American History) after his death.6 Her brother’s military service generated a special effort in “The Warlike Dead in Mexico.” Augusta poured dramatic effects into the song in an expanded ternary form, AAABA, to set the five verses provided by Mary Balmanno. The somber opening introduces the low octaves that represent the bell tolling for the dead, along with a shivering trill in the bass that accompanies chords in G minor (ex. 6.1). She did not often use a minor key as the primary tonality of a composition, but it was a natural choice for a dirge. A slow walking tempo and dotted rhythms were typical signifiers of funeral processions. The A section makes use of a mournful melody intoned above walking octaves in the bass. Three verses are set to the same music until the B section intervenes with a flowing, lyrical melody in 86 in the key of E-flat major for verse 4 (ex. 6.2). The fifth verse returns to the doleful tempo, key, and mood of the A section. Judith Tick links this elaborate setting to such works as “The Death of Nelson,” composed by John Braham.7 Since Augusta accompanied Braham for at least a half-dozen song recitals, she knew the Englishman’s celebrated piece, but dirgelike tributes for fallen military heroes were common publications during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Every military band had its repertoire of funeral marches—music that Augusta had heard since childhood during an age when militia, dance, and town bands performed often in public outdoor spaces as well as in concert halls of American cities and towns. Augusta employed vivid chromatic chords to good advantage in this song. Diminished-seventh chords and an augmented-sixth chord signal the anxious mood in the introduction as the music moves between G minor and B-flat major. The augmented-sixth chord holds a position of prominence to set the emotional words, “hearts laid (low),” in measure 10, “thousands (slain)” in measure 14, and “soldier’s (knell)” in measure 26. A dramatic octave leap upward occurs at several point in the melody, to highlight the phrase “in siege” and between iterations of “toll, toll.” The contrasting B section in

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Example 6.1. Augusta Browne, “The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” introduction and first verse, mm. 1–29. /DUJR

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Example 6.2. Browne, “The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” fourth verse, mm. 34–56.

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dimensions of this setting prompted Tick’s assertion that Augusta’s songs were “too elaborately structured to suit American popular taste.”9 Although many of her songs were simpler in style, length, and form, Augusta crafted ornate works in longer forms for special purposes or events. But even in short songs, she sought to add details that elevated them above the formulaic clichés of many of her contemporaries. “The Warlike Dead in Mexico” featured a lavish chromolithographed cover in red, blue, green, and gold tones. The rainbow hues enticed customers with five eye-catching vignettes of battles in Mexico (Monterrey, Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo, Vera Cruz, and Mexico [City]); a portrait of the dedicatee, Henry Clay; a brief quotation; and the motto of Clay’s Whig party, “We Hope in God.” The cover was a print tour de force as well as a national political statement, and accordingly has been retained in special collections across the country. The collected papers of Clay contain a letter from Augusta in which she asked the statesman for permission to dedicate the song to him.10 She

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described the song—originally titled “The Valiant Dead in Mexico”—as a “requiem to the memories of those brave men whose loss has fallen so heavily upon America,” and she asked, “May I beg, Sir, a few lines from you on the subject, as I am desirous of immediately putting it to press.” Clay’s complete response to the composer does not survive, but the sheet music cover of the song included words taken from his answer: “I need not say that the affecting subject of the Song touches me both as a Father and I hope a Patriot.” His son, Henry Clay, Jr., had died on February 23, 1847, at the Battle of Buena Vista. Augusta churned out sheet music and literary publications in 1847–48, but she still held only a marginal place in New York concert life. The principal pianists who accompanied the best singers and instrumentalists around town were Europeans who had immigrated to America: Henry C. Timm, Frederick Rakemann, Louis Rakemann, William A. King (married to Henry Watson’s sister Henriette), Wilhelm Scharfenberg, and Richard Hoffman. With the exception of King, most had been born in Germany or had studied music there. A February 1848 concert of the American Musical Institute (a short-lived choral organization) included “The Warlike Dead in Mexico” when national fervor for the military intervention in Mexico was at its height.11 William D. Comes sang the solo, but Augusta was not listed at the piano. Her colleague Timm conducted, and Dodworth’s band played at the institute program. In December 1848 a notice mentioned Augusta among the musicians who would soon perform in a “Grand Sacred Concert” to benefit the “Home for the Friendless,” a residence for the destitute just completed by the New York Female Reform Society.12 A Victorian-era woman could escape the role of wife but not her lifelong identity as daughter. The central role as the unmarried daughter of the family—an essential caregiver to those older and younger—presented responsibilities that Augusta shouldered without comment or criticism in any known writing. She functioned as a miniature adult in the academy from the time she was a child; as a woman, she served as the dutiful daughter at home. The situation was not without its compensation: a secure residence in which to live, teach, compose, and write. She was not burdened with housework, which had long been accomplished with paid help. During the 1850s, a young Irishwoman, Sarah Morrow, joined the Browne household as a live-in maid. Morrow remained in the Brownes’ employ for the rest of Augusta’s life, providing a stable presence dedicated to domestic service. Like most women of her era, Augusta was an outsider who operated at the peripheries of commercial and cultural arenas in which men held the

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positions of authority. Only men served as directors in arts organizations such as the New York Sacred Music Society (established 1823), the forerunner of the New York Philharmonic; or the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn, the association that built the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1861. Augusta’s generation risked public disapproval for being unwomanly if they were too aggressive, ambitious, or insistent. Nonetheless a number of remarkable American women—born, like Augusta, around 1820—achieved significant feats: Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) rallied against legal and social barriers for women. Maria Mitchell (1818–89), the first female American astronomer, discovered a comet. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) became the first American woman doctor. Clara Barton (1821–1912) found her métier on the battlefields and hospital wards of the Civil War. These women chose their work over marriage. Others, like Lucy Stone (1818–93) and Julia Ward Howe (1819–1911) were able to make their mark within the demands of being a wife and mother. Augusta would strike a balance by marrying when her childbearing years were almost over and her professional achievements and reputation were long since manifest. An unmarried life in literature or Christian social service was not uncommon among educated women—sometimes referred to as bluestockings—in the Northeast.13 As the author Louisa May Alcott mused in her diary on Valentine’s Day, 1868, “Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”14 Service to the community provided opportunities for single women to circulate in the public sphere and build a circle of friendships and contacts. Acceptable public activism such as temperance, abolition, or charitable causes to aid the destitute grew out of women’s traditional role as domestic nurturers. Teaching music was a bridge between the private and public spheres. Since her teenage years, Augusta had often taught in the homes of her students, crisscrossing the city to reach them. In An Old Fashioned Girl (1872), Louisa May Alcott described the heroine Polly Snyder, who proclaims, “I’m a music teacher, and trot round giving lessons all day.” Augusta’s longtime friend Anthony Philip Heinrich—who scratched out a living in New York from 1837 to 1857—complained, “I am trotting about from morning till night teaching little misses on the piano forte for small quarter money, often unpaid.”15 Even though Augusta was fascinated by the thriving urban environment that she recounted in articles such as “The Music of Our Neighborhood,” the reality in wind and weather was hardly as cheery as Polly’s statement. One can easily imagine a petite, bonneted form wrapped in a short mantle over voluminous skirts, as Augusta deftly made her way

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from one lesson to the next. Many of New York’s familiar iconic settings did not yet exist. The land for Central Park was acquired in the early 1850s, but the design for the park plan would not be awarded to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux until 1856. She had to thread the sidewalks or board the horse-drawn trolley cars that ran amid the carriages and delivery wagons that jammed Broadway. A policy of appearances was essential for women while going about their professional outreach in the workplace and in public. A study of nineteenthcentury American women entrepreneurs notes that “the management of public image was paramount” and those who succeeded often “created personae of ladylike decorum that veiled their ambitions and entrepreneurial talent.”16 Augusta had to maintain the semblance of genteel conformity as she cultivated her customer base. She aspired to teach the children of well-heeled business and community leaders, especially older daughters poised between seminary and marriage—young women who wanted to be able to perform songs or sparkling solos in front of family and admirers. A long-running advertisement in the Home Journal for “lessons on the Piano Forte, and in Harmony and Singing” stated that “Miss Browne has now vacancies for two or three pupils: terms $25 per quarter.”17 Like her father, she had always charged by the term rather than by the lesson. Because of her her experience and skills, Augusta was able to charge tuition per term equivalent to the rate for a top music professor at a female seminary for a semester of tuition.18 Although some women taught music in seminaries, the premiere position was usually held by a man. One exception was Augusta’s contemporary Faustina Hasse Hodges (1823–95), the oldest daughter of the Trinity Church organist Edward Hodges. Faustina was already a young adult when she joined her father in America in 1841, but her musical skills won her a place for further study at Troy Female Seminary. Emma H. Willard’s school in Troy, New York, offered the most rigorous education for girls on the Eastern Seaboard. Faustina rose to the position of head music teacher at Troy Seminary for several years during the 1850s before pursuing her preferred work as a church organist.19 She published hymns and domestic songs that were a cut above many of her colleagues’ efforts. Several of her songs, such as “The Rose Bush” (1859), achieved dozens of editions and exceeded sales of Augusta’s sheet music many times over.20 Faustina did not marry and remained interwoven with her family. Another contemporary, Jane Sloman Torry, of the British-born Sloman family of musicians, taught at the Brooklyn Female Academy. Jane was a successful composer of songs and piano pieces who taught in Brooklyn

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for many years, after her husband, the merchant William B. Torry, died in 1858.21 Her sisters Anne and Elizabeth taught in New York and Charleston, South Carolina. Anne Sloman was prolific as a song composer in the same magazines that printed Augusta’s music.22 Despite a lack of opportunities for women comparable to men’s positions in the arts, Augusta, Faustina, and the Sloman sisters shared the same career quests. They measured professional success by advanced students, music publications, and urban church positions. They needed an organization for women in music that could have fostered collegial ties or advocated for more opportunities. There was nothing like the Royal Society of Female Musicians, founded in England in 1839 to accommodate women who could not be members of the Royal Society of Musicians.23 Categories already existed for “associate female members” in the Philharmonic Society of London and also in the Society of British Musicians.24 In the United States, the Music Teachers National Association (est. 1876) did not come into existence until Augusta’s final years. The young professor nevertheless continued to develop her business expertise in New York City. For advice and assistance, she had long relied on her father, who functioned as a teacher, mentor, and business partner. She lacked an artistic partner in music, unlike her contemporaries Robert and Clara Schumann; the composer Josephine Lang and her husband, Christian Reinhold Köstlin; or Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. If Augusta had experienced education and cultural interaction similar to those that these Germans enjoyed, she, too, might have produced compositions in additional genres and larger forms. She did not attain comparable levels of achievement as a composer or as a pianist, but she nevertheless embodied a fusion of their creative activities in performing, teaching, composing, writing, and journalism. To get her works into print, Augusta had to exercise individual agency and entrepreneurial drive that seem typically American. The support of like-minded literary women sustained Augusta, but she also relied on men as colleagues and collaborators. She cultivated acquaintances among Protestant churchmen, among them Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, Sr., of St. George’s Church in New York City. His powerful evangelical oratory and Low Church practices suited her opposition to the Anglo-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement. “General” George Morris, a popular poet as well as the coeditor and publisher of the Home Journal, partnered her as lyricist in several of her songs. The lawyer William W. Fosdick was a part-time poet who dedicated verses to Augusta that she set in an 1853 song, “Mary Lyle.”

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Augusta revamped an earlier Columbian Magazine song in Scottish style, “Where Quair Runs Sweet amang [sic] the Flowers,” with Fosdick’s new words in “Mary Lyle” (ex. 6.3). In the magazine song, which refers to the river Quair in Scotland, the melody has a Scotch snap rhythm on each instance of the word “lassie.” But Augusta dropped the obvious Scottish signifier in “Mary Lyle,” and the result was a parlor song that resembled current numbers in vogue. The piece was simultaneously issued by different publishers in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. It was a common strategy of American and European sheet music firms to publish the same work simultaneously with partner firms in different cities to discourage plagiarized editions that would steal sales of their new songs. The melody of Stephen Foster’s ballad “Gentle Annie” has parallels with Augusta’s pseudo-Scottish songs. Foster uses a Scotch snap each time the name “Annie” occurs, much as Augusta had done for “lassie” in “Where Quair Runs Sweet.”25 When the melodies of “Mary Lyle” (1853) and “Gentle Annie” (1856) are presented in the same key and time signature, the tunes show some similarity (ex. 6.4). It was not the first time that Foster and Augusta had produced analogous domestic music. Augusta’s Mexican Volunteers Quick Step (1847) had a counterpart in Foster’s 1848 quickstep, Santa Anna’s Retreat from Buena Vista (1848).26 Despite his tremendous popularity as a composer of minstrel numbers, Foster preferred to publish plantation songs (“My Old Kentucky Home Good-Night!” 1853) and parlor songs (“Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” 1854) during the 1850s. By foregoing minstrel numbers and focusing on genteel domestic airs, Foster moved closer to Augusta’s style of song composition. Augusta maintained ties and interactions with musical colleagues. She published a letter of admiration and support for her “revered and distinguished friend,” Anthony Philip Heinrich, in 1852, at a time when the aged composer was raising funds to return to Europe.27 Heinrich had spoken up on Augusta’s behalf in 1842 when the New World published critical remarks about her music; now she gladly appealed to the New York Musical Times to promote sales of two thousand tickets to an upcoming concert featuring his British Symphony. Heinrich, she wrote, “deserves the gratitude of this country, for his exertions in the cause of music have been unremitting and enthusiastic.” This public epistle hints at the mountain of mail she penned over the years in the course of her professional activities and publications, although only a handful of her handwritten letters survive today in the correspondence of better-known contemporaries. Augusta generally lived with her parents and a sibling or two, so they left no cache of revealing family letters among them.

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Example 6.3. Augusta Browne, melodies compared: “Where Quair Runs Sweet” (1848), mm. 9–18; “Mary Lyle” (1853), mm. 9–18.

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Among her contemporaries, Henry C. Watson, the music critic who founded Watson’s Art Journal (later the American Art Journal); Hermann Saroni (Saroni’s Musical Times); and Richard S. Willis of the New York Musical World penned essays, poetry, and music in many of the same genres that Augusta plied—strophic songs, ballads, hymns, piano solos—and printed them in their monthly journals. However gratifying as a platform for the particular views of their editors, magazines were notoriously difficult to carry on successfully. Such endeavors too often resulted in major financial losses. Many music journalists, including Watson and John Sullivan Dwight, found the commercial business of periodical publishing elusive if not punishing.28 Augusta wisely never attempted a periodical of her own. Even if she was not paid a great deal by the editors for her articles, poems, or songs, at least she did not lose money in the process.

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Example 6.4. Melodies compared. Augusta Browne: “Mary Lyle” (1853), mm. 9–12; Stephen Foster, “Gentle Annie” (1856), mm. 5–8.

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A Good, Sensible Organ Augusta wrote often of her love of the organ and its contribution to worship: Whether it thunder forth the sublime peals of its collected might in triumph to the skies, or sigh forth a prayer in its zephyr-breathed diminuendo, it is alike the monarch of all instruments, and, therefore, the most worthy suitable to be consecrated to the service of the Deity.29

The absence of the majestic presence of the organ was anathema: Why a church without an organ is to me as a parched desert without water, shelterless as a sun-scorched plain without the shadow of a tree, and blank as a frame without a picture. Not a greater aid to devotion can there be, than a noble organ judiciously played; its profound harmonies rolling through the diapason of the soul.30

The organ loft contained her “brightest associations from earliest childhood, and in it have been passed my happiest hours.”31 In a series of 1857 advertisements, Augusta listed organ first among musical subjects that she taught, followed by piano, voice, and harmony.32 Her comments through the decades on the organ and its place in worship were equal parts practicality and personal philosophy based, as she put it, on “sad and oft experience.”33 The “primary essential” for music in the church, she wrote, is “to secure a competent organist . . . who is, moreover, intelligently impressed with the sacredness of his office.”34 Far too many pianists who were “ignorant of the A, B, C’s of church music” took church positions without knowing anything of organ playing and its “arts of modulation and counterpoint.”35 Furthermore, all

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too often, “the house of God is . . . desecrated with strains from ephemeral operas—bacchanalian songs, waltzes, marches, redolent of the atmosphere of the playhouse.”36 Despite her love of the instrument and her activity as a church organist, Augusta published no known solo organ music other than organ accompaniments in choral works. Her lack of works for organ is consistent with keyboard historian J. Bunker Clark’s observation, “only rarely did [early American organists] write their organ compositions down.”37 An organist’s repertoire and arrangements provided a tool kit for use at church. Organists routinely extemporized or jotted down materials that were informally notated, since the music was always subject to change according to the particular organ and the liturgical needs of the service. In addition to accompanying psalms, hymns, and anthems in church, organists provided specific interludes that Augusta described. The voluntaries, as she called the prelude, offertory, and postlude, are still present in contemporary Christian services. Her distinctive remarks indicate how she believed each duty should be performed. “One of the solo obligations of the organist is the voluntary, so called first from being played at the voluntus (will) of the organist,” as prelude or recessional music.”38 “At the church door . . . we are in the Sacred Presence . . . [and] the opening prelude should be reverential in style, sober, suggestive, skillful, equally removed from flippancy and dullness.”39 “A broad, massive manner of harmony in accompanying is a warm stimulus to congregational singing; it inspirits the timid to sing out, not ‘peep or mutter,’ and a goodly volume of sound drowns out false notes.”40 “The organ playing during the taking up of a collection is of weighty import, as a beautiful strain of music has often softened stony hearts to contribute liberally.”41 “As the object of the prelude is to soften, soothe and solemnize the mind for the coming service, so is it the object of the postlude to disguise the noise and stir of a retiring congregation; it should, therefore, be generally loud and brilliant.”42 “Had clergymen any real idea how often the efficacy of their profoundest sermons in utterly naturalized, —swept away by improper closing voluntaries, —they would be startled into reform. There exists an abundance of superb organ music suited to all capacities, and organists should be required to study it. No need is there to borrow the tinsel of the world for the garniture of the Church.”43 “No one can be a fine organ-player who does not understand harmony, who cannot on the pedals give the roots, the generic tones of the harmony. Striking mere unisons to the bass notes, as written for the outside part, is not real pedaling.”44

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Early American organs often lacked pedalboards, but Augusta noted the importance of pedaling on the instrument. She directed her services as an organist toward churches “possessing a fine instrument.” Meanwhile, women were being squeezed out of the organ loft in some Protestant churches. The push toward more romanized worship in the Church of England, resulting from the Oxford Movement, privileged men at every level of church music— whether singing, choral directing, or playing the organ. Some advertisements even specified “ladies not eligible” for organist vacancies.45 Women organists in Victorian England were often relegated to insignificant or rural churches that paid little or nothing, posts that no man was willing to take. Although no physical reason prevented their cultivation of the organ, girls and adult women were warned that “for a woman to take command of this male instrument was grossly to overstep her musical boundaries.”46 Augusta struggled as she sought church jobs that corresponded to her background and experience, but her fervor for the instrument and its role in worship never wavered. The organist-composers whom she most esteemed were Bach, Handel, the English Regency church musician Samuel Wesley, and “the Chevalier Sigismund Neukomm . . . one of the most distinguished organ performers living.”47 Augusta also admired the dean of New York organists in the 1840s and ’50s, Dr. Edward Hodges (1796–1867) of Trinity Church. Born into a dissenting Protestant family in Bristol, England, Hodges studied music without access to boyhood training in Anglican cathedral choirs. Lacking cathedral background, Hodges could not capture a plum organist post within the Church of England and thus left for the United States to pursue a premier position. George Templeton Strong first heard Hodges play in 1840 and declared, “I never heard any performance on that instrument [to] equal his.”48 Augusta offered high praise of the music at Trinity as well: “[T]he glorious instrument, obedient to the command of its accomplished master, poured forth wave after wave of magnificent harmony.”49 With Hodges as organist from 1839 until 1858, Trinity Church—at the time the preeminent Episcopal church in North America—exemplified the “pure, simple, devout and grand” manner of worship music that Augusta advocated, whereas, at nearby Grace Church, the organist William A. King selected some material from operatic repertoire. John Ogasapian observes, “The styles of music at Grace Church and at Trinity represent the two extremes to be found in in urban Episcopal churches at the time. But Grace Church’s music was less an example of the Episcopal tradition than of the kind of music to be found in any fashionable Protestant church in New York.”50 Augusta repeatedly bemoaned the use of tunes from stage, opera, or

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theater that was creeping into worship, pointing to an example such as the “Lager-bier Chorus from Faust.”51 With his fine playing, compositional finesse, and dignified taste, Hodges embodied the qualities of an outstanding church musician. He and his daughter Faustina would have known Augusta at the least as a musical colleague through Episcopal circles. Hodges also served as a coeditor at Willis’s Musical World during the 1850s, when Augusta published articles in that periodical. Her serialized “Rockets from an Organ Loft” contained sketches of fictitious “denizens of the organ loft,” presumably modeled on musicians that Augusta had known or observed during church services. Some were described as too gloomy, too apologetic, or too “cold and unimpassioned,” whereas others rampaged at the keyboard, using the “full volume of the instrument on every part of the service, regardless of fitness and appropriateness.”52 All too infrequent was one like Hodges, “the man of devout, reverential mind, [who] reveals his character in a rich, somber style,” but such an organist was an “invaluable treasure to a church.”53

Tributes to Hamilton Successes mounted for Augusta, but 1850 was a sad year, as the gifted Hamilton quickly sank through the stages of tuberculosis and died just a few days after his twentieth birthday. Hamilton and Augusta, ten years his senior, had bonded deeply through shared artistic experiences. She and their mother, Elizabeth, spent many nights nursing Hamilton at home. During these bedside hours, Augusta worked on a long series of “Musical Reminiscences” for the Message Bird, completed soon after Hamilton’s death in July. She then turned to telling his life in a selective memoir that contemplated his burgeoning artistic talents versus the spiritual purification he displayed at life’s end. The resulting Hamilton, The Young Artist was a work of consolation literature that related the stages of her brother’s Christian journey toward death. Hamilton could be compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva: saintly and pure, dying young from consumption. On April 15, 1852, Augusta inscribed a newly issued copy of her book to her brother Louis Henri.54 Remarkably, Augusta’s Hamilton and Stowe’s first complete publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared within a month of each other.55 The youth’s untimely pilgrimage toward salvation and heaven embodied the trope of a “good death” so important to nineteenth-century Americans.56 A good death was conscious and took place at home, surrounded by family

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and filled with declarations of faith. The victim remained lucid until the end and often spoke memorable words to relatives and friends present. Tuberculosis permitted its victims and their families a long decline, but not one marked by mental degeneration. The sad process could thus yield a “rich reservoir of meaning” for antebellum Americans.57 Antebellum and Victorian-era women were not supposed to talk about themselves. Hamilton was a hybrid memoir and Christian devotional tale intended to help grieving families rather than a personal memoir. Although Hamilton provides some autobiographical comments about Augusta, she was a witness rather than a central actor in the drama.58 Ingrained modesty was one factor, but, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun argues, “a woman’s ‘identity’ is grounded through relation to the chosen other,” whether to a husband, to children, to parents, to Jesus, and so on. Heilbrun continues, “without such relation, women do not feel able to write openly about themselves,” a trait amply borne out in Hamilton.59 Anecdotes provide a few insights, but there is no mention of her father’s music academy or the family business. Names of the living were abbreviated with initials or completely omitted, as in the case of Augusta’s parents. The author drew a veil of discretion over anything too personal or unpleasant in the Browne odyssey, such as the problematic challenges and lawsuits they experienced in Boston and New York. David Browne’s troubled history of business problems and personal disputes was whitewashed through omission. The account in Hamilton was intentionally vague, thus suited to a generalized moral tale, but it was a pattern maintained throughout Augusta’s writing. The family story achieved a more satisfying degree of polish as she smoothed out and reshaped their narrative into that of an upwardly mobile family with a respected patriarch at its head. In later family lore, David would be described as a captain in the British army and a lawyer with a large circle of illustrious acquaintances.60 His years as a regimental musician and the rocky progression of the family music business were completely erased. Augusta neutralized the family narrative into a bland background for the story of a brilliant young artist taken too soon. The memoir dripped with grief for his tragic loss, but Hamilton’s abbreviated life burned brightly as an example of Christian acceptance and spirituality. The book received kindly worded reviews as a work of devotional literature that demonstrated the love and faith of its author. An engraving of Hamilton had been intended for inclusion in the memoir. A handwritten annotation in the inscribed copy of Hamilton noted that the sketch was lost in a fire in Philadelphia prior to publication.61 But another image by the Brooklyn artist Walter Libbey (1827–52), identified as

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“Alexander Brown,” is very likely Augusta’s brother “Alexander H. Brown,” as he was identified along with “Walter Libby” in a list of award winners at the Brooklyn Institute (fig. 6.1).62 The purplish shadows beneath the youth’s sparkling eyes already suggest the “white plague” that killed Hamilton. Tuberculosis, known as consumption or the “white plague,” caused more deaths among adults than any other illness during the nineteenth century. Libbey himself succumbed to the disease two years after Hamilton (fig. 6.2). His self-portrait and the unfinished “Alexander Brown” hang in the Brooklyn Museum in Luce Visible Storage as a proud legacy of this local painter. Walt Whitman praised Libbey as an up-and-coming American artist who demonstrated “all the incipient signs of greatness.”63 Few of his works survive today, but the artist’s paintings appeared regularly in annual exhibitions at the American Art-Union and the National Academy of Design between 1845 and 1851. Libbey also painted a portrait of his friend Whitman, at one time held by the poet’s sister, but its current location is unknown.64 Walter Libbey was the best of friends with Hamilton, and Augusta recalled how they spent “whole days in the woods sketching from nature . . . and those seasons were of unalloyed happiness.”65 Libbey visited his dying friend frequently during his final weeks, and, according to Augusta’s account, Hamilton “made a request that he [Libbey] would immediately execute of him [Hamilton], partly from a pencil-drawing which he had, and partly from memory, a small miniature likeness to leave with me [Augusta].”66 The unfinished portrait of “Alexander Brown” in the Brooklyn Museum may have been Libbey’s effort to fulfill that request for Augusta. “No additional information about the sitter has come to light,” writes the curator Teresa A. Carbone, who notes that the portrait “reveals Libbey’s working method” through its partially finished state.67 After Libbey’s death, Augusta lauded him in an 1853 poem, “The Painter’s Last Rest; In Memory of the Late Walter Libbey,” and in an 1857 essay, “An Artist’s Memorial,” in which she described Libbey’s joy in the anticipation of heavenly salvation to come. In “The Painter’s Last Rest,” Augusta expressed belief that Libbey and Hamilton were reunited: “Dear kindred spirits, rest, Safe in the haven blest.” In her 1857 article, Augusta was more forthright than she had been in Hamilton, in which she had referred only to “a beloved friend of congenial tastes.”68 By contrast, her words in “An Artist’s Memorial” strongly suggest a homosexual attraction in addition to their shared passion for art: “The love between them was passing the love of brothers, and when separated, the epistles that flew to and fro, more resembled those of a romantic youth and maiden than of two young men.”69 Without question, these

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Figure 6.1. Walter Libbey (American, 1827–1852). Self-Portrait, ca. 1850. Oil on canvas, 23 13/16 × 19 7/8 in. (60.5 × 50.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, Gift of Miss B. C. Matthews (photo: Brooklyn Museum, 18.25_acetate_bw.jpg).

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Figure 6.2. Walter Libbey (American, 1827–1852). Alexander Brown. ca. 1848. Oil on canvas, 11 1/8 × 9 in. (28.2 × 22.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, Gift of Miss B. C. Matthews, 18.24 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 18.24_acetate_bw.jpg).

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two youthful artists shared a deep emotional bond that explains why Libbey would have painted a portrait of Hamilton. Libbey’s younger sister, Emily Barrows, even named two of her sons Walter and Hamilton Barrows. The two portraits and a medal Libbey received from the Brooklyn Institute were given to the Brooklyn Museum by “Miss B. C. Mathews” in 1918.70 Bessie C. Mathews (or Matthews) was Walter Libbey’s grand-niece and Emily Barrows’s granddaughter. Over time the name attached to the second portrait could have been remembered only as “Alexander Brown” by descendants in a generation who never knew Walter, Hamilton, or their interwoven history. Today Walter Libbey and Hamilton Browne rest at Green-Wood Cemetery in family plots not far from one another, and their portraits hang one above the other in the Brooklyn Museum.

Pilgrim’s Progress Condolence literature—readings to comfort the bereaved—formed an everpopular niche within Christian literature, and it was a genre written and read by Victorian women. When so many deaths could not be prevented with the medicine of the era, the goal for the living was to give meaning to the deceased. In her own tribute to a son lost to tuberculosis in 1853, the popular author Lydia Sigourney commended Augusta’s tender memoir of Hamilton.71 Sigourney and Augusta were presumably acquainted, since they both wrote for the Columbian Magazine and other household periodicals during the 1840s. Augusta’s close literary friends Mary Balmanno and the Cary sisters wrote tributes to her brother that found a place in Hamilton.72 The composer continued to reminisce and memorialize in the wake of her brother’s death, including a marchlike duet, “The Youth’s Parting Song,” that began, “Hail, brother, hail,” and concluded, “our hearts are knit, forever.” In Hamilton, Augusta described her brother’s final days, when, “like Bunyan’s pilgrims, come to the end of his journey, he awaited in peace the arrival of the celestial messenger.”73 The Pilgrim’s Progress was a personal favorite of Augusta’s: “the most precious book of the ages,” she called it, and it was much on her mind during the 1850s.74 John Bunyan’s seventeenthcentury fable, The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which Is to Come: Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream (1678; Second Part, 1684), appealed widely to nineteenth-century American audiences as a parable of their own journey toward a land of promise in the United States and on to the promised land beyond life.75 The artist Daniel Huntington (1816–1906)

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coasted on the popularity of paintings of scenes from The Pilgrim’s Progress.76 Huntington’s paintings, especially Mercy’s Dream (1841), were well known through painted copies and engraved reproductions widely distributed during this era. A crew of painters even created a diorama of scenes from this spiritual journey that traveled to New York City during 1850 with plans to tour nationwide in 1851.77 A few months after Hamilton’s death, Augusta began to set excerpts from The Pilgrim’s Progress in a pair of songs: “Song of Mercy” and “Song of Christiana.” She was drawn to the less familiar Part Two of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which describes the experiences of women, as Christiana and her companion Mercy embark on a pilgrimage, following the example of Christian, the hero of Part One. Mercy enacts a more vital role in Part Two than Christiana, who is a faint echo of her heroic husband, Christian. The paired songs were announced well before publication. The Journal of the Fine Arts noted, “Miss Augusta Browne, the popular authoress and composer, is about to publish two chaste and thrilling sacred songs . . . from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.”78 When the two pieces of sheet music appeared in June 1851, the New York Chronicle approved of their “sterling sentiment and merit,” and the “pleasing character” of the music, which was “not foolishly sentimental.”79 The composer took pains with these song settings, of which “Song of Mercy” is the more elaborate, with a formal recitative and strophic air; “Song of Christiana” is an animated song of faith. Augusta dedicated “Song of Christiana” to Huntington, an indication of her familiarity with his Pilgrim’s Progress paintings. The depiction of Mercy’s Dream that decorates the cover of “Song of Mercy,” however, is a different image by another artist. The composer remained healthy despite the presence of consumption in her siblings. Her prose never mentioned any personal illness or common adult maladies, such as headaches and eyestrain. Thus she eluded the trope of frailty, neurasthenia, or chronic headaches associated with many nineteenth-century women, especially teachers and writers. Despite the solemn religious overtones of many of her works around the time of Hamilton’s death, Augusta maintained a lively, ebullient character in her piano pieces from the same period. The dynamic Cornet Waltz was a lively number for the band pavilion or dance floor that was dedicated to the Amateur Cornet Club of New York. Similarly, The Crystal Palace Waltz was a flashy piano solo that provided music for pleasure or dancing, and paid tribute to the spectacular new spaces of the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the analogous New York City Crystal Palace.80

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Her most impressive piano solo composed during the 1850s was the programmatic Chant d’amour (Song of Love) Tableau Musical, opus 81, advertised as “descriptive of the sentiments, Love, Hope, and Joy.”81 Chant d’amour is a virtual dialog in music between “He” and “She,” with themes explicitly labeled “L’amour,” “L’esperance,” and “La joie.” The three themes guide the pianist and listener through a romantic courtship in melodrama adorned with filigreed variations and cadenzas. After an operatic opening flourish with bold chords and a menacing tremolo, the tender and lyrical “Love” theme unfolds in octaves in the right hand in measure 8 (ex. 6.5). The second theme, “Hope,” is a square, songlike tune that begins in measure 26. Augusta used the same theme as the main melody in “Song of Mercy,” suggesting her fondness for the tune. The “Hope” theme becomes the subject for three difficult variations in fast notes, octaves, and repeated notes. The rapid, brillante fingerwork high in the treble suggests a feminine voice in the variations; the vigorous octaves and bass passages suggest a male answer. A change of meter to a galloping 86 introduces the third theme, “Joy,” in measure 90. The program of Chant d’amour hints at Augusta’s 1847 short story of romance, “Kate Darlington,” in which the heroine escapes disguised in men’s clothing to flee across the Scottish border to marry her sweetheart instead of her father’s choice (an aged squire). This narrative explains why the “Joie” section begins with 86 hoofbeats in a minor key that could suggest a thrilling elopement before the music sweeps triumphantly into the coda. With its forthright program, lush period style, and overt sentiment, Chant d’amour enacts a Victorian-era romance in music. By 1852 Augusta had passed the period of intense mourning for Hamilton, “the star of our household.”82 The consolation book and related publications exorcised her overwhelming sorrow and loss. She experimented with literary modes, including satirical pieces that ridiculed music and art critics, and an essay, “Negro Minstrelsy,” attacking the “buffoonery and profanity” in songs from blackface minstrel shows (see ch. 12). She indulged in a short story of young lovers set during the Crusades in “The Secret Letter,” published in the Iris gift book for 1853. A “sketch of modern chivalry,” written by her brother William Henry, was another short story of romance that appeared in the same Iris volume.83 Augusta turned more and more to William Henry, five years her junior, as she had previously shared “the sister arts, music, painting and poetry” with Hamilton.84 With her example, assistance, or urging, William Henry published an extended series of essays about his experiences in the Mexican War in the Knickerbocker magazine. The series of “My Campaign Reminiscences”

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Example 6.5. Augusta Browne, themes in Chant d’amour, op. 81: (a) “L’amour,” mm. 8–15; (b) “L’esperance,” mm. 26–33; (c) “La joie,” mm. 90–99. D

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eventually ran to sixteen installments between August 1854 and October 1857. William Henry had allegedly been arrested and imprisoned for challenging an army officer in Mexico, but the facts of the episode were disputed in the press.85 What is certain is that William Henry wanted to expunge the incident from military records and public memory. The matter kept surfacing in the newspapers, in columns sparked by political partisanship. William Henry led Republican clubs that backed John C. Frémont for president, whereas his anonymous attackers published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a Whig paper that supported Franklin Pierce. In proactive selfdefense, William Henry solicited letters to confirm his service from commanding officers, including General Winfield Scott, to counter critiques of any misbehavior while in the military. He became active in public events presented by Mexican War veterans and, on September 14, 1852, he led a

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one-hundred-gun salute from the New York City battery to commemorate the American military entrance into Mexico City.86 The protracted series of campaign reminiscences in the Knickerbocker also minimized the embarrassing incident from his past. While William Henry was soldiering in Mexico, David was increasingly engaged by clients to write their letters of application for military pensions. Veterans from the War of 1812 and even aged widows of Revolutionary War soldiers employed his service in communicating with faraway government offices for military affairs. Files of letters to and from commissioners of pensions as early as 1847 demonstrate this role as epistolary go-between.87 Before he became a music teacher, “David Browne” had been listed as an “agent and public accountant” in Dublin city directories between 1810 and 1815. An agent was not qualified to argue before a court but could carry out business instructions from individuals who lived at a distance or who needed assistance in reading and filling out forms, writing letters, or otherwise representing them. William Henry was listed as an agent by 1850, then as a lawyer or attorney by 1851, after completing his legal studies. He advised clients and wrote letters concerning “claims for Pensions, Pay, Land, &c., and legal business in general.”88 David no longer took part in music instruction with Augusta but instead assisted in William Henry’s fledgling law practice. By enfolding his father as part of the office, William Henry was able to occupy his unpredictable parent while keeping an eye on him. David functioned in his son’s office as an agent, but he could fill in as an errand boy, receptionist, or raconteur. The patriarch’s long-held dream of studying the law at last became a reality, if somewhat late in life. By the mid-1850s David was listed as a lawyer. He had become a naturalized American citizen in 1852. Although he never argued in court as William Henry did, he carried out legal matters such as executing and settling estates.89 In 1851—when her father was securely in place at her brother’s office— Augusta celebrated David as a “paterfamilias” in “The Man Who Nurses the Baby,” by “A.B.” Her tender tribute in the Home Journal paid honor to “that noblest and most admirable of his kind, the man who loves to tend the baby.” The homage may be the most notable example of Augusta’s writing with the domestic coziness so favored during this sentimental era. “Little children,” she rhapsodized, “lovely little ones, white-souled buds of existence, fair dovelets of heaven’s own empyrean: happy the man of the world, who, turning his back on scenes of heartless frivolity and falsely alluring pleasure, seeks his dearest enjoyments among them, in their purifying association, for ‘of

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such is the kingdom of heaven.’”90 Yet these sugary words offer a vision of men who tend their infants, and thus the usual trope of maternity has been inverted, with a man assuming the role of nurturer in the domestic space. The stilted language is Victorian but the sentiment is modern. This essay echoed across the land in reprints, but, sadly, because the original carried only Augusta’s initials, the author never received a byline when the piece ran in Godey’s Magazine and in British anthologies.91 Family life ran smoothly with David enjoying legal work with his son. There were also grandchildren living in Boston. Augusta Emily, the namesake niece of the composer, was Louis Henri Browne’s only child. The little girl lived in Hingham with her mother Sarah while Louis boarded downtown near the commercial piano trade on Washington Street.92 Emily A., as she later preferred to call herself, would teach at a Boston elementary school before her marriage in 1883.93 St. John Browne’s son Henri (known as Harry) stayed with his maternal grandparents near Lynn while his widowed father labored as a piano builder in the city. As an adult, Harry would work as a salesman in Lynn and Boston.94 In spring 1854 the Brownes relocated to East 27th Street, uptown from the Broadway neighborhood near Crosby Street where they had lived since 1848.95 An advertisement in the Home Journal suggested some enhancement of their social status: Musical Card.—Miss Augusta Browne, Composer and Professor of Music, begs leave to acquaint her friends and the musical circles of New York, that she has removed to No. 87 East 27th Street, near Lexington Avenue, and will continue to give Lessons on the Piano Forte, in Singing, and in the science of Harmony. Especial attention given to the higher styles of music. Application for terms &c., may be made at her residence, or at the office of her brother, W. H. Browne, Esq., Counsellor at Law, and Commissioner of Deeds, 37 Chambers Street.96

The mention of “the science of Harmony” and “higher styles of music” demonstrates that Augusta sought to attract advanced students with an interest in music beyond a taste for current popular tunes. In 1845 Augusta alluded to the repertoire she preferred to teach, writing, “The truly scientific works of Clementi, Cramer, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, &c., are nearly neglected in this country for the flimsy trash of the moment.”97 Cipriani Potter, an eminent English pianist, composer, and the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, commended similar repertoire in 1838 when he wrote that less

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advanced students should study Clementi, Dussek, Steibelt, Hummel, Moscheles, and Mozart before encountering the difficulties of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.98 Augusta’s “conscientious” instruction was noted in the success of Edwina Dean Lowe (1836–1920), a prominent soprano soloist in St. Louis during the 1860s and ’70s, who had studied in New York with “Miss Augusta Browne, a lady of artistic skill,” who, “by her judicious teaching, laid the foundation of a thorough knowledge of music.”99 The first half of the 1850s saw the peak of Augusta’s reputation as a composer and teacher. She continued to develop journalism that linked music history and personal commentary in serialized essays. “A Chapter on Musical Sentiments and Sympathies” came out in 1853 in the New York Musical World, followed in 1854 by “Rockets from an Organ Loft.” In these essays, revised from earlier articles, Augusta refined her favorite themes, first laid out in 1845: music in life, music in worship, and music in history.

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Chapter Seven

Courtship and Consequences New York City was at the height of an art boom during the 1850s, with excellent opportunities to view or display works through organizations of artists and associated galleries.1 Augusta Browne’s contacts included artists from the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Institute, and the American Art-Union. She continued to benefit from connections she had made through her brother Hamilton and his friend and fellow art student Walter Libbey. The composer often referred to a sisterhood of arts—music, visual arts, literature—a common theme in the middle of the nineteenth century that also was articulated by Walt Whitman, who was likewise drawn to the artistic circles of Brooklyn and Manhattan.2 Exactly how and when Augusta met the recently arrived painter John Walter Benjamin Garrett is uncertain. They could easily have met at a gallery event. Augusta was five or six years older than the artist, but a whirlwind courtship culminated in a wedding within weeks. At thirty-five, Augusta was well established in her career and did not have many childbearing years left. Marriage no longer presented the risk of overwhelming her professional activities with the needs of childcare. The New-York Daily Times announced the marriage: “on Thursday, 20 Sept. [1855], at the residence of the bride’s father . . . Miss Augusta Browne to Mr. J. W. B. Garrett, Esq.”3 The Home Journal elaborated, “Miss Augusta Browne, the well-known and distinguished musical composer and authoress, of this city, to J. W. B. Garrett, a distinguished young artist of Memphis, Tennessee.”4 A Philadelphia fashion plate issued in 1855 suggests how a home wedding in the Browne parlor might have looked (fig. 7.1).5 Becoming a bride so late demonstrated that Augusta still had the looks, style, and wit to defy the old maxim that women who tarry may never marry. Previously unmarried women in their thirties often wedded an older widower with children during the antebellum period. The union of a spinster

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Figure 7.1. “Paris, New York & Philadelphia fashions for spring & summer 1855, published & sold by F. Mahan, No. 186 Chesnut Street, Philadelphia.” Marian S. Carson Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. LC-DIG-pppmsca-24880 (digital file from original print).

and a younger man presented a promising subject for gossip and speculation, but the fastidious assertion that the marriage took place in her father’s home provided a seal of respectability. The Christian name used by Augusta’s family is uncertain, and newspapers printed only Garrett’s initials. Harking back to the family’s fond memories of Walter Libbey, they may have preferred to call him “John Walter” instead of John.6 He came from a slave-owning family in Nash County, North Carolina, an area of hilly plantations near the Virginia border. His father, Martin R. Garrett, attended the University of North Carolina before his marriage in 1820.7 John Walter Benjamin Garrett was born about 1825, making him close in age to Augusta’s brother William Henry Browne. Martin Garrett tried his hand at teaching and during the 1830s ran a boarding school, Stony Hill Academy at Ransom (or Ransom’s) Bridge, an institution that promised

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“intellectual improvement,” “parental watchfulness,” and “strict, firm, and prompt discipline.”8 The US census for 1830 listed the Garrett family with eight slaves.9 Martin’s wife, Lucretia A. (Burt) Garrett, came from an affluent North Carolina family with properties in Warren and Halifax Counties. Lucretia Garrett had borne seven living children—five sons and two daughters—when she died sometime after the 1840 census. She had been the owner of several slaves she inherited from her father’s and mother’s wills, a situation that led to a case argued before the North Carolina Supreme Court.10 The court upheld the lower court’s ruling that the slaves in her estate could not be sold to pay amounts her husband owed.11 The case mirrored the legal horrors of enslaved men, women, and children being discussed as fractions that could be divided among owners and claimants. Martin did not appear to prosper in Nash County, judging by his debts, and he fell into a short-lived speculation in mulberry trees intended to support silk production. In 1839 he uprooted his household and relocated to Tennessee. An auction advertisement announced land, crops of corn and cotton, livestock, and household furniture for sale, in addition to mulberry trees, but buyers were few.12 Members of the Burt family ultimately purchased his 220 acres of land in North Carolina.13 The Garretts settled in or near Macon, Tennessee, a community in Fayette County some thirty-five miles due east of Memphis.14 His father continued in agriculture, but John Walter had dreams beyond working as a farmer. As a young man he made his way back to North Carolina, where he became involved in journalism. His newspaper work would provide literary experience in common with Augusta’s. In November 1847 the young Garrett was named “Editorial Chair” of the Louisburg Union, a paper with Democratic opinions.15 This periodical was short lived, but by March 1848, the aspiring John Walter announced a start-up in Hillsborough, North Carolina, titled the Orange Ratoon, another anti-Whig paper.16 He wrote a prospectus that declared, “The Ratoon will be thoroughly Democratic: devoted to that system of national policy originated by the immortal Jefferson, sanctioned and defended by the inimitable Jackson, and now being carried into effect, and maintained with zealous ability, by the much abused, but, nevertheless, indefatigable, wise and patriotic President of our Republic James K. Polk.”17 The North-Carolina Standard opined that “[Garrett] is a young gentleman of much promise—industrious, prudent, and sound in the faith. We . . . hope his success may be equal to his merits.”18 His political leanings resulted in the selection of the young man as a delegate from Orange County, North Carolina, at the Democratic convention in 1848 in Baltimore.19 During

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September 1848, John Walter left his post as the Ratoon editor and withdrew from the newspaper business because of “declining health,” although he was still able to participate in Democratic rallies in Ransom’s Bridge on September 30 and October 20, 1848.20 In the aftermath of the MexicanAmerican War, General Zachary Taylor of the Whig Party defeated Senator Lewis Cass of the Democratic Party and the former president Martin Van Buren, who ran representing the Free Soil Party in the three-way presidential election of 1848. “John W. B. Garrett” was listed as a clerk for North Carolina in 1849 for a term of ninety days and was paid $200 by the US Department of State.21 He maintained an interest in literature and sold subscriptions as an agent for the Southern Literary Messenger from 1848 through 1850, but the young man changed course from politics and began to make his way west as an itinerant portrait painter.22 His name turned up in the Cincinnati press in the summer of 1852, when he had recently arrived from Memphis and was completing a portrait of Judge Thomas Stanley Matthews.23 For the next two years he was listed in Cincinnati city directories and occasionally was mentioned in newspapers from Cincinnati and Memphis.24 Portrait painters of the time often worked in one place until commissions ran out, then proceeded to another city.25 Portraits and miniatures were desirable consumer items for the rising middle class. In April 1854, John Walter was staying in Memphis at the United States Hotel, where townspeople could call to see his “elegant and finished portraits,” including a recent “inimitable” painting of touring the Spanish flamenco dancer Pepita Soto, “universally admired for its fidelity with the original, and its execution conceded to be that of a ‘master hand.’”26 By May 1854 the artist’s studio occupied “the rear of the store of Cessitt, Hill & Tallmadge, where he will be pleased to receive visitors, and have them look at his pictures.”27 John Walter advertised that he specialized in creating expressive oil portraits based on daguerreotypes.28 A skillful painter could bring life and character to sitters who often appeared stiff because of the long exposure time required for daguerreotypes. But disaster struck in Memphis in December 1854, when volatile oil paints, paper, canvas, and heating fires combined in a dangerous recipe. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer reported, “The studio of Mr. Garrett, an artist of Memphis, late of this city, was destroyed by fire on Tuesday morning [December 10]. Loss $5,000, insurance $1,500.”29 After this dire event, the devastated painter may have returned to Cincinnati, but he soon visited Louisville, where he investigated business prospects. He showed a sample painting of a Memphis belle to George D.

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Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, who reported rapturously in his paper that “Mr. Garrett’s portrait of this young lady has more than the truth of a daguerreotype, and, as a painting, it is in the finest style of art. Not only are the features painted, but the beautiful spirit that breathes and speaks through them.”30 The editor penned a flowery poem as well. Prentice’s praise was reprinted in the Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer. The painter retained clippings of the article to use as a reference for months to come. Even without a studio, personal business soon recalled John Walter to Memphis. On April 7, 1855, the Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer advertised, “For Hire, A sprightly Negro Girl, about 15 years of age; a good House Servant. Apply to J. W. B. Garrett.” A week later, a second notice in the same paper announced, “For Hire, A No. 1 Negro Woman—a good cook, washer and ironer. Apply to J. W. B. Garrett.”31 As we have seen, John Walter and his siblings had inherited partial shares in slaves who had belonged to his mother’s family; additional enslaved persons were listed as part of the Garrett household in the 1840 census. “Hiring out” these enslaved workers was practical and profitable for the itinerant artist. His parents were no longer living, and he had an unmarried sister, Lucretia, to look out for. During the summer of 1855, with minimal baggage and the remainder of the insurance settlement from the December fire in Memphis, John Walter made the decision to go to New York City to pursue his aspirations. By the beginning of August he had arrived and presented his Louisville citation to the editors of the Home Journal. Favorably impressed, the paper printed Prentice’s poem and announced: We have the pleasure to inform the readers of the Home Journal that Mr. Garrett, the artist and the painter of a portrait of a lady eulogized by our friend George D. Prentice, of Louisville, is at present in this city, which he intends to make his residence during the summer, and will be happy to receive calls at his studio, No. 3 Ludlow Place, Houston-street, below Sullivan.32

The well-spoken artist settled in easily and was described as “a fine fellow . . . with the genial, courteous manners of the sunny south.”33 His marriage to Augusta took place during the month following his introduction in the press. John Walter established a studio at 709 Broadway, mere steps away from 700 Broadway, where the Browne family had lived in 1841, but the area had since developed into a hectic commercial nexus (fig. 7.2). The couple lived off and on with Augusta’s parents on East 27th Street.34 The bride published short articles that celebrated her partner as they confronted the financial

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Figure 7.2. Attributed to Silas A. Holmes (American, 1820–1886). Broadway, looking north from Broome Street, ca. 1855. Salted paper print, 29.2 × 39.1 cm (11 1/2 × 15 3/8 in.), 84 XM.351.8. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty Museum’s Open Content Program. Garrett’s studio was located at 709 Broadway.

challenges faced by newlyweds. A year after their marriage, the Home Journal offered another boost to John Walter with an endorsement in “An Artist’s Studio.” Augusta followed this just a week later with an essay, “The Mind is a Kingdom,” in which she praised the life of the mind amid the difficulties that so often surrounded struggling artists whose “soul[s] feasted sumptuously on angels’ food, and triumphed gloriously over the ingratitude of princes.”35 She continued the thought in “An Artist’s Memorial,” writing, “his studio is his Paradise,” and, “[I] esteem his poverty more honorable and attractive than the luxury and gold of a Croesus if ungifted with the soul’s noble treasure.”36 Amid the glow that surrounded their first year of marriage, grief intervened. St. John Browne, Augusta’s brother closest in age, died of tuberculosis in Pepperell, Massachusetts, in February 1856. A few months later, John Walter’s younger sister, Lucretia A. M. Garrett, age twenty-three, succumbed

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to the same disease at the address of David and Elizabeth Browne.37 She had come to New York soon after her brother, probably already ill from consumption and unable to live on her own. The young woman’s mortal illness precipitated a distressing situation in the Browne home within weeks of Augusta’s marriage. On November 29, 1855, William Henry Browne, as a lawyer and commissioner of deeds, executed a document granting power of attorney to John Walter for Lucretia’s property, specifically, for the sale of a slave. The power of attorney was witnessed, neither by Augusta nor by one of her parents, but by the family domestic, Sarah Morrow. Did Augusta appeal to William Henry to help their sister-in-law, or did he feel obligated to assist because of his profession? He was an enthusiastic early Republican who led Fremont & Dayton Central Club in New York City during the election of 1856 and presumably shared his political party’s stance against slavery.38 Was the maidservant’s signature obtained to spare Augusta’s feelings, or to save face for the Brownes? Augusta left no evidence of the matter. On December 31, following Lucretia’s death, John Walter was in Memphis, where for “Eight Hundred Ninety five dollars . . . [he] bargained and sold and conveyed to John H. Brinkley his heirs and assigns a negro girl named Lucy, aged about sixteen years.”39 Lucy was evidently the fifteen-year-old advertised “for hire” as a “sprightly” girl and a “good house servant” in the Memphis Daily Eagle the previous year. Augusta never espoused the cause of abolition. Many New Yorkers felt as uninvolved or ambivalent as the Brownes with regard to emancipation. Stephen Foster never advocated for freedom despite the empathy he expressed in his plantation songs for those ensnared in slavery’s bonds. Augusta’s silence on abolition remained unbroken. She had spoken out in essays against the demeaning lyrics expressed in blackface minstrelsy and stated that “Negro” songs insulted and misrepresented African Americans, but her writing never addressed the matter of slavery (see ch. 12). Even if she had no wish to become involved in the issue, the sale by her husband of her sister-in-law’s chattel, in a deed prepared by her brother, thrust the reality of slavery into her life. There is no evidence that the Brownes used moral suasion in an effort to convince Lucretia or John Walter to free the girl rather than to sell her. The Browne family even had the financial resources to buy Lucy’s freedom outright, but they did not choose to do so. Instead they facilitated the power of attorney and thus played a role in the sale of an enslaved teenager in Memphis. What may seem to modern sensibilities like cold-hearted complicity in the slave trade was not unusual at the time in

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New York and other northern states, despite the ever-growing national controversy about this divisive issue. William Henry again assisted Lucretia Garrett when she made a will on September 8, 1856, a few days before her death, once more witnessed by Sarah Morrow.40 John Walter was named executor as well as the principal beneficiary. Whatever misgivings they may have had, the Browne household did not waver in embracing the artist’s sister as one of their own. Lucretia was interred alongside Augusta’s siblings already in the Browne plot at GreenWood: Hamilton, St. John, Washington, and Elizabeth. John Walter continued to show his work at National Academy of Design exhibitions. One of his new paintings was a portrait of his brother-in-law William Henry Browne “when a young lieutenant in the Mexican War.”41 This portrait was probably based on the engraved illustration—likely taken from a daguerreotype—used on the sheet music cover of “The Volunteer’s War Song.”42 The Home Journal noted the fine portrait “on exhibition at the store of Dechaux, in the same building with Mr. Garrett’s studio.”43 The portrait was also exhibited at the National Academy in spring, 1857; the picture later hung in the Browne home, along with other family portraits, as mentioned decades later in the will of William Henry’s widow.44 He may also have created a portrait of Augusta, but few paintings by J. W. B. Garrett are known to survive today. The rising tide of photography pushed hard against portrait painters. Who could blame middle and lower-class Americans for turning to the many daguerreotype and photography studios that sprang up during the 1850s, providing quick, inexpensive reproductions? Augusta’s 1857 essay “Crotchets of Comfort for ye Seekers of Fame” offered balm to the suffering artist, asserting, “every eminent man who has attained illustrious rank in the annals of fame, has either emerged from the depths of obscurity or been compelled to battle with difficulties and discouragements that tried his inmost soul.”45 In autumn of the same year, financial and family considerations prompted a notice in the New York Daily Tribune: Mrs. Augusta Browne Garrett, Professor of the Organ, Piano Forte, Singing and Harmony, has resumed her tuition in the above branches. . . . Terms made known at Mr. Garrett’s Studio, No. 709 Broadway, or No. 222 Adams-st., Brooklyn.”46

The curious phrase “has resumed her tuition” could have meant that Augusta was pregnant for some months when she did not teach. She would never have

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revealed something so personal as a miscarriage in her prose, and there is no official record or indication of a birth to the couple. The most telling fact in favor of a pregnancy is that David Browne purchased a house in Brooklyn in March 1857; moreover, David bought a residence that was ample for the grandchildren that he and Elizabeth eagerly anticipated.47 The frame house at 222 Adams Street was a home for a family, with modern features such as sewer lines and gas lighting, and included a good-sized yard with an arbor on a lot more than one hundred feet in length, providing plenty of space for grandchildren to play.48 The house lay within walking distance to the ferry boats that ran between Manhattan and Brooklyn, so David could commute to his legal office with William Henry, Augusta could make her teaching rounds, and John Walter could go to his studio to paint. During the same months Augusta began to reissue some earlier sheet music—the musical “bouquets” from 1841 and 1842—in a new series called Strains of Many Lands: the National Melodies of 1. Caledonia, 2. Hibernia, 3. England, 4. France, 5. America, published by Oliver Ditson of Boston. In this series label, she combined titles by two of her respected forerunners in music and poetry: her father’s mentor Logier, who published a series of Irish airs arranged for piano titled Strains of Other Days; and the ever-popular Mrs. Hemans, who authored the poetry collection Lays of Many Lands (1826).49 Augusta updated and retitled her earlier “bouquets” of national tunes, thus avoiding any issue of copyright with their original publishers. She also had a backlog of earlier piano solos with Swiss, German, Arabian, Neapolitan, and Russian themes to refashion as additional Strains of Many Lands. The revised editions apparently ended after Lays of Caledonia and Hibernia, even though these two numbers received favorable mention in the press: Hibernia was deemed “elegant music” and Lays of Caledonia was considered “sweet and plaintive.”50 Of the new series, only Lays of Caledonia was placed as a copyright deposit in the Library of Congress, but it demonstrates Augusta’s process in revising the earlier bouquet. The majority of the original was unchanged, allowing the typesetter to work from the older published version insofar as possible, with the substitutions to insert written out separately. The 1841 Caledonian Bouquet contained five songs, beginning with a brave-sounding “Scots wha’ hae,” followed by “The Poor but Honest Soldier,” “Burns’ Farewell,” “Roslin Castle,” and “Braes of Busby.” In the 1857 revision, Augusta inserted a short cadenza between the first and second tunes. After “Burns’ Farewell” she added a newly composed section of energetic, dancelike music before

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launching into the convivial favorite “Auld Lang Syne.” Gone was “Roslin Castle,” a tune widely used as a funeral dirge during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Augusta chose to substitute “Auld Lang Syne” in A-flat—a key in which the tune fits well under the hands at the piano—but she wanted to retain the easy key of A minor for the medley finale, the reel identified as “Braes of Busby,” better known today as “Dowd’s Favorite” or “O’Dowd’s Reel.” She kept her preferred keys through a precipitous modulation from the key of A-flat by converting A♭ into G♯ in an E-major seventh chord, the dominant of A minor, in measures 103–4. The transition races through descending octaves outlining the G♯ diminished-seventh chord, coming to rest on low G♯ before resolving to an open octave on A♮. The drumlike tattoo sets a martial mood for the final tune (ex. 7.1). This simple if abrupt solution demonstrated that the composer still enjoyed the challenge and novelty of “obstruse modulations,” as her father had termed them in Logierian academy examinations years earlier.51 Augusta and John Walter moved into her parents’ new home in Brooklyn by mid-1857. They were fortunate to have done so, because economic disaster arrived in a torrent. The financial Panic of 1857 occurred that autumn, as one bank after another failed when customers demanded payment in gold for their deposits following the collapse of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company on August 24, 1857. An enormous sum of gold bullion from California, intended to shore up the banks, was lost in the September shipwreck of the SS Central America during a hurricane. The economy contracted, manufactured goods remained unsold, and workers lost their livelihoods as businesses closed. The panic, plus the downturn in portrait painting, motivated an aggressive advertising campaign by Augusta. She ran a series of “musical cards” for three months in the Home Journal during the spring of 1858 and for two months in the Musical World during the summer. In addition to offering instruction in New York City and Brooklyn, she announced, “Mrs. Garrett having been especially educated to the organ, and having been organist in some of the leading churches, would, with pleasure, enter into a similar engagement with an evangelical church having a good organ. She would also invite the attention of amateurs to her new Piano Forte compositions, Strains of Many Lands, published by Ditson.”52 Augusta had not conducted such vigorous advertising for a decade, soliciting all at once for students, a church job, and sheet music sales in the face of the financial downturn. Years after her start in New York City, she struggled to increase her professional activities.

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Example 7.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, Lays of Caledonia, transition from “Auld Langsyne” [sic] to “Braes of Busby,” mm. 96–110.

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Her husband remained peripatetic, perhaps by nature as much as by profession. John Walter spent some weeks in Memphis after his sister’s death while he settled her estate.53 He kept in mind possible venues where his portraits could be in demand, especially as the financial panic took hold. In April 1858 he was once again near the region of his childhood in North Carolina. The Tarboro Southerner called him “one of the most distinguished artists of New York” and reported: His visit to this region is partly for his health, and partly professional—he having been engaged to paint the portraits of a family residing a few miles from Tarboro. Mr. G. informed us that he will also undertake others if desired until the first of June, at which time he is compelled to return to New York. He engages to make an entirely satisfactory portrait, or will not expect the picture to be taken. . . . The following beautiful lines, by Prentice of Louisville, are sufficient endorsement of Mr. Garrett’s skill as an artist.”54

The artist was still using Prentice’s 1855 commendation as an introduction and credentials. The paragraph indicates persistent health issues even though the winter weather was over in New York. John Walter was a shooting star who rocketed into Augusta’s life without warning, but his death came without warning, too. He collapsed and died in their home on a hot afternoon in August 1858, not quite three years after their marriage. The cause of death was attributed to “disease of the heart” in newspaper obituaries.55 A damaged heart could have resulted from a once-common childhood disease such as rheumatic fever, and occasional references to the young man’s “declining health” indicate such a chronic condition since at least 1848. The shock of his abrupt end resonated through the family, but Augusta had no fear for his soul. She believed that her husband was a firm Christian; his sudden death demonstrated that any day could be one’s last. The funeral was held, as were so many pivotal events in Augusta’s life, at the home of her father. John Walter’s memorial at Green-Wood states “My Husband” on one side, and “My Sister” [Lucretia Garrett] on the other; the smaller carved words are no longer legible. There was no recorded will owing to the artist’s unexpected demise, nor was there any indication of sales of other enslaved persons following his death. His startling end took months for Augusta to absorb and to find closure.

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Performing Widowhood Augusta’s brief years of marriage had been a gift in her life, a time of joy and anticipation, despite the personal, professional, and financial stresses. In their wake, Augusta had to embrace the immediate physical observation of widowhood, beginning with the full rituals of Victorian-era mourning. Many widows continued to wear black for the rest of their lives, enlivened only by mourning jewelry and bits of trim, although they could graduate to lighter colors such as grays and purples after a time.56 Opting every day for black with a white widow’s cap, as many period photographs and daguerreotypes show, certainly facilitated dress and grooming in an age of endlessly fussy apparel. The period of deep mourning lasted up to two years for a widow. During that time, women were expected to stay at home and limit their social activities, seeing only relatives, close friends, and clergymen. Conducting business, such as going parlor to parlor as a music teacher, had to be curtailed. Augusta probably lost many if not most of her students when she could not travel to their homes; furthermore, the observance of mourning made it problematic for them to come to her home for lessons. It would be 1861—fully three years later—before she again advertised as a piano teacher or organist, and her sheet music publication ceased for even longer. The new widow was secluded in the Brooklyn house on Adams Street, but she was far from idle. Augusta immediately began the cathartic process of writing a tribute to John Walter. The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations was completed less than four months after her husband’s death, according to the introduction, dated December 20, 1858, and dedicated “to one asleep” in anticipation of future reunion.57 Rather than a hybrid memoir like Hamilton, this book was a “series of reflections” in a compilation of devotional literature taken from sermons, essays, and poems, interwoven with her own prose and poetry.58 Revelation 21:19 provided inspiration: “And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones.” The plan of the book was twelve chapters, one for each of the “precious stones” in the foundations of the wall of the holy city, the New Jerusalem.59 For each jewel, Augusta wrote an introduction, followed by selections that elucidated or emphasized the qualities she associated with each gem and its affiliated church father: jasper for Peter, emerald for John, sapphire for Andrew, topaz for James the Less, and so on.60 The volume opened with “music by the late John Walter B. Garrett” titled “The City of Delight,” with words attributed to Saint Augustine.61 The verses describe the joys of paradise to come. This simple, strophic song, “arranged

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by A.B.G.,” is a testament to the earnest faith and the pleasure in music that the couple had shared (ex. 7.2). Advertisements by the publisher, Sheldon, described the plan of The Precious Stones as “entirely novel, both in conception and execution,” in its treatment of the “beauties of the Heavenly Home.”62 In addition to Augusta’s favorite poems and essays reprinted from earlier periodicals, she included excerpts from Christian patriarchs, church writers, and clergymen, along with anonymous pieces taken from contemporary periodicals such as the Westminster Magazine and Littell’s Living Age. Augusta also included a poem written by her husband, “Reverie in a Forest of North Carolina,” midway through the volume, in a section that included excerpts about the afterlife, the “pilgrim’s farewell,” and the New Jerusalem.63 The Precious Stones received at least fifteen reviews in general magazines, literary journals, and religious periodicals. While Augusta’s “fanciful interpretations” could not be deemed serious scriptural studies, the compilation was embraced as a thoughtful volume of devotional readings.64 The Eclectic Magazine noted the collection’s “gems of thought, upon which the pious mind will love to dwell in its hours of retirement from the world, and from which to gather strength for the . . . pilgrimage here on earth.”65 Even a London periodical commended the compilation: “We cannot doubt that this charming volume will bring heaven nearer to many hearts, and will comfort many mourners by its vivid descriptions of that bright world whither the loved ones have gone, and where they tarry for us till we come.”66 The book is still found in many library collections today. Its “sentiments of pure morality” made the volume a benign, tasteful gift for many occasions.67 An inscription from a Sunday school teacher to a student can be seen in one digitized copy, and, in another, the name of the owner, E[dward] B[rown] Walsworth, a Methodist minister who operated a female academy in Oakland, California.68 As Godey’s Magazine observed, “A strong, religious sentiment marks every page of this book.”69 The work succeeded as a tribute of love to a deceased spouse, an iteration of Christian faith, and a dose of comfort to “troubled minds” and “stricken hearts.”70 The Precious Stones was a testament of grief, but it was also a highly marketable item of devotional literature. The volume, priced at one dollar, was well received and widely advertised. Gift books for the parlor made up a profitable corner of the publishing industry. These literary keepsakes were usually compilations of verse and short prose, with attractive illustrations and lavish binding. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had come out during 1855, the summer that Augusta married; his well-groomed third edition (1860) aimed for

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the elegant look of parlor-table books like The Precious Stones.71 Suitable for young and old, regardless of sex, the deluxe leather-bound, embossed edition of The Precious Stones was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a coffee-table book. Born out of sorrow, The Precious Stones easily outsold any of the composer’s works of music, to judge by the number of surviving copies. The span of the 1850s contained the highs and lows of Augusta Browne’s adult years. As a composer and music teacher she reached the peak of her professional reputation, yet situated at either side of the decade were tragic personal losses that she mourned in music, poetry, and two published books. Other than her rapid work preparing The Precious Stones, there is no record of what else Augusta did during the months following her husband’s death. The gesture was heartfelt, but the effort could not purge the enormity of her loss. Depression was a natural outcome of such emotional trauma. Appendix 2 shows a void in her creative output that lasted for several years. She was not quite forty, still young enough to resume teaching or a church job, but Augusta’s heyday as a professional musician was over. She did not publish any sheet music under her name during the next five years. We know that Augusta labored on a third book during this time, another piece of Christian literature that she offered to publishers around 1860 or 1861. This manuscript was intended as a work of studious scriptural and historical research that made use of information and anecdotes garnered from library collections in New York and Brooklyn. In July 1862 she submitted an excerpt to Rev. Charles Hodge, D.D. (1797–1878), an eminent Presbyterian theologian who founded and edited the Princeton Review. She explained to Hodge that full publication of her book had become impossible owing to “the unfortunate aspect of the times.”72 When a book contract was not forthcoming, she had broken up her manuscript and submitted the chapters as articles to several periodicals, including the Princeton Review. The “unfortunate aspect” that Augusta referred to was, of course, the outbreak of the Civil War, which swept away business as usual, at least as she had known it.

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Chapter Eight

Pilgrim in Progress As we have seen, Victorian conventions of mourning curtailed Augusta Browne Garrett’s teaching and public life at the peak of her activities. A widow in her forties without wealth or power warranted courtesy but little attention. It has been said that a man dies once, but a woman dies twice— the first time at her marriage, the second at her demise. In nineteenth-century America, a widow died yet again when her identity shifted from partner to leftover. Widows often experienced limited financial resources and became ever more reliant on others. As Augusta struggled to regain professional momentum, the escalating Civil War drastically altered her everyday life. Her brothers—two surviving of the original six—rose to the Union cause and soon departed to fight in the New York State volunteer infantry. The burden of family care fell squarely on Augusta and Sarah Morrow, their trusted housekeeper, during these troubled months. The house on Adams Street grew empty and fraught with anxiety following the departure of her brothers. During autumn, an ad announced that the composer was to “resume lessons in Pianoforte playing, and in harmony and singing.”1 She also solicited for a church position, writing, “Mrs. Garrett, having had the unusual advantage of being specially educated in Organ playing and in Classical Church Music, and having been organist in several churches, would be pleased to enter into an engagement with any church possessing a fine instrument.” It is uncertain whether Augusta found a position in Brooklyn at this time, but as the war progressed and men were called to the front through enlistment or the draft, more church openings became available. William Henry Browne was in his mid-thirties, a bachelor with previous military experience in the Mexican War. Louis Henri Browne was close to fifty, with a wife and young daughter in Boston. He was a skilled piano builder who held several patents in piano construction.2 Louis may not have shared his younger brother’s fervor for the military life, but he served

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staunchly alongside him. William Henry chafed to combat the “traitors and disunionists from East to South,” as Augusta described the enemy.3 He leaped into the war frenzy by organizing a volunteer unit nicknamed the “Montezuma Battalion” and was soon promoted to lieutenant colonel.4 After rallying volunteers to enlist and raising funds for supplies, the unit left for Washington, DC, in June 1861 as part of the Thirty-First New York Volunteer Infantry. One month later, the Thirty-First participated in the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), a debacle in which the federal troops, including many inexperienced volunteers along with picnicking onlookers, were forced to retreat to safety. Augusta’s two brothers were subsequently assigned to the Thirty-Sixth New York Infantry and soon became part of the Army of the Potomac. The Thirty-Sixth fought in the Peninsular Campaign of 1862, as well as many skirmishes and battles, including Antietam, the bloodiest single day of combat during the Civil War.5 A vivid recruiting poster for the Thirty-Sixth under William Henry’s command (“Colonel W. H. Brown”) announced, “Cost what it may, The Nation must be Saved!”6 The broadside followed the “Seven Days’ Fighting” that concluded with the Battle of Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862. Another version of the poster announced bounties of $204 for men who enlisted for nine months.7 While her brothers served in the battlefield, Augusta experienced the hubbub at the front vicariously through their letters. She shared upbeat excerpts from William Henry’s posts with the Brooklyn Eagle and the Home Journal. On September 5, 1861, William Henry wrote, “The enemy annoys us somewhat at the outposts, but he gets as good as he sends.”8 He devised a trick to reveal the range and caliber of enemy guns by mounting a stove pipe to protrude above the top of a cannon. The object looked ominous but merely provided a dummy target for the Confederate artillery to pound. Unlike so many musicians around her, Augusta did not compose any known songs or piano pieces that celebrated the Union Army or referred to the conflict. Legions of composers, male and female, seized every opportunity to capitalize on public feeling by marketing patriotic numbers, sentimental songs of loneliness and loss, martial choruses, battle pieces, and dances commemorating wartime battles, military officers, or political figures.9 Some of the nation’s best-remembered songs date from this wartime trove of music, such as “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Just before the Battle, Mother,” “Tenting on the Old Campground Tonight,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.”

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In contrast to her tribute pieces during the Mexican War, Augusta’s lack of Civil War music may have resulted from a repugnance to profit from a national tragedy that pitted relatives on opposite sides. While her loyalty to the Union was certain, Augusta never mentioned issues of slavery or abolition in her prose. Her husband had inherited slaves, and her own brother had been complicit in the sale of the sixteen-year-old housemaid Lucy. Did she wonder what side John Walter Garrett would have chosen had he lived? Was her silence due to general anxiety, a sliver of doubt, or simple respect for her deceased spouse? Another family of musicians, the Slomans—familiar to Augusta for years—found themselves physically divided between the warring sides. Elizabeth Sloman lived in Charleston, South Carolina. She published “Sumter: A Ballad of 1861” for the Confederate war effort.10 Her sister Jane Sloman Torry (often spelled Torrey) lived in Brooklyn, where she and her daughter participated in fundraising activities in February 1864 with a “private musical reception in aid of the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair.”11 Their concert at the Brooklyn Athenaeum included a song, “The Northern Volunteers,” with lyrics “composed for this occasion by Miss Jennie Torry.”12 A third sister, Anne Sloman, who had been active as a composer of magazine songs during the 1840s and ’50s, is not known to have published music during the Civil War. After the war, Elizabeth moved back to New York City, where in 1874 she published “Barbara Frietchie,” based on John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem about the indomitable Maryland woman who hoisted her Union flag to fly as Stonewall Jackson’s troops marched past.13 War and widowhood continued to redefine Augusta’s daily life and persona. Brooklyn was the third-largest city in the United States in 1860, a thriving community with a population of more than a quarter million. Cultural activities in New York City required transport by ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan, since there was no bridge until 1883. Additional travel by foot and/or horse-drawn omnibus was required on both sides of the river. The route was long and taxing for an unescorted woman who was a full-time caregiver. Augusta needed opportunities closer to Adams Street. She would have known and admired the new Brooklyn Academy of Music, opened in 1861 on Clinton Street, although she played no specific role in the fundraising efforts of the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn, which coincided with the period of mourning following her husband’s death. Nor is there any indication that Augusta participated in the mammoth Long Island Sanitary Fair held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, February 22 to March 9, 1864, to raise funds for struggling families of Union draftees. Her name did not

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appear in local newspaper coverage that contained detailed lists of committee members, including many women she would have known. For a widow caring for aging parents, church circles provided the most readily accessible opportunities to participate in her community. Augusta resumed writing prose pieces for a few newspapers and household magazines. Periodicals provided a means of participating in the public arena in a small way even if she was often housebound. She turned to some treatment of military subjects during 1862–63, especially the power of martial music to rally soldiers—long a refrain in her writing—in “Trumpets and Drums.” Another article published in the Knickerbocker, “A Raid on the Enemy’s Camp,” admonished the “tribe of sensation-seeking preachers who . . . have converted pulpits into political stumps, and churches into boisterous political rings.”14 Augusta called the practice of politicizing sacred spaces “the deadly plague of the country,” and denounced “these irreverend Reverends [who] daringly oppose holy precedent.” She sought refuge in worship from the stressful, obsessive anxieties that were ever-present when loved ones were serving on the front lines. She found some relief by interweaving history and social commentary in “A Fantasie on the Piano-Forte” (1862). The piano fulfilled a welcome domestic role in troubled times. The ivory keys were always ready, “as if with a perpetual smile,” to augment social enjoyment or to allay the “ceremonious tedium of the drawing-room.” She praised the work of piano builders like her brother Louis, writing, “American pianos have no superiors. . . . [T]hey are the only ones at all suited to our ever-varying climate.” Augusta noted the foibles of some music consumers with a tone of gentle satire, writing, “There are two classes of piano purchases. The first comprises that sensible and educated portion of the community who [appreciate] an intrinsically fine instrument; the other is composed of the far more numerous tribe who . . . view the instrument merely as a piece of costly furniture, requisite to complete the adornment of the parlor, and balance some other massive article.”15 As a music teacher going from parlor to parlor, she had abundant experience with both classes of buyers. She suggested that people behaved the same way when they bought paintings. The subject matter and the ability of the artist mattered less than a gilded frame or a painting just the right size for the space on the wall. In an entirely new essay titled “The Three Autumns,” Augusta extolled the beauties that follow the end of seasons: the fall harvest, when fruits are most mature; the autumn time of life, when calm thought replaces reckless action; and the twilight end of each day, a time for reflection and remembrance.

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Appropriately, this bittersweet essay appeared during autumn 1861 in the New York Observer, the conservative Presbyterian weekly published by Sidney and Richard Morse, the brothers of the celebrated inventor and one-time painter, Samuel Morse. These brothers had included Augusta’s family in their sphere since the days when her eleven-year-old sibling Hamilton petitioned the National Academy of Design for instruction. The inventor had been one of the academy’s founders and served as its director even while he was developing his transformative telegraph. The Morses were vital contacts as Augusta struggled to reengage with the public during her first decade as a widow. She wrote “The Three Autumns” from a vista of self-reflection, no longer the eager entrepreneur of years gone by, but a woman in transition, thinking about the years ahead. The heartrending losses of siblings and spouse during the 1850s presented a call to action rather than a reason to retreat into grief. The way ahead was the pilgrim’s journey. Her acceptance of loss was accompanied by a sense of mission. Faith without action was insufficient. Her music and prose had always been intended to be morally and spiritually uplifting, but now Augusta refined the focus of her activities to enacting and expressing her faith in deeds, which meant creative activity as well as charitable works. She wrote no new fiction such as short stories of romance and turned ever more often to sermonizing in print. Her ardent religiosity may have corseted her world view, but it cemented her later life and works.

Faith in Print Augusta and John Walter Garrett had been wedded for all too brief a time— less than three years—when he died in 1858. Not surprisingly, thoughts of death and the afterlife dominated her creativity in the months that followed. The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations, published less than a year after his death, combined extracts from religious prose by other authors with a compendium of her own writing, old and new. She completed another book-length manuscript that addressed beliefs and customs surrounding death and burial in different cultures, as well as conjecture about the heavenly kingdom that awaited Christian believers. Literature of the antebellum period described heaven in concrete images that offered solace to the terminally ill and reassurance to the bereaved. The German Reformed Church minister Reverend Henry Harbaugh produced a series of mid-century books that painted the heaven to come.16 Augusta chose several excerpts by Harbaugh for The Precious Stones. But such consolation literature may have

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seemed increasingly fatuous in the face of the grim realities of battle and wartime death facing Americans. No publisher accepted the full manuscript for her third book, so Augusta turned to publication of chapters as separate articles wherever she could. The National Quarterly Review accepted two extracts, one on burial customs, the second on “angelology and demonology.” Inclusion in this serious monthly buoyed Augusta’s confidence in her scholarly research and writing, as evidenced by her July 1862 letter offering “The Angel of the Covenant” to the Princeton Review. “The whole is entirely Scriptural,” she asserted, and “has cost a great deal of studious and conscientious consideration, and, it is hoped, may be of interest to Biblical students.”17 Augusta sought to validate her qualifications to Rev. Charles Hodge— the Princeton Review founder and editor—but only after emphasizing her appropriate female modesty, writing, “It savors unpleasantly of egotism to speak of oneself.” She asserted her credentials as she continued, “I only desire to redeem myself from the suspicion of tyroism [amateurism] by observing that I have published a large number of musical and literary compositions.”18 Through his journal and his influence at the theological seminary in Princeton, Hodge was “arguably the [Presbyterian] church’s most dominating figure in the first half of the century” and has been called the “Pope of Presbyterianism.”19 The Princeton Review published no articles by women during the nineteenth century. Presbyterian clergymen were both its primary contributors and audience. It would be another century before women obtained any foothold as ordained ministers in the denomination. However it was worded in a letter of response, presumably written by editor Hodge during the latter half of 1862, the Princeton Review declined her article. Within weeks Augusta published the most modern-sounding essay of her life, “A Woman on Women; with Reflections on the Other Sex.” Wit and mirth clothed the narrative, because it was culturally unacceptable for a woman to voice anger and criticism toward the male hierarchy except in the guise of humor. But Augusta’s thesis was unequivocal: “The equality of woman must not be considered a neoterical [new or recent] whim, a modern heresy—by no means; from the dawn of history she has asserted her prowess.” The timing of publication in the Knickerbocker in January 1863 suggests that she was motivated, at least in part, by the rejection from the Princeton Review. She wrote pointedly, “It is lamentable that even in matters of religion there should be such an ungenerous indisposition to admit woman to an equality with man.”20 Augusta injected humor and sarcasm, alternating

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with historical and scriptural examples, to assert women’s intellectual equality with men and to advocate for parity of education. “A Woman on Women” was hailed as a feminist manifesto by Judith Tick, but the circumstances of date and content demonstrate that it was also as a reaction to the recent judgment of the Princeton Review.21 As if she were engaged in argument with Hodge, Augusta emphasized what she called the “crowning glory” of her sex, namely, that women were the first to witness Christ risen.22 After asserting women’s Christian equivalence, she derided men for their low opinions of women’s creative abilities in music and literature despite substantial achievement to the contrary. Tick judged Augusta’s essay as a cumulative outburst of “personal frustrations as a professional musician and writer” and a “bitter animus against the double standard by which women were judged.”23 There can be no doubt of her frustration; Augusta specified, “Every step of the rugged way up the hill of Parnassus is disputed by some envious brother, who ingeniously thrusts in her path some stumbling-stone, or deals to her sly shoves. If man could but warble soprano, the sum of her tribulations would be full.”24 She recounted additional comic anecdotes of everyday misogyny in this ten-page invective. A Gloucester, Massachusetts, newspaper noted the essay with the comment, “The spicy humor of the introductory sentence speaks for the entire article,” which “deserves a more than passing perusal.”25 The author indeed proclaimed “equality of women” and encoded her resistance to patriarchal authority, but the article did not announce a protofeminist who rallied for women’s legal rights or suffrage. There is no evidence that Augusta advocated for or even supported these causes. Furthermore, she never again wrote on the subject of women’s equality. She did write a great deal more on the subjects of Christian faith and morality. The prominent educator Catharine Beecher promoted “aggressive Protestantism” for women to shape the national morality, especially through the rising generation. Augusta stepped up to the role of moral reformer within the arena of Christian social action, a sphere of activity that was wide open to women’s participation. She may have embraced Protestant activism as the most immediate means of personal authority and female empowerment in her era. The rejection from the Princeton Review was a blow that turned Augusta toward other ways of publishing Christian literature. Her arguments may not have been considered sufficiently rigorous or informed to satisfy biblical scholars, but her essays advocating Christian observance were readily accepted by evangelical editors at the American Sunday-School Union and the American Tract Society. Benjamin Cutler was the senior minister of St.

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Ann’s Episcopal Church, the oldest Protestant Episcopal church in Brooklyn. St. Ann’s stood near the Brownes’s home on Adams Street and likely was the family’s customary place of worship. Cutler was also president of the Brooklyn City Mission and Tract Society, and he served on the publication committee of the American Tract Society. With Cutler’s influence, Augusta had a direct channel to the evangelical publishing empire of the American Tract Society. This not-for-profit, nondenominational publishing concern developed an unprecedented distribution system that permeated the nation.26 Dissemination and evangelism were their goals rather than profitability. Free pocket tracts and inexpensive editions of Bibles and other religious literature were delivered by local colporteurs to homes and churches on the frontier. Augusta published an undated, anonymous booklet with the American Tract Society during the 1860s.27 Her name soon surfaced in connection with the pamphlet in the Brooklyn Eagle, which reported, “‘Can I attend the Theatre?’ is a question answered in the negative by Mrs. Augusta Brown Garrett.”28 She also published sections of this pocket-sized booklet under her own name in the New York Observer and a Chicago religious serial, the Advance.29 Augusta’s antipathy toward stage dramas and the theater—including opera—stemmed from the immorality of the deeds that propelled the action of so many plots: murder, lust, jealousy, revenge, and greed. As she put it, “the elements most detrimental to virtue are the life of the drama.”30 As early as 1832, Frances Trollope noted that in Cincinnati, “[l]adies are rarely seen [at the theater], and by far the larger proportion of females deem it an offence against religion to witness the representation of a play.”31 The Ladies’ Repository stated that no Christian should attend the theater because it would be “a violation of that precept, ‘Abstain from all appearance of evil.’”32 Proscriptions against stage dramas were trumpeted by the Presbyterian Church and other denominations in antebellum America. Augusta echoed their arguments and borrowed colorful descriptions of the theater as “the devil’s playground,” “the Devil’s Chapel,” “the school and nursery of vice and lewdness,” and “the way to the pit.” Not least, Augusta could never forget the tragic death of her brother Washington during the Astor Place Riot in 1849. She knew all too well the passions that the stage could incite. Antitheater sentiment soared after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater. Augusta continued her crusade in a letter-writing campaign in which she urged Episcopal churchmen to preach vigorously against theater attendance and advocated that those who frequented staged dramas should not receive communion. She bemoaned the “sad laxity of

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morals pervading religious society” and warned clergy that they were failing as watchmen against “ungodly pastimes, theatre and opera-going, card-playing, ball-going and such-like.”33 Tawdry pastimes and prostitution flourished as never before in New York City after the Civil War. Anthony Comstock, a postal inspector who worked in league with the YMCA to create the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, waged a morality campaign against distribution of obscene materials through the US post office. The 1873 Comstock Act—known as the “chastity laws”—forbade any kind of contraception to be conveyed through the mail; the mandate was expanded to pornography in 1876. The composer-turned-evangelist participated in the general moral outcry when she addressed card-playing in an undated, anonymous pamphlet aimed at youth. Extracts published in religious periodicals affirm that Augusta was the author. She referenced her earlier essay on stage drama, writing, “After the theatre, which is the chief nursery of vice, card-playing is the most perilous of all amusements; it is the lure of the gambling saloon.”34 The twentyfour-page Methodist Episcopal Church booklet Can I Play Cards? warned children that “Little Sins Become Bad Habits,” and “Cards and dice are among the chiefest lures of the glittering palace of sin.” She entreated youth not to cave in to what is now termed peer pressure, declaring, “When importuned to an enticing sin, surely the word No is easy to pronounce. What! be singular, bear the shafts of ridicule? Yes. Be bravely singular; ridicule is a weapon of Satan, and as such must be fearlessly met.”35 Augusta’s dictum, “surely the word No is easy to pronounce,” eerily prefigures the “Just Say No” campaign a century later.36 The phrase “Be bravely singular” encompassed Augusta’s sense of mission in later life. These words originated in a sermon by the leading Baptist preacher of the era in Britain, Charles H. Spurgeon. He was frequently compared as an orator with Henry Ward Beecher, the eminent Congregationalist minister of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Spurgeon’s sermons were reprinted year after year in Great Britain and America. He used this notable phrase in a sermon printed during March 1874, at approximately the time when Augusta was at work on her anti-card-playing pamphlet. The expression leaped out at her from Spurgeon’s statement, “It is folly to be singular except when to be singular is to be right—and then we must be bravely singular for Christ’s sake [italics added].” Her later years traced one marker after another in a pilgrim’s path to be “bravely singular for Christ’s sake.” “Few can bear to be singular,” Augusta wrote at the time, yet she had been singular, or at least out of the ordinary, all of her life, first as a child

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prodigy and then as a professional woman musician in America.37 The courage to face an audience to perform on piano or organ since childhood, and to traverse the city to pursue professional activities as an adult, made it easier for her to sermonize even if she was ridiculed as an overzealous Sunday-school teacher. It was possible for Augusta to be strident in support of morality and faith when it was unacceptable to broadcast her own achievements or to speak out for women’s political rights. Her contemporary, the British author George Eliot, has been called the moral voice of England. Augusta’s prose contributed to a moral voice in America. Once widowed, Augusta succeeded in surviving grief and transforming her life into an evangelical mission of morality and faith, using those social channels available to her. Religious activism provided a practical choice for her energies, as it did for many Victorian women. This turning point represented a convergence of effort on faith-based works whether in music or prose. Augusta jubilantly expressed the certainty of a heavenly afterlife, a hope that propelled her through anxious days, poignant deaths, and professional setbacks. Joyful Christian belief was a refrain throughout her music and writing. Nineteenth-century women could not be ordained as ministers in the Episcopal Church, nor could they sermonize in the church proper, following the scriptural admonition that “women should remain silent in the churches.”38 But Augusta could preach using periodicals as her pulpit. Throughout her remaining years she would author essays with moral and Christian themes on the religious topics most significant to her since her earliest prose publications. Between sermons in print Augusta occasionally turned out prose in a lighter vein. “A Few Wordy Griefs” jokingly sighed about common grammatical errors that offended the ears, such as confusion between lay and lie, common mispronunciations, and improper pronouns. A chronic verbal misuse was like a mosquito, she asserted, “a very small creature; but what can be more annoying?” Some words “seem to be doomed victims for torture,” she wrote, but “why should the habitual use of bad language be tolerated by Law?” She implored, “Ought not some punishment to be imposed for the murder of the national tongue?”39 The cutting humor that Augusta employed in “A Woman on Women” also emerged in “Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman?”40 A “grand master of specious politeness,” she called Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, who had published a celebrated series of letters to his illegitimate son that cynically explained the dos and don’ts of British high society and the “fine art of becoming a man of the world and a gentleman.”41

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The earl recommended a pretense of religion to satisfy appearances and an avoidance of music as a “frivolous, contemptible” use of time spent in bad company.42 Augusta attacked his hypocrisy and lack of morality. “Scripture is the right text-book of etiquette,” she insisted, compared with one for whom “inserting your knife between your fellow-mortal’s ribs, would be a trifle compared with putting the same instrument into your own mouth at table.”43 Her moral authority sharpened with each publication. Reverend Cutler at St. Ann’s represented an invaluable connection for an aspiring author on topics of Bible study or Christian conduct. Augusta recorded her own account of a visit to Cutler to discuss an upcoming publication not long before his death, writing in the New York Observer, “after a short conversation on literary topics, he arose from his chair, remarking that he would like to hear some music, and, opening the pianoforte, placed upon the desk, the Oratorio of the Messiah, and requested me to play and sing this most seraphic of compositions, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’”44 She held this aria in the highest esteem as a perfect union of text, music, and faith, writing, “of all the thrilling and impassioned pieces of the Oratorio, [it] is the gem . . . a work of consummate genius.”45 That a woman in her midforties could sit down at a moment’s notice to sing Handel’s great soprano aria while accompanying herself indicates that Augusta was still a musician with substantial performing skills.

Musical Matters Music for worship was a serious business to Augusta, even though she believed that worship music should be joyful praise. She revered sacred music by European masters including Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Neukomm as summits of Christian music and accordingly welcomed selections from sacred odes and oratorios into the church. To her chagrin, some churchmen thought oratorio unsuitable for worship services. She responded in her most purple prose: The opinions of those who maintain that music of the highest class,—music the most scientific and magnificent, is unfitting for the service of the sanctuary, can be of no importance in the view of enlightened and educated Christians, for, inasmuch as the Magi and wise men of the East brought in their earnest homage, gifts the most costly and precious, to lay at the feet of the infant Savior,—so ought we to offer as fragrant incense unto his ascended Majesty,

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with hearts lifted humbly the while, the noblest, the purest, the holiest, and the mightiest inspirations of that celestial science, which he has of his merciful bounty poured into our souls.46

Handel’s sacred oratorios, especially Messiah, represented the epitome not only of sacred music to Augusta, but of canonic European musical composition. She was incredulous that some churchmen objected to music from Handel’s and Haydn’s oratorios in the worship service because the excerpts were “not devotional.”47 The antithesis of such sublime oratorios was music from secular sources used in church. All too often, the “serenity of the mind [is] disturbed by secular melodies,” she lamented, because so many organists preferred “an airy waltz or a so-called ‘improvisation’” that “desecrate[s] the sanctuary and pervert the object of worship.”48 Music taken from opera or the stage for use in the church was “an evil more to be deplored than any other,” and “all theatrical music should be inexorably banished from the house of God.”49 The repertoire of church music possessed “the noblest music, ancient and modern,” and she enumerated the sacred composers Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, William Boyce, and William Croft, as well as Purcell, Handel, James Kent, [William] Jackson, and Mendelssohn.50 But even the music borrowed from masterworks was often ruined by cutting and rearranging. She disparaged the “everlasting pruning and cropping going on in sacred music of late days [that] is just like stripping a stately tree of all its beautiful and luxuriant foliage, and leaving nothing behind but a bare, rugged, bark-covered trunk.”51 She lamented, “Where choirs find all the meagre and ugly music they revel in is a mystery, a sort of black art! And sometimes, when they do deign to warble a familiar air, how do their souls thirst to murder it!”52 She cautioned, “All attempts at a high or florid style of execution ought to be reserved for the Anthem, which does belong exclusively to the choir, and also perhaps, the ‘Te Deum.’”53 Sadly, though, “The glory of the Episcopal liturgy, the incomparable Te Deum, is a favorite victim of choir slaughter.”54 She fumed, “To offer in Divine service careless or mediocre music is therefore an insult to the Majesty of Heaven; let those . . . beware of their responsibility, when they grudge the expense and labor requisite to a proper performance of sacred music, who judge that a few psalm tunes, muttered perhaps half out of tune and time, are good enough for the House of God.”55 But she also rejoiced, “How often, while listening to some of the productions of the great masters of church music . . . do we wonder, if such is the music of earth, what must be that of heaven; our minds are filled with rapture,

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and we exclaim with Mercy, in Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘Wonderful!—music in the house, music in the heart, and music in heaven.’”56 Awash in evangelism and revival, Augusta’s music was always imbued with a vibrant expression of Christian faith. One could say that she was more adamant about the love of Christ than the love of a sweetheart. She contributed to Protestant church music in America with essays well as through hymn settings and songs of faith. All the while, she remained a vehement anti-Catholic. Augusta stated her prejudice “against the infatuations of the Romish Mass—its pageantry, its man-worship, its sensuous music, its fragrant incense, its gilded decorations, its glittering lights,” and expressed concern that “scores of silly young people are caught in the net of Rome through the charms of music alone.”57 She agreed with an anonymous writer who warned that lavish Roman Catholic worship music “befits their dark design of excluding the Gospel of Christ” and that Christians should be “satisfied with a chaste simplicity in sacred songs, as an attribute distinctively Protestant and evangelical.”58 Solidly Protestant, Augusta’s hymns, songs of praise, and anthems were typical in their Christian sentiments, Victorian sentimentality, and fourvoice, homophonic sonority. She hesitated to publish hymns in great numbers, stating that “we should confine ourselves chiefly to the good, solemn old airs, of which there is certainly an abundant and beautiful variety.” The composer had observed that congregations were often confused by new tunes for familiar hymn texts, and many people preferred the customary melodies. She voiced opposition to the use of abridged tunes taken from European symphonies and oratorios, writing, “Oh, if there were only a law passed, by which all compilers, arrangers, alterers, and spoilers from the works of great masters, were compelled to pass muster before a tribunal of accredited scientific musicians. . . . [W]hat an incalculable blessing it would prove to the community.”59 By contrast, Lowell Mason and his disciples published new hymns by the hundreds, many based on borrowed and abridged melodies. Mason’s circle—sarcastically termed the “Better-Music Boys” by the twentieth-century critic George Pullen Jackson—believed that this “scientific” music would raise the level of Protestant church music and congregational singing.60 American hymnbooks continue to convey Mason’s stylistic legacy to Protestant congregations. The printing and marketing of music and books diminished during the Civil War, owing to shortages of materials, manpower, and audience. Augusta’s musical output shrank during the 1860s, but she contributed two hymns in mainstream Protestant style, “Stewart” and “Excelsior,” to the Book

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of Praise, a nondenominational hymnal published in 1866.61 Both hymn texts embodied the dread and fears of wartime. The lyrics of “Excelsior”— “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah”—called for a “powerful hand” to guide a “Pilgrim thro’ this barren land.” Her musical setting was properly chaste and beseeching. The hymn “Stewart” sets scriptural verse by the Reverend Augustus M. Toplady (1740–78): “Your harps ye trembling saints, Down the willows take; Loud to the praise of love divine, Bid every string awake.” The hymn text is labeled “Weak Believers Comforted” and categorized as “Hope” in the publication. Mason had used an adaptation of Gregorian chant for this text in some editions of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music.62 Augusta’s newly composed music is serene, yet dissonances resulting from suspensions in measures 2, 6, and 8 suggest “trembling” followers (ex. 8.1). Such dissonances went beyond anything Mason’s circle employed in typical hymn settings. Periodicals continued to provide a convenient venue for Augusta’s music. Theodore Hagen, the editor and publisher of the Musical Review and Musical World (running title Musical Review and World), issued two of her songs in 1863, both as magazine supplements and as separate sheet music imprints. “The Old Clock’s Warning” added sentimental poetry to her piano dance from 1846, the De Meyer Grand Waltz. This song was but a minimal effort to craft an attractive domestic ditty similar to other cozy, reassuring songs on the market. It was akin to Henry Russell’s “The Old Armchair” and John H. Hewitt’s “The Old Family Clock.” Her more original effort, “A Chaunt of Home,” expressed the future heavenly home in uncomplicated, Victorian-era music and was equally suited to the parlor or church.63 The comfort that the poem offered to the soul near death, or to a family in loss, was never more timely than in the summer of 1863, when the Musical Review and World published the song, soon after the Battle of Gettysburg: “Haste my dull soul, arise, Cast off thy care. . . . He, who thy burdens bore, Jesus is there!” Nineteenth-century evangelism emphasized homecoming to the safe haven of salvation through a loving friend in Jesus, a view expressed in a multitude of hymn lyrics. Hymn texts were shaped through the century by a wave of feminization that “undermined patriarchal religion by centering power in the home rather than in the church . . . and by emphasizing service rather than conquest.”64 Protestant women came into their own with the gospel style of hymnody that grew out of the songs and hymns sung at the camp meetings of the Great Revival. Some of the best-known hymns of the period were created by women: “Jesus Loves Me” (sisters Anna and Susan Warner), “Just as I Am” (Charlotte Elliott), and “Nearer My God to

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Example 8.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, “Stewart,” from The Book of Praise, mm. 1–13.

Thee” (Sarah Flower Adams). The lyricist Fanny Crosby (1820–1915) and the composer Phoebe Knapp (1839–1908) sometimes collaborated, as in the case of the gospel favorite “Blessed Assurance.” In her lyrics for some eight thousand hymns and gospel songs, Crosby emphasized piety and personal relationship with a compassionate, loving Jesus rather than the severe Puritan God of wrath. Augusta preferred to emphasize spiritual uplift and the promise of salvation in her text choices for hymn and sacred song settings. Thoughts of the pilgrim’s journey and the heaven to come remained much on Augusta’s mind. “The Watcher at the Gate” (1866) was likely intended as a quartet anthem for church use. Although Augusta preferred congregational singing, she recognized that up-to-date songs, whether sacred or secular, often used a quartet of voices for the refrain. Most large urban churches hired singers for a solo quartet as part of their regular music forces even if

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they had a volunteer choir. “The Watcher at the Gate” begins with a soloist, who could add a cadenza at a point before the quartet joins for the sonorous refrain, “I’m kneeling at the threshold, heart-weary faint and sore, waiting for the dawning, for the op’ning of the door.” The song has the lyrics of personal testimony and the rich, harmonious vocabulary of the emerging gospel hymn style of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. “The Watcher at the Gate” was still in use at the end of the nineteenth century.65

Aftermath of Battle “A Chaunt of Home” appeared just weeks after the news arrived from the war front that every family dreaded to hear. William Henry had been seriously wounded on May 3, 1863, while fighting at Salem Heights (also known as Marye’s Heights), near Fredericksburg, Virginia (fig. 8.1). A minié bullet smashed his left knee and thigh bone. He was hospitalized for the next six weeks. It was little short of a miracle that he did not require amputation or die from gangrene, but walking would never again be easy after such a serious wound. Augusta’s brother Louis was fortunately not injured in battle. Most of the Thirty-Sixth New York Volunteer Infantry finished their service in June. They were welcomed back to New York City at the end of the month. On June 25, William Henry was granted permission to return to the city to join his regiment when they were honored with a reception and mustered out of service.66 While William Henry lay injured in the hospital, he wrote to his parents to allay their fears. Augusta incorporated some of his words in a letter to the Musical Review and World, in which she lauded the power of music to rally soldiers and lift their spirits before and during battle.67 Since childhood, she had heard anecdotes from her father’s military experience about the power of music to inspire soldiers. Now she used her brother’s words to convey the sentiment in a nutshell: “Medical prescription [italics original]. One fine band, to be administered at least once a day. I think it helps a fellow wonderfully.” Augusta enumerated the benefits of military music: “To inspirit the soldier in weariness, to enliven him in solitude, to solace him amid privations, to calm his perturbations, and to whisper to his parting spirit glorious premonitions of the land of undying song.” Even in the throes of battle, “music is an invaluable agent,” she wrote. “Music gives the soldier more courage than does meat.” She further asserted that her brother believed so strongly in the benefits of music for men-at-arms that he had privately funded a band for his regiment.

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Figure 8.1. Andrew J. Russell. “Behind stone wall, Marye’s Heights, May 4, 1863.” Photographic print, albumen; image 23.5 × 32 cm, mount 35.5 × 44 cm.). Joel B. Clough Collection of United States Military Railroad Photos by Andrew J. Russell, Photo Archives, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The Thirty-Sixth had been mustered out only a few days when the fighting began at Gettysburg. Many families must have offered thankful prayers that the unit dodged that terrible bloodbath. The Seventh New York State Volunteer Regiment, with which the Thirty-Sixth had served, fought at Gettysburg, and then was reassigned to New York City to quell the civil unrest that accompanied a renewed call to draft soldiers during July.68 The New York City draft riots lasted several days, beginning on July 13, as incensed male laborers protested conscription and selection with a lottery tumbler known as the “wheel of misfortune.” Eligible men—up to age 45 for unmarried males and age 35 for married—were fearful for themselves, but also furious at wealthier citizens who could pay $300 to avoid service by hiring a substitute. Brooklyn experienced less criminal mischief than New York City, where mobs attacked soldiers, police, and government officials, in addition to looting and destruction. Anger at war service was not the only incendiary emotion. Perceived competition for jobs in New York turned some immigrant laborers, especially among the Irish-born, against African

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Americans. Recent immigrants feared that former slaves would flood the labor market as a result of emancipation. More than one hundred victims died during five days of violence in what is considered the most severe episode of civil unrest that the nation had experienced to that time. Some soldiers from the Thirty-Sixth were called up to police the mob during the draft riots. William Henry could not participate, since he was barely mobile with crutches. He continued his painful recuperation at home in Brooklyn but longed to be back on the battlefield. He tried to reenlist but, owing to his injured leg, he was appointed in December as a colonel in the Invalid Corps, later called the Veteran Reserve Corps. In this capacity he was ordered to Baltimore during August 1864 to serve as provost marshal general, chief mustering and disbursing officer, and superintendent of recruiting for Maryland and Delaware. With so many tasks in war-torn, divided Maryland, all of his legal finesse and powers of judgment were essential to conscript troops and carry out court-martials for military crimes. William Henry continued these duties beyond the war’s end and was still remembered for them years later in Baltimore.69 A photograph carte de visite of William Henry Browne from this time, about 1865, shows a handsome, mustachioed man in a smart civilian suit of a style advertised in mid-decade fashion magazines (fig. 8.2).70 The slender build, fair coloring, and delicate features are reminiscent of the portrait of “Alexander Brown”—very likely Augusta’s youngest brother Hamilton Browne—painted by Walter Libbey (see ch. 6). Together, the two images suggest that Augusta was also small in stature, fine in features, and light in hair and complexion like William Henry.71 These projections concur with accounts in concert notices from the 1840s, in which she was described as very pretty. William Henry’s continuing service in Baltimore led to a quandary for Augusta and her parents: whether or not to relocate from Brooklyn. A move away from New York would mean a wrenching displacement away from Augusta’s professional activities. Building a new studio of private students requires months for any music teacher in a new city. Losing her local contacts in the cultural and publishing worlds of New York presented a major setback that would necessitate the most industrious letter writing. But given her parents’ increasing ages and her brother’s decreased mobility from his traumatic leg wound, it became evident that they needed to consolidate family, household, and resources. As winter settled over the Northeast in 1864, elderly parents, forty-something daughter, and Irish-born maid-of-all-work departed for Baltimore.

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Figure 8.2. “Wm. H. [Henry] Browne, Col., 24th V. R. C. – Bvt. Brig. Gen.” MOLLUS-Mass Civil War Photograph Collection, vol. 85, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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Leaving New York was the third great obstacle to befall the beleaguered musician’s professional life in a decade, coming on the heels of the strictures of widowhood and the trepidations of the Civil War. Although it was not the path that Augusta would have preferred, she did not falter or shirk familial duty. The “substantial and desirable” two-story house on Adams Street was advertised for sale during February and March 1865.72 The transaction was completed on May 2, and Augusta was mailing her works to publishers in New York by summer’s end.73 Baltimore had once been familiar to the Brownes, but they had not lived there since 1836. Carrying on the household in a new location as the war ended was a full-time job for Augusta: locating suitable shops and grocers, searching for New York newspapers, learning street routes, and avoiding damaged or dangerous areas. On March 13, 1865, only a few weeks before President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday, William Henry received a promotion to brigadier general by brevet. The government granted many such promotions to longtime Union officers as the war came to a close. William Henry’s military service in Baltimore extended for more than a year following General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Augusta continued to ply editors of New York periodicals. She revised and expanded materials from earlier articles in “Musical Echoes,” a series that appeared during 1864–65 in the Musical Review and World and its successor, the New York Weekly Review. Her advocate at the Home Journal, “General” Morris, had died in 1864, leaving Augusta without any collegial editor at that newspaper, so she was alert to new publishing possibilities. When a new music periodical started up in Cleveland, Ohio, she soon made contact with its editor, Silas Brainard. The Western Musical World published one of her stories, “Five Shillings worth of Talent,” based on an anecdote about Logier.74 This humorous account had appeared years earlier in the Message Bird. Augusta revised and recirculated much of her earlier prose after leaving New York. This publication strategy worked well while she was engaged in extensive caregiving of her elderly parents. If she thought a piece had merit, she touched up the text and submitted it, often with the assertion, “For the Musical World,” or “For the New York Observer,” as though the material were newly penned. She republished entertaining materials from the 1840s and ’50s, including her sketches of art critics, music critics, and the cacophony of New York street music. A series titled “Musical Reminiscences” in Brainard’s Western Musical World closely followed the themes and materials she used earlier in “Musical Echoes” and “Musical Sentiments and Sympathies.”

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If Augusta sought work as a church organist or piano teacher in Baltimore, it was not evident in the local newspapers. Word of mouth through church and social circles would soon have resulted in pupils for such an experienced instructor. On the other hand, notices for new musical compositions quickly popped up in the press. Between May and October 1866, the Western Musical World advertised a new song, “Autumn of Love,” and a piano solo, Chant of the Sea—Transcription [sic].75 “Autumn of Love” was a refined parlor song that harkened back to her essay “The Three Autumns.” The text was based on a poem by Salvator Rosa to which Augusta added her own second verse, which culminated, “Autumn’s fruits in glories rare / The crowning hour of bliss declare.” The sheet music collection of President Rutherford B. Hayes retains this song, which was more straightforward and less fussy than the over-embellished airs of her youth. Over time Augusta had successfully developed her compositional style to be more simple, direct, and effective. The 1866 piano solo Chant of the Sea was also less ornate than the filigreed keyboard variation sets of earlier years. “An elegant composition of medium difficulty . . . written in a melodious and flowing style,” pronounced ads in the Western Musical World.76 The publisher Brainard touted the piece, “which we think will become a favorite with pianists” and “has been greatly admired by those who have heard it.”77 The subtitle “transcription” indicates an instrumental adaptation of a number taken from another musical medium. The melody of Chant of the Sea. Transcription matches a traditional Irish song called “Lullaby” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tunebooks.78 No lyrics for the melody survive to suggest a sea shanty or any association with the sea, but Augusta described it as a “celebrated maritime air” in a communication sent to the New York Observer.79 Her Chant of the Sea is an energetic character piece that spins out the four-phrase song melody in an expanded variation followed by a coda (ex. 8.2). The distinctive phrase, “chant of the sea,” appears in a translation of the journals of Eugénie de Guérin (1805–48), a French writer whose personal diaries were first published in 1863. Excerpts appeared in widely read American periodicals, such as Littell’s Living Age, at the time when Augusta composed her keyboard transcription. Guérin sought to describe the sound of the ocean in her journal, writing, “It is, I think, between the grave, deep voice rolled out by the unfurling wave, and the shrill, stony noise of the wave that is departing lightly rustling over the sand and shells, that the extraordinary ring of the chant of the sea is produced.”80 Even though Augusta’s “transcription” is based on an existing song, her music aptly translates the “extraordinary ring of the chant of the sea.”

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Example 8.2. Augusta Browne Garrett, Chant of the Sea, theme, mm. 8–39.

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Example 8.2.—(concluded)

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In this piano solo, Augusta confounds such gendered expectations as “the focus on small nature, on flowers and birds . . . [in] the works of America’s first celebrated women composers.”81 The composer had always been a city dweller who experienced nature principally as it was described in prose and poetry. Green-Wood Cemetery—predating the green spaces of Central Park and Prospect Park—provided her escape into nature in urban New York. But the ocean was always nearby, whether in St. John, Boston, or New York. Her solo “transcription” captures some sense of the majestic, hypnotic force of the sea in the spacious theme in the right hand and the rolling accompaniment in the left hand. Augusta’s Chant of the Sea prefigures the better-known American composer Edward MacDowell’s Sea Pieces, opus 55 (1898). Both composers use the breadth of the keyboard, big chords, and spacious figurations to express the power and sweep of the ocean.82 The composer mailed scores of her most recent music to the New York Observer in January 1867. The Morse brothers mentioned her submissions

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with kind words and noted that “Mrs. G.” was well known to the readers of the Observer and “the announcement of her recent works will gratify many of her musical admirers.”83 In midsummer 1866 William Henry was honorably discharged from the Veteran Reserve Corps in Baltimore, where he resumed the practice of law. He also began the process of filing for a military pension. This proved to be no easy matter because his name did not always show up properly in US army records. Despite his distinguished service, William Henry had to obtain extensive affidavits from officers and generals that backed up his claim. The pension office was drowning in applications from soldiers following the war. Augusta’s older brother, Louis, applied in October 1865, citing debilitating rheumatism and damage to his hearing. These were serious setbacks for a piano builder and technician, but his claim was denied because there was no evidence of physical disability on file at the time his service ended.84 William Henry’s serious injury in battle was undisputed, but the process was still grindingly slow. His leg wound had not been recorded at the time he mustered out with his regiment in 1863.85 At the end of August 1867, William Henry was certified for payment of $22.50 per month for injuries to the left thigh. His damaged limb worsened with age and periodically required treatment. In 1892 a bill passed by the US Senate increased his payment from $30 to $50 per month.86 Once again, certified copies of previous letters had to be submitted that confirmed his service and moreover asserted his “noble example” of “the bravery of the soldier, the skill of the officer, and the courage of the gentleman.”87 The family patriarch, David Browne, died on July 22, 1867, one month before William Henry’s pension was granted. Records from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery note the cause of death as “debility.”88 The term could imply a long decline from dementia or reduced physical function from stroke; either case would demand much caregiving from family members: Augusta; her mother, Elizabeth; William Henry; and their loyal household maid, Sarah Morrow. During her father’s final months, Augusta republished “The Man Who Nurses the Baby” as “The First Paterfamilias.”89 This short essay never mentions music or the Browne family business, but it speaks about the embracing love of a true father, and comments, “Much astonished will he be . . . to find himself and his modest merits immortalized in print.” The obituary for David Browne in the Baltimore Sun emphasized his “assurance of faith . . . [and] glorious hope.”90 “I have a glorious hope” was a favorite phrase that Augusta asserted “was the expression of a dying Christian, eight-two years of age,” precisely her father’s age at his death.91 More likely

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she was recalling the Reverend Stephen Tyng’s words, “I have a glorious hope, a glorious home, a glorious household, a glorious eternity before me.”92 She had long known and admired Tyng’s evangelical Episcopal ministry at St. George’s Church in New York City. Augusta expanded his inspirational phrase into a five-stanza poem that she would set later in a hymn. A verse from the poem was included in her own obituary with the notation, “From a poem written by herself on the death of her father.”93 Through the 1820s and ’30s, each member of the family had experienced anxiety and stress resulting from David’s battles in the press over the controversial Logierian method, his disputes with other teachers, and the family’s resulting relocations along the East Coast. The patriarch and the patented method continued to resonate in the lives and professional choices of his adult children. David was—on paper, at least—a business partner teaching music alongside Augusta during the 1840s. He became part of William Henry’s law practice after 1850. Sister and brother provided a domestic and professional cocoon for their father for a quarter-century, with one or the other always on hand to mitigate the vagaries of David’s verbal rants and quirky behavior. The siblings cooperated to care for their aging parents as their faculties declined. Augusta supervised the household and shepherded her elders during the war years and Reconstruction. William Henry ensured financial support and a home for them all after they left New York. The Browne family members remained bound in a Gordian knot that death could loosen but not dissolve.

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Chapter Nine

“Glad Fruition” The family was still mourning David Browne’s death when the dwindling group of mother, daughter, son, and housekeeper relocated to Washington, DC. William Henry Browne accepted an appointment as an examiner of land conveyances and mechanical engineering at the US Patent Office in 1868.1 He was among a wave of men and women who came to live and work in the capital following the war years, when the distressed city had become shabby. The District of Columbia needed to enlarge to accommodate these recently employed civil servants during the Republican administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. Forceful methods by the civic leader Alexander “Boss” Shepherd resulted in the filling of the Washington Canal, the paving of city streets, and improved infrastructure. Iconic government buildings, such as the dome and extensions of the Capitol Building, were completed or expanded. The Patent Office occupied a square city block at 8th and F Streets, NW. The architectural design in imposing Greek Revival style signified a temple to American invention, ingenuity, and industry. Construction of the enormous space—currently occupied by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery—lasted more than thirty years before completion in 1866. Meanwhile, enhanced amenities for urban living included new residential neighborhoods with sidewalks, gas street lamps, parks, and squares. Washington quickly bred a fashionable, well-heeled upper class as money flowed freely during Reconstruction. During the Easter season in 1871, Augusta’s name appeared as organist and choir director at Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church, located at 3rd and C Streets.2 William Henry was listed as a second bass in the small vocal ensemble that sang the special music at the Easter morning service. A dramatic 1862 photograph of the church “topped by airy, open steeples made of wood” shows the impressive church designed by James Renwick—better

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Figure 9.1. George N. Barnard. “Trinity Episcopal Church, 3rd & Ind. Ave. Unfinished Capitol in the background.” Brady-Handy Collection LC-BH823- 1 [P&P]. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

known for his distinctive red sandstone Smithsonian Castle building—with the unfinished dome of the Capitol as a backdrop (see fig. 9.1).3 This music position must have been a prize to Augusta. Not only was Trinity a leading church among the city’s white-collar workers but it also lay within a block or two of her address at 422 3rd St., NW. Augusta made good use of her professional credentials as she pursued life in Washington. The celebratory 1871 Easter services at Trinity were filled with music, including several choral numbers composed by “Mrs. Augusta Browne Garrett, of New York, organist of the church.”4 The Evening Star listed “Grand Te Deum, composed for the occasion” and “Gloria Tibi, composed by Mrs. A. B. Garrett.” Despite the Latin titles, these texts were sung in English in Episcopal churches. The “Gloria tibi” precedes the reading of the gospel. The “Te deum laudamus” is a hymn of thanksgiving for ceremonial occasions. Augusta acclaimed the “sublime” text of the “Te deum” in several essays, calling it “that superb psalm of Christian worship, thanksgiving, and confession.”5 There can be no doubt that she set the words with particular care, but these two choral settings were apparently never published and now are presumably lost. In addition to the morning program, the newspaper announced that “evening services will conclude with Mrs. Garrett’s Grand Vesper Chorus,” a work published during the 1840s.

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The programming of the composer’s music, both old and new, suggests that she intended to make a strong impression in Washington at this occasion, but the success of her effort is uncertain. Newspapers from the next several years do not mention Easter music at Trinity or any role by Augusta at the church. She did not continue in the position for long, even though her address on 3rd Street remained unchanged. Miss Ada Moxon was organist by 1875 and served until at least 1881.6 Throughout this period, the minister at Trinity remained the Reverend Thomas G. Addison, who held the post from 1867 until his death in 1896. If Augusta had grievances or disagreements with the church, she did not publicize them. Never again would she repeat the humiliating press coverage of her unsuccessful suit against the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn for nonpayment. Although newspaper accounts of Christmas and Easter music in Washington’s Protestant churches do not mention her name as an organist or composer later in the 1870s, this does not preclude her engagement as a substitute organist at church services and funerals, or a less formal role playing hymns and songs for Sunday-school classes. In earlier years Augusta had never indicated that she served as a choir director, but Trinity expected the organist to lead the chorus. The additional duties may have been onerous for a modest church salary that was not essential to the Browne household income. Her aging mother, Elizabeth, became increasingly infirm during these years. Caregiving demands at home may have taken precedence over a church position that involved choir rehearsals as well as organ practice. In 1870 the musician and journalist wrote a review of a Washington, DC, performance of Handel’s Messiah for the Cleveland publication Brainard’s Musical World.7 Augusta had never undertaken concert reviews during her years in New York and Brooklyn, perhaps avoiding this area of music journalism while she was active as a local performer and composer. Music criticism was largely a male domain; furthermore, her moral precepts precluded attending operas and dramatic productions—an obvious drawback for any would-be reviewer—but she had abundant background to review oratorio and orchestral concerts. The Messiah write-up offered praise and encouragement to the Philharmonic Society, conducted by Dr. J. P. Caulfield and accompanied by the pianist George W. Walter, along with comments about Handel’s oratorio and its Christian significance. One of the attractions of the performance was a slate of soloists from the Parepa-Rosa English Opera Company, including the prima donna, Madame Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa. The soprano’s rendition of “the most sublime of all airs, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’” did not disappoint, but Augusta suggested that “the

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[Philharmonic] Society . . . contains members who could have executed the contraltos, tenor, and bass solos with correctness and brilliancy.” She had inside information from William Henry, who was a member and later an officer in the Philharmonic Society.8 Her foray into concert reviewing did not continue at the Musical World or in Washington newspapers. The occasion may simply have been an opportunity to pay tribute to her favorite sacred work and to salute her brother’s involvement in both the Choral Society of Washington and the Philharmonic Society. Without question, Augusta’s most daring outreach in Washington was an unpublished piano solo that she sent to the greatest pianist of the century, Franz Liszt. She dedicated Aurora. Romance (on original Melodies) to the “Abbé Franz Liszt,” and identified herself as “Augusta Browne-Garrett of Washington, D. C. U. S. A.”9 The Washington location indicates that she sent the manuscript score sometime after 1868. Almost as an afterthought, Augusta added “Op. 200” to the left of the otherwise centered material on the handwritten title page. She may have been in haste, because “Liszt” was initially misspelled “Lizst” and was later rubbed out and corrected. We lack any correspondence that the composer sent or received in connection with this undated manuscript, but by offering the manuscript and seeking Liszt’s permission for the dedication, she probably hoped to obtain an acknowledgment from the composer with positive words that she could use to sway a publisher. Liszt was famous for his generous help to musicians, and many aspiring composers sent works to him. In the absence of a letter or any notations on the manuscript, his reaction to Aurora is unknown, but this substantial piano solo never came out in print. Augusta’s fearless resolve to send her work to the dean of pianism nevertheless ensured that the manuscript has been preserved in the collection of Liszt’s Italian protégé Giovanni Sgambati (1841– 1914), whose music collection is now held in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome.10 Aurora is probably the only extant musical manuscript in Augusta’s own hand. It is ironic that, given her vehement anti-Catholic leanings against anything that she considered “Romish,” her piano manuscript is now protected in the library instituted by Cardinal Girolamo Casanata (1620–1700) and housed in a building next to Piazza Sant’Ignazio, site of the church established by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Aurora demonstrates keyboard style much updated from Augusta’s variation sets from the 1830s. This composition is built from sections in contrasting characters and tempos, as were the composer’s larger piano solos from the 1840s and ’50s. The “romance” genre of songs and piano pieces

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usually implied lyrical works of modest proportions. By contrast, Augusta incorporated grandiose effects throughout Aurora. Mannerisms of the bravura pianism of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage and Hungarian Rhapsodies are evident: thick chords at the extremes of the instrument, passages of thundering double octaves, and double-dotted rhythms. The opening chords evoke the grandeur of nature, but this is no gentle dawn. The notion of sunrise seems at odds with the forceful music of the introduction (ex. 9.1). The main theme of Aurora, marked marziale, is a sixteen-measure tune with vigorous, heroic character (mm. 22–37). The opening and closing pillars of Aurora use the robust marziale music, resulting in a large ABA form. The central, contrasting sections contain fluid, idiomatic piano figuration. The title leaf of Aurora asserts “original melodies,” but the treble line in the first two measures—D♭–D♭–A♭–D♭–F–E♭–D♭—bears considerable resemblance to the opening of Mendelssohn’s a cappella trio, “Lift thine eyes, O lift thine eyes” (“Hebe deine Augen auf ”), from Elijah, A–A–A–D–F♯–E–D (ex. 9.2). Both melodies use similar dotted rhythms to outline an ascending second-inversion chord followed by two descending whole steps. The distinctive gesture is embedded within the marziale theme in measures 22–23. Augusta admired Mendelssohn’s oratorios, and there is little doubt that she was familiar with Elijah.11 Whether she was conscious or unconscious of the similarity of the melodies, the thick chords and sturdy bass in Aurora give the theme a different character from Mendelssohn’s angelic treble voices. Augusta added the words “the breezy call of incense-breathing morn” directly beneath the word “Aurora” on the title leaf. The epigraph comes from the opening of the fifth stanza (l. 17 of 128) of Thomas Gray’s renowned eighteenth-century “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.”12 Gray’s poem meditates on the end of day and the end of life. The lesson of the elegy is that, whether for the humble ploughboy or the man of genius, “the paths of glory lead but to the grave” (l. 36). The word aurora never appears in the text. The composer’s imposing music seems curiously at odds with the twilight venue and gloomy sentiments of Gray’s elegy. She may have chosen the line to allude to Liszt’s Catholicism or simply as an apt description of an early morning’s scented ambiance. A resolution to these contradictions comes from Augusta’s prose. To borrow from Augusta’s words from an 1841 obituary for her sister Elizabeth, Aurora celebrates “the morning of a glorious eternity.”13 In 1851 she reiterated, “It is a significant expression of Saint Augustine, ‘the morning of the resurrection,’” and she quoted Dr. Caldwell’s advice to the mourner not go to

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Example 9.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, Aurora, introduction through marziale theme, mm. 1–37. Archivio Sgambati Mus. Ms. 320, Courtesy Biblioteca Casanatense MIBAC Rome.

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Example 9.2. Themes compared: (a) Mendelssohn, “Lift thine eyes,” Elijah, mm. 1–2; (b) Browne, Aurora, introduction, mm. 1–2; (c) Aurora, marziale theme, mm. 22–23. Archivio Sgambati Mus. Ms. 320, Courtesy Biblioteca Casanatense MIBAC Rome. D $QGDQWHFRQPRWR

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a cemetery at evening or night, because “these are no times to visit the grave of one who hopes and trusts in a risen Redeemer; but come in the morning, in the bright sunshine, and when the birds are singing.”14 In Aurora, Augusta composed nature—brilliant sunlight, breezes, and birdsong—to signify Christian belief in salvation represented by the dawn. The coda of the piece suggests the triumph over death with a cascade of octaves followed by a crashing chord progression and cadence (ex. 9.3).

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Example 9.3. Browne Garrett, Aurora, coda, mm. 116–3. Archivio Sgambati Mus. Ms. 320, Courtesy Biblioteca Casanatense MIBAC Rome. $OOHJURYLYDFH œ œ œ. nœ bœ. œ œ bb b b c œœ œœ . œ œœ œ œ . n œ b œ . œ œ Œ œœ œœ . . . & b

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Miller.indd 193

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Life in Washington The Patent Office had cavernous halls to hold the scale models of inventors’ creations that were required as part of their applications. But William Henry had less interest in physical models than in innovative thinking about intellectual property. He developed a special interest in trademarks and copyrights at a time when they emerged as matters of discrete value in the commercial world. The broad question of intellectual property rights led William Henry to work on a detailed documentation of trademark law that was first published in 1873, followed by revised and enlarged editions in 1885 and 1898. His Treatise on the Law of Trade-Marks and Analogous Subjects immediately became the leading authoritative source on the subject and remained so into the twentieth century. This specialty resulted at least in part from David Browne’s history of legal difficulties around the disputed Logierian method of music instruction. William Henry could have been in court arguing the lawsuit brought in 1830 by the Cowan sisters against his father when he wrote, “A trade-mark [sic] is one’s commercial signature. To forge it is as morally wrong as to forge his name to a promissory note.” He contended that a patented trademark was private property and, furthermore, the businessman “builds up a trade on the strength of that mark.”15 Over their years of legal practice together, father and son must have shared hours discussing the finer points of the law with respect to the patented Logierian method. Logier had been a man ahead of his legal times. The method was as uniquely his invention as Shin’ichi Suzuki’s approach to teaching stringed instruments, a pedagogy that spread around the world during the second half of the twentieth century. Teachers of the Suzuki method are expected to complete specific training in the pedagogy, just as Logier envisioned for professors of his system of instruction in 1815. The notion that trademarks could be copyrighted and legally binding was still in question as late as 1878, when Judge Charles E. Dyer of the US Circuit Court of Wisconsin ruled that the government held no authority to convey such copyright to trademarks.16 William Henry offered his own conclusion that “Congress has full power to legislate on the subject of trademarks. That power is derived from constitutional authority ‘to regulate commerce.’ The registration statute of July 8, 1870 (Revised Statutes, sections 4937–47), is consequently valid.”17 Enforcement of trademark legality in the United States long predated international acceptance and recognition of copyright protection. International protection for intellectual property—which

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includes creative works, patented inventions, and trademarks—remains difficult to enforce even in the twenty-first century. As appendix 2 shows, Augusta produced little between 1870 and the 1873 publication of Browne on Trade-Marks, as it was informally called. We can infer that Augusta spent considerable time and effort assisting with her brother’s seven-hundred-page tome and contributed to its success. The days were long past when William Henry filed letters on behalf of military widows. His reputation made, he resigned from the Patent Office for private practice in 1875.18 Thereafter he served as an expert lawyer for well-heeled manufacturers whose competitors imitated their names, labels, or advertising. Patentdrug companies were especially drawn to his office. In 1890 William Henry spoke at an annual banquet of the Wholesale Druggists Association in which he described himself as the “legal adviser of so many of your number.”19 His clients included the Vogeler Oil Company, the Lone Jack Cigarette Company, Golden Crown Tobacco Ltd., and the Singer Company. Augusta and her brother had long participated actively in each other’s pursuits as well as sharing a domicile. Two decades earlier she had encouraged William Henry to publish accounts of his Mexican War experiences. During the Civil War she conveyed the poems that he sent home to the editors at the Home Journal and the New York Observer. They collaborated on at least one song, “Who Has Not a Ship at Sea,” in the 1870s. A notice in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described the “very beautiful song” as “sweet and melodious,” and another newspaper asserted that “it is certain that the piece will become very popular.”20 The wistful cover lithograph suggests the apprehension of a young woman watching over a city harbor and waiting for news of her distant dear one.21 Although the illustrated cover survives, the printed notes are lost, a sure sign that the song never achieved the rosy prediction of the press. The collaboration nevertheless demonstrates how close a relationship the siblings shared. Widowhood reduced Augusta’s identity due to prevailing social conventions. For twenty-five years, she had been described variously as a “Professor of Music,” “Composer,” “Teacher of Music,” “Musician,” or simply, “Music” in city directories in Philadelphia and New York. A separate, individual listing for her disappeared during the brief years of marriage. After 1858 Augusta was listed by name, sometimes additionally as “Widow” or “Widow of J.W.,” but never again as a musician or teacher. Evidence from the 1870 census may indicate that she could afford to be selective and had no need to chase work. The federal returns in 1870 listed the value of real estate and personal estate reported by participants. Augusta; her mother, Elizabeth; and

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William Henry each listed real estate valued at $10,000, plus additional personal estates of $2,000 for Augusta, $4,700 for her mother, and $5,000 for her brother.22 These substantial sums reflected David Browne’s legacy, the sale of their Brooklyn house, and the value of any remaining property in New Brunswick. In millennial dollars, $10,000 would be worth something like $175,000, and Augusta’s personal estate of $2,000 might equate to more than $35,000, giving her a nest egg totaling more than $200,000 in modern currency. Some of this money would soon go to finance a new residence. Boyd’s annual city directories for the District of Columbia indicate that Augusta, her mother, and her brother resided on 3rd Street, NW from about 1870 until after Elizabeth’s death in 1875. In 1877, “Mrs. A. B. Garrett” applied for a building permit for the construction of a three-story brick house on K Street between 16th and 17th Streets, NW.23 The value of the house was estimated at six thousand dollars, and it was Augusta—not William Henry—who applied for the permit. This was the composer’s chance to have the home of her dreams, a house with a spacious room large enough for her piano, organ, books, and collected sheet music, where she could play, teach, perform, practice, or compose. A bay window provided good natural light at the keyboard. The downstairs rooms were large enough to accommodate a lavish formal tea, years later, when William Henry’s nieces by marriage, the daughters of his wife’s sister, made their society debut in 1895.24 When the new house was finished, William Henry and Augusta moved into 1645 K Street, NW, on a middle- and upper-class residential avenue with leafy Farragut Square nearby. A Metropolitan Coach route ran along the street. This horse-drawn omnibus service was essential for a man with a serious war injury to one leg. The prudent pair built their new residence next to a fire station, Engine Company no. 1. The fire station remained in use as late as the 1940s, but the impressive YWCA residential apartment at the corner of K and 17th Streets swallowed up the former Browne residence in 1926. When the 1876 Centennial Exposition was held from May through November in Philadelphia, Augusta undoubtedly would have wanted to attend the great event that celebrated the nation’s first century. She could have used the frequent train service from Washington to visit as often as she wished. Art and culture were as much on exhibit as inventions and manufacturing. More than fifteen hundred piano recitals took place at the centennial, averaging more than ten per day.25 Half-hour performances took place at the exhibits of more than a dozen participating piano manufacturers. Bands performed on a raised platform in the Central Pavilion of the Main Building. Two great organs were housed in the north and east galleries of the Main

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Building. An instrument donated by Hilborne L. Roosevelt of New York was the choice of 159 organ recitalists; another instrument made by Hook & Hastings of Boston attracted some 473 organists.26 Augusta would not have missed the chance to hear these massive instruments and to play them herself, if possible. The concert and performance venues in the exhibition halls and on the grounds demanded the skills of a legion of volunteer musicians and keyboardists.27 Sketchy lists specify only a few of the keyboardists who played, but Augusta may have been among the hundreds who performed on the organ or piano for the multitude of daily concerts held during the exposition. Such an old hand at introducing herself by letter would have been unfazed about applying for a performance slot. She continued to identify herself as an organist to the end of the 1870s. The impression that emerges of Augusta’s Washington years indicates a steady calendar of projects for her and engagements for her brother. Denominational activities such as Sunday-school teaching and church committees necessitated much time and energy. Although Protestant women could rarely assume active ministry, they exercised extensive leadership in missions and social services within the church structure. The siblings attended Episcopal churches, and they may have changed congregations when they moved to K Street. The Church of the Epiphany, at 13th and G Streets, NW, was the largest church at the time in the Episcopal diocese of Maryland. Augusta delivered a lecture at Epiphany during an education conference at the church around 1878, and William Henry conducted a regular men’s Bible class there.28 It was a church position to which Augusta would have aspired if it had ever been open, but the organist at Epiphany throughout this period was Katherine Quail Pearson. “Miss Katie Quail” came to the position in 1868 and served with praise and affection until her death in 1890.29 Certainly the two women were acquainted through Episcopal circles and likely were collegial friends.30 Projects for church, mission, and family help to explain why few works were deposited for copyright under Augusta’s name during the 1870s, but the ballad “Forever Thine” was an earnest expression of love and devotion in the face of all obstacles. The song likely paid tribute to her husband and their fleeting years of marriage. The heartfelt poem by Alaric Alexander Watts was reprinted under different titles in innumerable serials and anthologies during the nineteenth century: Forever thine, whate’er this heart betide Forever thine, where’er our lots be cast;

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Fate that may rob us of all wealth beside, Shall leave us love, till life itself is past. The world may wrong us, we will brave its hate, False friends may change, and false hopes decline, Tho’ bow’d by cank’ring care, we’ll smile at fate, Since thou art mine, beloved, and I am thine! Forever thine!

Many of the misfortunes mentioned in the poem had befallen Augusta and her late husband: financial struggle, critical disdain, dashed hopes, anxieties, and family deaths. Her polished song setting incorporates strong melodic line, clarity of form, and effective harmonization (ex. 9.4). A dominant chord harmonizes the opening of the melody, with the tonic chord only briefly stated before the harmony moves to secondary-dominant and submediant chords, followed by a weak V–I cadence. This was an unusual opening for Augusta, who customarily affirmed the tonic unmistakably from the outset. The unsettled harmonies suggest the vicissitudes of life expressed in the lyrics. As she went about her daily affairs in Washington, Augusta steadily continued submitting her literary work. She adhered to the pattern of revising her older prose and poetry, and published few new essays. “The Mysteries of Dreaming” was a new article that gathered literary and historical anecdotes about dreams, including the power of dreams to communicate with the dead. Spiritualism flourished at mid-century, especially after the Civil War, when desperate Americans sought to communicate with their beloved dead through séances and spiritualists. Even before the war, William Henry had published a humorous poem, “My Spiritual Experience,” that portrayed a séance as the work of con artists. Many close friends in Augusta’s New York circle died during the 1870s. The Cary sisters, who had welcomed her as a friend in their literary set, passed away in 1871 within a few months of each other and were buried beneath a single memorial at Green-Wood. The inventor and erstwhile painter Samuel Morse died in 1872 and was also interred at Green-Wood. Augusta had long venerated Morse and lauded his telegraph by comparing it with music, because both could convey emotions across great distances. A poem of tribute written by William Henry held a unique position in the lavish memorial service honoring Morse at the US Capitol on April 16, 1872.31 After the slate of speakers had finished their homages, his poem was performed by the Choral Society of Washington, arranged to the music of the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhaüser (ex. 9.5).32

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William Henry’s opening stanza enfolded the inventor’s famous phrase, the first message sent by telegraph in 1844, “What hath God wrought.” Augusta may have helped William Henry to hone the lyrics to be sung to Wagner’s music. She and her mother were surely in the audience. Their three-decade acquaintance with the Morse family ran deep. Despite her possible involvement with the lyrics or the choral arrangement, Augusta was not among the performers at the memorial service. The Choral Society was a men’s chorus in the tradition of the German Männerchor, or amateur male singing societies that performed in concerts and competitions. The year 1875 was a watershed for Augusta. Her brother Louis Henri Browne died of bronchitis in May at age sixty-one. Her mother, Elizabeth Browne, died of “paralysis,” probably resulting from one or more strokes, in July at the age of eight-one years and two days.33 With so many recent losses in mind, Augusta made a will on August 6, 1875.34 Both family members were laid to rest in Green-Wood, the landscaped oasis that Augusta called “city of the loved and treasured.”35 Her friend and collaborator Mary Balmanno died in 1875 and was also buried there. Augusta’s mother, Elizabeth, remains a shadowy figure who left no marked stamp of her personality, even though she was as skillful in art as in music and taught both subjects to her children. Elizabeth was unquestionably a woman of education, culture, and strength who helped her children fulfill their potential while coping with a well-intentioned but unpredictable husband. Elizabeth worked side by side with her husband in the family business and was swept along from city to city by David Browne’s difficulties. Mother and daughter may have shared a close-knit dependency based not just on mutual talents, but on the necessity of managing a large family of children with a mercurial father figure, much as Louisa May Alcott and her mother, Abigail, supported each other with scant help from Bronson Alcott.36 Such a vigorous, gifted woman could hardly have been a bland or nondescript person, yet Augusta wrote little about her mother. She affectionately mentioned music that Elizabeth played or sang, such as the “beautiful cradle-hymn of Dr. Watts . . . ‘Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,’ . . . which was sung to her little ones by my own dear mother.”37 The obituary in the Washington Evening Star noted Elizabeth’s “full faith [in] Christ, whom she loved and served from early youth.”38 No intimation of antipathy or disagreement surfaces in references to Augusta’s family, but Victorian-era silence frequently masked turmoil in family relationships. Whether through a promise or an unspoken agreement, William Henry continued to provide for his widowed sister and their steadfast housekeeper,

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Sarah Morrow. He had not married as a young lawyer, even though he was a sociable gentleman who enjoyed company. He belonged to the Freemasons as well as several veterans’ groups and held positions as an officer. He traveled to New York to participate in parades and reunions of his volunteer regiments. In 1886 he received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of the City of New-York (now New York University), where he had graduated after the Mexican War. The elite Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, comprising officers who had served in regiments making up the Grand Army of the Republic, elected him to membership in 1888.39 William Henry evidently relished the repartee and jollity that accompanied cigars and alcohol at gentlemen’s banquets, perhaps to his sister’s chagrin. But he seems to have been content with the household on K Street and had no desire to live by himself. He was no misanthrope.

A New Serial In December 1879, Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine announced that it would “omit no effort to make this Magazine a bright, entertaining and instructive companion for the hours at home on Sunday. Its aim will ever be the inculcation of goodness and charity, purity of character, humanity and philanthropy for all.” This monthly magazine contained nondenominational Christian literature from sermons to sentimental stories for Sunday reading in the parlor. It was a good fit for Augusta’s moral literature, which was sometimes light in tone but always serious in intent. A flurry of material—hymns, poems, and articles—flowed from Augusta’s pen into the Sunday Magazine. Her focus on Christian subjects is apparent from essay titles that she published in this serial: “Benedic Anima Mea”; “A Standard-bearer of Christendom— Bishop Ken”; “Is the Fire of Hell Material or Immaterial?”; and “The Blessed Company of all Faithful People.” After 1880 she produced almost exclusively for this journal. She reworked old essays into new articles that embellished her preferred topics: Protestant music, Christian morality, and the glorious prospect of heaven. Her tenets did not waver for forty years; even the same phrases turned up decades later. The Sunday Magazine also became Augusta’s de facto venue for publishing hymns and sacred songs. Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine had devoted space to music from its introduction in 1877. Following Leslie’s death in 1880, the journal’s second editor, the Reverend Thomas DeWitt Talmage, continued the practice of monthly music. The magazine sought to include music

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suitable “for all denominations of Christians” and of “easy character, which may be sung by small choirs and in the home circle,” values that echoed Augusta’s.40 Talmage ministered at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington, DC. Easy local access to the editor reinforced Augusta’s involvement with the Sunday Magazine. The composer noted, “Sunday-school music is a subject on which . . . the writer would lovingly linger”; however, she gave few details except general encouragement, writing, “hinder not the children in their hymns; rather let them sing.”41 Sunday-school songs needed to convey personal evangelism in simple, effective music that anyone could remember as easily as popular songs. Augusta set conventional hymns in four-part harmonic style for the magazine, but songs gave more latitude for individual expression, such as the “Christian Slumber-Song” (“Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”), which combined the words of Bishop Ken’s “Evening Prayer” and “Morning Prayer.” She borrowed a text from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for “Song of the Shepherd Boy,” a compact setting with a declamatory theme that descends the scale before triumphantly marching upward (ex. 9.6). The composer worked the sturdy shape of the musical theme into a taut setting that suited the rhythm and sense of the words. Certain phrases especially resonated with her years: “I am content with what I have” and “He that is humble ever shall have God to be his guide.” Augusta asked the rhetorical question, “What constitutes the highest class of church music?” in “Wanted: An Organist,” in 1881. She proceeded to answer her own question, writing, “certainly not that which is most intricate, belabored, pedantic; on the contrary, the artlessness of art—a grand simplicity” demonstrates genius. The most “sublime airs” and “soullifting” hymns were “wonderfully simple,” she continued.42 In the “Song of the Shepherd Boy,” she achieved artful simplicity in an uncluttered setting. “I Have a Glorious Hope,” issued in 1880 in the Sunday Magazine, was a hymn composed by Augusta to her own poem based on words that she attributed to her father (ex. 9.7). The rich, Victorian harmonization is more expressive and unpredictable than earlier nineteenth-century Protestant hymn settings. The accented passing note and resolution, C♯–D, that begin measure 14 in the soprano line presents the musical equivalent of leaning at the moment when “I lean” occurs in the text. The effect of the wordpainting is somewhat marred by the parallel octaves, A–B♭, that accompany it in the lower parts. In contrast with the soaring faith expressed in “I Have a Glorious Hope,” the composer’s final music publication in the magazine was a dark glimpse of judgment day. Published just days following Augusta’s death in 1882, the number seemed eerily prescient of her fatal pulmonary

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“A Gift from the Other World” A noteworthy recognition in Augusta’s late years appeared in the appendix to John W. Moore’s Complete Encyclopaedia of Music.44 The statements in the

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appendix—possibly the first reference work to identify any women composers in the United States—prompted Tick’s assessment of Augusta as the most prolific American woman composer before 1870.45 Moore’s entry notes Augusta’s piano compositions first among her creative work, placing them before the songs. Several specific titles mentioned by name fall into the category of fantasies and character pieces: La brise dans le feuillage, Air a la Russe; and her national bouquets. The list separated her music by genre, suggesting in relative importance fantasies, variations, and dances, followed by songs. If this was Augusta’s own assessment, then she ranked her longer, freer piano compositions as her finest works. The details in the entry cited early works that had been out of print for years, such as the fantasia on the Russian vesper hymn, as well as hinting at her recent opus 200, the unpublished romance Aurora. The particulars of unpublished works and out-of-print pieces were likely known only to Augusta, and the language of the entry is very much in her author’s voice: BROWNE, AUGUSTA, or Mrs. Augusta Browne Garrett, late of New York, now residing in Washington, DC, a composer of note. Her productions, which are in all styles—fantasies, airs variés, waltzes, songs sacred and secular,—number about two hundred; and many of them, such as the brilliant romance “La Brise dans Les Feuillage,” “Air à la Russe,” “National Bouquets,” and various songs, have gained great popularity. / Besides occupations in music, Mrs. Garrett has long had literary pursuits, contributing to many magazines and other periodicals, and has published two books. One of these is “Hamilton, the Young Artist” (memoirs of her brother); and the other, “The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundation[s].” Many of her articles on church-music have elicited much interest.46

Judging from style and content, it is reasonable to conclude that the entry was based on Augusta’s personal response to a query from Moore before the Appendix was published in 1875.47 If so, the passage reflects her mature selfassessment and was a rare chance for her to speak frankly about her achievements without censure for immodesty. She placed piano works first and most prominently; she listed no specific song titles, and she made no reference to music for church use. Her second career as an author was presented in parallel and emphasized works of Christian literature among the prose. Augusta controlled the narrative in this dictionary entry, whether the passage was entirely her work or not. The text articulated what she thought was unique and significant in her output.

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Moore’s Appendix provided material that a Boston colleague, Simon Pease Cheney, cited in a music collection titled The American Singing Book. The 1879 anthology included “The Pilgrim Fathers,” composed by the “Miss Browne” who was the sister of the noted poet Felicia Browne Hemans. But Cheney confused one Miss Browne with the other and credited Augusta with this wellknown song. He rewrote Moore’s entry in a fusion of two lives into one: Miss Augusta Browne, of New York, (now Mrs. Garrett, of Washington, D.C.), is an American composer of note. Wherever or when born, she is of English descent, and early enjoyed the advantage of a scientific musical education; many years ago becoming famous as a composer and as a performer upon the organ and piano-forte. Her compositions, many of them, are for the instruments upon which she performed; but she has written music for songs also, and for sacred compositions; among which, one of the most popular and perhaps the best known in this country, is the “Pilgrim Fathers”; the words being composed by Mrs. Hemans, (Felicia Dorothea Browne,) who was born at Liverpool, Eng., Sept. 25, 1793, and who died May 16, 1835, aged 41. The age of Mrs. Garrett is not known; but she was born to adapt the beautiful words of Mrs. Hemans to excellent music; and it is known that besides occupations in such compositions, Mrs. G. has contributed to many magazines, and has published some books, such as “The Young Artist” and “Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundation[s]”; and her articles on “Church Music” have elicited much interest.48

Cheney muddied the waters for generations of librarians and popular song enthusiasts who dutifully passed on the attribution of “Pilgrim Fathers” to Augusta Browne.49 Cheney’s description nevertheless contains the telling passage, “[she] early enjoyed the advantage of a scientific musical education; many years ago becoming famous as a composer and as a performer upon the organ and piano-forte.” These words were indeed correct, referring to Augusta’s “scientific” Logierian training, her performances as a child in Boston, and her stints as a church organist. The sentence could have come straight out of the information provided by the composer to Moore through their mutual publisher, Oliver Ditson. If so, this childhood background was omitted in Moore’s Appendix, but Cheney incorporated it into his volume. One must wonder whether Augusta saw the American Singing Book after publication and sent a letter to Cheney to set the facts straight about who was who. It would have been typical of her to do so, but the deed was already done, and thus she became the “Miss Browne” of the “Pilgrim Fathers” until Judith Tick sorted out the matter a century later.50

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Augusta was lively and full of plans for future music and prose when she left her home on Wednesday, January 11, 1882, to pay some calls. Washington was still mourning the autumn death of President Garfield after less than a year in office, but Vice President Chester A. Arthur had smoothly assumed the presidency. The day before, she had sent two of her favorite poems to the Sunday Magazine: “The Heart and the World” and “An Artist’s Farewell to Time,” the first written as a memorial tribute to her brother Washington Browne and the second honoring Walter Libbey. The temperature was seasonal that afternoon, not too cold and with some chance of rain: a good opportunity to get outside and walk several blocks from the house on K Street to 1326 L Street, NW. In this four-story brick row-house apartment building, she visited with residents, probably the Gurdon (often recorded as Gordon) Wilcox family: a businessman with a wife and a daughter almost twenty, whom Augusta may have instructed in piano or voice.51 But at some point during the visit, Augusta collapsed. A doctor was summoned, and she may have been transported home, but it was in vain. Augusta died that afternoon “between 3 and 4 p.m.,” according to the newspaper accounts.52 Her death was the antithesis of the long, withering declines of the Browne siblings who perished from tuberculosis. Just as her husband had collapsed and died without warning in 1858, Augusta was gone in minutes. Whether she had exhibited prior symptoms is unknown; however, she had made a new will six months earlier.53 Although her parents lived into their eighties, her own death at sixty-one was hardly premature during the nineteenth century. Augusta was the same age as her brother Louis at the time of his passing. The event made the front page of the Evening Star. The brief item titled “Sudden Death of a Lady” reported that “Mrs. Augusta Browne Garrett, sister of Gen. Wm. H. Browne, died suddenly of congestion of the lungs yesterday at the house of Gen. Browne, 1326 L street northwest. She was out making calls when taken ill, and died soon afterwards.”54 Even so short a notice muddled the facts, with the home address listed as on L Street instead of 1645 K Street. The official death certificate listed the place of death as L Street, with congestion of lungs owing to an embolism as the cause of her demise.55 Obituaries in three newspapers included the final stanza from her poem and hymn, “I Have a Glorious Hope,” words that had also appeared when her father died: “I have glorious, glorious hope!” Lord, for Thy Son’s dear sake, Into Thy heavenly garner pure Thy longing servant take; The River’s brink is reached, I hear the songs of home; Thou, loved in youth, in age, Saviour, to Thee I come.56

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The Sunday Magazine published an anonymous accolade, “In Memoriam” to “a Christian lady, an estimable woman, a devoted wife and sister, and a frequent and valuable contributor to the Sunday Magazine.” “She has only gone home,” the magazine continued, and, although it happened with “appalling abruptness,” she was prepared in spirit. The tribute praised her breadth of talents in music, prose, and verse and proclaimed, “The glorious hope which she had is now changed to glad fruition.”57 William Henry paid his own elegiac tribute in poetry in which he plaintively addressed Augusta as “sweet sister! long my guide” and “my guardian-spirit, sent by Christ.”58 A day after the funeral, he traveled by train to Brooklyn, taking her remains for burial at Green-Wood. Only a handful of Augusta’s relatives and friends were still alive to join William Henry at the cemetery: their niece Emily Augusta Browne, now a primary school teacher in Boston; their nephew Harry (Henri Montgomery Browne), a salesman in Lynn, Massachusetts, with a wife and young daughter (Ethel); and the ever-loyal Sarah Morrow. A week later, William Henry filed Augusta’s will, which left all her property to him, “excepting $200 to Henry M. Browne, and $100 to Sarah Morrow.”59 The profound grief for his sister in the lonely domestic void led—or perhaps freed—William Henry to marry six months later.60 He was a bachelor approaching sixty. He shared a haunting anecdote from Augusta’s final morning with the Sunday Magazine. The music for the hymn “Day of Judgment,” dedicated to the late president, was forthcoming in the February 1882 issue of the Sunday Magazine. Augusta intended to send a copy of the hymn to Mrs. Garfield, she told her brother in the morning just a few hours before her collapse on L Street. William Henry wrote the letter and sent the music in her stead. The Brownes had some measure of acquaintance with President and Mrs. Garfield, including contacts through Freemasonry. William Henry had even served as one of the Columbia Commandery Knights Templar, whose members made up an honor guard that accompanied Garfield’s casket to Ohio after the president’s death.61 In a letter of condolence to Augusta’s brother, Lucretia Garfield acknowledged Augusta’s hymn dedication, writing, “Your letter . . . and also the Magazine [were] almost a gift from the Other World. I thank you for so thoughtfully carrying out your sister’s purpose. The grand old hymn, to which she has given a new voice, and her prose article, do seem almost a prophecy.”62 It was an uncanny coincidence. Augusta’s posthumous publications in the February and March issues of the Sunday Magazine—one poem honoring her long-deceased brother, Washington, and another honoring the artist Walter Libbey; the hymn dedicated to Garfield; and an essay, “The Blessed Company of all Faithful People”—all hinted at a voice from the “Other World” beyond the grave.

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Figure 9.2. Browne family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. Hamilton’s obelisk, with several flat tablets collected in a stack; tall headstone for David and Elizabeth Browne, shorter headstone for “My Husband” and “My Sister.” Photo by the author (2010).

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In her 1881 will, Augusta had requested that a small stone be placed at the head of her grave bearing “simply my name and a text of Scripture.”63 Even in death, she didn’t reveal her age or date of birth. The Browne family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery (no. 3304, Section 82/91), sits near the top of a hill not too distant from the ornate bronze angel that marks the grave of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The plot contains three upright memorials and several flat markers for Augusta’s siblings (Louis H. Browne, G. W. Browne, E. M. Browne, and St. John Browne). In recognition of his military service, William Henry earned a burial place at Arlington National Cemetery following his death in 1900.64 The three vertical gravestones at Green-Wood have been greatly worn by time and the elements (fig. 9.2). The inscriptions are no longer entirely legible. The most visible marker is a tall obelisk that displays an artist’s palette labeled “Hamilton.” Another substantial gravestone honors “Our Father and Mother,” David and Elizabeth Browne. The third vertical stone is dedicated to “My Husband,” John Walter B. Garrett, on one side, and “My Sister,” Lucretia A. M. Garrett, on the other. Augusta’s original marker is missing, but her influence remains unmistakable in the stone version of the circle described in her 1842 song, “The Family Meeting”: “We are all here, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, All who hold each other dear. . . . We’re all, all here.” In her final article, published in the Sunday Magazine a month after her death, Augusta revealed her personal eagerness for “the delight of reunion with the beloved of yore [that] is doubtless among the ecstatic anticipations of heaven.”65 And she looked forward to the celestial music, because “we are assured by Scripture that music is one of the ineffable joys of heaven.” In “Music from Heaven,” published in 1845, she had first revealed her vision of the music to come: There thrills such music through my soul, As cannot, cannot be of earth; But is the echo to that song, Bursting from heaven’s enraptured throng. But hark! Celestial symphonies Are swelling soft as zephyr’s sigh, What seraphic forms are these Who whisper, ‘Come! Thy home’s on high.’ Bright angels sent to waft away My soul to live in endless day.66

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Chapter Ten

Legacy in Music Augusta Browne remained first and foremost a pianist-composer even though she published many songs and taught voice. The piano stood at the heart of her life in music. She paid tribute to her principal instrument, writing, “The piano is the most domestic of all instruments. Mine stands to me almost in the place of a human friend.”1 Around this “old companion” hovered a “thousand innocent and blissful associations of childhood.”2 The hours she spent at the keyboard as a youngster were not practice alone, but also recreation, solace, and reverie. Her output of music over a lifetime unfolded from keyboard skills and harmonic understanding initially learned through the Logierian system of instruction. Even the youngest children learned chords and voice leading from their first lessons in this system. This early underpinning in music theory—known then as the science of music—provided the foundation for Augusta’s development as a composer. Publication of set after set of variations counters Tick’s assertion that variations were an “atypical genre for most mid-nineteenth-century women.”3 With years of immersion in Logierian materials, variations were the most natural form in the world for Augusta to perform, improvise, and compose. She incorporated variation technique in most of her piano pieces throughout her life, even when those compositions embodied a larger genre such as the fantasy or march.

Keyboard Works By mid-century the piano was firmly established as the primary household instrument in North America; as Augusta wrote in 1862, “A house destitute of a piano is like a landscape without water—dry, irredeemably dry.”4 In The Dawning of American Keyboard Music, J. Bunker Clark sorted American

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piano music published before 1830 into five principal genres: sonatas, rondos, variations, medleys, and battle pieces.5 Although Augusta was well acquainted with all of these genres, her own keyboard compositions fall into the categories of variations, medleys (national bouquets), and character pieces (e.g., romances) that sometimes assume ternary form, rondo form, or free adaptations of these forms. Among her earliest surviving publications is the set of variations based on “The Gipsie’s Wild Chant”—a catchy tune from Alexander Lee’s opera Lo Zingaro—laid out the formula that Augusta would apply to subsequent variation sets.6 A flashy introduction with arpeggios and rapid scales precedes the statement of the theme. After increasingly complex treatments, a lively coda brings the piece to an energetic ending. Many music imprints in the late eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century specified “piano forte or harp,” as did Augusta’s Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara (The Gypsie’s Wild Chant) and The Merry Mountain Horn, with Variations. Up to a point, music for one instrument suited the other as well. But for works more idiomatic to the keyboard, harp performance became less viable. As pianos replaced harps in domestic parlors, the sheet music designation “for piano or harp” disappeared as well. Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara abounds with directions to the performer. The young composer inserted trills and turns at every opportunity. Overdetailed instructions include duplications, such as the use of hairpin crescendos or decrescendos in addition to verbal cues (e.g., dim. or cresc.). Numerous marks for detached attacks, either dots or vertical dashes, appear in conjunction with the instruction staccato. Similar musical passages may bear different staccato marks, some with dashes and others with dots. Such distinctions of staccato attack occur in some classical-era imprints, but most publishers consolidated the practice into dots during the first half of the nineteenth century. All of Augusta’s early works, both piano solos and songs, show the same fussy indications for ornaments, expression, and articulation. Typesetters struggled to reproduce her markings to the letter. Keyboard training would have been essential to understand and reproduce the many nuances. Thus the plethora of embellishments, dynamics, and varied attacks signified the composer’s sophistication as well as the presumed high level of proficiency in those who played or purchased the works. These coded indications of elevated musical training persisted through the 1840s in Augusta’s music. Even after she adopted more simplicity in notation, the composer continued to endow her piano music with an overabundance of ornaments and grace notes.

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Augusta turned to the writer-composer Samuel Lover in animated variations based on “The Angels Whisper.” An Irish superstition deems that when a child smiles in its sleep, it is whispering with the angels. Lover’s melody is similar to the traditional Irish song “Mary, do you fancy me.” His maudlin lyrics tell of an Irish mother who anxiously fingers her rosary beads, her husband away at sea, while their baby slumbers. Sentiment aside, the piano figuration in this set is effective and varied within a concise whole. The tonality of E-flat was a favorite for Augusta, who wrote in this key often because the chords, scales, and arpeggios for E-flat fit comfortably beneath the hands. For this reason, she chose keys with two to five flats in her most difficult piano works. Her choices for themes were usually sprightly tunes in major keys. She sometimes turned to a minor key for contrast in one variation of the set, but pieces set in minor keys were rare in her output. The young composer’s formal sets of variations belong to the latter 1830s, a decade when “theme and variations was the most important artistic form for early keyboard music” in the United States.7 Manageable variations on traditional or well-liked tunes attracted a broad middle- and upper-class market of piano students and amateur music lovers. Familiar or beloved tunes appealed to audiences, while the agility of variations demonstrated domestic performers’ keyboard study and skill. Because variations involved arranging, adaptation, and ornamentation, rather than invention or creation—activities considered superior in intellect—this form was considered a genre suitable for women to compose and perform.8 Themes and variations were nevertheless bread and butter for many male composers, from the European masters Mozart and Beethoven to American musicians such as James Hewitt and Benjamin Carr. More of Augusta’s publications may emerge as nineteenth-century sheet music continues to be catalogued. Binder’s volumes remain the principal source of Augusta’s music before 1840. After 1840 some thirty titles of her sheet music were entered as copyright deposits by music publishers, although binder’s volumes augment the copyright holdings of the Library of Congress. Augusta’s music is found in binder’s volumes alongside similar piano solos by many men and a few female contemporaries who wrote in similar musical genres. Among the male composers frequently encountered is Francis H. Browne or Brown (1818–91), who was unrelated to Augusta, but they shared the problem of the frequent misspelling of the Browne-with-an-e surname. Another ferocious musical entrepreneur, the German-born Charles Grobe (ca. 1817–79), composed some two thousand piano pieces and songs for the parlor.9

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These men—almost exact contemporaries of Augusta’s—pursued the same professional paths of teaching, composition, and publication, as well as holding the top positions in academic institutions. The New Englander Francis H. Browne taught at seminaries in Providence, Rhode Island, and in New York City before establishing his own successful music academy in Stamford, Connecticut, after the Civil War.10 In addition to numerous sheet music imprints by leading Boston and New York publishers, Francis Browne self-published books on music instruction. Grobe was the professor of piano at the Wesleyan Female Seminary in Wilmington, Delaware, where he taught the desirable tier of upper-class and rising middle-class young women whom Augusta aimed to instruct on a private basis in New York and Brooklyn. Women were employed by female seminaries as music teachers, but usually as subordinate instructors rather than as principal professors. F. H. Browne and Grobe were two among many of Augusta’s comparable male colleagues, who, like the vast majority of American composers of this era, are long forgotten except by antiquarian experts. The contents of binder’s volumes include music by hundreds of individuals, many of them immigrants—composers such as James Bellak, Gustave Blessner, Leopold Meignen, James C. Beckel, Edward Mack, J. C. Viereck, and William Iucho—who worked in the United States and produced music similar in style to Augusta’s. In 1870 the twenty leading American sheet-music publishers in the selftermed “Board of Music Trade” collaborated on a monumental listing of their titles, now regarded as the most complete survey of nineteenth-century music publication in the United States.11 The Board of Music Trade Complete Catalogue divided keyboard music into categories of “Rondos, Fantasies, Variations, &c.”; dance types, separated into sections devoted to waltzes, polkas, schottisches, and so on, “Sonatas”; “Instrumental Sets”; “Studies and Exercises”; “Overtures, Battle Pieces, &c.”; “Four Hands,” and many more. Augusta’s piano works fell largely into the most numerous keyboard category of the Complete Catalogue—“Rondos, Fantasies, Variations, &c.”—but she also had pieces listed among instrumental sets, waltzes, galops, marches, quicksteps, and four-hand duets. As the Complete Catalogue demonstrates, her piano pieces represent the most typical genres of music published in nineteenth-century America. The majority of piano works listed in the 1870 Complete Catalogue would be regarded by later critics and pedagogues as music that was intended for diversion or entertainment, but not music for serious study. Present-day piano students typically study sonatinas, sonatas, études, Romantic-era character pieces, and selected dances such as waltzes or mazurkas. An attitude of cultural elitism developed during the latter part

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of the nineteenth century and flourished through the twentieth century, but this was not the case during Augusta’s busy years as a young professional. “Sonatas” take up less than two pages in the Complete Catalogue, though with no entries composed by Augusta. Variations and arrangements of well-known songs were far more acceptable to Victorian listeners than such formal concert fare as sonatas and fugues. A performance tradition of improvised variations on familiar songs or national airs was not only common but had long been expected in European and American concerts. Franz Liszt performed impromptu variations on “Rule Britannia” when he concertized in Great Britain in 1827. Audiences loved the flashy technical feats of virtuoso performers of the era, and they expected to see and hear such displays. In 1853 Augusta criticized the empty piano pyrotechnics of touring concert artists, writing, “The principal aim of the majority of composers and performers of the present day seems to be the perpetration of astounding difficulties, and woe betide the audacious aspirant after celebrity who dares to deviate from the tracks imprinted by the giant steps of a few magnates.”12 These “modern fantasies” too often resulted in “strained joints, aching sinews, and splintered nails.” Despite this humorous diatribe on the excesses of star pianist-composers, one could call Augusta a “Lady Liberace” for the lavish introductions and flourishes that adorn many of her piano solos. The piano figurations and occasional fingerings in her solos imply that she had good-sized hands with a stretch that easily exceeded an octave. She incorporated skillful passagework, including scales and arpeggios sweeping up and down the keyboard, armloads of octaves, and handfuls of fast repeated notes. The need for a well-developed technique is clear from Augusta’s piano music, but she appealed for powers of expression beyond capable hands when she wrote, “A fine pianist must possess rapidity of execution, in connection with expression and the most impassioned enumeration of touch; the soul should seem to issue from the fingers.”13 This passage echoed the thought in the French author George Sand’s novel, Consuelo (1842). In one scene, the heroine, a singer, has an imagined conversation with the composer Franz Josef Haydn in which she asserts that for musicians “the soul manifests itself at the tip of the lips or the fingers.”14 Pedaling is an essential performance aspect of piano music that Augusta notated, sometimes with precision, at other times erratically. Pedaling, often described as the soul of the piano, is vital to the Romantic keyboard style. She indicated pedal abundantly, especially in cadenzas and on arpeggiated figures. The surviving manuscript for Aurora proves that the composer used

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Example 10.1. Augusta Browne Garrett, Aurora, pedal indications to blur discordant harmonies: (a) m. 21; (b) mm. 78–79; (c) m. 99. Archivio Sgambati Mus. Ms. 320, Courtesy Biblioteca Casanatense MIBAC Rome. D

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a single, sustained pedal to blur together two dissonant harmonies. As indicated in measure 21 (ex. 10.1a), the pedal should be held through an arpeggiated figure that contains both the A-flat dominant-seventh chord and and the diminished-seventh chord on A♮; a similar effect using an E-flat dominant-seventh chord and a diminished-seventh chord on E♮ occurs in measures 79 and 99 (ex. 10.1b, c). She uses the effect of mixed dominantseventh/diminished-seventh arpeggios three times in the piece, making it a distinctive feature of the composition.

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The composer’s pedal indications often last for measures at a stretch, even when harmonies change, or when melody notes would be blurred by such pedaling. Beethoven also used blurred pedal effects in a few piano sonatas, such as the last movement of the Sonata no. 21 in C major, opus 53 (“Waldstein”). In cases of overlapping notes or harmonies within a single pedal indication, Augusta’s intention may have been a general instruction to add pedal to a passage, but to make appropriate pedal changes according to harmonic and melodic changes. Robert Schumann signaled this kind of broad suggestion with the instruction Mit Pedal in some pieces, and Clara Schumann employed an analogous phrase, sempre con Ped. When Augusta indicated a pedal held through many running notes or through multiple measures, musical sense dictates that she meant something like these general directives to add pedal for color and legato, leaving the specifics to the taste of the performer and the resonance of the instrument. She sometimes specified the additional use of the una corda, or soft pedal; similarly, she noted “both pedals” or “2 peds.,” in compositions such as the Hibernian Bouquet, Fantasia and Variations on a Celebrated Air a la Russe, and La brise dans le feuillage. With name recognition, some positive reviews, and plenty of publications, Augusta could experiment during the 1840s with more idiosyncratic compositions than variation sets. “Musical Bouquet,” an attractive title used occasionally in sheet music publications, was not commonplace in 1841, when Augusta began to use the expression in a deliberate way for her medleys of national songs.15 These collages consisted of patriotic and folk tunes connected by introductions, transitions, and variations. With the use of this flowery description, Augusta differentiated her arrangements of national songs from those of many competitors who proffered similar medleys, and she designated the importance of these pieces by assigning formal opus numbers to several of them (opp. 31, 33, and 40). The leap from “number” to “opus” signified Augusta’s entrance to a higher rank of composers as she entered the professional rivalry in New York City. The American Bouquet presented uncomplicated versions of “The StarSpangled Banner,” “Hail, Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle.” In 1862 Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed and published his elaborate Civil War fantasy, L’Union, Paraphrase de Concert, based on the same three tunes that Augusta had used in her American Bouquet more than two decades earlier. Augusta’s English, French, Caledonian (Scottish), and Hibernian (Irish) bouquets begin with introductions using evocative chords, rippling arpeggios, or a military fanfare to set the desired mood. Up to five familiar national songs

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follow, with a variation appended to one of the tunes. The French Bouquet uses melodies of the French Revolution, adorned with military figurations that link “La Parisienne,” “The Fall of Paris,” and the Marseillaise. The French Bouquet has an unmistakable military quality owing to the trumpet-anddrum-style salutes that occur in the work. Such tattoos were common in books of army bugle calls and drum patterns that communicated messages in the British and French armies, a practice familiar to David Browne as a military bandsman during the Napoleonic Wars. The English Bouquet is a jolly compilation of British favorites, including “God Save the Queen” (Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837) and “Rule, Britannia.” The New York Evening Post noted that the Caledonian Bouquet “consists of several fine old Scottish airs, with new harmonious accompaniments and embellishments, by Miss Augusta Browne, who has acquired much reputation as a composer and performer.”16 According to its opus number, the Hibernian Bouquet was the last of the series to appear in print and the most personal of the bouquets. The Hibernian Bouquet begins with an improvisatory prelude that mirrors the act of a harper testing the tuning of the instrument in preparation to begin a song, in this case, “Carolan’s Concerto” (ex. 10.2). Augusta described the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan (1670–1738) as “the glory of Erin’s bards” and a composer of “enchanting and spirit-stirring melodies.”17 She paid homage to his genius, writing, “We . . . list[en] with rapture as he sweeps the chords of his harp with a mighty inspiration in his Concerto.”18 Her version of “Carolan’s Concerto” closely follows the setting of the piece that opens the first volume of Thomas Moore and Sir John Stevenson’s Irish Melodies.19 With this near-borrowing, she paid homage both to the bard and to these two unrivaled popularizers of Irish song during first half of the nineteenth century. Example 10.3 introduces the five Irish tunes used in this bouquet. From the jaunty “Carolan’s Concerto” (ex. 10.3a) the mood shifts to reflective and con molto sentimento in “Gramachree” (ex. 10.3b) and its subsequent variation in smaller beat subdivisions. This old tune became better known as “The Harp That Once thro’ Tara’s Halls,” with Moore’s new text in Irish Melodies. The plaintive “Gramachree” gives way to a vibrant reel in 86, “The Bunch of Green Rushes” (ex. 10.3c), with the lilting melody poised above broken chords. A cadenza follows that sets the key and mood for an austere military song, “The Boyne Water” (ex. 10.3d), that celebrates the victory of Protestants under King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 against the Irish Catholics under James II. Only Protestants would

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consider “The Boyne Water” to be a patriotic Irish song, but the Brownes were Anglicans, originally from the northern counties of Ireland. A joyful “[St.] Patrick’s Day” (ex. 10.3e) ends the medley with a rollicking dance in “Imitation of the Bagpipe.” By using stubbornly repeated figures in the bass, Augusta suggests a bagpipe drone, while setting off the melody in the upper octaves of the piano against the drone. The fabric of the piano writing is never very thick or contrapuntal in the bouquets. Rarely does the arrangement stray beyond a melody and

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Example 10.3. Browne, Hibernian Bouquet, five Irish themes: (a) “Carolan’s Concerto,” mm.13–17; (b) “Gramachree,” m. 59 and variation, mm. 69–70; (c) “The Bunch of Green Rushes,” mm. 88–93; (d) “The Boyne Water,” mm. 131–39; (e) “[St.] Patrick’s Day, mm. 151–58. D &DURODQ V&RQFHUWR&RQPROWRVSLULWR

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accompaniment, although octave doublings, pedal points, and full chords fill out the texture of the music. One could say that Augusta employs keyboard color rather than counterpoint to create her effects—for example, to suggest instruments, including horns, fifes, and drums. The piano pedals offer further colors. By sustaining the vibration of the strings with a single, continuous pedal, she suggests the resonance of the harp or the faraway echoes of outdoor music. She injects harmonic surprises, such as an unexpected chord or an abrupt modulation from one key to another, as in the Hibernian Bouquet, when she moves without any transition from a cadence in C minor to the key of A minor in the next section. This is a deliberate means of startling the listener with the change from the pastoral character of “The Bunch of Green Rushes” to the martial introduction that precedes “The Boyne Water.” Her own keyboard prowess notwithstanding, in her mature works Augusta tailored the level of her publications to the abilities of domestic pianists. Her waltzes and quicksteps demanded less advanced keyboard skill than her fantasies. Americans played dance music for pleasure as well as to accompany dancing in the parlor. Augusta wrote more waltzes than any other dance type and avoided polkas, schottisches, quadrilles, and mazurkas. Polkas she regarded as “vile,” possibly because of their hopping steps and rapid pace, which caused women to overheat, and couples to collide on the floor.20 The polacca, or polonaise, had been a stately old processional dance from the courts of eastern Europe, but the polka was associated with lower-status immigrant groups from Germany and eastern Europe. Along with the galop, the quickstep was a lively dance well suited to Augusta’s melodic gifts. The Columbian Quick-Step was composed and published in the Columbian Magazine in December 1844 with a dedication to the magazine readers. The dance begins with a military-style flourish, and the main theme suggests the galloping horses of the cavalry (ex. 10.4).21 When war with Mexico was declared in 1846, Augusta revived the piece and republished it as the Mexican Volunteers Quickstep with a dedication to her younger brother, William Henry Browne, when he signed up for to serve in the conflict. The retitled solo was hailed as a “brilliant yet easy piece” by the Brooklyn Eagle.22 The Subterranean newspaper went even further, praising “a very excellent piece of music.”23 The title page of the sheet music noted that the number had been performed by Dodworth’s band, the leading New York City ensemble for social events. Augusta’s melodies usually adhere to balanced phrases of regular length (four, eight, or sixteen measures), often in an a, a1, b, a1 plan, where the first phrase typically ends with a half cadence on the dominant chord and

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Example 10.4. Augusta Browne, The Columbian Quick-Step, mm. 1–22. &RQVSLULWR

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the paired phrase ends with a full or complete cadence on the tonic chord. The contrasting b phrase may move to a different key before returning to the initial phrase with a complete cadence (a1). This structure of regular, balanced phrases is both commonplace and formulaic, yet it satisfied the desire for immediate access and comprehensibility by the music lovers who purchased and played this music. Music for waltzes, quadrilles, galops, schottisches, and many other dance types relied on periodic structures of regular eight-, sixteen-, and thirty-two-measure phrases, because dance figures were constructed according to these regular patterns. During the decade between 1843 and 1853, Augusta combined tunefulness with satisfying, if predictable, musical structures in a series of graceful waltzes: Ethereal Waltz, La gazelle valse brillante, De Meyer Grand Waltz, Iris Waltz, Cornet Grand Waltz, and Crystal Palace Waltz. Her obvious liking for the waltz belies the assertion that “very few women are known to have composed waltzes,” and “there are no symphonic ballroom waltzes written by women.”24 Augusta’s waltzes were suitable for social dancing, and the title page of her Cornet Grand Waltz noted that it was performed by the Amateur Cornet Club of New York. Augusta could compose an engaging melody with effective and occasionally surprising changes of harmony, as in the abrupt shift from D major to B♭ major in the middle of the Cornet Grand Waltz. Although she was very successful at composing a fresh, satisfying thirty-two-measure tune with stylish piano writing, she never went beyond to create innovative structures or textures in her waltzes. She could magnify the formal plan by adding additional contrasting sections, as in longer pieces such as the Crystal Palace Waltz, but she never transformed the dance into something more innovative. The most brilliant European concert pianists, such as Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg, published music that only very skilled pianists could master. Augusta heard many touring virtuosi, but reserved special praise in her journalism for the Austrian pianist Henri Herz, “for so long nearly absolute sovereign over the hearts of the piano-playing universe.” She noted that, “Being a teacher himself [Herz] has made his work more practicable, for he naturally studied the capabilities and capacities of students in the various stages of progress.”25 As her observation indicates, Augusta thought it was important to match keyboard style to the relative skills of intermediate and advanced players. From years of teaching experience, Augusta knew what to expect in students and amateur pianists, and she was able to create music for this market that sounded impressive without undue technical demands. Some contemporary

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advertisements described her solos as “medium difficulty,” or “without difficulty,” but that meant something different in the Victorian age than today. None of Augusta’s piano works can be considered anything less than early advanced or late intermediate in current assessments of piano repertoire.26 One way to capitalize on her intimate awareness of what developing pianists could handle was to create simplified arrangements of difficult pieces. Piano students often request easy versions of music that they wish to play. Augusta published several such arrangements and may have produced others as well. Himmels Grand Vienna Waltz, “Newly arranged for the piano forte by Miss Augusta Browne” was published during her Philadelphia years. In 1850 she arranged the drinking song from Donizetti’s opera Lucrezia Borgia with the English title “It is Better to Laugh than be Sighing.” This convivial brindisi, “Il segreto per esser felici,” had been included in operatic fantasies by De Meyer, Liszt, and Thalberg, but their versions were devilishly difficult. Augusta’s eminently playable, two-page waltz arrangement was a response to pianists who loved the tune but could not hope to play the virtuoso versions. Her arrangement avoided octaves and double thirds, and the printed edition included fingering. Both features accommodate the piano student and make this one of Augusta’s easiest piano works. Another piano solo, Jenny Lind’s Dream, was “arranged” for the Message Bird magazine, but it was no more than a section extracted and simplified from the much longer Jenny Lind’s Dream Waltz by Carl Löbe, a composer who was quick to cash in on the fad of Lindomania.27 If Augusta took a creative shortcut in Jenny Lind’s Dream, she made the work accessible for the intermediate pianist. Manageable for the student also meant marketable for the composer. Augusta mined the songs and melodies of other countries for years. Her songs and piano compositions specify German, Swiss, Russian, Neapolitan, Polish, Arabic, and Persian sources. Patriotic or folk tunes were one means of national reference as themes for variations or medleys; subject, scene, or choice of lyrics presented other national signifiers. Augusta did not travel internationally as an adult, but she remained curious about distant lands and peoples. Given the prevailing cult of domesticity and sentimentality, the composer’s interest in foreign subjects, rather than a conventional focus for a woman on home and children, demonstrated cosmopolitanism and intentional outreach from her parlor to the world. The delightful sheet music cover of Augusta’s 1847 Grande marche arabique, “Ouevre 74,” signaled the international flair in her output. The Grande marche arabique exemplified the fad for Orientalism or exoticism so popular in art and literature of the mid-nineteenth century. The turbaned,

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bejeweled Turk with scimitar and luxurious facial hair on the sheet-music cover announces the exotic subject to the viewer (fig. 10.1). The portrait of the “exotic other” depicted a man rather than the trope of an odalisque or seductive woman more frequently chosen in images of exoticism. Augusta chose the less common arabique rather than the usual French adjective arabe, perhaps to convey a greater sense of mysterious, “Arabian” legend. The opus number, “Oeuvre 74,” indicates that Augusta thought well of her effort in this imaginative character piece. She did not assign opus numbers to her songs and only irregularly to piano solos. The composer occasionally inserted sheet music title pages in French to suggest culture and elegance, but in this work, her intention may have been to enhance the exoticism of the piece. Augusta was familiar with a favorite piano solo of the era, Leopold de Meyer’s Marche marocaine, which the virtuoso performed in his New York concerts in 1845. In Hamilton, the Young Artist, Augusta recalled how her younger brother Washington loved the exciting music of de Meyer’s march, but her Grande marche arabique was quite different in style.28 The Grande marche arabique owes much more to a concert work that thrilled audiences in Paris in 1844. “A great composer has appeared. His name is Félicien David and the masterpiece is called Le désert,” wrote Hector Berlioz in the Journal des Debats.29 Egypt and Syria provided a source of Oriental melodies for this orchestral and choral ode-symphonique, which sounds half Middle Eastern and half European. Félicien David emulated Arabian style with half steps and the avoidance of the raised seventh degree in his melodies, and he included almost the entire chanted Muslim call to prayer in one section of the work. Augusta heard and esteemed Le désert, which came to New York within months of its Paris debut. The same year that she composed Grande marche arabique (1847), she wrote about the magic of David’s nomadic caravans in the Columbian Magazine. She described Le désert as “picturesque and enchanting” and continued, “This curious and exciting composition . . . cannot fail to rivet the attention of the most soulless auditor, and awaken in him . . . wonder.”30 The introduction to Grande marche arabique evinces the influence of Le désert. The opening measures establish that this is a tone poem rather than merely a waltz or polka with a fanciful name. The evocative sound of distant fanfares is answered by a low drum roll in the bass clef, then interrupted by a tinkling dancelike melody high in the piano treble. The modal dance tune outlines a gapped scale with a raised fourth degree. Bold chords function as a

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Figure 10.1. Augusta Browne, Grande marche arabique, op. 74. New York: William Hall & Son, 1847. U.S. Sheet Music Collection Sub-group-1-Series-3-A, Box 19. Sheet music cover courtesy of the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

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curtain raiser, followed by a poetic arpeggio leading into the main section of the march, with its distinctive themes in A minor (mm. 23–38) and A major (beginning in m. 39) (ex. 10.5). The body of the Grande marche arabique owes an obvious debt to Mozart’s beloved Rondo “Alla Turca,” from the Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331. The musicologist Ralph P. Locke developed a checklist of typical musical devices used to convey the perception of Middle Eastern “Turkishness,” or alla turca style.31 Elements of exoticism in Augusta’s Grande marche arabique correspond to almost every item on Locke’s checklist, excluding only those features associated with orchestral instruments. She makes use of minor mode alternating with major in abrupt shifts from one to the other, reliance on root-position chords with little harmonic change in the left hand, frequent turns and grace notes in the melody that create pungent dissonances with other parts, loud dynamics with heavy accents, stubborn repetition of motives and accompaniment figures, and short, regular phrases. Like Mozart’s “Alla Turca,” Augusta’s Grande marche arabique freely reinterprets rondo form: introduction; A (minor key); B (major key), A presented in variation; C (major key); B presented in variation; coda.32 The A theme returns with brillante arpeggios and broken octaves, and the B theme is varied by racing left-hand triplet scales and broken chords. In Grande marche arabique, the composer blended European musical markers of the faraway Middle East into a commercial American setting for the antebellum parlor. Grande marche arabique preceded Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s more celebrated showpiece Bamboula, Danse de Nègres, first published in Paris in 1849, and his colorful musical renderings of Spain, Puerto Rico, Havana, and the Caribbean.33 The Creole pianist from New Orleans had lived and studied in Paris for some years before achieving tremendous celebrity when he returned to concertize in the United States in 1853. Gottschalk’s works were intended to display his dazzling pianism in the concert hall, whereas Augusta’s exoticism was positioned as a marketable product aimed at the skilled amateur at home. The Grande marche arabique could be described as a large-scale character piece. Romantic-era character pieces like Augusta’s sometimes sprang from a scene or literary image that provided the catalyst for the composition. Form was not predetermined, although ternary form (ABA) with a contrasting middle section was frequently used. Grande marche arabique relies on contrasting sections for variety, on returning material to provide coherence, and on variations to give brilliance and vitality to the returning themes. By interjecting variation technique into sections of larger fantasies or rondos,

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Example 10.5. Augusta Browne, Grande marche arabique, introduction through A and B themes, mm. 1–46.

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Example 10.5.—(concluded)

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Augusta created hybrid forms that enlarged the dimensions of the character piece. Variation remained an essential tool of composition in her larger works, rather than the older baroque techniques of imitation and counterpoint, or more recent means of motivic or thematic development used in piano sonatas by classical- and Romantic-era composers in Germany and Austria. Music that was additive rather than developmental was typical for American composers in the antebellum era. In 1849 Augusta used a similar hybrid technique in Arietta Napolitana, opus 79, which has a large ternary form with variation sections. Another piano solo from the same year, La brise dans le feuillage, features bold, attractive piano writing that captures the dialog of wind and leaves. The composition addressed a question that she had written in an 1845 essay: “The music of birds is understood by many, but that of trees by how few?”34 The title page in French—like that of the Grande marche arabique—labeled the work as a “romance,” while the running title on the music pages was Romanza. The romance suited Augusta’s lyrical gifts, interest in literary subjects, and pianistic style. La brise dans le feuillage (ex. 10.6) traces a sectionalized form (ABCBDB) with an introduction rich in sweeping arpeggios; the A theme in striding octaves in the key of C minor (ex. 10.6a); the B theme in parallel thirds in the relative major key of E-flat major (ex. 10.6b); the C theme in A-flat major (ex. 10.6c); the B theme restated and presented in a variation with rippling broken chords; the contrasting D theme in A-flat major (ex. 10.6d); and a return to the undulating B variation before a tranquil coda (ex. 10.6e). The sequence suggests turbulence in the treetops from a passing storm before calm returns as the winds diminish to breezes. She injected colorful changes of harmony within the opening melody in C minor, including the use of the minor subdominant chord (E♭–A♭–C♭) in the left hand in measures 14 and 16, the Neapolitan sixth chord (F♮–A♭–D♭) in measure 18, and an augmented-sixth chord (A♭– C♮–E♭–F♯) in measure 20. The use of French on the title page and the abundant musical details indicate that Augusta took pains with this piece, which she dedicated to Adolphe R. Logier, one of the sons of the inventor of the Logierian system of music instruction. She inscribed a presentation copy to her brother St. John Browne.35 Augusta’s performing skills, compositions, and pedagogy became outdated as more and more German-trained musicians immigrated to America after mid-century. It was hard to keep the interest and loyalty of upper-class families as exciting, newly arrived foreigners joined the teaching ranks in New York City. Although her talents and tastes were in line with these new

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Example 10.6. Augusta Browne, La brise dans le feuillage: (a) A theme, mm. 10–21; (b) B theme, mm. 31–34; (c) C theme, mm. 47–50; (d) D theme, mm. 87–94; (e) variation of B theme, mm. 103–6.

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arrivals, her musical pedigree—study principally with her parents—was lackluster. Had she been born twenty or twenty-five years later, Augusta probably would have pursued the possibility of advanced instruction in piano and theory in Europe. A stream of American students, both male and female, went to study in Paris or Germany after the Civil War, and European training was de rigeur for concert performers and prominent teachers. Augusta’s last extant piano solo was a bold move to counter her diminishing professional status after leaving New York City. Like La brise dans le feuillage, the romance Aurora was a sectional work with contrasting themes, but variation technique was still embedded in the form of her last known work for the instrument (see ch. 9). The Aurora manuscript, dedicated and mailed to Franz Liszt, did not mark the first time that she sent a piano solo abroad to an artistic celebrity. Complimentary or even courteous words about her music from Liszt might have convinced a publisher to print Aurora, but the effort came to nothing. Augusta assigned Aurora opus 200, far beyond any known tally of her works. She had designated Chant d’amour as opus 81 (1851), but works published after that did not carry opus numbers. The figure of “200” suggests a general approximation rather than a precise chronological number. Was Augusta estimating her lifelong train of musical works by including those never written down, as in the case of organ preludes or solos used in church playing? It was commonplace that such solos were half improvised, informally notated (if at all), and never published. Did she have a corpus of unpublished pieces? Or did the total of two hundred include materials published without Augusta’s name? Such works could encompass arrangements of music by other composers, little pieces composed for student use, and songs for Sunday schools or juvenile hymnals, to name a few possibilities from her known activities. The opus number of Aurora generates more questions than answers.

Voice of Song “Oh! voice of Song!” exclaimed Augusta Browne. “Truly is music the telegraph of the heart.”36 Songs provided an expressive channel common to every American, whether one heard a tune at the theater or chapel, listened to an organ-grinder playing in the streets, or paid for a sheet music imprint from a fashionable “music saloon.” In 1849 Augusta described the ubiquitous sounds of music throughout her New York City neighborhood,

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writing, “Torrents of harmony gush forth from every domicile.”37 A river of song flowed through nineteenth-century America, contributing to a land of widespread, diverse musical activity in daily life. Music at home could mean choruses or hymns sung by the family around the all-purpose dining table. In larger homes, the more formal setting at the parlor piano provided the venue for relatives or friends to hear and enjoy time-worn favorites as well as the new. The music industry—including music publication, manufacture and sales of musical instruments, and music instruction—expanded enormously in American cities from 1820 to 1860. In the 1870 Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music, songs in English and other languages, duets and ensembles, excerpts from operas and oratorios, and songs with instrumental accompaniment other than piano fill some 270 pages. Songs in English alone total more than twenty thousand titles. Gillian Anderson estimates that sheet music made up 24 percent of copyright deposits on average between 1870 and 1983. Such a substantial number indicates Americans’ tremendous appetite for sheet music and the corresponding vitality of the music publication industry in the United States for more than a century.38 Augusta treasured her family heritage of Irish and Scots songs and mentioned some of her favorites in her essays and stories. “‘Old songs, the precious music of the heart,’ who does not love them,” Augusta wrote in praise of “those old familiar lays” and their “thousand treasured recollections.” “Much of the new music is beautiful,” she continued, but “it lacks the thrilling charm of association, for which we so cherish the lays of yore.”39 Nineteenth-century Americans expected songs to be tuneful and comprehensible, whatever the source. As Nicholas E. Tawa observes, it was a “relatively unsophisticated audience, but by no means an uncritical one.”40 Augusta aimed to create well-crafted, appealing music in styles that would sell in her day. None of her songs claimed a place in the national cultural memory, but they are exemplary songs of their age that exhibit musical sophistication, substance, and period charm. The budding composer’s songs from the 1830s and ’40s exude the optimism and freshness of youth in a range of subjects and musical treatments. She often followed the antebellum fashions for songs in Scots dialect (“Bonnie Bessie Green,” 1841), boat songs (“The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” 1842), Tyrolian echo songs (“The Marvellous Horn,” 1844), and messenger-bird songs (“The Courier Dove,” 1848), but never blackface minstrel songs or comic numbers, which she considered crude and offensive. Love, affection, loyalty, family, faith, and death were the perennial topics of parlor songs, and Augusta’s were no exception. Her later

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songs were strong and straightforward settings, often entwined with a core of joyful Christian faith. As appendix 2 demonstrates, by far the greatest number of Augusta’s songs or ballads appeared during the 1840s.41 Many of Augusta’s songs share norms of style and form with a multitude of American popular songs in the years around the Civil War. The musicologist Charles Hamm has distilled these common features into a formulaic prescription: a piano introduction based on main melody (four or eight measures); the solo verse, usually sixteen measures of four four-measure phrases with typical melodic phrases: a– aʹ–b–c, a–b–a–c, a–aʹ–b–aʹ, or a–b–c–b; and often a chorus with the same words sung after each verse.42 This chorus refrain could be performed by a soloist, a chorus in several parts, or anyone who cared to join in. The chorus usually included some of the music from the verse, and often the final phrase of the verse is repeated as the final phrase of the chorus. A piano postlude (four or eight measures), often identical to the introduction, provided closure. Additional verses were performed to the same music. A song with a refrain or chorus was nothing new, but Hamm describes the pattern with verse followed by chorus as “almost universal” and “one of the most uniquely American features of this body of song.”43 Almost two centuries later, the format remains a mainstay of popular song writing in America. Augusta’s melodies adhere to balanced phrases, usually of typical length (four, eight, or sixteen measures), often in a–aʹ–b–aʹ plan, where the first phrase (a) pauses with a half cadence on the dominant chord, and the paired phrase (aʹ) ends with a full cadence on the tonic chord. The contrasting phrase (b), often called a bridge, sometimes moves to a different key before returning to the final phrase (aʹ), which is similar to the first phrase but with a full cadence at the end. When the principal melodic phrase (a) and its variants occur several times within each verse, the tune becomes easy to follow and remember. Augusta’s symmetrical paired phrases (a–aʹ) often follow these stock building blocks of songwriting. She wrote in the average female vocal range between c1 and f 2, a range of one and a half octaves. Some texts present a man speaking (“Mary Lyle,” “Bonnie Bessie Green,” “O Lassie Dear,” “The Fisher-Boy’s Song,” “The Seaman’s Night Song,” “Wake, Lady Mine”), but the settings could be performed by either sex. The numerous cadenzas in her songs demanded vocal expertise cultivated through advanced music instruction, which was more common among young women than men. “The Courier Dove” is an example of a song that sounds simple yet exhibits grace and elegance. Published in the Columbian Magazine in April 1848, “The Courier Dove” was apparently unique to the magazine, since no

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separate sheet music imprint exists for it. Augusta’s musical style has been described in Art Song in the United States, 1759–1999, as “attractive, usable period song,” and her “Courier Dove” setting fulfills this description.44 The lyrics allude to “my love who’s far away from me,” and accordingly speak to a common human condition; moreover, the words can readily be altered to suit either gender: he/she, him/her are interchangeable, as in “if he/she should also change.”45 The melody proceeds in lyrical phrases that could be described as American bel canto. The polished, logical units of paired fourmeasure phrases adhere to a straightforward a–aʹ–b–aʹ plan, adorned with graceful vocal embellishments and a flowing accompaniment straight out of an art Italian song of the same era (ex. 10.7). This song of a distant amour is a little gem that embodies the parlor of the American past. “The Courier Dove” also demonstrates an example of the “copycat” phenomenon that pervaded the market-driven sheet music industry of the nineteenth century. Every hit song of the era generated a flock of similar titles by competing composers. There were numerous examples of birds carrying love letters or missives from the deceased in sheet music of the 1830s and ’40s. One of the models for this fad was “The Messenger Bird,” a duet by the British “Miss Browne,” or Harriet Mary Browne, who is often confused with Augusta. The original “Messenger Bird” came from the “spirit land,” but soon was reborn as a carrier pigeon or courier dove. The same year that she published “The Courier Dove,” Augusta also published an “answer song” entitled “The Reply of the Messenger Bird.” The lyrics and melody of this lovely setting offer “the wounded heart a balm, and a joy for those that pine” through the promise of reunion in the world to come. Augusta presumably sold certain songs to magazine publishers during the 1840s, when her music appeared ten times in the Columbian Magazine and five times in the Union Magazine. As with “The Courier Dove,” separate sheet music imprints do not exist for many of her magazine songs. These songs were not reprints picked up by the magazines because they were already well known or popular, as has been asserted for Augusta’s “Wake, Lady Mine”; on the contrary, they were brand new songs written for and launched in family periodicals that were a conduit to the public.46 Augusta had found a venue that promoted her music and enhanced her name recognition issue by issue, at little cost or even some financial gain. Mid-nineteenth-century American parlor music was “a vast middle ground of solo song, from the utterly naïve to the highly sophisticated.”47 Most parlor music was couched in an unassuming, middlebrow style, in which the melodies largely adhered to familiar forms, with the accompaniment of a limited

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Example 10.7. Augusta Browne, “The Courier Dove,” mm. 1–28.

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Example 10.7.—(concluded)

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number of basic chords—sometimes as few as two or three, just enough to harmonize the melody without overwhelming the amateur performer. American music consumers desired songs that they could straightaway play, comprehend, and embrace. Originality was less important than how the tune fitted the accent and expression of the words, how the melody suited the voice, and whether the song exemplified the sentiments of the era. Music and lyrics can become indelibly intertwined and cemented in personal memory, as advanced dementia patients demonstrate in their response to music from their youth.48 Songs can carry words across time and into our cultural heritage. A catchy musical phrase with words that stick stubbornly in the ear and the mind can become more than a best seller and enter the national vocabulary, like Foster’s two-note “doo-dah” in “Camptown Races.” Foster, George Root, Septimus Winner, Augusta Browne, and hundreds of other composers of the era sought that unique combination of melody and words that would captivate Americans and find a place in their shared culture. Many popular favorites from Augusta’s era lingered on well into the twentieth century. Only a few songs from the nineteenth century persist in the national memory today, when consumers sing less at home, at school, or in social circles.

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Throughout her career Augusta used previously existing song melodies in a deliberate way. She was careful to acknowledge borrowed material, even if it was only a small portion of a melody. One song from the 1830s, “The Sun Has Set,” incorporated a less familiar melody that Augusta knew from her father’s music imprints. She took several melodic phrases directly from a tune that Michele Mortellari (ca. 1750–1807) used in his ballet La fille sauvage, ou Le pouvoir de la musique. David Browne published this dance melody as an anonymous piano solo, La fille sauvage, in Dublin and Boston.49 She acknowledged the borrowing with the words, “The Composer is indebted for part of this Air to a Celebrated Composer,” but did not identify the source. Augusta may have been uncertain of the authorship of the air since her father’s imprint did not specify the composer. Augusta occasionally published songs that assigned new words to complete, existing melodies. She added sentimental poetry to the patriotic British chorus “Heart of Oak” to create “The Chieftain’s Halls” (1844). She acknowledged her source on the title page, “adapted to a celebrated English air.” The “celebrated” air—still the anthem of the Royal Navy—is a chorus from William Boyce’s theater work Harlequin’s Invasion. The newly added text celebrates proud warriors who once lived in an ancient castle’s halls, now in ruins. The dedicatee of “The Chieftain’s Halls” was Mrs. J. D. W. Williams, a member of a Boston Brahmin family and the former Ellen Bigelow, who had been a music student of Augusta’s father. Another striking contrafactum, “To Inez in Heaven,” specifies that the song was “Adapted & Arranged to an Air by Beethoven/Schubert.” The attribution demonstrates that Augusta was uncertain of the composer, but she used the melody and harmonization in toto in her arrangement. The music is one of Franz Schubert’s “Trauerwalzer” (or “Sehnsuchtwalzer”), Originaltänze, op. 9, no. 2, D. 365. Schubert’s unusual bass progression suits the sad memories of the singer, who had loved Inez in earthly life (ex. 10.8). Mrs. Hemans’s poetry was a translation of an excerpt from Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), a national epic of Portugal by Luís Vaz de Camões. The story of Inéz de Castro, a fourteenth-century lady-in-waiting who was murdered, was retold in poems, plays, and twenty operas in Spanish, English, French (Auber), and German (Weber). The piano parts for Augusta’s songs were more imaginatively crafted than two or three primary chords in block positions. Flowing keyboard patterns, less common chord changes, and more distant modulations distinguish many of her numbers from boilerplate song sheets of the day. In “Bird of the Gentle Wing”—“composed impromptu,” according to its title page—

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Augusta introduces apt text painting of birdlike chirps with crisp grace notes and staccato attacks in the introduction to delineate the “bird of the gentle wing, songster of air.” Augusta’s lyrical settings aimed at a more cultivated style than many of her American competitors, including Foster and Winner. In “The Marvellous Horn,” she sets a translation from a German poem by Justinus Kerner. This duet is comparable to Lieder by her German contemporaries Franz Abt (1819–85) and Robert Franz (1815–92), if not at the artistic level of the Romantic-era song masters Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. She uses imitation between the voices to create echo effects in “The Marvellous Horn.” Vocal duets were useful for students to sing together, or for a student to perform with his or her teacher. Augusta produced duets during the 1830s (“The Stranger’s Heart”), 1840s (“The Fisher-Boy’s Song”; “The Marvellous Horn”; “Fair Geraldine”), and 1850s (“The Youth’s Parting Song”). These were the decades when she was most active as a teacher of keyboard and voice. Songs, singing, and women had long been associated because such music was thought to be innate to the presumed sensitive, expressive feminine nature, whereas learned symphonies and instrumental music were alleged to demand unnatural erudition and brainpower from the fair sex. Although Augusta believed in music’s power as the “vehicle of that sacred spirit-language in which soul responds to soul,” she did not wallow in the overdone sentimentality and nostalgia that pervaded much parlor music.50 Her topics embraced universal themes of love, loss, and family, but Augusta generally avoided such emotional touchstones as motherhood, yearning for the old country, or the jilted lover. Maudlin trigger words—such as tears, rose, wreath, blind, sweet, darling, bereaved, lament, forget, spare, promise, cherish, and farewell—do not occur in the titles of Augusta’s songs, although we do encounter family, Bible, fair/fairest, babes, dove, olden, departed, and thine. Although Augusta adhered to the genres and styles considered suitable for women to compose, she also pushed away from the parlor and its sentimentality by avoiding some subjects intimately associated with women (babies, children, home). By contrast, her titles often featured active verbs or animated words: Wake! Speed! Vive! Haste! Come! Hail! and Rejoice. To Augusta and many in her era, good music, art, and literature should be morally uplifting. She rejoiced in music’s powers of “arousing, melting, and refining the soul of man.”51 Lowell Mason argued successfully to introduce music into the curriculum of Boston’s public schools, asserting that the benefits of music for children were intellectual (the “science” of music), moral (socializing and devotional), and physical (promoting good health).52 John

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W. Moore also championed vocal music as a means of stimulating virtue and the higher emotions, and thus should be taught in the school curriculum to mold children.53 Some of Augusta’s contemporaries were closely identified with particular social movements of the era. The Hutchinson Family Singers succeeded with abolitionist songs (“Get Off the Track”) that stirred crowds before the Civil War. Mrs. E. A. Parkhurst made a social impact with temperance songs during the 1860s (e.g., “I’ll Marry No Man If He Drinks”). Women’s creative work during the Victorian era typically had a moral or didactic element regardless of the genre: fiction, children’s stories, poetry, or parlor songs. It was no surprise to antebellum audiences when a poem or parlor song presented a lesson in morality or virtue. “The moral tone,” writes Derek Scott, “is precisely what makes the Victorian ballad differ in character from the songs that came after. Early twentieth-century British and American ballads tend to shy away from the moral didacticism found in the previous century’s ballads.”54 Many of the songs from the “drawing-room genre” were as likely to be performed in church halls and assembly rooms as in the parlor. In addition to songs with a moral lesson, Augusta steadily published settings that were suitable for the parlor or for church events and meetings without being liturgical music for worship services. The New York Evangelist endorsed her works among others, explaining, “They have all a good moral tone, and possess musical qualities which will make them popular.”55 She could nevertheless compose with a deft touch, as in her lighthearted magazine numbers. One of these, “Pleasure! Naught but Pleasure,” published in the Columbian Magazine, exudes high spirits and even omits any moral: “The heart’s a toy, where grief and joy / Combine in mingled measure; / Come, let us then the hours employ, / In pleasure, naught but pleasure!” New York newspapers and literary papers received new music directly from music publishers. An announcement in the “New Music” section of a local paper amounted to free advertising, and any positive mention was a bonus. A negative critique was hurtful if not harmful to Augusta’s reputation. Augusta was publicly humiliated when the music critic for the New World— subsequently identified as Henry Watson—opined in 1842 that “her faults are those of a young writer whose style has not been strictly cultivated.”56 Augusta’s relationship with Henry Watson never improved, and she may have avoided contact rather than risk negative comments from such a prominent journalist. But she did not manage to escape his displeasure on at least one other occasion. In 1845 an anonymous review of her new song “Once Upon a Time” appeared in the Broadway Journal, whose resident music critic was again Watson:

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The next song, by Miss Augusta Browne, would be a very pretty and pleasing song if the last twelve measures of each verse were left out. The six measures marked con Molto Sentimento, bear no relation to those which go before, or to those which follow after. They interrupt the movement of the song, and offer no point of consequence sufficient to warrant the interruption. The accompaniments show a marked improvement in Miss Augusta’s writing, but we advise her to abolish the arpeggio mark with which all her writings abound, for it is a vulgarity in style, and is rarely used, except for some very visible effect, by writers of any reputation.57

The suggestion that her musical style demonstrated poor taste would have been cause for Augusta’s displeasure if not dismay. Rolled chords, marked by a wavy vertical line preceding them, were extremely common throughout nineteenth-century piano music. This practice may have been one of Watson’s pet peeves, but it is humorous to see his dislike rise to the level of newsprint. “Once Upon a Time” demonstrates how Augusta sought to express the atmosphere of longing for a past of mystery and legend. The melodic theme in “Once Upon a Time” capitalizes on the contrast between the main tonality of G major and its relative, E minor, as seen in the first phrase of the melody (ex. 10.9). The formal scheme for Augusta’s melody, a–aʹ–b–bʹ–a–aʹ–c–d, is out of the ordinary for a parlor song, and it was the concluding phrases that the reviewer disliked (ex. 10.10). In the c phrase (mm. 33–37), Augusta muses on the past by repeating the key words of the text, “Once upon a time,” in the relative minor key (i–ii6–i46–V–i) before shifting back to G major. The repetition of the text emphasizes the yearning for a long-ago past with a phrase that descends the scale like a sigh. Then, like the sun emerging from behind a cloud, a sprightly, dancelike phrase (d) repeats the words “once upon a time” three more times (mm. 39–44 ). The burden text, “once upon a time,” appears at the end of each verse. The unsigned critic— that is, Watson—regarded the playful handling of the text as needless and unrelated. When Augusta attempted an expressive experiment that stepped beyond the customary parlor-song formulation, Watson was quick to scold her for thinking beyond routine phrase structure. The composer expressed her reaction to such pronouncements when she cited the “sorrows and heart-griefs which a musician is doomed to undergo from the incompetent and conceited critic.”58 Watson reigned as the preeminent music critic in New York

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Example 10.9. Augusta Browne, “Once upon a Time,” mm. 9–16.

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City during the 1840s, but fortunately there were other commentators. The Brooklyn Eagle offered a warm assessment of Augusta’s songs during 1845, finding “the melodies pleasing and expressive” and the harmonies skilled, as well as “the great requisite of popularity—simplicity.”59 The Eagle predicted success for the “authoress,” to whom “we certainly owe this small tribute to the expediency of encouraging local talent.” Augusta set poetry by poets living and deceased. The popular Felicia Hemans was an obvious choice. Roswell Park (1807–69), a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was the poet in several early songs: “The Sun Has Set. A Boat Song,” “Bird of the Gentle Wing,” and “Speed, Gallant Bark.” Park was a man of diverse skills: army engineer, Episcopal reverend, professor of “natural philosophy and chemistry,” and president of Racine College.60 He was no household name like Mrs. Hemans, but his poetry had a clarity and vitality that appealed to Augusta. Another contemporary, Mary Balmanno, provided the texts for at least half a dozen songs. The collaboration between this lively Scotswoman and the composer resulted in Scots-style lyrics and musical themes in songs such as “Oh! lassie dear! I maun awa’” (1848). The two women shared propensities for neo-Gothic architecture and deliberately archaic vocabulary. Balmanno and her husband, Robert, were avid, dedicated bibliophiles whose artistic passions mirrored the composer’s.

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George Pope Morris was a favorite New York poet of the era. Many composers set his best-known poems, such as “Woodman, Spare that Tree!” that hit the right blend of art and sentiment for antebellum readers. Despite their acquaintance, it remains uncertain whether Morris collaborated actively with Augusta on songs. In Augusta’s song “The Music We Love Most,” to a text by Morris, the sounds of nature are praised but not preferred, because “though we in all kinds of music rejoice, / There’s none can compare with the sweet human voice.” Augusta’s buoyant, dynamic setting was marked “con molto animato.” The piano accompaniment rushes forward through octaves, scales, and arpeggios in the introduction, before settling into a steady, driving 86

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Example 10.11. Augusta Browne, “The Music We Love Most,” mm. 1–13.

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rhythm (ex. 10.11). The harmonization is varied by the use of secondarydominant chords and augmented-sixth chords throughout. The augmentedsixth chord F♮–A–C♮–D♯ receives emphasis from octaves in the bass in measure 44 of the lighthearted conclusion of the song (ex. 10.12). The premature deaths of children and near-adults lost to disease found lyrical expression and catharsis in many parlor songs of bereavement. In an archetypal Victorian-era song of mourning, Augusta composed “Fairest Flower So Palely Drooping” (1847) as a memorial to her friend Mrs. Luther Wyman, the wife of a prominent Brooklyn shipping merchant with strong musical interests.61 Balmanno supplied lyrics for “Fairest Flower,” and she also sketched the plot in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery where Mrs. Wyman was interred, a scene that was engraved by the firm of Charles

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Example 10.12. Browne, “The Music We Love Most,” mm. 42–51.

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Currier for the sheet music cover. The smooth but mournful musical phrases hug Balmanno’s words with appropriate touches of minor chords. The Anglo American announced the new imprint with flattering words for both author and composer: “[The] language is beautiful, pathetic, well chosen . . . and the music is by one who in this kind of composition is very much admired and approved.”62 Augusta had also addressed such loss in “A Thought of the Departed” (1844), called “Requiem” on its inner pages. The deceased individual was not named, but the song was dedicated to Miss Elizabeth Cox at the time when the composer served as organist at Dr. Samuel Cox’s First Presbyterian Church. The reverend’s daughter Elizabeth Cox (1825–1901) was a few years younger than Augusta and was a friend and perhaps a student. The death of a sweetheart or fiancé may have occasioned the song, since Miss Cox did not wed until a decade later, when she married Stephen Howard Thayer, a widowed lawyer, in 1854. The serene melody of “A Thought of the Departed” contrasts with chromatic chords in the introduction and postlude that signify the anxious emotions on the occasion of loss, such as the minor plagal cadence—an A-flat-minor chord resolving to E-flat major—that concludes the song. The melody of the song does not conform to a simple pattern like a–aʹ–b–aʹ. The asymmetrical phrase structure follows the five-line stanzas written by Balmanno, whose poem was first published in a small collection of her verses printed in England in 1830.63 The five phrases can be described musically as a–aʹ–b–bʹ–c: Thou art in thy grave—beloved! [a] Thou art in thy still cold grave! [related melodically; aʹ] Thy gentle heart hath ceas’d to beat [b] Nor canst thou hear though wild winds meet [related melodically (sequence); bʹ] Or tempests round thee rave. [c]

The five-line stanza presented a musical challenge for the composer, but Augusta incorporated many expressive details within a compressed musical space in this “Requiem.” Each of the five elastic phrases differs from the others, yet grows seamlessly out of the preceding phrase (ex. 10.13). The fourth phrase, “Nor canst thou hear though wild winds meet,” moves from the tonic key of E-flat major to its relative, C minor, by using a sequence of the preceding phrase that leads upward by step to an expressive high point on f 2 in measure 12.

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The preceding examples demonstrate ways in which Augusta sought to incorporate musicality and craft in songs intended for the domestic market. She aimed high within an accessible genre, seeking to imbue vernacular music with sophisticated elements. Some of her songs display solid craftsmanship, but others reveal misplaced textual accents and awkward vocal writing in the melodies. Both faults may have stemmed from her being a lifelong pianist who composed at the keyboard. Erroneous rhythms and uncomfortable vocal writing resulted when words in a line of poetry coincided with a strong melodic idea that Augusta liked. In “The Old Clock’s Warning” (1863), she borrowed the melody from her successful piano solo, the De Meyer Grand Waltz, but the keyboard melody is ill suited to the anonymous verses. As a result, unimportant words (“thing”) and unaccented syllables (“neat-est”)

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coincide with strong beats of music (ex. 10.14). The composer should have avoided such obvious blunders, yet instances of poor text setting occasionally dot her songs. In her choice of texts, she favored the high-flown style of Victorian-era poetry that relied on tortuous word order to fulfill the desired rhyme pattern and metrical scansion. Convoluted syntax was characteristic of much nineteenth-century poetry, but what may be comprehensible when read or even when spoken can become difficult to grasp when sung. Englishlanguage parlor songs may seem transparently simple, but communicating their texts successfully remains a challenge. There is a clear connection between melodic themes in many of Augusta’s works, whether piano pieces, parlor songs, or sacred songs. The single most characteristic opening in her song melodies is an ascending sixth. Melodies that begin with a rising sixth come from all decades of her output, from the borrowed tunes used in “The Voice of Spring” and “The Sun Has Set” (1830s) to “The Music We Love Most” (1847) and “Forever Thine” (1872). Although this shape is not uncommon in musical themes, Augusta had a decided preference for the gesture or its variant, with an additional note that completes a second-inversion chord (fifth, root, third). Example 10.15 shows five of her melodies that begin with this gesture. The ascending sixth or outlined ascending chord (ex. 10.15a) signified hope to Augusta, evident in the opening of the hymn “St. George’s” that she would later retitle “Esperanza” (ex. 10.15b) and the specific musical theme labeled “L’esperance” in Chant d’amour (ex. 10.15c; see also ex. 6.5). Some musicologists tie the rising sixth leap followed by a descending line to a gesture of melancholy frequent in Irish and Irish American songs, but Augusta’s specific connotation of hope for this gesture is unmistakable from details in her music.64 The “l’esperance” theme might even be called Augusta’s “signature,” a melodic figure that rises through the tones of a second inversion chord as the theme unfolds. Augusta aimed high in her mixture of musical styles for consumers in the home, yet her work generally retained the sound and style of the parlor. She used typical musical styles of her era but went beyond them with variants that managed to sidestep some hackneyed norms of the period. She did not adhere to what Stephen Saunders calls “the parlor song’s archetypal topoi: family, domesticity, and nostalgia.”65 Loss and yearning for a far-off past were sometimes subjects in her choice of lyrics, but optimism and hope were the bright keynotes of her music and her mission of moral uplift. Lodged in her song titles, topics, and melodic signature was her personal directive— active, upward, and outward—manifest in the motto “Excelsior,” meaning “loftier” or “ever higher.” This expression is familiar as the state motto of New

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Example 10.14. Augusta Browne Garrett, “The Old Clock’s Warning,” mm. 18–26, compared to The De Meyer Grand Waltz, mm. 3–11. ,OWHPSRPRGHUDWR

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York, prominently emblazoned across the state flag, but it meant something more to Augusta. She clarified her meaning of the motto in “The Music of America” (1845), in which she proclaimed music to be “the heavenly art, whose watchword as she upward points, is ‘Excelsior.’”66

Anthems and Hymns “Divine worship consists of two parts: prayer and praise,” wrote the composer in words unchanged from 1845 to 1882.67 But she elaborated, “Of these the more exalted is praise, because it is the language of thanksgiving . . . whereas prayer is necessarily self-seeking, being the expression of our needs and petitions for their relief. Prayer is limited to this mortal existence, while the voice of praise shall not cease to resound throughout eternity.”68 By “voice of praise” the composer meant the music of psalms, chants, hymns, and anthems. Anthems were more elaborate works of sacred music with words selected from poetry, prose, or Scripture. They required greater church resources, such as vocal soloists, a choir that could read music, and instrumental or organ accompaniment. Thus anthems were special music used in more prosperous churches to mark festive services. Augusta’s documented anthems were composed for use at the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and Trinity Episcopal Church in Washington, DC (see chapters 4 and 9). As a church organist, Augusta was comfortable with the liturgical practices of Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed worship. The composer’s guidelines for sacred music were clear: “When we seek to pay adoration to the Almighty, we wish for solemn, suitable harmony, and not for strains of semi-operatic sentimentality. . . . [Sacred music] is, in its severe plainness and sublime simplicity, the highest style of art, and has been the chosen pursuit of the greatest masters of the divine science.”69 In accordance with her embrace of “severe plainness,” her church music lacked embellishments, cadenzas, or other manifestations of personal style. Her hymns, anthems, and songs of praise were mainstream in style and nondenominational in tone. Some ten hymns in standard four-voice harmony from the 1840s until her death in 1882 bear Augusta’s name, but none are in current use in American hymnbooks. “No vocal music is so soul-inspiring as hearty, honest, congregational singing,” she declared.70 The singing of hymnody lay at the heart of worship for Augusta, whether for the congregation at church or the family around the

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piano. Hymns, especially the “good, solemn old airs,” belonged to all believers as a means of devotion and prayer.71 “Many admirable sacred melodies have been composed of late years,” she wrote, “but the rich, glorious old chorales of England and Germany have never been equaled; their majestic, glowing strains will continue to reverberate through the arches of Time.”72 In her final published essay, “The Blessed Company of All Faithful People,” she celebrated the music of the world to come and mused, “[A]re there not a few of our familiar church tunes which seem worthy, in their enchanting cadences, of immortal voices?”73 She went on to cite “St. Michael’s,” “Truro,” “St. Ann’s,” “Old Hundredth,” and a dozen more. Her favorite hymns came from European common tunes, English parish tunes, and the English Methodist style of hymns, plus a few from the Yankee composers William Billings (“Jordan”), Thomas Hastings (“Rock of Ages”), Timothy Swan (“China”), and Oliver Holden (“Coronation”).74 The composer lamented, “It has grown to be a rarity to hear any longer in some—nay, nearly any of the churches—an old favorite melody,” and “the sound of a familiar tune is like the sight of an honest old friend’s face.”75 Congregations were confused and disappointed by the waves of new tunes being used instead of the older hymns. Augusta wrote, “[W]hen a familiar hymn which we have been accustomed to sing to a certain tune is given out, it is a keen disappointment to find it spoiled by some drone or fantastic ditty.”76 Her own hymn settings followed traditional style, such as the four-voice “St. George’s,” published in the Message Bird, and later revised as “Esperanza” (ex. 10.16). The text, by Isaac Watts, has been set to many tunes. Augusta distinguished her setting with a “symphony” at the end of each verse. The keyboard interlude is based on a chain of suspensions above descending first-inversion chords (mm. 17–20). The harmonic pattern is more typical of eighteenth-century compositions than Victorian-era songs, but it lends elegance to the accompaniment.77 In nineteenth-century Britain as in the United States, Victorians poured their religious fervor into hymns. But in Augusta’s view, sacred music and hymn lyrics must refer to the Savior, “the ensign of salvation.”78 For this reason, in her opinion, the popular hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee!” was a disappointment, no matter how beloved, because the text failed to address the “Mediator,” and “Lacking this confession, the distinctive feature of Christianity is absent. Christ, who is the end of all preaching, should ever be prominent as the grand central object.”79 Given Augusta’s zeal for the significance of music in Protestant worship, she published surprisingly little music specifically for liturgical services.

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Instead, she produced settings suitable for less formal occasions: family devotions, social circles, and church meetings. Bible reading and family prayers were customary in many nineteenth-century homes, and hymn singing was part of that tradition. Her “drawing-room” songs frequently provided a moral lesson or demonstrated pious Christian language that suited family occasions or church events. Her “Song of Mercy” was “calculated either for the home circle, or for the Sacred Concert,” according to an 1851 announcement.80 More than a quarter-century later, she cited the suitability of two new hymns for “choir or social music” in an 1879 letter to the sacred-music publisher Hubert P. Main.81 Her phrase echoed a Biglow and Main publication that specified “Hymns and Tunes appropriate for the Prayer Meeting and the Home Circle.”82

Summation Augusta’s works circulated as part of a vibrant, competitive business in sheet music, not a marginalized, female-only production or marketplace. Nevertheless, every aspect of Augusta’s professional life entailed gender considerations within the culture of her era. Genre and gender were inseparable in the minds of the antebellum public. However much she might have wished to publish oratorios and symphonies, the idioms acceptable for mid-nineteenth-century American women to perform and compose were songs, hymns, and piano solos in smaller forms. Augusta’s music falls largely into these genres despite many examples of her compositional skill. Gender constructs undeniably limited what she could attempt to publish and market, but through small but telling details of form, harmonization, melodic gestures, and song topics, Augusta avoided gendered expectations for women composers without making an outright challenge to societal norms that could generate negative repercussions for her reputation as a composer and teacher. The parlor and its piano offered wholesome, nurturing company and activity in the home. Music making at home implied domestic harmony as well as upwardly mobile economic status. But the arts were not mere pastimes to Augusta; they were building blocks of morality. If Americans wanted music that was diverting, then she would publish music that was pleasurable as well as uplifting. Augusta wanted her music to be refined and refining, elevated and elevating, but it needed to be marketable. She composed art music that intertwined culture with commercial appeal.

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Rather than aiming for an elitist cultured music or an entertaining vernacular music, Augusta sought to create a cultured vernacular style in her music, meaning works that were well crafted and elevating, but intended for a wide audience to hear, to play, and to enjoy. The composer elaborated on the skill and harmonic science that composition demanded, writing, “Instrumental music is the highest order, requiring in all cases a comparative knowledge of harmony, and . . . an understanding of the mathematics generally.”83 Yet one would never say that Augusta’s compositions sound too academic; if anything, her music may seem naive or amateurish to some modern ears. Hers is music of expression and craftsmanship, but it is music of another time. Augusta’s musical training had been Eurocentric, and she modeled many compositions on Continental and British works. Although her keyboard style absorbed the sentiment and figuration of mainstream Romantic composition, her piano solos did not attain the level of compositional sophistication found in works by European composers, both men and women, who had more years of advanced training and contact with leading musicians of the era. Among her best-known European women contemporaries, the Germans Clara Wieck Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, the French composers Louise Farrenc and Cécile Chaminade, and the British pianist Kate Loder exhibit greater finesse of harmony, counterpoint, and form. Augusta’s piano solos and songs nevertheless brim with confidence and optimism, two qualities so characteristic of an American outlook, and so uncharacteristic of the Angst, agitation, and melancholy that were manifest in music by Schumann and Hensel. Music, she wrote, “is emphatically the language of joy and hope, not of despair.”84 In 1850, as though she were pondering the frowning face of Beethoven shown in many images, Augusta wrote, “we have no faith in the heaven-guerdoned [rewarded] genius of a gloomy man, or gloomy woman either.”85 Augusta’s piano solos are tuneful and idiomatic for the instrument. Her best keyboard works evince adept writing and dramatic use of the instrument. They are engaging to hear and a pleasure to play. Although they did not establish an innovative style, they present attractive examples of parlor piano music of their era. Melodic ideas with strong, clear shapes stand out in her compositions, along with colorful harmonies and fluent accompaniments. Her works represent significant categories of sheet music in nineteenth-century America for the home, the concert, and the church. Many American colleagues mined the same genres, but Augusta’s works were competitive and full of ingenious details.

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The merit of Augusta Browne’s music to present-day listeners is not that her works transcend their era, but how aptly they exemplify and bring it to life. Her sparkling solo pieces effortlessly take us back 150 years to conjure up the piano in the parlor. Although she was a keyboardist by nature rather than a tunesmith, the best of her songs are well crafted and evocative of the era. Selections from her songs would make a fresh and worthy addition to a vocal recital today alongside more familiar tunes by Stephen Foster. In a memorial poem of tribute, Augusta’s brother William Henry praised his sister as “blest soul, so full of song.”86 Indeed, her songs, hymns, and piano music contribute a distinctive voice to American music.

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Chapter Eleven

Legacy in Literature The composer-turned-author Augusta Browne avoided such tropes of antebellum female domestic life as the happy home, cherubic babies, or the selfless wife and mother. She looked outward, rather than inward or toward intimacy, and never took the common (if profitable) path of telling women how to manage their households and family—the backbone of women’s periodicals and of much literature marketed to them. She leapfrogged over advice articles and conduct books to those subjects most important to her: music, literature, the fine arts, and the Christian faith. In nineteenth-century America, just as in eighteenth-century Britain, print culture marginalized women at the same time that it depended on them as consumers of novels and periodicals. Sentimental fiction, prescriptive advice/conduct books, and devotional works—even those written by women—shaped their readership with a firm didactic purpose, rather than mirroring women’s actual lives and experience. Despite a growing presence in print, antebellum women writers were ever more funneled into a “discourse of domesticity” limited to topics (home, family, and virtue) and genres (poems, stories, household manuals) considered appropriate for womanhood to read and to write about.1 Men remained the gatekeepers at cultural institutions that defined creative merit while assigning women to serve as nurturers of music, literature, and art. American women nevertheless published novels with considerable success. The literary historian Joyce Warren avers that “women dominated the literary scene in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century” with best-selling novels, yet these women were “systematically excluded” and forgotten in twentieth-century histories of American literature.2 In Warren’s view, these female writers did not focus on the central narrative of a heroic male quest; thus, novels by women diverged from the dominant pattern of American fiction that would enter the literary canon, such as Herman

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Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Warren also blames the disdain of later decades on the “moral earnestness and sentimentalism” that characterize the work antebellum female writers.3 Harriet Beecher Stowe retained fame and recognition, however sentimental her prose, because “no book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”4 But women were not alone in publishing material that was occasionally poetic, oftentimes preachy, and frequently ponderous. This America was a nation of readers who were accustomed to verbosity in print media. They read sermons as often as serialized novels, and were accustomed to religiosity in both. The Brownes were a literary family immersed in print culture, including a father, son, and daughter who published throughout their careers. They aspired to be well read and well informed. David Browne led as a model with his published essays (1820, 1824, and 1830), publicity, and correspondence in the press. Augusta pursued essays, fiction, and poetry in print, and in turn, fostered her younger siblings. She inserted Hamilton’s essays and poems into her memoir Hamilton, the Young Artist, and into the Iris literary annual for 1853. Her example and support encouraged William Henry to write his Mexican campaign reminiscences in a series that was published in the Knickerbocker (1854–58). She urged her brother to write poetry during the decade that followed; Augusta offered his poems from the Civil War front lines to Morris at the Home Journal in 1861.5 One can imagine that the Brownes shared their works-in-progress as a matter of course over the years, providing each other with editing and feedback. They had access to books and periodicals both foreign and domestic from subscription libraries such as the New York Society Library (est. 1754) and free libraries such as the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library (est. 1842), later called the Brooklyn Lyceum and the forerunner of the Brooklyn Museum. The New York Public Library opened in 1854 as a reference reading room. Using these channels, Augusta could inform her writing with histories, scholarship, and travel literature. From her father’s missteps, Augusta recognized the need to stay on the right side of public opinion lest she jeopardize her professional standing or the family business. She knew that she ignored social constraints at her own peril. Nevertheless Augusta presented some cultural resistance to Victorian expectations in her prose writing. She never discussed women’s fashion or finery, for example. By contrast, she used description of gentlemen’s accessories to ridicule the vanity of men in her satirical piece “The Musical Critic’s Portrait.” While she turned to unabashed nostalgic sentimentality in the popular piece “The Man Who Nurses the Baby,” later retitled “The First

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Paterfamilias,” the essay turned the trope of motherhood on its head by celebrating the father as nurturer. Augusta expressed mainstream opinions and common sentiments of the era, but she avoided expression of political affiliations and even of current events. Gender, social class, education, and Protestant faith shaped her worldview, including virulent prejudice against Roman Catholics. Her identity as a dedicated Christian was always paramount in her thought. Subjects in her poetry and prose align with themes of pilgrims on their lifelong journeys to a Better Land, the Heavenly Home, the Heavenly City, or the place where “We Will All Meet Again.” These images, rather than motherhood and children, dot her writing. Augusta and many other women writers aimed to be as smart and informed as men, but within the codes of feminine behavior, or as Mary Kelley describes it, “intellectual talents . . . joined with more conventional attributes of womanliness.”6 Augusta often paired humor and history to reinforce her points. For a woman to be angry or strident was as unacceptable in print as in speech, but humor provided a weapon. She used satire or hyperbole to poke fun at art critics, reviewers, and other elitist male authorities who did not relish being critiqued by a woman. Her essays never told women how to run their homes or raise their children, but she did counsel Christians to live and uphold their creed. Augusta enacted her religious tenets in an evangelistic crusade in print. At the same time she experimented with literary genres and publication venues. In 1845 the newly minted essayist began by cultivating the “feminine space” of women’s domestic magazines, but she soon moved beyond “lady literature” to publication venues with a broader audience. Although Augusta worked in styles and forms acceptable for women to publish, she did not confine her audience to women or children. She used magazines as a conduit to reach Americans across the growing nation. Twenty-six states made up the United States in 1840; by 1850 the total was thirty-one states, plus four organized territories. By the time of her death in 1882, thirty-eight states reached from coast to coast.

Poetry Poems found a place in every kind of serial during the antebellum era. There was no great difference between poetry by women and by men in the magazines of the period; both employed exalted language and heightened emotion.

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Faith (but not denomination) and virtue were constant themes; sentimental treatments of love, domesticity, and motherhood abounded. E. Douglas Branch writes of the “British Nightingale,” Felicia Hemans: “No other poet was so cherished by American readers, no other spoken of with such unanimous respect.” Lydia Sigourney became the American Hemans: “Mrs. Lydia Huntley Sigourney was an institution. She and George Washington were beyond criticism.”7 Hemans and Sigourney provided the models for antebellum women poets. Many hundreds of their poems appeared in print but are now mostly forgotten. In contrast, fewer than a dozen of Emily Dickinson’s eighteen hundred poems—all unattributed and unauthorized—appeared in published literature during her lifetime.8 Augusta’s poetry was not abundant, but she took pains to resubmit her poems numerous times to different serials.9 These poems usually addressed death and the joy of promised reunion to come. Her verses cherished the memory of beloved siblings and friends. Augusta lamented her brother Washington, who died in the Astor Place riots in 1849, in “To a Departed Spirit” and “The Vacant Chair,” both printed in Hamilton. A strophe from “The Vacant Chair” illustrates Augusta’s Romantic-era verbiage and syntax: We miss thee, when the Queen of Eve Glides o’er her sweet dominion, When blossoms droop, and wearied birds Speed high on nestward pinion.

One of her favorite poems, regularly reprinted from 1851 to 1896, was “Coelum et Terra,” also published as “Heaven and Earth” or “One Year in Heaven.” This tribute commemorated the wasting death of her artist brother Hamilton from consumption. She intended it for the memoir Hamilton (1852) but went ahead and placed the poem in the Home Journal in 1851. In the text she effectively used the structure of alternating verses “one year in heaven” with “one year on earth.” One year in heaven! since, from its prisoning clay, Thy soul exultant winged its upward way, Sprang to embrace the waiting seraph throng, And entered heaven’s high courts with a triumphal song. One year on earth! since we, the funeral knell Tolling sad welcome, laid thy form to Mid summer’s wreathing-blossoms, dust to dust,

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To slumber till the resurrection of the just. ... One year in heaven! thine artist’s soul is now Filled with deep beauty vainly sought below; And many a gorgeous dream, a vision grand, Glows into semblance bright, by ambient zephyrs fanned. One year on earth! O early loved and lost! Still pity us, on life’s fierce ocean tossed: Be thou the sweet-souled guardian angel given To guide us to the skies when earth’s last link is riven!

She penned other poems that honored Hamilton, including “An Artist’s Farewell to Time” and “The Youth’s Parting Song.” To honor Hamilton’s beloved friend and probable portraitist, Walter Libbey, she wrote “The Painter’s Last Rest.” In “The Heart and the World,” also included as a tribute in Hamilton, Augusta applied alternating lines in each strophe to contrast between the “World, with thy pageants false as fleeting” and the “Heart,” which generated man’s highest purpose: Heart, seek on high thy sphere of action; World, I condemn thy vain attraction, All baseless as the wind; Let me so use my brief probation As to secure in Heaven’s duration The pinions of the mind.

Structures such as the opposition of heaven/earth and heart/world anchored Augusta’s best efforts in verse. The author included her favorite poems in the Precious Stones anthology of consolation literature (see chapter 7).

Short Fiction and Humor Storytelling was a natural part of family life in the Browne household, where Augusta had six little brothers and sisters by the time she was ten. Some of her later magazine pieces were less fiction than retelling of anecdotes that she had heard from older family members. The success of the scary, if humorous, “Musician’s Adventure,” based on Logier’s terrors while practicing the church organ at midnight, was a prelude to a genre that Augusta could have plied

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to financial advantage had she chosen to pursue tales of the supernatural. These were among her most widely reprinted pieces, and the genre commanded commercial value. The more gruesome the tale, the more eager was the press to grab it. Louisa May Alcott made good money by publishing such Gothic tales—usually under a pseudonym—in the early stages of her writing career before she found the style of family story that her audiences loved. She enjoyed writing lurid tales, but domestic novels and stories were simply too lucrative. Alcott retained the rights to Little Women, and its publication provided financial means to her parents and siblings for years. Augusta’s “Tale of the Supernatural” (1850), in which a traveling minister spends the night in terrified prayer as demons and spirits shriek around him in a haunted house, first appeared in Holden’s Dollar Magazine. She revised the story a year later for the Home Journal. The tale took on a life of its own in American newspapers with titles such as “A Ghostly Banquet,” “An Unearthly Banquet,” and “A Supper with Spectres.” Four decades later, Romance, a magazine of short fiction, reprinted “An Unearthly Banquet” with the prefacing remarks, “It is not unlikely that some whose eyes fall upon the following blood-curdling tale, will remember reading it when, twenty or thirty years ago, it was copied from one paper into another all over the United States. It bore the modest signature of ‘Augusta Browne.’”10 The story again made the rounds of American newspapers, from the Florida Agriculturist to the Los Angeles Herald, a decade after Augusta’s death.11 Another frightening yarn, “The Story of a Dog-Hero” (1862), was first published in the New York Observer before entering the realm of newspaper reprints as “A Providential Escape.”12 The tale relates how a brave dog named Neptune takes on a ring of villains who intended to rob a traveling rent collector and add his corpse to “a large number of bodies in various stages of decay . . . huddled together in a deep vault beneath the house.” Augusta described “poor Neptune, whom, in their rage, they had ruthlessly slaughtered,” as “an instrument of Providence” and “God’s agent in saving Mr. Seymour’s life,” thus making the chilling story suitable for publication in the Presbyterian Observer.13 Augusta made selective use of her Irish heritage as story material. In 1846 she used Irish brogue in “The Enchanted Piper,” a fairy tale of Barney O’Brian of Kilkenny, who falls asleep in a cave and awakes in the ghostly presence of Ireland’s greatest harpist, Turlough O’Carolan. The Bard of Erin grants Barney the gift of music on his bagpipes in order to woo Norah O’Riley, because “Love! is it you say? . . . Sure, I was a mortal musician one’st meself, and know all about it.”14 “The Enchanted Piper” struck a chord and was

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widely reprinted in newspapers. The backdrop of Irish folklore and fairies also provided the setting for “Irish Curiosity; or, the Story of Shane MacTeig O’Callaghan and His Wife Nelly.” An Irishwoman’s relentless questioning leads to the end of the mysterious gold coins left for her husband by the wee folk in thanks for his protection and kindness to them. Despite the unhappy outcome, Augusta argued, “But gentlemen are not curious, oh no! What in woman is termed curiosity, entirely changes its signification in their case, and becomes only a laudable and noble thirst for knowledge.”15 It was not the last time that she would challenge gendered notions of women’s intelligence and abilities. Augusta returned to the theme of Ireland’s musicians in “The Rival Fiddlers” (1848), the story of a contest between an honest country fiddler and a showy townsman who brags about his credentials. Humorous, Irishflavored dialogue brings the provincial folk to life. Rivals since childhood, Larry Flynn and Phil Dolan play off to see which will win the position as church musician in their small town. Larry, who had gone to London and heard a concert by the greatest violinist of the century, Nicolò Paganini, thereafter calls himself a “pupil of Paganini.” The audience asks for a “thrue Irish tune,” but Larry responds, “Ladies and gentlemen, Paganninny wouldn’t demane himself by executin’ Irish airs; and of coorse I can’t—theyr’e ould and vulgar.” Modest Phil performs a melting rendition of the traditional Irish air “Gramachree,” plus Paganini’s difficult violin etude, “La Campanella,” to win the contest and the girl.16 The mythical Erin remained largely an invented dream, and “to be Irish was to have experienced a great sense of loss—the loss of loved ones, home, and family were tied up with the even greater loss of the homeland.”17 Although Augusta acknowledged the genius of poets Thomas Moore and Samuel Lover from that “land of stars, the Emerald Isle,” her own Irish persona was ephemeral.18 The David Browne family played down their Irish origins after the Great Famine brought so many impoverished immigrants to America, with resulting tensions and anti-Irish prejudice.19 Along with many other Protestant Americans, the Brownes held vehement anti-Catholic sentiments that Augusta occasionally expressed in print. Augusta continued to dabble in fiction publication, but she never exceeded the short-story length despite the novel’s being a genre in which women could achieve financial and critical success. George Eliot’s scathing words ought to have scared off all but the most adamant authors: “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the

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prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.”20 Fiction by women often explores “connection, commitment, community,” as well as the “primacy and power of human affections and affiliations . . . and the value of ordinary life,” rather than focusing on heroic deeds.21 When Augusta crafted original plots rather than retelling anecdotes, her heroines were resourceful young women who outwitted would-be protectors who kept them imprisoned in the domicile, even if that venue was a castle. In “Kate Darlington,” a clever trickster succeeds at foiling an arranged marriage by escaping across the border to Gretna Green costumed in a young man’s stylish suit, while her fiancé dresses as an old man to fool their pursuers. All turns out happily, but this “story familiar to all magazine and newspapers readers” was nevertheless rebuked as a “bad influence” by Miss F. L. Townsend in Holden’s Dollar Magazine in March 1850 for the idea that a proper woman would ever wear male attire.22 A medieval heroine impales a message to her distant beloved on a soldier’s lance as he departs for the Crusades in “The Secret Letter,” from the Iris gift book for 1853. As a result of her disobedient act, a loving union prevails over an arranged marriage. Nostalgia for a bygone age was strong in this piece, in which Augusta inserted her deceased brother Hamilton’s pseudo-medieval verses that begin, “A pilgrim sate by ye river’s brinke. . . . And he wept ryght mournfullye.” Hamilton’s poetry was as neo-Gothic as Augusta’s romance of Ladye Ermengarde, the “Fairest ladye of my love.”23 The short story echoed “The Olden Time and the New,” an essay published two years earlier, in which Augusta advocated the beauties of legend, imagination, chivalry, and romance sadly missing during an age driven by utility and the “Gold-Spirit” that was fueling the California gold rush.24 In “Love Versus Law,” young lovebirds seek to elude the wedding plans made for an heiress by her elderly guardians. The poor but persistent suitor consults a lawyer, who unearths an obscure law to solve the couple’s dilemma. In due time, they enact a scheme in which the heroine saddles her horse, mounts, then reaches out her arm to assist the beloved artist to swing up behind her on horseback despite his “protests.” In this way, any guilt on the gentleman’s part has been removed, since he was the one abducted, not she, and the pair ride away to a happy ending. The piece despaired of “the gradual extinction of romance and chivalry” of the age, yet romance was about to blossom in the author’s life.25 She met and married J. W. B. Garrett during the summer when the story was published. Although she revised and resubmitted such anecdotes as “The Musician’s Adventure,” Augusta wrote no new fiction pieces after her marriage, nor did she ever republish her three tales of romance. These love stories turned on the

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young women’s qualities of courage and ingenuity. Such heroines were very independent for antebellum fiction, when the “first principle of the domestic novels [was] the necessity of selflessness and repression of the will.”26 Stories in magazines such as Godey’s were intended to model appropriate female behavior, but Augusta’s young women used their wits to succeed without violating the bonds of family. Her stories counter the statement, “What is important about the Western romantic heroine is that she has no agency, or power to act on her own behalf.”27 Not so for Augusta’s protagonists; each changed her fate through her own agency. They exhibited qualities of independence, intelligence, and self-reliance, much as Augusta herself faced life. She wrote a bit of herself into these plucky heroines who found a way around societal conventions. In these stories Augusta could express freedoms that she dared not exercise as long as she cultivated a professional life as a music teacher to girls and young women in New York and Brooklyn. Her comparatively late marriage suggests the possibility that earlier courtships or engagements had been vetoed or discouraged by parental disapproval. Such disappointments may have underpinned her fictions about clever girls who found ways to elude the plans of their elders. The composer chose never to tell her own story outright, but her fictions of escape suggest daydreams of deeds that could alter women’s lives. Her heroines exhibited resistance to patriarchal authority. The decisive actions occurred out of doors rather than in the parlor: eloping while in male apparel; placing a message on a spear as a knight departs for the Crusades; grabbing a man’s arm to help him up onto horseback behind the saddle. This was Augusta’s style of feminist writing. Like other urban East Coast writers in the 1840s, she wanted to be witty and sophisticated in print. In nonfiction essays Augusta strove to shape a lighthearted, intelligent style that conveyed airy and amusing observations of everyday experience. Her magazine pieces sometimes suffer from the breathless chattiness of a visiting auntie starved for conversation, but wordy columns were welcome in the Victorian press. The enormous appetite of the reading public had to be fed with inches of print in every issue, a perennial challenge for an editor to meet. “On the Rights of Quadrupedal Musicians” (1858) commented on musical abilities in the animal kingdom. She cited personal experience in the essay, “a dog—and an ugly brute he was—who incommoded me not a little during his mistress’s lessons, by the audibility of his admiration for the piano. His ecstatic contortions at certain passages might excite the envy of many an opera habitué, while his yells were the perfection of falsetto.” And

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she pointedly wrote, “If one-half of the time, pains, gold, expended on many an idle, stupid Miss—in the hope that she will one fine day be enabled to play five or six tunes—were bestowed upon an intelligent dog, cat, pig, or other household pet, how different might be the oftimes result?”28 In 1877 she praised the Browne household cat, Rubinstein, “whose talents and performances were remarkable, and who owned a rich tenor voice, which, in the midnight concerts, did thrilling execution. A nice ear for music, too, had Rubin, as proven by a disgust at wrong notes.”29 This pet was presumably named for Anton Rubinstein, the Russian piano virtuoso who toured North America in 1872–73.

One Woman’s View The culmination of Augusta’s essays couched in satire was her 1863 article, “A Woman on Women; With Reflections on the Other Sex.” During the 1840s and ’50s, Augusta walked a tightrope to maintain her professional activities and an unblemished reputation. After 1860 she wrote as though she had less to lose, especially in this Knickerbocker article. As posited in chapter 8, “A Woman on Women” was in some part a response to the rejection of a chapter submitted to the Reverend Charles Hodge, editor of the Princeton Review, in July 1862. Her Knickerbocker article particularly addressed scriptural sources about women and their special relationship to Jesus. She asserted that a fifth-century church council had debated the question of “whether women were included in the Redemption, [and] whether the Savior actually died for women as well as for men.” Augusta called this “the most monstrous, most appalling, most surpassing insult ever perpetrated against the sex, the very apex of mortal insolence.” The Gospels made clear that “women were faithful when His trusted disciples slunk trembling away,” and “to women was first revealed the illustrious event of His Resurrection.”30 As for original sin, “with deep reverence to Revelation,” she wrote, “woman erred through a desire of unhallowed knowledge—man through a love of unhallowed indulgence.”31 From righteous anger about sustained mistreatment from the church, Augusta turned to the subject of education. According to some, “it was sufficient for a woman to know enough to make a shirt and a pudding”; the pudding qualification turned up in other antebellum sources, including a column by Fanny Fern.32 But Augusta responded:

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[The] cranium of a thoroughly cultivated woman is a store-house for every art, useful as well as ornamental. Why should concocting a sonnet hinder a woman from concocting a pudding; fashioning a picture from fashioning a bonnet; working out a harmonic fugue from working a pan of dough; or manipulating a magnificent symphony of Beethoven, from deftly handling a broom?33

Some women were silly, others were vain or garrulous, but so were men in equal numbers. She noted the commonplace conceit and “very significant hint” that woman “is expected to comport herself with the humility” of a violet, whereas man, “the bold-towering sunflower,” usurps “all the light and warmth and glory.” Womankind—regardless of “womanly genius”—could only act and achieve beneath “the shadow of the aforesaid umbrageous vegetable.” Men, moreover, demonstrated “a decided disapproval of female genius.”34 Margaret Fuller’s book Woman in the Nineteenth Century had come out in 1845, an enlarged version of an article that had appeared two years earlier in the transcendentalist monthly the Dial.35 The first edition of Fuller’s new book sold out in a week. If Augusta did not read it, she undoubtedly heard about it. The volume argued for women’s intellectual capacity, advocated for women’s equality with men, and imagined a broader conception of marriage in which a wife was not the slave of a man, but a powerful, soulful presence that made marriage into a harmonious sphere. Fuller had come from Boston to New York City to work as a journalist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in 1844. Augusta never mentioned Fuller in her prose, but Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Fuller’s powerful columns in the New York Tribune overlapped with the months when Augusta began to publish her own essays and poetry in the Columbian Magazine. Phrases from Woman in the Nineteenth Century turn up in similar form in Augusta’s most outspoken piece on gender parity. Even the title, “A Woman on Women,” may allude to Fuller’s early version, published in the Dial as “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” Public, private, personal, and professional concerns were interwoven in Augusta’s prose, but it was seldom autobiographical. Formative experiences and private feelings were suggested but rarely specified. The bold authorial voice in “A Woman on Women” makes the work stand out in Augusta’s writing. While the subject of misogyny is atypical among her essays, the procedure in the article remains similar to earlier publications. Her serious essays

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maintained a fiber of anecdotes cited from historical works, noted writers, and Scripture. Augusta cited unassailable authorities to underpin her opinions, lest her prose be dismissed as foolish drivel from a woman’s pen. For all its passion, “A Woman on Women” relies too much on borrowed anecdotes and too little on personal statements. Augusta was never again so outspoken on the subject of gender. By 1863 she was already turning toward sermonizing. Her quest became the transformation of her faith, tested by life, into her works. The musician-turned-author was not always a Pollyanna dispensing domestic happiness. Her writing sometimes reveals a frustrated individual, as when she sighed, “We think on our own disappointed hopes and frustrated aims; on our own wasted energies and purposes, which were fresh and buoyant when first we heard those strains.”36 After her marriage, financial pressure as the nation slid into the Panic of 1857 motivated Augusta to decry the “dark and crying sin that is laid at the door of artists . . . the unpardonable one of poverty.” She countered that poverty “seems to be the hot-bed of genius,” but lamented that genius so often “absolutely perished through sheer poverty, neglect and despair.”37 Only a year earlier, Augusta had written that not poverty, nor persecution, nor disease could dull the “peculiar delights” of the creative spark, “so immeasurably do the delights of the spiritual transcend those of the mortal.” Despite the “charge of eccentricity,” she proclaimed, “such minds are the stars, the flowers, the glories of earth.” She concluded, “‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’ would be a suitable motto for every son and daughter of genius.”38 She defended the perpetual and discouraging toils of artists, writers, and musicians who were ignored by a fickle public, “compared with which the labors of the ploughman are mere pastimes,” but this struggle was the “true test of genius.” She wrote of the spiritual rewards of “artists who love and pursue Art for her own Sake,” and recalled the well-known anecdote of the composer Beethoven, who indignantly signed a letter “Ludwig, brain owner” in response to his more affluent sibling, who described himself as “your brother Johann, land owner.”39 Such remarks rallied the spirits of a newlywed couple in reduced economic circumstances. For several years after her husband’s abrupt demise in 1858 from heart disease, Augusta focused on topics related to bereavement: death, salvation, mourning, and consolation. Her Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations was “a religious inquiry into the momentous future whither we are all journeyers.”40 Subsequent essays were philosophical meditations in which the still-young widow reflected on mortal closure. She

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wrote poignantly of the harvest in the “autumn of life” before the reunion with “beloved ones who have departed from our sight,” whose loss “quenched out so much of life’s glory.”41 Death at home had been all too frequent before the conflict, but then were added the horrors of slaughter on the battlefield. While the Civil War raged, Augusta mentioned the combat only occasionally. In “Trumpets and Drums” she referred to secessionists as traitors but did not focus on slavery; instead, she wrote the praises of the power of military music to marshal forces and lift spirits. She and her parents lived amid constant fear and anxiety, with two family members—Louis as well as William Henry—serving on the battlefields of Virginia. A false report of William Henry’s death at the Battle of Fair Oaks (or Battle of Seven Pines) was published in 1862.42 Most American families, Northern and Southern, suffered from similar daily worries.

A Voice for Morality Readers in earlier centuries routinely read sermons, in part because they were offered in print decades before novels. Christian devotional literature, including sermons, remained an important segment of the literary market in nineteenth-century America. Augusta worked hard at marketing her music and writing during the 1840s and ’50s, but she lost the fire to sell as she turned toward the mission to serve Christian faith through her writing. Women carried the burden of morality in the Victorian era, and Augusta contributed ever more as a voice for morality. Fiction and humor fell away as sermons in print, religious essays, and tracts became her choice in prose-writing. Augusta made a foray that was midway between satire and sermon when she debated “Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman?” to which she answered firmly, no. Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, Philip Stanhope, explained the earl’s coldly calculated code of behavior for a gentleman during the 1750s. Augusta regarded the letters as “a tissue of frivolity, perfidiousness, and systematic corruption,” and denounced “a man who, in the course of about six hundred letters to a boy beloved, never once mentions the Holy Scriptures as a guide.”43 The Apostle Paul was the true gentleman, she wrote, and Scripture the best code of conduct. The catalyst for this twelve-page tirade is not known, or whether it was generated by a particular individual or event, but the year was 1865. Augusta alluded to the “present calamitous war,” and contrasted the earl’s loathsome brand of morality with “countless evidence, on both sides,” of generous acts “in the true spirit of love” between

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“noble Northerns, and noble Southerns, forgetful, in the crisis of nature’s agony, of their mutual animosities.”44 The lessons of one tragic personal loss after another, including two sisters, four brothers, artist friends, fellow musicians, and the culminating blow of her husband’s death galvanized Augusta to use her works as a testament of Christian faith. As a widow, she shifted to writing predominantly on religious subjects for religious periodicals. Although religion and music had always been intertwined in her prose, her most sermonizing essays date from the 1860s. Her faith was her rock, but sometimes she bogged down in devotional pieces that exhorted readers like a scolding schoolmarm. Her articles did not flinch from damning wrongdoing wherever she saw it, whether in the home, the theater, or the church. She counted herself as an “advocate of morality” against “pernicious amusements” that poisoned American society.45 Such “religious earnestness is perhaps one of the most difficult hurdles for twentieth- [and twenty-first-]century readers” of nineteenth-century literature.46 Her sermons in print reached a zenith with at least two pocket-size pamphlets published by the American Tract Society, which published a flood of free literature intended to spread the gospel and to encourage Americans to embrace higher morality and duty. During the first decade after it was founded in 1825, the American Tract Society distributed an estimated 35 million tracts, Bibles, and Christian books. Along with the American Sunday-School Union, it was one of several benevolent societies that distributed publications and reprints widely across the nation. Her first tract, “Can I Attend the Theatre?” came out around 1868; sections were published separately as “The Devil’s Ground” in the New York Observer and “The Way to the Pit” in the Chicago-based Advance. Augusta’s invective sizzled in “The Devil’s Ground,” in which she labeled the stage “the school and hot-bed of vice,” and called on “every advocate of morality to arouse himself to counteract and neutralize the evil, to arrest the tide of corruption rushing over the land.” The second tract, “Can I Play Cards?” belonged to the early 1870s; the extract “Card-Playing Christians” appeared in the Evangelical Repository during the spring of 1874. She cautioned congregants that they risked expulsion from the Episcopal Church for cards and gambling, and warned parents, “If you wish your children to be ignorant, idle, and dead to religion, permit them to play with cards.”47 Augusta was something of a religious snob, a Victorian WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), who looked down on Roman Catholics. During the westward expansion of the nation, many East Coast Protestants worried that Catholicism would dominate the new Western territories.48 They

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argued that the Catholic Church would attempt to assume control over family structure, school instruction, and civic government. During the 1830s and ’40s, Samuel Morse and his brothers used their New York Observer to publish fanatical columns on this subject that were later reprinted. Morse and others argued that American Catholics were ruled by Rome and this dangerous “American Popery [was] uncontrolled by Americans . . . [and] managed in a foreign country by a foreign power for political purposes.” Jesuits were Morse’s particular targets as “foreign agents of Austria” without loyalty to American policy, while holding “dangerous power unparalleled in any Protestant sect.”49 The Browne family had been associated with the Morse brothers since the 1840s through the National Academy of Design and the New York Observer. Whether or not because of their influence, Augusta shared many of their opinions. During the Irish famine, virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric grew even louder as legions of desperate immigrants were depicted as filthy, brawling drunkards. She launched a vicious attack on Roman Catholicism in “Romanism among Us” (1869), in the Advance, and amplified her remarks in the New York Observer article “Are We to Have a St. Jonathan?” (1878), after John McCloskey of New York was named the first Catholic cardinal from the United States. Much as “Paddy” signified an Irishman, “Jonathan” was used during the mid-century as euphemism for a New Englander or a Yankee. Augusta blasted, “It is a cause of serious regret that so few of the clergy of any denomination now see fit to interest themselves in exposing the Romish heresy, and to explain to their people its antagonism to the doctrines of the Apostles and the pure early Church.” She repeated oft-told rumors of “secret baptism of Protestant children” by “bigoted nurses,” “the crafty mercies of Romish schools,” dying Protestants unable to protest being given the Catholic last rites, and the “machinations of Jesuits” who “swarm in our midst.”50 Augusta continued to produce a steady stream of religious articles during her final years. She dwelled on faith and hope for salvation, but her essays maintained a conservative slant. In “Is the Fire of Hell Material, or Immaterial?” she took on what she regarded as dangerous heresies emerging from new scientific theories such as “researches into ‘Darwinism,’ or ‘Evolution,’ or such-like trash.” The pulpit, she continued, “is not a theological playground on which to dandle the puppets of a whimsical or puerile imagination; it is a watch-tower, from whence the cry should continually resound, ‘Flee from the wrath to come!’”51 In response to her life experience, Augusta chose to cling without question to the tenets of her faith and

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to stand up for them. Even in her own time this musician-turned-writer was never taken as seriously as she wished in her essays on theater, card playing, churchmen, and Protestant church music. Along with many other anti-Catholics, she exaggerated the role of Protestant believers in America, writing, “It is to our shame that as a nation we make no formal profession of our Protestantism . . . to which the land owes its glory and progress.”52 Despite such overblown rhetoric, Augusta contributed money and effort to beneficial social services and causes that were organized and conducted by the women of Protestant denominations.53 Although the composer was but a minor author, her writings are valuable artifacts of their time. Her publications in popular literary genres reveal a bright, opinionated individual tempted to explore her talents of expression yet gripped by tenets of her Christian faith. Augusta Browne’s essays and stories can sound both sentimental and preachy, yet they are exemplary of an American who regarded herself as serious and up to date, while remaining faithful to her Christian and cultural traditions. Her religious tendencies and social correctness were more pragmatic than priggish in her younger years, when they were essential to the conduct necessary to maintain her work as a teacher of young women and children. Widowhood and war refocused her writing away from fiction. She evolved into a forceful writer for conservative Protestant views. Her writing might be most enjoyable when she engaged in affected hyperbole for satire or humor. She sometimes reflected common Victorian attitudes that were smug, patronizing, or elitist, but, at her best, she interwove substance and spirited style.

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Chapter Twelve

Contributions to Music Journalism When Augusta Browne published her first essays on music in 1845, there were no comparable Englishwomen writing music journalism.1 Augusta’s only model may have been Margaret Fuller, the pathbreaking New England intellectual who published concert reviews as early as 1841 in the transcendentalist periodical the Dial. Beginning in 1844 Fuller reported on music events and the general arts in her columns for the New York Tribune. Horace Greeley started his daily Tribune on April 10, 1841, just a few weeks before the Browne family relocated to New York City from Philadelphia. When Fuller went to Europe in 1846 as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, she wrote about the operas that she attended. Unlike Fuller’s discussion of concert performances, Augusta immediately established the style of topical arts piece that would characterize her music journalism with a meandering collection of “Musical Thoughts,” soon followed by “The Music of America” and “The Divine Origin of Music.” Although Fuller found that symphonic music—especially that of Beethoven (whom she called “hero,” “Liberator,” and “democratic king”)— best embodied her conception of harmony as a model for society, she had the greatest praise, like Augusta, for Handel’s Messiah as an embodiment of Christian faith. Fuller upheld the power of music to uplift the spirits and to erase physical pain or psychological suffering; and by extension she thought that it could heal the suffering and social divisions of Americans.2 Thus Fuller’s belief in music as “a tool of social reform,” and “a moral force that could harmonize social and economic rifts” went far beyond Augusta’s ideals of music for spiritual uplift.3 The transcendentalist writer conceived of symphonic harmony as a model for national harmony. She envisioned that,

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just as in an orchestral symphony in which disparate sounds and instruments coalesce into a harmonic whole, a community could come together as one. A decade later—Fuller having died in the shipwreck of the Elizabeth near Fire Island in 1850—Augusta was the only essayist on music cited in a list of two hundred “American Female Writers” in the Lady’s Almanac for 1854.4 Augusta’s opinions about the arts fell within the continuum expressed by her better-known male contemporaries, but her views were not borrowed; rather, they emerged from her childhood musical training and life experience. Common ground and musical values shared with male peers demonstrated nuances rather than differences of opinion. Her beliefs did not shift, nor did they develop; indeed, they remained resolute and static across the years. Augusta devoted her efforts to revising and refining her statements. This chapter will explore extracts from the composer’s articles and how they correspond to significant themes in music journalism in mid-century America. Early nineteenth-century press reports about concerts or fledgling music organizations offered descriptions and words of encouragement. Such concert reviews were more valuable as chronicles of urban culture in New York or Boston than as evaluation. Nineteenth-century journalists frequently used their columns “to influence public taste, and to teach the public about music.”5 By the 1840s, explicit critiques of concerts emerged in the columns of Henry C. Watson and Richard Grant White.6 Augusta received the embarrassing sting of Watson’s rebukes more than once, and the chronicler Vera Brodsky Lawrence notes “the murderous atmosphere of mutual hostility that pervaded the New York journalist community.”7 But by mid-century the predominant voices of music criticism in the United States belonged to two Americans born in 1813: William Henry Fry and John Sullivan Dwight. Fry grew up in a Philadelphia newspaper family and studied music with the French-born Leopold Meignen, a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire. After additional study in Europe, Fry moved to New York to write for the New York Tribune. Between 1846 and 1852, Fry served in Paris as the foreign critic for the Tribune. After his return to New York, he gave a famous series of music lectures in 1854 that Augusta may have attended, although there is no evidence one way or the other. Fry loved opera and composed several of his own, but his work suffered from comparison to European music of the day. Nineteenth-century American composers of symphonies and operas fell into the impossible position of being judged as too American, not American enough, too European, or not European enough. Fry advocated

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for a declaration of independence from European domination despite his predilection for the musical styles of the Continental masters. He tried to balance these tendencies in compositions that evoked grand American subjects, following the model of the Hudson River School of painters. Niagara: A Symphony was composed for the Musical Congress at New York’s Crystal Palace on June 15, 1854, but the work was never performed because it called for fifteen hundred performers. Fry thought big and composed on a grand scale, far larger than anything Augusta attempted. He opined that American composers had to prove themselves at a time when institutions such as “Opera Houses and Musical Societies [were] worse than useless so far [as] they foster American Art.”8 He advocated for English-language American opera, and he blamed the United States for not supporting and cultivating its composers. Fry espoused vocal music and opera as the most significant channels of musical expression because he felt that the power of sound was enhanced when combined with text and drama. The effect of even purely instrumental music was heightened when it expressed scenes or stories, an approach often called program (or programmatic) music. Augusta had already published many articles and her first book when the former Unitarian minister, New England transcendentalist, and Brook Farm resident John Sullivan Dwight brought out the first issue of Dwight’s Journal of Music in 1852. She never mentioned this publication; when Browne referred to Dr. Dwight in her writing, she meant the Reverend Timothy Dwight, an early president of Yale College and a noted writer of hymn texts. But J. S. Dwight had been writing music reviews in transcendentalist periodicals for more than a decade when he started his journal. Dwight agreed with Fry that the power of music was the ultimate expression of feeling; however, he believed that abstract music without text or story—known as absolute music—could convey emotion better than music tied to words. The highest emotions were inexpressible in words, but music could convey a higher, ideal world. German symphonic composers had advanced furthest toward this goal, in his opinion, and Beethoven’s symphonies stood at the apex of music and expression. Songs to entertain the family or piano pieces to amaze an audience held no value for him. Like his transcendentalist colleague Margaret Fuller, Dwight believed that Beethoven could solve America’s problems, for example, “in 1846 he held up Beethoven’s Ninth [symphony] as an alternative to the Mexican War.”9 In the first issue of his music journal, Dwight pronounced German orchestral music as “the True, the ever beautiful, the Divine.” Dwight’s influence outlasted Fry’s by almost twenty years after the latter critic succumbed to tuberculosis in 1864.

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Like Dwight, Augusta may have regarded herself as “a severe, friendly voice to point out steadfastly the models of the True, the beautiful, the Divine,” although her models were not necessarily identical to Dwight’s.10 Both firmly believed in music’s refining role in American life. Like Dwight, she admired the German triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the last of whom she revered but also termed “that prince of eccentrics.”11 She agreed that Beethoven’s orchestral music included “masterworks of power and passion,” but oratorio, especially Handel’s sacred oratorios, represented the pinnacle of music for her because of their explicit message of faith.12 The Boston-based Dwight was neither a performing musician nor a practicing businessman, but he became the nineteenth-century gatekeeper of elite musical taste. He and Augusta concurred that the music of minstrel shows was degrading and was no reflection of authentic songs of African Americans. They adamantly agreed on the need to cultivate musical education among Americans. Dwight praised the training of instructors to teach music at the 1853 Normal Musical Institute in New York City. He believed that Americans would embrace the masterworks of European composers once exposed to their works in suitable concerts. But Dwight’s aim to raise the musical taste of the wider American public was never fulfilled. While his advocacy encouraged concertgoing in American cities and towns, concert fare in the second half of the century continued the typical US potpourri of intersecting styles and genres, rather than the “highest class of compositions.”13 Then as now, popular music and its supporting industry swayed the public more than orchestras and symphonies. Concert music often relied on the support of star performers or a stage spectacle to captivate an audience. Dwight wanted no compromise of his cultural ideal in which instrumental music alone, not its performers, stood at the summit. Such a narrow view did not match Augusta’s experience as a performer, teacher, and composer. However much she extolled the power of oratorio to move souls, Augusta knew that she needed to balance education with comprehensibility and recreation in her music publications. Another journalist at the helm of a music magazine was Richard Storrs Willis, whose New York Musical World cultivated a breadth of material, including Augusta’s essays and music. Willis had studied in Germany and was inclined to Dwight’s values and reverence for German music, but he admired Fry’s bold thinking, even if he did not always praise the outcome. Willis was a practical musician who composed songs and sacred music not unlike Augusta’s. Her attitudes fell not far from Willis’s along the continuum between Fry’s and Dwight’s poles. In the ongoing conversation about Dwight’s advocacy

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of abstract instrumental music and Fry’s preference for programmatic music, Augusta seemed closer to the latter in works that she praised in her columns, such as Félicien David’s symphonic ode Le désert (see chapter 10). But only a few of her keyboard works, such as Chant d’amour, were programmatic. “The power of association is immense,” she wrote in her mature years, and association was the key to the power of music.14 In multiple essays, Augusta reiterated the strength of “old songs, the precious music of the heart,” to move the soul to joy or to sorrow, and to compel a person to march, to remember, or to yearn.15 In the twenty-first century, research studies on brain, music, and memory continue to demonstrate that the memory of music remains deeply implanted in our brains even when speech or mental focus seems to be absent. As Augusta expressed in her very first essay, one could “Waken up the memories of the aged with ‘Auld Lang-syne,’ or ‘John Anderson,’ and they will wander back [in] time.”16 She wrote, “Much of the new music is beautiful, sublime, embodying the spirit-harmony of genius, but still it finds no echo in our memories; it lacks the thrilling charm of association, for which we so cherish the lays of yore.”17 David Browne had also expressed the power of music, writing, “A mournful tone, when accompanied with suitable words, affects us with sadness; a sprightly air will inspire us with joy; a tender and plaintive strain will melt us into love and pity . . . and upon this principle it is that the science of Music is founded.”18 Whereas the “science of music” or “scientific music” usually referred to the process of composing using traditional European principles of harmonization, voice leading, counterpoint, and form, David’s explanation also embraced its affective dimension. Dwight called music the “language of the emotions” as well as the “natural language of Sentiment.”19 Augusta referred to music as the “beloved science” but also as the “universal language” and “key of the heart,” alluding to the power of music to move the sentiments. Abolitionists of the era recognized the power of music to stir the emotions, and they made use of the sentimental and political songs of the Hutchinson Family as tools of moral suasion to further their cause. In a column in the Brooklyn Times, Whitman echoed the common faith in the power of music to enhance “moral purity, amiability, and refinement” and to substitute “all that is beautiful and artistic” for “the grosser manifestations of the passions.”20 From a plateau of knowledge and experience, Augusta liked to view music as a metaphor for earth and creation, citing harmony as the “fundamental and all governing principle of nature.”21 She developed the notions of harmony and musical composition into fanciful metaphors, writing, “Life is full of music. Plain every-day transactions may be compared to simple concords,

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disputes and troubles to discords. . . . Changes and revolutions are all modulations,” she continued before concluding, “The life of one day may be likened unto a perfect musical composition.”22 In 1851 Augusta expanded the analogies of life and musical elements in even greater detail. She constructed an elaborate comparison of life to a “grand fugue, strict or free, according to the governance of circumstances; a fugue of many parts, each calling forth with unfailing precision its answer, and countersubject.” She linked emotions and life experiences to such fugal devices as diminution, retrograde, deceptive cadences, pedal points, and stretto “until the momentous performance of life is terminated in a grand perfect cadence.” After this elaborate fancy, she declared, “Life is in truth the subsiding prelude which announces the grand performance of existence . . . the rolling cycles of eternity,” a concept that paraphrased the words of an ode in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Nouvelles méditations poétiques (1823).23 Lamartine’s poem remains familiar because of Franz Liszt’s use of the ode in the preface to his symphonic poem Les préludes (1854). Augusta’s 1851 paraphrase of the same poem reflects her knowledge of European culture and literature. She was aware of current music journalism of the time and even preceded some better-known writers in expressing ideas of the era.

“Music—the Language of Heaven” Beginning with her first words published in a national periodical, Augusta extolled music as a divine language bestowed on mankind by the Almighty. She sprinkled Old and New Testament references as the basis of authority: the song of Miriam, the harp of David, music sounded in the temple, and holy song in heaven according to the revelation to Saint John. Her essay “Musical Thoughts” closed with the entreaty, “Music! celestial visitant! So familiarize us with thy high and holy language in this lower sphere that we may be the more purified and prepared to join in the ‘new song’ in that home above, from whence thou hast thy source.”24 Augusta maintained her own exalted prose style of “high and holy language” in a string of articles about sacred music across the years. For four decades, she proclaimed the significant role of music in the church and advocated for congregational singing as an essential part of the service, writing, “Sacred song is not a mere accessory of worship—it is worship.”25 She linked that practice with “the Savior himself [who] used music in conducting the worship of his disciples.”26 Many American musicians of the era argued that music was a unique and valuable means of uplifting mankind and elevating the spirit toward God.27

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Augusta wrote, “[The] love of music is implanted in man for a far greater purpose than a mere gratification of sense; it is to whisper to him of a higher and spiritual life,” and she praised music’s power of “arousing, melting, and refining the soul of man.”28 Her essays commented, sometimes with humor but always with fervor, on what constituted appropriate music for church services and the proper roles of the organist, choir, and soloists. She often cited Martin Luther’s words, “Next to theology, I give place to music” and relished Luther’s assertions that “The devil hates music,” and “music is intolerable to demons.” To cap it off, “the grand argument in favor of the Divine origin of music is the fact that there is no music in hell.”29 Heaven, she insisted, is “the land of immortal song . . . that blest home where music is the atmosphere.”30 She wrote of the testimony by the dying who heard strains of that otherworldly music, and even of mourners hearing “celestial music above a deathbed.”31 Congregational singing of psalms and hymns was “practicing for heaven,” because “the soul must be attuned to the songs of heaven before joining the celestial choir.”32 Many of Augusta’s later articles retread the same material in slight revisions of earlier essays. Some sentences went unchanged from “Divine Origin of Music” (1845) to “Musical Reminiscences” (1850), “Random Strains in Prose” (1851), “A Musical Revival” (1875), and “Benedic Anima Mea” (1880). Her principles never wavered across the decades. Sometimes she embroidered a thought with more purple prose or with more emphatic language. Theme and variations informed Augusta’s religious prose just as theme and variations structured her piano solos. After the Civil War, her tone became more strident in articles such as “The Abuse of Church Music” and “A Musical Revival.” Her opinions may seem traditional to modern readers, but she emerged as a pilgrim afire with a mission. She proclaimed that the nation needed a “revival of religion which shall sweep through the Church, enkindling and developing its singing talent,” because “praise is the noblest exercise of devotion.” This revival would rely on “a good organ and organist,” a choir and congregation that joined in singing heartily, and a ministry and committee who would “select suitable ministrants of the musical service.”33 Although the clergy and church musicians held responsibility for cultivating music in the service, every Christian needed to give voice in worship.

National Music The thrilling power of national tunes on citizens and soldiers alike was a favorite topic in Augusta’s essays from her first publication in 1845:

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Every country has its national music, sacred to itself; but what melodies can ever equal in pathos the Irish and Scottish? You may thrill the soul of an Irishman with “Gramachree,” or “Savourna Deelish” until his heart throbs and his eyes moisten; and you may thrill his soles with “Patrick’s Day,” or “Paddy Carey,” until the pounding of his brogues on the clay floor of his cabin may be heard nearly a mile off.34

The United States had its own repertoire of “soul-stirring airs.” She cited “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” as “grand auxiliaries to bravery” and “engines of tremendous power” to Americans. From national songs to the battle music and tattoos of the military was but a short leap for the essayist. The topic of national music turned up in many of her articles, never more poignantly than during the Civil War, when she brought together her strongest statements about national music and the military at the end of 1863, following the massacre at Gettysburg. “Music,” she wrote, “is often the only pleasure left the noble soldiers, who, on the altar of their adored country, have voluntarily sacrificed, not merely all the luxuries but even all the comforts of life.”35 Like Margaret Fuller, Augusta believed in the power of music to heal the body and soul, and she cited William Henry’s prescription of “one fine band a day” to help soldiers recovering in hospital.36 Her childhood with a former captain in the Irish volunteer militia gave her a keen awareness of and delight in military music. Not only is music “an indispensable adjunct to every military movement” from reveille to combat but the “marvelous effects of music on armies marching to battle are well attested, historical facts.”37 She related the following humorous anecdote about the power of the bagpipe to Scotsmen: At the battle of Waterloo, among a host of others, there was taken captive a Highland piper. Napoleon, struck with his mountain costume and muscular frame, requested him to play on the instrument which he had heard sounded delightfully amid the glens and mountains of Scotland. “Play a pibroch,” said the mighty captain. The Highlander played it. “Play a march.” He did so. “Play a retreat,” continued Napoleon. “Na, na,” said the Highlander, “I never learned to play a retreat!”38

The power of music cut both ways, however, because “the very men who, accompanied by martial music, would valiantly take their places in the very

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brunt of the battle, would be utterly unable to resist . . . the softest murmur of ‘Home, sweet home.’”39 Soldiers needed the means to face pain, sorrow, and defeat as well as to overcome fear. Thus “the more the heavenly influence of music is disseminated in the army, the better. Nothing has so felicitous and electric an effect on the soldier as music, whether secular or sacred. It has power to make the desponding spirit glow with holy exultation.”40 During the early 1840s, Augusta incorporated traditional and patriotic tunes into her keyboard bouquets, but her music compositions after 1850 did not make use of American songs or subjects. She was aware of American nationalist works, such as music by Anthony Philip Heinrich, whose Log Cabin House cantata had thrilled her as a little girl.41 The nationalists or “nativists” were those who intentionally incorporated indigenous North American elements in their compositions. Some American composers focused on achieving an independent individual style that was not rooted in European norms. In her music journalism, Augusta did not enter the ongoing conversation among music critics about what constituted American music or nationality in American music, even though this topic was “the central debate of the nineteenth century in the American arts—literature, painting, architecture, and music.”42 And there is no evidence that she felt anxiety about her musical identity, with its mix of Irish, British, American, and European influences. The composer did express concerns about music making in the United States. “The Music of America” (1845) was an informal series of observations on topics that concerned the author as a teacher and church musician. Augusta insisted that Americans had “enough native talent . . . but even native talent must be cultivated by competent teachers [italics original]” to bring the art to a higher level of performance, appreciation, and creation.43 The article careened from topic to topic, touching on “degrading negro comic songs” and the “higher tone” of music presented by the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston) and the Sacred Music Society (New York). She painted a humorous depiction of Yankee singing-school masters who conducted rural singing schools. Although it was intended as a comic aside, other significant points in her essay have long been ignored in favor of presenting this single paragraph as the moral outrage of a snobbish society lady. The excerpt continues to be reprinted in music history and music education textbooks: The most mortifying feature and grand cause of the low state of scientific music among us is the prevalence of common Yankee singing schools, so called.

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We, of course, can have no allusion to the educated professors of vocal music from New England, but to the genuine Yankee singing masters, who profess to make an accomplished amateur in one month, and a regular professor of music (not in seven years, but) in one quarter, and at the expense to the initiated person usually of one dollar. Hundreds of country idlers, too lazy or too stupid for farmers or mechanics, “go to singing school for a spell,” get diplomas! from others scarcely better qualified than themselves, and then with their brethren, the far-famed “Yankee pedlars,” itinerate to all parts of the land, to corrupt the taste and pervert the judgment of the unfortunate people who for want of better have to put up with them. [italics original]

Her concern over the “low state of scientific music among us” was not an isolated assessment. Only weeks earlier, a Boston monthly, the American Journal of Music, had declared, “That Music as a Science takes no higher stand than it now does in this country is not to be wondered at, when we consider the utter incompetency of those who undertake to teach it.”44 “Scientific” instruction was available in many American towns from musicians trained abroad, as Lowell Mason had pursued with Frederick Abel in Savannah, Georgia. Mason and his circle had published hymnbooks with “scientific” rules of harmonization since the 1820s. By 1840 their musical conventions were instructing rising teachers and spreading their scientific hymn style through the Northeast. Augusta referred deferentially to this circle as “the educated professors of vocal music from New England,” but their conventions and normal musical institutes may not have measured up to her notions of study. “The requirements of a regular musical education are numerous and difficult . . . [before] the title of musician be fairly earned,” she wrote, “at least, thus have I been taught to believe.”45 Augusta admired “scientific” music, meaning European music foremost, but not exclusively nor reflexively. In “The Music of America,” she praised the hymn tunes of William Billings and Oliver Holden as well as the oratorios of Handel and Haydn. In other essays, Augusta demonstrated that she enjoyed American popular songs, patriotic airs, and military band music. To paraphrase a well-known passage from music criticism of roughly the same era written by Robert Schumann, Augusta respected both “the aristocracy of mind and the republic of opinion.”46 She welcomed popular music that did not violate her sense of music’s mission to be uplifting, refining, and faithaffirming. Augusta was democratic in concept but specific in opposition when she considered something vulgar, trite, or of poor quality. She believed that good music would always have positive moral effects.

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Augusta called for a “musical reformation” that would begin in New England, presumably led by the “educated professors” of music there. She noted that one must progress “beyond Jack Horner” in order to appreciate Milton, and the same applied to “do, re, mi,” in order to advance in the “heavenly art” of music. She emphasized the need for “capable persons” rather than “one-fingered organists” as church musicians to cultivate congregational singing and select suitable music for Protestant worship. The offquoted paragraph on singing schools made but one point among many in her wide-ranging essay. When Augusta was irked, she wrote with humor or satire. Not only did humor offer effective persuasion but it was a useful strategy for an authoress, since angry, strident opinion was anathema for a Victorian-era woman. In this essay, Augusta attempted to use a light tone to convey her opinions with a distinctive voice, but she has been regarded as serious when her approach was satirical. The over-the-top reaction, “Cobbling and Music! We just ask how any musical nerves can stand that?” was an expression of exaggerated hand-wringing to make her point. She continued, “But jest or earnest, this is a true specimen of the class of gentlemen who are busily employed in disseminating a music taste.” The key phrase in “The Music of America” may be “jest or earnest,” by which she meant jest and earnest. Her essay began with a serious but straightforward tone. The middle part contained mock outrage infused with sarcasm; and the final paragraphs expressed hope for reform and progress. Reprints of the text of the “Music of America” began just a few weeks after publication in the Columbian Magazine. The essay was commended and excerpted in an anonymous article that assailed the “humbuggery of making teachers of music in ten days,” in Hartley W. Day’s American Journal of Music.47 Day used his journal to attack Lowell Mason, the powerful Boston teacher who had once been his mentor. Day and others made complaints that led to a six-month suspension of duties for Mason in 1845.48 In February 1848 “The Music of America” appeared in full in the Musician and General Intelligencer, a Cincinnati periodical edited by the Reverend Augustus Fillmore. Although the Columbian Magazine received proper credit at the end of the article, Augusta’s name was misspelled without the final “e,” the punctuation had been overhauled, and some spelling was altered (e.g., Haydn misspelled “Hayden”; the British spelling “quire” replaced choir). These variants make it easy to trace the Cincinnati source when it was used in later borrowings. The Boston Musical Gazette quickly reprinted the Cincinnati version of Augusta’s article.49 This periodical was published by

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A. N. and James C. Johnson, brothers who had been Mason followers during the early 1840s before they parted ways with him in a disagreement about choral methods.50 “The Music of America” went from the East Coast to the western frontier and back and was copied by both advocates and detractors of Mason’s teaching. The twentieth-century history of Augusta’s article on nineteenth-century American musical life continued in 1933 with an excerpt in George Pullen Jackson’s White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands.51 Jackson rejected the “genteel” sentiments and elitist embrace of European craft in favor of the vitality of the shape-note tradition in rural revival singing. He constructed an opposition between Mason’s disciples of “Better Music” and a rural tradition of performance and composition, cultivated in part by revival meetings and singing schools. Jackson was a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, located adjacent to the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, where the only surviving volume of the Cincinnati Musician and General Intelligencer is held. Thus Jackson had access to the complete article in the Cincinnati reprint, and accordingly identified her as “Augusta Brown.” Jackson never indicated that the Cincinnati article was taken from the Columbian Magazine. Not having a complete text, and not knowing the original source, later music historians relied on Jackson’s excerpts. They had only a single paragraph about the “mortifying” and “common Yankee singing schools” from which to judge the author, and they took her comic diatribe as outrage. In America’s Music from the Pilgrims to the Present, the musicologist Gilbert Chase introduced a chapter on shape-note singing titled “The Fasola Folk,” in which he borrowed Jackson’s excerpt from “The Music of America” authored by “a certain Miss Augusta Brown.” “Pointing to the musical superiority of Europe,” Chase hammered, “Miss Brown voiced her opinion as to the causes of America’s inferiority in this field.”52 Augusta never used the words inferior, inferiority, superior, or superiority in “The Music of America.” Chase further accused Browne of an “outburst of snobbishness, so typical of the genteel tradition.”53 Augusta’s persona was virtually hijacked during the twentieth century, as different critics passed along snippets of her prose—without any knowledge of her life or context for the quotation—in support of their own historical interpretations or cultural agendas.54 Chase’s phrase “the Inferiority of Yankee music” continues to be repeated and passed along as though Augusta had written these words. Most significant for music pedagogy in the United States, this excerpt lives on in A History of American Music Education (1992) and multiple editions of Music Education: Source Readings from Ancient Greece to Today.55 After more than

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thirty years, in his third edition of America’s Music, Chase dropped the Yankee singing-school anecdote in view of the very different portrait suggested by Judith Tick’s research and assessment of Augusta as a professional musician. Yet Chase added new confusion with his revision. Discussing Augusta’s music in a chapter titled “The Genteel Tradition,” Chase cited “one of her most impressive songs, ‘Wake, Lady Mine’ (1845), which she placed in the category of ‘parlor arias,’ as contrasted with the more common ballads.”56 Augusta never used the expression “parlor aria,” although from Chase’s prose, one would assume that the composer labeled “Wake, Lady Mine” as such. Tick supplied the expression “parlor aria” for a few of Augusta’s more elaborate songs, such as “The Warlike Dead in Mexico.”57 In her dissertation, Tick noted that “Wake, Lady Mine” was a “slight strophic song” with an undemanding accompaniment.58 “Wake, Lady Mine” is indeed one of Augusta’s simplest songs—published once in a magazine and never as a separate sheet-music imprint—but this twenty-one-measure ditty gained luster from Chase’s remarks, and online reiterations continue to name “Wake, Lady Mine” as Augusta’s signature work.59 It would not be the last instance of the composer-author’s afterlife being haunted by the reiteration of misinformation.

Minstrelsy Augusta Browne spoke out against the insulting lyrics of minstrel songs from her earliest articles. Although acts in blackface had played in New York City theaters from the late 1820s, minstrel bands such as Christy’s Minstrels and the Virginia Minstrels gained wide popularity in the mid-1840s. During 1845 she rebuked minstrel songwriters in not one but three separate essays in the Columbian Magazine: The melodies of the “olden time” . . . should be familiarized to the rising generation, and the present race of negro airs, with their low and demoralizing doggerels, banished from all society. (“Musical Thoughts,” 69) An English paper some time since in reference to the silly and degrading negro comic songs originating in this country, remarked, that “if they were a sample of American music, the national taste must be very elevated.” A most cutting sarcasm; would that we could say an undeserved one. (“The Music of America,” 37)

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A good musical bonfire is much needed of quadrilles, polkas (the vile polkas), negro songs, &c., for the double purpose of illumination, and of purifying the harmonic atmosphere. (“The Divine Origin of Music,” 220)

Her objection to the words of minstrel songs was even more specific in an 1851 column: “Who, in his rational mind, would, could, for one moment, give ear unto the vulgar and oftentimes profane jargon of the negro songs . . . were it not for the many truly charming melodies attached?”60 She recognized the original and characteristically American attributes in the “truly charming melodies,” such as syncopated rhythms and catchy motives in songs like “Old Dan Tucker,” but she provided no details. Whether songs, dances, gems, and melodies were called “Ethiopian,” “negro,” “African,” or “sable,” they were usually written by white composers during the antebellum era, and many of the minstrel tunes sounded no different than the melodies encountered in a host of other songs and dances of the day. Her 1854 essay, “Negro Minstrelsy,” was published in the Home Journal on January 14, followed within days by reprints in the Christian Advocate and Journal and the Anti-Slavery Bugle.61 Augusta began the article with regrets that “we have no censors appointed to regulate our popular diversions and amusements, and banish those which are injurious to refinement, purity of mind, or improvement.” If it were so, she continued, “it is certain, [we would] blush at the association of the name of music with negro minstrelsy.” She invoked the glorious poems and songs of medieval minstrels and troubadours before resuming the thread begun in “The Music of America” regarding the “silly and degrading negro and comic songs originating in this country.” By this time, Stephen Foster had also acknowledged that the lyrics of many “Ethiopian songs” were “trashy and really offensive,” and he sought to transform the language in his self-titled plantation songs and other parlor music.62 Augusta asserted that minstrel songs did not present the music of African Americans and that the lyrics were a hostile insult to people of color: Why they are called negro-songs is a matter of marvel: the term is a libel on the whole colored race, who ought to rise en masse to defend their respectability. No one at all acquainted with the unique and ofttimes real poetry of genuine negro nature—with its pathos, humor, ambition and, when properly instructed, fervid piety—could, for one moment, suppose the doggerels attached to these melodies to be correct delineations of negro character.63

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The composer cited the elevated style of educated Negro oratory, a style antithetical to the uncouth verses that she abhorred in the lyrics of popular minstrel songs. She believed that vulgar speech and habits resulted from listening to minstrelsy, writing, “To the present prevalence of negro songs, none can deny, is attributable much of the slang and low breeding found even among circles where better might be hoped.” She worried that “negro-minstrelsy [is] . . . exercising a more extensive and injurious influence upon society at large than many would imagine, not only as regards the progress of musical science, but also of morals and religion.”64 Whereas people of education and culture had the wisdom to ignore such tasteless material, Augusta feared for “a more numerous class,—the thoughtless and the very young, who are attracted by anything mirthful, and which demands no toll from the intellect.” She continued with the following anecdote, “a new version of the history of the Creation, taken from the musicbook of a young lady” (could this have been a student?): Dey first made the earth, and den dey made the sky, And den dey hung it up above and left it dar to dry; Den dey made the stars out of niggar wenches’ eyes. To give a little light when the moon don’t rise.

This example demonstrated how “through the medium of amusement, pernicious lessons may be conveyed with double facility.” She warned, “Instill this elegant lyric into the memory of a child . . . and sacred truths will henceforth be associated in his mind with low burlesque. . . . [T]he stain thus imprinted on the soul is ineffacible.” She admonished teachers to exercise appropriate selection in instruction, writing, “No musician who has a due veneration for his art—or, indeed, for good manners—could voluntarily introduce one of them to a pupil.”65 In “Negro Minstrelsy” she rejected any argument that popular opinion justified the standing of the songs of “this negro-mania,” writing, “Popularity is not the only gauge of merit or genius.” Once-popular airs of nymphs and shepherds had “passed away, unregretted—in our day of superior science,” only to be replaced by minstrel songs with “a buffoonery and profanity that force the former ditties to bury their diminished heads in the remotest corner of the lumber-room.” Relaxation and recreation did not excuse vulgarity or trashy entertainment; rather, she argued, “does not the whole universe of nature, art, science, afford sufficient scope for the pleasure and gratification of young and old, simple and learned. . . . Our pleasures should have

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a refining tendency.” She exhorted newspaper readers, “We should strive to raise the intellect, not to debase it.” The Home Journal preceded her essay with the comment, “Perhaps the author of the following communication takes her subject a little too seriously, and perhaps not. In either case, the subject of popular amusement is one of the great importance and is here treated with the ability and earnestness which its importance demands.”66 This antebellum assessment of minstrelsy remains an important document of its time. Her opinions represented the feelings of other musicians and critics, such as Henry Watson, who wrote, “[C]omic negro songs can receive no notice in the columns of the New World, for we are sure than none of our fair readers would commit such an outrage upon good taste as to place them upon their piano-forte.”67 As late as 1875, the New York Observer applauded the music publishers Biglow and Main for “doing a good work in publishing hymns and tunes of permanent value, which ought to supersede much of the trifling music taken from the negro minstrelsy of the day.”68 Augusta addressed the subject again in 1853 in her serialized essay, “Musical Sentiments”: Polkas, negro songs, and such like, those pernicious banes of musicians, have, we blush to acknowledge, obtained a far greater dominion over the fancies of the populace, than any other—shall we call it music—published. Go where you will—always excepting refined intellectual society—and you are very apt to be entertained with senseless dances, or some of the Ethiopian gems, rendered in a patois that a well-bred negro would indignantly disavow, but which not a few of the would-be elegantes anxiously cultivate as an enviable accomplishment.69

Clearly, she did not equate minstrelsy, “negro songs,” or “banjo songs” with the music making of African Americans. Minstrel performances were impersonations and caricatures of African Americans performed by white men in blackface; not until after the Civil War did black performers begin to tour in minstrel troops. White American men composed, published, and staged the bulk of this repertoire. Augusta recognized that the commercial music industry exploited racial stereotypes that relied on belittling people of color. By calling out the offensive language used in the songs, she took on the role of a prophet of political correctness a century ahead of the wider American consciousness. But Augusta’s statements have not been reprinted as often as the responses to them, misrepresented over time as her own words. A few

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weeks after the composer’s essay appeared in the Musical World and Times, letters to the editor prompted him to write on September 24, 1853, “The following two sides of the question came to us simultaneously by mail.” One side of “The Negro Melody Question” came from Charleston, South Carolina, in which the unnamed author urged The Musical World to advocate for better taste in music: By reference to . . . the second article on Musical Sentiments, by Augusta Browne, deprecatory of Ethiopian songs as so generally introduced into parlors . . . “Wait for the Wagon,” and such other melodious trash, are in a fair way to cast all sentimental music in the shade. It is your province to reform the taste for music.

The second anonymous letter, from Point Coupee, Louisiana, disdained such bourgeois refinement: I see Miss Augusta Browne sneers at negro melodies. Let her compose one which, like “Old Folks at Home,” shall be sung, played, and whistled from Maine to California, in four months after it is published, and I will concede her right to ridicule them if she likes. I don’t like the negro words myself, and wish you would put [George Pope] Morris, S[tephen] C. Foster, and [James G.] Maeder up to a partnership, Foster to compose the airs, Morris to write the songs, and Maeder to harmonize them.70

The responses from these anonymous, aggrieved readers were reprinted in John Tasker Howard’s 1934 biography of Foster.71 Like the phrase “the inferiority of Yankee music,” the remarks have been passed along carelessly. By 1980, the musicologist Nicholas E. Tawa asserted, “She wrote that minstrel music had to be considered ‘melodic trash’ that threatens ‘in a fair way to cast all sentimental music in the shade.’”72 The sentence citing the mounting popularity and threat of “melodious trash” came not from Augusta, but from the anonymous Charleston letter to the Musical World. The reader’s opinion has been misquoted as well as wrongly attributed. Augusta rarely returned to the subject of blackface minstrelsy after the Civil War but moved on to her preferred topics of evangelism and morality. In 1865 she lamented among concertgoers the “vulgar horde of the ‘shoddy,’ who infinitely prefer a negro song to a gem of Mozart.”73 She bristled in 1880, after she heard “a negro ditty, strongly suggestive of banjo and bones, chorused lustily . . . as a prelude to the Sunday evening service.”74 Her

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judgment never changed when it came to the inappropriateness of popular music—whether from the opera house or the minstrel stage—in Protestant church music.

Music and the City A lifelong city dweller, Augusta enjoyed less opportunity to savor nature in solitude than many Americans. The wildest venue in her day-to-day life was Brooklyn’s “picturesquely beautiful Green-wood Cemetery,” where she could experience the “summit of a sun-kissed mount” or the “drooping foliage of a sequestered glen.”75 Railroad travel opened up the American landscape in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and New England for urbanites like Augusta during the 1840s. Farms and fields still abounded in Brooklyn and Long Island at mid-century. Rivers, canals, and the ocean were nearby. Thus, she had plenty of impressions of nature to draw on in her prose even if her day-to-day experience was embedded in the cityscape. Augusta drank in the city with eyes and ears. Instead of writing about life in the drawing room à la Jane Austen, she described the sounds emanating from the streets and coming out of residential windows. The essayist celebrated the aural tapestry that she experienced during her daily rounds going from parlor to parlor as a music teacher. “Performing in our neighborhood is like bringing coals to Newcastle,” she wrote in 1848; “We are actually haunted . . . by the votaries of Apollo.”76 The urban soundscape provided a canvas for the author to concoct back stories of the street musicians, from a homesick Swiss lad playing his accordion to organ grinders who vied to sound so out of tune that citizens would throw coins to silence them. Her compendium of antebellum city sounds embraced serenaders, student sopranos, vendors, and even the dinner horn. She triumphantly concluded the frothy romp through her part of town: If music be the food of love, a right loveable set ought we to be, for from every nook and cranny issue forth dulcet sounds. And if music be as beneficial in the cure of diseases as the ancients affirmed, then ought we to enjoy in our neighborhood the most robust health. Now, if I have not proved our neighborhood to be a most harmonious one, then have I signally failed in my endeavors. Nay, even the very fruit-mongers have a flourish to their calls while passing through our neighborhood.77

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Emily Dickinson captured something of the same tumult of sound around the cityscape in her poem “Musicians Wrestle Everywhere” (1861). Augusta offered abundant details in her eight-thousand-word article; Dickinson described a similar vibrant soundscape in three lines: “Musicians wrestle everywhere— / All day—among the crowded air / I hear the silver strife.” The composer’s music journalism could be said to include her satirical essay “The Musical Critic’s Portrait,” which mocked self-fashioned pundits in the press: “Perhaps no one endures more intense misery from mean annoyances than the artist, either musician or painter. The conceited, ignorant pseudo-critic is the grand bane of his existence.”78 The article was based on “mournful personal experience,” she wrote in the companion piece, “The Picture-Critic’s Portrait,” and warned, “This is no merely fancy portrait; the absurd and unpleasant original may be met with in nearly every concert-room and opera-house.”79 She borrowed words from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that corroborated her observations: “Man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured.” With little knowledge or ability in their chosen fields, her fictionalized critics were puffed-up dandies whose behaviors and pronouncements “[have] so often marred my enjoyments” and “whose proudest ambition it is to attract notice, no matter at whose expense.” The music critic in her caricature was named Mr. Viol, a smartly dressed gent, “bedecked in gorgeous vest of ample dimensions, cravat, and gloves of unspotted whiteness, small cabinet of diamond studs gemming his bosom. . . . [O]ur hero’s portly person is luxuriously deposited on one of the choicest cushions in the house, in full view of the assembly, out of the slightest draught of air, and in the way of several loudly remonstrant ladies of inconvenient brevity of stature, whose line of vision he totally obliterates.” When a keyboardist performs a “hurricane of sextuple chords, and insane triple chromatic runs” and then a soft passage, Mr. Viol “suddenly thunders out, with an emphatic thump of the gold-headed cane, and clap of his large paws, ‘‘Bravo! Bravo!’” After the pianist plays an encore, a stranger inquires of the pundit: “What do think of that, sir? passable, eh?” “Stuff, sir, stuff! utterly lacking in both solidity and imagination.” “Because that, that, sir,” said the stranger, raising his voice, “I grieve to inform you, is universally admitted to be the best work, the chef-d’oeuvre of your favorite Alessandro Scarlatti!”80

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This trick exposes the music critic’s ignorance because he has long praised the works of the baroque masters, despite “never in the whole course of his mortal career, has Mr. Viol heard a work of either Corelli, Scarlatti, or Lully, or a single scrap of Handel’s operas.” In the companion piece, an art connoisseur, Mr. Gamboge, tries to take advantage of a penniless artist. Gamboge travels to Europe to buy paintings in “obscure lanes and old dark shops where great works are always hid away.” He relies on the recommendation of his Italian valet, because “the lowest Italian . . . knows infinitely more about high and the great style, than the best artist among us here.”81 Neither he nor the picture critic, Mr. Carmine, can recognize an original painting amid “indifferently executed copies,” old and new. A Victorian woman could expect ridicule when she criticized a well-established figure of authority in the press. Augusta therefore took the strategy of embedding truth in exorbitant fictions. She intended these sketches of critics to amuse, but also to vent personal disagreements and vexations. In addition to her own “mournful” experience from the pen of Watson, she knew artists stung by the opinions of critics long before she married the painter J. W. B. Garrett. Reviewers exercised too much power over those who struggled to create music and art. Consumers held another kind of leverage altogether. In art as in music, the marketplace prevailed in nineteenth-century America, regardless of the “celestial coinage of the brain” that composers and artists poured into their works.82

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Chapter Thirteen

A Legacy Written into History The lives of American women musicians born before the Civil War remain largely unknown. Although Augusta Browne may be better described as an ingenious composer than a composer of genius, such minor figures may illuminate their time and place better than stories of celebrities. As Virginia Woolf put it, “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.”1 In the effort to “repopulate” the American music scene during the one hundred years from the Revolutionary War to Reconstruction, scholars are uncovering many women whose names and activities have emerged through newly digitized materials from the past: printed music, newspapers, magazines, books, personal letters, diaries, and business correspondence. These sources confirm that the American music business was a brisk commercial marketplace in which women participated as professionals and producers as well as consumers throughout the nineteenth century. Male musicians in early America needed to be jacks-of-all-musical-trades to make ends meet: they taught, sold musical goods, conducted in theaters, played in bands and orchestras, published music or instruction books, and composed, just as Augusta’s father, David Browne, did when he arrived in North America in 1820.2 Like their male counterparts, women sought out teaching, publications, and playing for worship, in addition to occasional concert performing, but they had fewer options overall. Some women— Augusta among them—avoided questionable workplace venues (e.g., beer halls, pleasure gardens, and theaters) that hired musicians for orchestras or entertainment. Female academies and churches were the institutions most likely to employ women as professional staff, but men usually held the top teaching or administrative posts. Women were denied access to board

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positions and even membership in the elite cultural institutions that steered musical activity in urban centers. Nineteenth-century patriarchal ideology dictated that women should serve with selflessness and sacrifice. Augusta was reared to be pious, modest, and self-abnegating. Her life and prose arguably demonstrated these values, yet ultimately she embodied neither domesticity nor rebellion against it. As a little girl, Augusta provided the agile hands to demonstrate her parents’ teaching. That relationship reversed as she entered adulthood. She assumed greater presence in the family music academy, and her father became her “right-hand man.” David smoothed the way for his daughter by conducting her business arrangements, by guiding her to participate in commercial channels and professional networking, and by providing a protective aura of respectability for a young, unmarried female professor of music. Even so, Augusta could not sit back and wait; she had to assert herself in order to participate in the New York City market for music instruction and sheet music sales. Through advertisements, announcements, and personal communications with editors and publishers, Augusta kept her name and work before the public.

Augusta’s Place in American Music Augusta received musical training that was Eurocentric. Logier’s instruction books for harmony and music theory largely followed traditional European norms. But her music demonstrates a market-driven simplicity of form and harmonization that suited American tastes. In her piano dances and songs, the square-cut, periodic phrases reflect Anglo-American more than German, Italian, or French styles. The predictable phrase structures and harmonies contribute to a “parlor music” sound common to thousands of Victorian-era songs and piano pieces. In her most elaborate piano solos, Augusta surpassed typical American keyboard music with pieces that exhibited more complex form, harmonization, and figuration than the works of many of her peers. As much as anything, buoyant optimism is what makes her music sound so American. Romantic-era angst and melancholy had little presence in her output. Her music is immediately accessible, tuneful, and lyrical. Although it is unfamiliar, it nevertheless seems familiar. Her compositions never fail to evoke their time and place: nineteenth-century America. For a brief time we experience that earlier world as we listen. What Americans liked to hear was explicit in a concert review in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript, September 29, 1830: “The public requires

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something familiar; something national in character; something exciting; something that all can feel, and in the beauties of which all can participate.”3 Augusta thoroughly understood the meaning of this precept: that Americans liked to hear a tune they knew (e.g., associated with patriotic, military, traditional, seasonal, celebratory, or theatrical occasions), and they enjoyed recognizing that tune as it returned in fresh settings and variations. Thus she adhered to the American predilection for inserting known tunes in her keyboard bouquets, sets of variations, rondos, and fantasies. Her output was not limited to the cultivated tradition. Augusta moved along a continuum—not a black-and-white binary—between low and high art paradigms. She knew and relished much music that later generations would consider vernacular (i.e., heard and enjoyed by many). If, in her judgment, minstrelsy was low art (or no art), and oratorio was high art, she was poised somewhere in the middle, not stationary, as she shifted between popular and elite audiences as the principal consumers for different works. If nothing makes Augusta’s music measure up as “great,” her craftsmanship and unique gestures compare favorably with those by hundreds of other sheet-music composers of the day. In retrospect, no individual has emerged as the foremost American composer of art music during the antebellum era. But second rank does not have to mean second-rate. Her music can be enjoyed like paintings “from the school of,” as opposed to those by the leading artist; or like period antiques from a good maker, rather than the acknowledged master of the era. We enjoy the work of second-tier novelists and poets even though they are not innovative or unique, but because they can delight us with story and skill. We play piano music by many composers of lesser stature and craft than Bach and Mozart. Salon music, parlor music, and pedagogical music can give pleasure to perform and to hear. A first-rate song may be more satisfying than a second-rate symphony. Little nineteenth-century American music has become standard repertoire for keyboard students or piano recitals. Works by earlier nineteenth-century American composers—James Hewitt, Benjamin Carr, and Anthony Philip Heinrich—are still rarities in the concert hall. Those nineteenth-century Americans whose works have entered standard repertoire for piano teaching or performing—Edward MacDowell, Amy Beach, Scott Joplin—display late Romantic styles. And these composers are known best for their character pieces and other small works, not for their sonatas, concertos, or operas. A few piano solos by Gottschalk turn up on piano recitals. These virtuoso pieces are attractive to audiences because of their colorful American, Creole, or Caribbean sounds. Foster’s parlor songs are acceptable for vocal recitals,

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but the degrading language in his minstrel songs and even in his plantation songs renders them problematic to place on today’s concert programs. What stands out in Augusta Browne’s compositions? Good melodies, pleasing harmonies, and flowing accompaniments abound in songs that can be considered American bel canto. Effective piano writing animates her solo keyboard character pieces with programmatic or literary components. Her musical works would arguably have been more sophisticated and intricate if she had studied abroad or had access through a college or university to advanced studies in form, counterpoint, and instrumentation. The former option did not transpire for Augusta, and the latter option was rare for an American woman born in 1820. But her best keyboard works were as good as most American piano music produced during her lifetime. If her music never went beyond modest forms, gendered expectations were not the only reason. As a practical matter, she focused on miniatures that were marketable.

An Entrepreneur and a Christian Humanist Aspects of Augusta Browne’s story echo the experiences of other women musicians, although the extent of her second career as an author and music journalist makes her unique among them. Clara Wieck Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel were obvious contemporaries in Germany during the same decades, while Faustina Hodges and Jane Sloman Torry were comparable musicians active in the same professional pursuits in New York and Philadelphia. Hodges and Torry spent their formative years in England; by contrast, Augusta left Ireland as an infant and experienced girlhood and education in the United States.4 As a young musician in the 1840s, Augusta was clever, spirited, and dedicated. After she was widowed, lost her New York venue, and published mainly in genres of Christian literature, she could sound like a sharptongued scold. But even as Augusta grew ever more devoted to her faith, she retained a mirthful streak. Her writing was never funnier than in “Wanted, an Organist,” published less than a year before her death. Although the bulk of the article came from essays published years earlier, the newly written opening paragraph is a crisp, understated gem that speaks to anybody who has served as a church musician: The Church of St. Jonathan, on Seventeenth Avenue, wanted an organist. The duties were light—merely three services on Sunday, besides leading the

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Sunday-school music, and a few saints’ days and festivals during the week. Of course he must instruct the choir, and have rehearsal on Saturday evening. To a competent and sparkling performer, salary $187½. No vacation, because during the minister’s absence for three months for rest, more than ordinary care must be bestowed upon the music in order to keep up the church.

Fifty cents a day was all that a skilled, tireless musician could earn at the fictitious Church of St. Jonathan. This brief sketch exemplified her 1845 statement, “The life of a true artist, generally speaking, is one of constant and unappreciated toil.”5 The composer constantly navigated between public and private, popular and elite, in her music and prose. Augusta wanted to create music and writing that connected her audience to higher truths and faith, yet she worked amid amateurs whom she had to please or at least satisfy. She opted for a middling approach to maximize her appeal and her message. She wanted to instruct while she amused the reader, using not “jest or earnest,” as she interjected in “The Music of America,” but combining the two.6 Hers was a life of faith that found fullness in mission rather than in children and housekeeping. “I wish woman to live, first for God’s sake,” wrote Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.7 Augusta fulfilled that manifesto; her life exemplifies “the centrality of religion in the American experience.”8 And Fuller wrote, “If you have a power, it is a moral power.”9 Again, Augusta exercised hers. The fervent expression of faith and “sentimental peddling of Christian belief,” manifest in her life and creativity, will not resonate with every reader.10 It is all too easy to dismiss the religiosity and morality of a Victorian-era Sunday school teacher. Augusta nonetheless presents an inspiring example and leaves a significant heritage as a composer, author, teacher, evangelist, and advocate for Protestant church music. Despite the strictures of a highly gendered era, she resolutely sought publication and thus wrote herself into history. Although she never achieved national fame and celebrity, she ventured more than many, pushing against perceived boundaries while moving within acceptable societal mores. Ever the outsider, she circumvented rather than confronting gendered obstacles. Transgression was not her way. Yet the temerity of her actions speaks as loudly as words: suing a church that halved her salary; submitting an article to the arch-conservative Princeton Theological Review; taking on male vanity and prejudice against women in the widely read Knickerbocker monthly; and sending a music manuscript to Europe’s greatest living pianist, Franz Liszt.

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Each generation finds a different truth in a subject’s life. George Pullen Jackson and Charles Hamm saw a snobbish ingénue in Augusta Browne. Judith Tick welcomed a feminist. I found first an entrepreneur; second, a creative spirit who pushed at the boundaries of acceptance for women’s works of music and prose; and third, an exemplar who gives genuine meaning to the commonplace term “faith-based.” One could describe the progression of her work in three stages: Parlor to Parlor (early years going to teach in the homes of students); Parlor to Public (through prose and music published in national press publications); and Parlor to Pulpit (essays in the press at a time when a woman could not be ordained in many denominations). Over time Augusta grew a sense of herself as a Christian reformer and cultural arbiter as well as an author and composer. She became her own woman, not a small feat in nineteenth-century America. And she achieved what the feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous proclaimed as a goal for women’s writing a century later: “Woman must put herself in the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”11 Augusta got around difficulty of access for a woman to public oratory through the use of periodicals as the vehicle for her public voice. Augusta ascended to minor renown as a composer and author, but her output was eclipsed by bigger artists, more fashionable styles, and betterselling hits of the day. She had it all—career, supportive family, creativity, husband—although, sadly, she did not have it all for very long. She accepted misfortune and persisted through war and widowhood to carry on her work. She refocused her efforts toward a different kind of success: a quest to transform her faith into deeds of music and words. If asked, Augusta might have said that her greatest success was the service of faith in her life and works. She was a pilgrim with a mission and a message, however old-fashioned. In her story, we see how even a conservative woman could maneuver as a professional in a man’s world. Augusta can hardly capture the modern imagination as a feminist revolutionary who rebelled against Victorian social dicta; on the contrary, her faith-based point of view led to pragmatic, limited choices within her era. Religiosity was a shield throughout her professional life. The resulting tension in her personality seems palpable. But even if she felt ambivalent or conflicted, Augusta was far from passive. She acted within the marketplace, within the cityscape, and within the Protestant church. Rather than a secular humanist, Augusta was a Christian humanist. Instead of choosing between popular or elitist, she sought a cultured vernacular style that aimed at a wide audience with a positive moral message, whether in literature or in song.

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Her life was a bittersweet mix, but the composer’s words sound as animated and optimistic at the time of her death as in her twenties. Like so many indomitable women before and since, she persevered through adversity. She never ceased to cultivate avenues to create and publish, and thus, two hundred years after her birth, we can experience a vibrant American voice in Augusta Browne’s music and prose.

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Appendix One Children and Descendants of David Samuel Browne and Elizabeth Montgomery Browne The David Browne family line terminated in 1976 with the death of the last descendant, Marion Phinney. Names in quotations were used by the family.

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md 1) Phoebe Howes (1826–49)

Arthur “St. John” (ca. 1823–55)

md 2) Louise Wolcott Knowlton (ca. 1846–1904)

md 1) Louise E. Turner (ca. 1843– 87)

md 2) Fannie B. Parker (ca. 1832–99)

John Walter Benjamin Garrett (ca. 1826–58)

“William Henry” (1825–1900)

Grandchild

Henri [“Harry”] Montgomery (1849–1912)

Sarah Barker (1814– Augusta “Emily” 1903) (ca. 1853–1939)

Spouse

Susan “Augusta” (ca. 1820–82)

Samuel (ca. 1815–ca. 1841)

“Louis” Henri or Henry (1813–75)

Child

Maria L. Martin (1855–1932)

Joseph M. Ballard (ca. 1851–1909)

Spouse

Spouse

Marion B. (1889– William “Earle” 1976) Phinney (1885– 1963)

Ethel R. (1877– 1956)

Great-grandchild

Table A.1. Children and descendants of David Samuel Browne (ca. 1785–1867) and Elizabeth Montgomery Browne (1794–1875)

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Alexander “Hamilton” Coates (1830–50)

George “Washington” (1829–49)

Daughter (ca. 1828– ca. 1835)

Elizabeth M. (ca. 1827–41)

Appendix Two Chronology of Augusta Browne’s Music and Letters This chart provides a rough chronological guide to Browne’s music and prose. When no publication date is known, “ca.” is based on information in advertisements or notices. Only the first publication of literary works is noted; not included are later revisions, extracts, and reprints (whether authorized or not). Publication details for all musical works are found in appendix 3. Full citations for literary works are found in the bibliography. Table A.2. Chronology of Augusta Browne’s music and letters ca. 1837

The Voice of Spring, no. 9

ca. 1837

Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara, no. 11

ca. 1837

Air a la Suisse with Impromptu Variations, no. 12

ca. 1837

The Rock Beside the Sea

ca. 1837

The Voyage of Life, no. 13 The Stranger’s Heart, no. 14 (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

Prose works

The Orange Bough, no. 15 Song of the Skylark, no. 16 The Merry Mountain Horn, no. 19 Bird of the Gentle Wing, no. 20 The Haunted Spring, no. 21

1839 The Sun has Set, no. 22

Brilliant Introduction and Variations on the Favorite Air, Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing, no. 23

ca. 1839

In the Days When We Went Gipsying Arranged as a Rondo, no. 24 La Normandie avec Variations The Angel’s Whisper, no. 26 Himmel’s Grand Vienna Waltz (arranger) ca. 1840

Two Favorite Airs Arranged as a Diversement, no. 27

ca. 1841

L’Henri Galloppe, no. 29

ca. 1841

American Boquet French Boquet, op. 31

1841 ca. 1841

Bonnie Bessie Green Caledonian Boquet, op. 33

1841 ca. 1841

I Would I Were a Fairy (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

1841

Prose works Obituary for sister Elizabeth (Christian Intelligencer)

ca. 1842

English Bouquet

ca. 1842

Fantasia and Variations on a Celebrated Air a la Russe Vesper Hymn, op. 35

1842

The Family Meeting

1842

Here, Therefore, O Israel

1842

Fisher Boy’s Song

1842

Unidentified music (Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Athenaeum)

ca. 1843

The Ethereal Grand Waltz

ca. 1844

Hibernian Boquet, op. 40

1844

Grand Vesper Chorus

1844

The Marvellous Horn

1844

The Chieftain’s Halls

1844

A Thought of The Departed/Requiem

1844

A Song for New England

1844

New England Churches (Columbian Magazine) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year 1844

Vocal works

Piano works

I Watch for Thee (Columbian)

1844

The Columbian Quick-Step (Columbian)

1844

L’Henry Gallop (duet) no. 45

1845

Fair Geraldine

1845

1845

Prose works

Musical Thoughts (Columbian) Once Upon a Time To Inez in Heaven

1845

The Seaman’s Night Song

1845

Song of the Redeemed

1845

The Musician’s Adventure (Columbian)

1845

The Music of America (Columbian)

1845

Music from Heaven (Columbian)

1845

Wake, Lady Mine (Columbian)

1845

The Divine Origin of Music (Columbian)

1845

La gazelle valse brillante

1845

German Air, with Variations (Columbian) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1845

Hark the Bonny Christ Church Bells (arranger); [Harrington] Love and Harmony (arranger)

1846

Pleasure Naught but Pleasure (Columbian)

Piano works

1846

The Enchanted Piper (Columbian)

1846

[Wyman] Poetry (arranger)

1846

[Hodson] The Family Bible (arranger) The De Meyer Grand Waltz, op. 73

1846 ca. 1846

Mary Fay

ca. 1846

The Little Star Easy Songs for New Beginners, no. 6 The Mexican Volunteers Quick Step

1847 1847

Prose works

The Volunteers’ War Song

1847

Kate Darlington (Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine)

1847

The Music We love Most

1847

Fairest Flower so Palely Drooping (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1847

The Persian Lover’s Song (Columbian)

Piano works

1847

Grande marche arabique, oeuvre 74

1847

La mignonnette, a Romance with Variations, no. 75

1847

Reveries of a Musician (Columbian)

1847

The Babes in the Wood

1847

The Soldier’s Departure (Union Magazine)

1848

The Rival Fiddlers (Union)

1848

Where Quair Runs Sweet amang the Flowers (Columbian)

1848

The Merry Sleigh Bell (Union)

1848

The Warlike Dead in Mexico

1848

The Courier Dove (Columbian)

1848

Speed, Gallant Bark (Union)

1848

Vive le Republique (Columbian)

1848

Wake Poland Awake (Union)

1848

Prose works

Irish Curiosity (M’Makin’s Model American Courier) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1848

Oh! lassie dear! I maun awa’

1848

The Reply of the Messenger Bird

ca. 1848

New Year’s Song Six Songs for Children, no. 2

Piano works

Prose works

1848

Music of Our Neighborhood. Morning (Union)

1849

To a Departed Spirit (M’Makin’s Model American Courier)

1849

Come Haste Away (American Metropolitan Magazine)

1849

An Olive Leaf for the Message Bird (Message Bird) La brise dans la feuillage. Romance

1849 1849

Five Shillings Worth of Talent (Message Bird) Arietta Napolitana, op. 79

1849 1849 1849

St. George’s (Message Bird) Our Neighborhood. Evening (Home Journal) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

1849

[Löbe] Jenny Lind’s Dream (Message Bird) (arranger)

1850

[Löbe] Jenny Lind’s Dream (arranger)

Prose works

1850

The Heart and the World (Knickerbocker)

1850

Musical Reminiscences (Message Bird)

1850

A Tale of the Supernatural (Holden’s)

1850

The Vacant Chair (Sartain’s) [Donizetti] It is Better to Laugh than be Sighing (arranger)

ca. 1850

1850

The Youth’s Parting Song (Union) The Iris Waltz (Iris for 1851 )

1851 1851

The Olden Time and the New (Iris for 1851 ) Chant d’amour

1851 1851 1851

The Olden Time for Me The Cornet Grand Waltz

1851

1851

The Sacred Mission of Genius (Journal of the Fine Arts) April Gallop (Journal of the Fine Arts) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1851

Song of Mercy

1851

Song of Christiana

Piano works

1851

1851

Prose works

Random Strains in Prose (Journal of the Fine Arts) [Shield] When the Rosy Morn Appearing (Journal of the Fine Arts) (arranger)

1851

Musical Association (Home Journal)

1851

Coelus et Terra (Home Journal)

1851

Artistic Associations (Home Journal)

1851

Air Irlandais (Journal of the Fine Arts)

1851

The Man who Nurses the Baby (Home Journal)

1852

Hamilton, the Young Artist

1852

The Musical Critic’s Portrait (Home Journal)

1852

The PictureCritic’s Portrait (Home Journal)

1852

Music of the Church (Home Journal) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

Prose works

1852

Grand Farewell Concert of Anthony Philip Heinrich (New York Musical World)

ca. 1853

The Secret Letter (Iris for 1853 )

1853

The Painter’s Last Rest (Musical World & Times)

1853

Mary Lyle

1853

A Chapter on Musical Sentiments and Sympathies (New York Musical World) Crystal Palace Waltz (New York Musical World)

1853 1854

Negro Minstrelsy (Home Journal)

1854

On the Expectations and Prospects of a Musical Professor (New York Musical World)

1854

The Youth’s Parting Song (duet) (New York Musical World) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1854

A New-Year’s Song (New York Musical World)

Piano works

Prose works

1854–55

Rockets from an Organ Loft (New York Musical World)

1855

Love versus Law (Home Journal)

1856

The Mind is a Kingdom (Home Journal)

1857

Strains of Many Lands (Lays of Caledonia, Hibernia)

1857

An Artist’s Memorial (New York Musical World)

1857

Crotchets of Comfort for ye Seekers of Fame (New York Musical World)

1858

On the Rights of Quadrupedal Musicians (New York Musical World)

1858

Visions in Twilight (New York Musical World)

1859

The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1859

[J. W. B. Garrett] The City of Delight (in The Precious Stones) (arranger)

Piano works

Prose works

1861

The Three Autumns (New York Observer)

1861

Epitaphs and Cemeteries (New York Observer)

1861

Burial Customs and Obitual Lore (National Quarterly Review)

1862

A Fantasie on the Piano-Forte (Musical Review and Musical World)

1862

Angelology and Demonology, Ancient and Modern (National Quarterly Review)

1862

The Story of a Dog-Hero (New York Observer)

ca. 1862

The Angel of the Covenant (unpublished) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

1863

1863

Piano works

Prose works A Woman on Women (Knickerbocker)

The Old Clock’s Warning

1863

A Raid on the Enemy’s Camp (Knickerbocker)

1863

A Wounded Soldier’s Experience of Music (Musical Review and Musical World)

1863

A Chaunt of Home

1863

Trumpets and Drums (Knickerbocker)

ca. 1862– Stewart (The Book 64 of Praise) ca. 1862– Excelsior (The Book 64 of Praise) 1864–65

Musical Echoes (Musical Review and Musical World)

1864

I Know that My Redeemer Liveth (New York Observer)

1865

Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman (Knickerbocker) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

1866

Can The Theatre be Purified (New York Observer) Chant of the Sea. Transcription

1866 1866

Autumn of Love

1866

1866

Prose works

A Few Wordy Griefs (New York Weekly Review) The Watcher at the Gate

1867

Sunday Concerts (Western Musical World)

1867

On the Abuse of Church Music (New York Observer)

1868

The Devil’s Ground (New York Observer)

1868

The Way to the Pit (The Advance)

1868

The Episcopal Church and the Theatre (New York Observer)

ca. 1868– 69

Can I attend the Theatre (American Tract Society Gems of Truth #146) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

Prose works

1869

Romanism among Us (The Advance)

1870

The Mysteries of Dreaming (Hours at Home)

1870

Music in Washington City (Western Musical World)

1872

Forever Thine

ca. 1873– 74

ca. 1870– 74

Can I Play Cards? (Methodist Episcopal Church tract no. 137) Aurora. Romance, op. 200 (not published)

1874

Card-Playing Christians

1875

A Musical Revival (New York Observer)

1876

When the Hurly-Burly’s Done (Episcopal Recorder)

1877

The Village Organist. A Musical Portraiture (Brainard’s Musical World) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

Prose works

1877

All Good Christians Love Dumb Animals (Episcopal Recorder)

1878

Are We to Have a St. Jonathan? (New York Observer)

1879

Hints for a SundaySchool (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

ca. 1879

Who has not a Ship at Sea

ca. 1879

Evening Hymn (not published)

ca. 1879

Ere I Sleep (not published)

1880

1880

1880

Benedic. Anima Mea (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine) I Have a Glorious Hope (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine) Departed this Life (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(continued) Year

Vocal works

Piano works

Prose works Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (Churchman) Christian Slumber Song (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

1880

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

1880

Advent Hymn (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

1881

1881

Wanted: an Organist (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine) Esperanza (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine) Song of the Shepherd Boy (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

1881

Is the Fire of Hell Material or Immaterial? (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

1881

Nearer My God to Thee (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine) (continued)

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Table A.2.—(concluded) Year

Vocal works

1882

1882

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Piano works

Prose works The Blessed Company of All Faithful People (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

Day of Judgment, Day of Wonders (Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine)

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Appendix Three List of Musical Works This appendix contains a catalog of compositions listed alphabetically by title with details, publication information, digital availability, and reproduction in microfilm series. Archival sources have been added for scores that are not yet digitized online.

Digital sources: Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 (Library of Congress), https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-sheet-music-1820-to-1860/ Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870–1885 (Library of Congress), https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-sheet-music-1870-to-1885/ Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu IMSLP (Petrucci Index), www.imslp.org Sheet Music Consortium (contains entries from many university special collections), http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/ HathiTrust Digital Library, www.hathitrust.org American Periodicals (based on American Periodicals Series microfilm collections) RIPM e-library of Music Periodicals (based on 19th Century American Music Periodicals microfilm collection)

Advent Hymn 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: Rev. Thomas Olivers; “Lo! He comes in clouds descending” Published in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 8, no. 6 (December 1880): 780 Uses same music as earlier “Excelsior” HathiTrust

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Air a la Suisse with Impromptu Variations for the Piano Forte No. 12 Piano Dedication: Mrs. William Swaim Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. Tune is Alexander Lee’s “On the Margins of Fair Zurich’s Waters” Held in University of Texas Special Collections, HRC Min 100034 BW 35 HRC and Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, bound sheet music, vol. 45

Air Irlandais, with Introduction and Variations [running title: Air Irlandaise] Piano Published in Journal of the Fine Arts 3, no. 5 (November 1, 1851): [98]–99 HathiTrust

The American Bouquet Piano Philadelphia: Osbourn’s Music Saloon, n.d.; Philadelphia: Lee and Walker, n.d. New York: Horace Waters, n.d., with dedication: Miss Sarah E. Wise of Virginia Also published as no. 8 of 10 Home Amusements or Variations on the most popular old & new melodies composed by J. C. Beckel (Philadelphia: Lee and Walker, 1852) Contains “Star Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle” HathiTrust

“Angels Whisper.” With Variations No. 26 Piano Dedication: Miss S. J. M. Wylie, of Philadelphia Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. Variations on Samuel Lover’s song “Angel’s Whisper”

April Gallop Piano Dedication: Miss Alice Cary

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Published in the Journal of the Fine Arts (formerly the Message Bird) [2,] no. 42 (April 15, 1851): [39]–40

Arietta Napolitana see The Celebrated Napolitan Air with Variations Aurora (The breezy call of incense-breathing morn) Romance (on original Melodies) Op. 200 Piano Dedication: Abbé Franz Liszt Unpublished manuscript held at Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, Arch. Sgambati Mus. Ms. 320 Inv. 289485 in online PDF finding aid Casanatense Liszt_schede

Autumn of Love Voice and piano Text: Salvator Rosa; “If Time, penurious of his treasure”; second verse by Augusta Browne Garrett Cleveland: S. Brainard and Sons, 1866 HathiTrust

The Babes in the Wood Voice and piano Text: “The babes in the wood” New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1847 Arrangement of an old ballad Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

Bird of the Gentle Wing No. 20 Voice and piano Text: Professor Roswell Park, of the University of Pennsylvania; “Bird of the gentle wing, songster of air” Dedication: Mrs. R[oswell] Park Philadelphia: Published for the Author by G. E. Blake, n.d.; Boston: C. Bradlee, n.d.

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Also an abridged version published in Godey’s Magazine, 23, no. 6 (December 1841): 290–91; and the World We Live In 2, no. 1 (January 4, 1845): 8 Levy Sheet Music Consortium HathiTrust

Bonnie Bessie Green Voice and piano Text: Henry B. Hirst; “’Twas i’ the sweet spring time o’ life” Dedication: Mrs. J[ohn] L. Motley (of Boston) NY: Hewitt and Jacques, 1841 Tune from traditional reel, “Bonnie Bessie Green” Irish Sheet Music Archives

Brilliant Introduction & Variations on the Favorite Air, “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing” No. 23 Piano Dedication: Miss Margaret K[een] Burtis of Philadelphia Based on “Ah! perché non posso odiarti,” from Bellini’s La sonnambula Philadelphia: Thomas G. Chase, [ca. 1839] 2nd ed., Baltimore: Saml. Carusi, n.d.; Philadelphia: Griffith and Simon; Louisville: Peters, Webb, &c. HathiTrust

La brise dans le feuillage. Romance [inner page title: Romanza] Piano Dedication: Adolphe R. Logier, Dublin Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1849; New York: W. Dubois Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

Caledonia see Lays of Caledonia Caledonian Boquet [inner page title: Caledonian Bouquet] Op. 33 Piano

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Dedication: the St. Andrew’s Society of New York; another imprint dedication: Mrs. William L. Roy. Of Brooklyn, L.I. New York: C. G. Christman, 1841 Uses national songs “Scots Wha’hae,” “The Poor but Honest Soldier,” “Burn’s Farewell,” “Roslin Castle,” “Braes o’Busby” Held at the New York Public Library, AM2-I; also held at the Center for Popular Music, American Antiquarian Society, and others

The Celebrated Napolitan Air “Le Voglio Bene Assai” with Variations [inner page title: Arietta Napolitana. With Variations] Op. 79 Piano Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1849; New York: W. Dubois Based on the “Arietta Napolitano” tune “Io te voglio” Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 HathiTrust

Chant d’amour (Song of Love). Tableau musical Op. 81 Piano Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1851; NY: Dubois and Warriner Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 (lacks first two pages of music)

Chant of the Sea—Transcription Piano Cleveland: S. Brainard and Sons, 1866 HathiTrust

A Chaunt of Home Voice and piano Text: Rev. G. J [sic]. Bedell, DD [Gregory Townsend Bedell]; “Haste my dull soul, arise” New York: Theodore Hagen, 1863 Also published in Musical Review and World 14 (August 15, 1863): supplement 66–67

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RIPM e-library of Music Periodicals HathiTrust

The Chieftain’s Halls Voice and piano Text: “Ruins” by “H. W. J. of Liverpool”; “Over mountain and meadow, the latest rays pour” Dedication: Mrs. J. D. W. Williams of Boston Boston: H. Prentiss, 1844 Melody is William Boyce, “Heart of Oak” Held at the College of William & Mary Swem Library Special Collections Bound Music Collection circa 1800–1970, vol. 269

The City of Delight Voice and piano Text: St. Augustine; “Winter braming, summer flaming” Published in The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1859), front matter Music by John Walter B. Garrett, arranged by Augusta Browne Garrett

Columbian Quick-Step Piano Dedication: The readers of the Columbian Magazine Published in Columbian Magazine 2, no. 6 (December 1844): 284–86 Republished as “The Mexican Volunteers Quickstep” (1847) American Periodicals HathiTrust

Come, Haste Away Voice and piano Text: Nelson Cook; “Come, haste away, at close of day” Published in American Metropolitan Magazine 1, no. 1 (January 1849): 46–47 American Periodicals HathiTrust

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The Cornet Grand Waltz [inner page title: Cornet Waltz] Piano Dedication: Amateur Cornet Club (of New York) Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1851; New York: Dubois and Warriner Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 Sheet Music Consortium IMSLP

The Courier Dove Voice and piano Text: “Outstrip the winds, my courier dove” [published in The Every-Day Book and Table Book, ed. William Hone (London: T. Tegg, 1830–39), 1:230. Published in Columbian Magazine 9, no. 4 (April 1848): 191–92 American Periodicals HathiTrust IMSLP

Crystal Palace Waltz Piano Dedication: Miss Sarah Bowman Published in New York Musical World and Times 7, no. 14 (December 3, 1853): 53–56

Day of Judgment, Day of Wonders! 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: Rev. John Newton; “Day of Judgment, day of wonders” Dedication: In Memory of the late President, James A. Garfield Published in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 11, no. 2 (February 1882): 224 HathiTrust

The De Meyer Grand Waltz, a Musical Jeu d’esprit Oeuvre 73 Piano Dedication: Leopold de Meyer New York: Firth and Hall, 1846; 2nd ed., New York: Wm. Hall and Son, 1846 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

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Levy HathiTrust

The English Boquet [sic] Piano Dedication: Lady Colebrook Uses traditional tunes “A Fine Old English Gentleman,” “God Save the Queen,” “Rule Britannia Rule,” “Heart[s] of Oak,” and “The Roast Beef of Old England” New York: C. G. Christman, n.d. Held at Royal Library, Copenhagen

Ere I Sleep, for every Favor Submitted with November 11, 1879, letter to sacred music publisher Hubert P. Main

Esperanza. C.M.D. 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: Isaac Watts; “There is a land of pure delight” Published in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 9, no. 3 (March 1881): 384 Music same as “St. George’s” (1849) HathiTrust

Ethereal Grand Waltz Piano Dedication: Miss Elizabeth R. Cox (of Brooklyn) New York: Firth, Hall and Pond, n.d. Held at Brooklyn Historical Society, accession 1985.007 Brooklyn Published Sheet Music Collection Box 3 of 5, under Firth, Hall and Pond – Augusta Browne

Evening Hymn Submitted with November 11, 1879, letter to sacred music publisher Hubert P. Main

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Excelsior 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” Published in Book of Praise, ed. Sylvanus Billings Pond (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Prot. Dutch Church, 1866), 336, hymn text no. 344 (split pages)

Fair Geraldine, A Serenade Duett 2 Voices (SS) and piano Text: Translated from the Spanish by Dr. Bowring; “As the stars are to evening” Dedication: Mrs. James M. Duffield, of Brooklyn Boston: Henry Prentiss, 1845 HathiTrust

Fairest Flower so Palely Drooping Voice and piano Text: Mrs. Balmanno; “Fairest flower so palely drooping” Dedication: “This song was occasioned by the recent deeply lamented demise of a lovely and accomplished Lady, well known in this community.”* *Mrs. L[uther] B. Wyman New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1847 The title page, with sketch by Mary Balmanno engraved by the Currier firm, can be seen at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2009632745/ (accessed September 4, 2014)

The Family Bible Voice and piano Text: George P. Morris; “This book is all that’s left me now” Boston: W. H. Oakes, 1846 “The music [Hodson] arranged by Miss Augusta Browne”; melody from George Hodson’s ballad “He Never Said He Loved” (New York: Atwill, n.d.) Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 Score also online from University of Virginia Special Collections M1 .S445 v. 166 no. 40

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The Family Meeting Voice and piano Text: Charles Sprague; “We are all here, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother” Dedication: Mr. [John] Braham “The authoress is indebted for a part of this Melody to an English Composer.” New York: Firth and Hall, 1842 The borrowed melody is similar to Braham’s song, “Is there a Heart that never Lov’d,” from Opera of the Devils Bridge Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 Levy

Fantasia and Variations on a Celebrated Air, a la Russe Vesper Hymn Op. 35 Piano Dedication: Madame Eliza de Peruzzi (de Paris) (née Eustaphiève) New York: Firth and Hall, n.d. “Vesper Hymn” is Thomas Moore’s “Hark! the vesper hymn is stealing” (set by John Stevenson), from A Selection of Popular National Airs (London: 1818) IMSLP

The Fisher Boy’s Song. Solo or Duett 1 or 2 Voices and piano Text: Charles West Thomson; “Hey for the dark blue sea! The Fisher’s restive home” Dedication: Miss Mary Anne Ayres New York: Firth and Hall, 1842; New York: J. L. Hewitt “Part of the subject from Cipriani Potter,” adapted from “Introduction and Rondo for Two Performers at One Piano Forte,” op. 8 (London: Clementi, n.d.) HathiTrust

Forever Thine. Ballad Voice and piano Text: Alaric Alexander Watts; “Forever thine! whate’er this heart betide” New York: J. L. Peters, 1872 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870 to 1885 IMSLP

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The French Boquet Op. 31 Piano Dedication: Miss E. (C?) Parrish Massey of Philadelphia New York: C. Christman, 1841 Uses national airs “La Parisienne,” “The Fall of Paris,” and the “Marseilles Hymn” Held at British Library h.1459.n. (36); National Library of Ireland Joly Music JM-236 (A-C); and University of Toronto Music Library rare book music G-18 674, titled Musical gems bound by J. Sage

La gazelle, valse brillante Piano Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1845 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

German Air, with Variations for the Piano-Forte Piano Dedication: Miss Anna W. Berry, Florida Published in Columbian Magazine 4, no. 5 (November 1845): 236–37 American Periodicals HathiTrust

Grande marche arabique Oeuvre 74 Piano Dedication: To Mrs. C. E. Habicht New York: Firth, Hall and Pond, 1847 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 HathiTrust

Grand Vesper Chorus 4 Voices (SATB) and organ or Piano Text: Bishop [R.] Heber; “God that madst Heav’n and Earth, Darkness and light”; second verse by Augusta Browne New York: William B. Dubois, 1842

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Another edition, New York: Wm. Dubois, n.d. [ca. 1852], Philadelphia: A. Fiot Melody uses fragment from Handel, Judas Maccabaeus, “Hail, the conqu’ring hero comes” Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 [This is vol. 1, no. 3, of B[enjamin] Wyman and George P. Newell, Library of Sacred Music (New York: Wyman and Newell, 1846)]

Hark! the bonny Christ Church Bells; and Love and Harmony 3 Voices (SSS) and piano Dedication: Boston Glee Club Text 1: “Hark! the bonny Christ Church bells” Text 2: “How great is the pleasure, how sweet the delight” [Dr. Harrington, “Love and harmony”] Boston: Keith’s Music Publishing House, 1845 “Two celebrated catches arranged with accompaniment for the Pianoforte” Held at University of Virginia M1.A3 N.H265 1845; also held at Library Company of Philadelphia

The Haunted Spring, with Variations No. 21 Piano Dedication: Miss Anna A. Knox Philadelphia: Osbourn’s Music Saloon, n.d. Based on Samuel Lover’s song “The Haunted Spring” HathiTrust

Hear, Therefore, O Israel Solo Voice (B), duo (SS), 4 Voices (SATB), and organ Text: Deut. 6:3–5; “Hear therefore, O Israel” Dedication: Rev. James M. Mathews New York: S. Ackerman, 1842 Held at the New York Public Library

L’Henri, Gallope Brilliante No. 29 Piano

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Dedication: Madame R. Sands Tucker de Brooklyn, L[ong] I[sland] Philadelphia, “Published by G. E. Blake, [n.d.], and by the Authoress, 254 Fulton St. Brooklyn New York”; 2nd ed., Boston: William H. Oakes, n.d. Held at Dartmouth College Rauner Library Special Collections; and Brooklyn Historical Society, accession 1985.007 Brooklyn Published Sheet Music Collection Box 3 of 5, under Firth, Hall and Pond – Augusta Browne

L’Henri, Gallop Brillante No. 45 Piano duet Dedication: Master Wilson K. and Miss E. Adela Nixon, (of Cincinnati) Boston: Wm. H. Oakes, 1844 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 HathiTrust

The Hibernian Bouquet Op. 40 Piano Dedication: The Marchioness of Waterford New York: Wm. Dubois, n.d. Uses the traditional Irish airs “Carolan’s Concerto,” “Gramachree,” “The Bunch of Green Rushes,” “Boyne Water,” and “St. Patrick’s Day” Held at University of Virginia Special Collections M1 .S445 v. 17 no. 44 Republished (perhaps revised) as Hibernia, [Strains of Many Lands] Boston: Ditson, 1857

Himmels Grand Vienna Waltz Piano “Newly arranged for the Piano Forte by Miss Augusta Browne.” Philadelphia: Osbourn’s Music Saloon, n.d. Held at Dartmouth University, Rauner Special Collections

I Have a Glorious Hope 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: Augusta Browne Garrett; “I have a glorious, glorious hope” Published in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 7, no. 3 (March, 1880): 384

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HathiTrust

I Watch for Thee Voice and piano Text: Mrs. C[ornwall] B[aron] Wilson; “I watch, I watch for thee” Published in Columbian Magazine 2, no. 3 (September 1844): 141–43 American Periodicals HathiTrust

I Would I Were a Fairy Voice and piano Text: R. F. Houseman; “I would I were a fairy” Dedication: Miss Euphemia Patton of Philadelphia New York: C. G. Christman, 1841 Boston: Henry Prentiss, n.d. Levy

“In the Days When We Went Gipsying” Arranged as a Rondo No. 24 “Property of the Editor” Piano Dedication: Miss Frances A.(?) Winchester (of Baltimore) Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. The theme is an old English ballad, “In days when we went gypsing a long time ago” Held at University of Colorado AMRC (American Music Research Center) in John Carbonell collection of binder’s volumes, no. 368, and Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County

The Iris Waltz Piano Colored frontispiece in the Iris: An Illuminated Souvenir for MDCCCLI, ed. John S. Hart (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1851) Chromo-lithograph plate in American Antiquarian Society digital collection GIGI In microfilm series American Literary Annuals and Gift Books HathiTrust

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It is Better to Laugh than be Sighing Piano “The celebrated song from Lucrezia Borgia. Arranged as a Waltz” Boston: Published by Oliver Ditson, [1850]; earlier imprint by C. Holt Arrangement of Orsini’s brindisi, or drinking song, “Il segretto per esser felici,” from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia Held in American Antiquarian Society and in University of Colorado AMRC in John Carbonell collection of binder’s volumes, no. 368

Jenny Lind’s Dream, Valse Brillante Piano Dedication: Mrs. Edwards Pierrepont. Brooklyn, L. I. Published in the Message Bird 1, no. 10 (December 15, 1849): [163] Boston: A. and J. P. Ordway, 1850 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 A shortened, simplified version of Carl Löbe’s “Lindianna, or Jenny Lind’s Dream Waltz,” op. 172 (1847).

Lays of Caledonia Piano Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1857 Strains of Many Lands, no. 1. [“The National Melodies of 1. Caledonia; 2. Hibernia; 3. England; 4. France; 5. America] Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 IMSLP Revision of Caledonian Bouquet, substituting “Auld Lang Syne” for “Roslin Castle,” and other changes

The Little Star Voice and piano Text: George P. Morris Boston: Oliver Ditson, n.d. Listed in Richmond Commercial Compiler, May 26, and June 2–6, 8, 1846 in “Music Saloon and piano Forte Warehouse,” “No. 6 of Easy Songs for new beginners, poetry written by Geo. P. Morris, composed by Miss Augusta Browne”

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“Ma Normandie” avec Variations Piano Dedication: Mlle. Elise Swaim Philadelphia: Osbourn’s Music Saloon, n.d. Held at the New York Public Library, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, and University of Colorado AMRC John Carbonell binder’s vol. no. 368 The tune is considered the national anthem of Jersey, composed by Frédéric Bérat (1801–55).

The Marvellous Horn 2 Voices (SS) and piano Text: “There calleth me ever a marvellous horn” Dedication: Mrs. A. G. Benson of Brooklyn Boston: Henry Prentiss, 1844 Text is a translation of “Alphorn,” from Die lyrischen Gedichte, by Justinus Kerner Held at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville Essex Music Collection and Brooklyn Historical Society, accession 1985.007 Brooklyn Published Sheet Music Collection Box 3 of 5, under Firth, Hall and Pond – Augusta Browne

Mary Fay Voice and piano Text: William Nixon Boston: H. Prentiss, 1846 Listed in Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 6, 1846 “Sheet Music,” Henry Prentiss . . . has published . . . “‘Mary Fay,’ words by William Nixon Esq, adapted to a Scotch melody by Miss Augusta Browne” Listed in Boston Daily Bee, May 20, 1846 “Sheet Music,” Henry Prentiss . . . has sent us . . . “‘Mary Fay,’ a pretty song, composed by Miss Augusta Browne”

Mary Lyle Ballad Voice and piano Text: William W. Fosdick; “’Twas when the brooks of Spring were blue” New York: Firth, Pond, 1853 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 IMSLP HathiTrust

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The Merry Mountain Horn, with Variations No. 19 Piano or harp solo Dedication: Miss M. W. Crawford of Philadelphia Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. Song by Henry Bishop “The Merry Mountain Horn” (London, ca. 1829), sung in Home, Sweet Home Held at New York Public Library and Salem College Library binder’s volume Performance on 19th Century Salon & Concert Music, Helen Beedle (Hellertown, PA: Helen Beedle, 2003), CD

The Merry Sleigh Bell Voice and piano Text: J.D.K.; “Merrily dash we o’er valley and hill” Dedication: Mrs. E. Miller Published in Sartain’s Union Magazine 2, no. 2 (February 1848): 92–93 American Periodicals HathiTrust

The Mexican Volunteers Quick Step Piano Dedication: Lieut. W. H. Browne, of N.Y. Volunteers 1st Regt. Enrolled for Mexico New York: C. Holt, Junr., 1847 “Performed by Dodsworths’ Band” Music is same as 1844 Columbian Quick-Step Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 Levy

La mignonnette. A Romance, with Variations No. 75 Piano Dedication: Mrs. Adam Stodart New York: C. Holt, Junr., 1847 HathiTrust

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The Music We Love Most Voice and piano Text: George P. Morris; “We all love the music of sky, earth and sea” Dedication: Miss R. M. Thayer (of Brooklyn L.I.) New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1847 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 IMSLP HathiTrust

Napolitan Air see Arietta Napolitana with Variations New England Churches Voice and piano Text: “The churches on New England ground” Dedication: M. A. Sayer, of Brooklyn Published in Columbian Magazine 1, no. 3 (March 1844): 143–44 American Periodicals HathiTrust

A New-Year’s Song Voice and piano Text: “Oh, the happy New-Year’s day” Dedication: “to her little friends by Augusta Brown [sic]” Six songs for children composed and arranged for the Piano Forte by Miss Augusta Browne no. 2 Boston: A. and J. P. Ordway, [copyright C. Holt, 1848]) Also published in “Music by our Subscribers No. 34,” New York Musical World 10, no. 18 (December 30, 1854): supplement 71–72 RIPM e-library of Music Periodicals

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. The Christian Slumber-Song. Voice and piano Text: “Now I lay me down to sleep” Published in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 8, no. 2 (August 1880): 256 HathiTrust

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Oh Lassie Dear! I maun awa’. Ballad Voice and piano Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1848; New York: W. Dubois Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 See also “Soldier’s Departure”

The Old Clock’s Warning. Ballad Voice and piano Text: “O, the old, old clock, of the household stock” New York: Theodore Hagen, 1863 Also published in Musical Review and World 14, no. 7 (March 28, 1863): supplement 26–27 Based on the De Meyer Grand Waltz HathiTrust Sheet Music Consortium (Indiana University Lilly Library Starr Collection) RIPM e-library of Music Periodicals

The Olden Time for Me! Song Voice and piano Text: Mrs. (Mary) Balmanno; “The olden time! The olden time! For mighty names renowned” Dedication: Chevalier Sigismund Neukomm New York: Dubois and Warriner, 1851; Philadelphia: A. Fiot Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 HathiTrust

Once Upon a Time Voice and piano Text: R. H. Taylor; “Oh! once upon a time I knew a fairy little belle” Dedication: Mrs. J[ohn] E[llerton] Lodge Boston: W. H. Oakes, 1845; New York: C. Holt, 1845 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

The Orange Bough No. 15

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Voice and piano Text: Mrs. (Felicia) Hemans; “Oh bring me one sweet orange bough” Dedication: Miss Christman Melody based on Handel’s “See, the Conquering Hero Comes,” from Judas Maccabaeus Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. Oregon Digital, University of Oregon, Historic Sheet Music Collection

Persian Lover’s Song Voice and piano Text: C. O. A.; “Hasten, love! the sun hath set” Published in Columbian Magazine 7, no. 6 (June 1847): 281–82 American Periodicals HathiTrust

Pleasure! Naught but Pleasure Voice and piano Text: M. B. H.; “The heart’s a toy, where grief and joy” Published in Columbian Magazine 6, no. 2 (July 1846): 44–45 American Periodicals HathiTrust

Poetry [inner page title: “Poetry. Ballad”] Voice and piano Text: George P. Morris; “To me the world’s an open book” Dedication: “Mrs. Henry W. Barnes of Brooklyn, N.Y. by Mrs. Luther Wyman” New York: Firth and Hall, 1846 “The Melody Composed by Mrs. Luther B. Wyman. Arranged for the Piano Forte by Miss Augusta Browne.” Levy

Reply of the Messenger Bird Voice and piano Text: Edward Young; “I’ve come, I’ve come from the spirits’ land” Dedication: Mme. Julie Fiot Philadelphia: A. Fiot, 1848; New York: W. Dubois Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

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IMSLP HathiTrust

Requiem see A Thought of the Departed The Rock beside the Sea Voice and piano [Text: Mrs. (Felicia) Hemans; “Oh! Tell me not the woods are fair”] Dedication: Mrs. William Nixon Philadelphia: G. Blake, n.d. Advertisement in the Episcopal Recorder (April 1, 1837)

Seaman’s Night Song Voice and piano Text: “Oh! ’tis sweet to be on the midnight sea” Dedication: Mrs. Geo. Hayward (of Boston) Boston: C. Bradlee, 1845 Held at American Antiquarian Society, Dartmouth College Rauner Special Collections, etc. Levy (cover only)

Soldier’s Departure Voice and piano Text: “Proteus”; “Oh, lassie dear I maun awa’” Published in Sartain’s Union Magazine 1, no. 4 (October 1847): 188–89 Incomplete version (first half ) of “Oh lassie dear! I maun awa’” (1848) American Periodicals HathiTrust

Song for New England [inner page title: “Song of New England”] Voice and piano Text: H[enry] W. Ellsworth; “Bright Edenland of Nations” Dedication: Mrs. Abbott Lawrence (of Boston) New York: Firth and Hall, 1844 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 Levy

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Song of Christiana Voice and piano Text: John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; “Bless’d be the day that I began” New York: Firth, Pond, 1851 Dedication: Daniel Huntington Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

Song of Mercy Voice and piano Text: John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; “Then, then will I go thither” Dedication: Revd. Geo. B. Cheever New York: Firth, Pond, 1851 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860 IMSLP

Song of the Redeemed Voice and piano Text: “‘More than Conquerors,’ we sing, Pilgrims in a hostile land” Dedication: Rev. George Coles Boston: Keith’s Publishing House, 1845 Text refers to Romans 8.37 Held at Brooklyn Historical Society, accession 1985.007 Brooklyn Published Sheet Music Collection Box 3 of 5, under Firth, Hall and Pond – Augusta Browne

Song of the Shepherd Boy Voice and piano Text: John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; “He that is down need fear no fall” Published in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 10, no. 4 (October 1881): 464 HathiTrust

Song of the Skylark No. 16 Voice and piano Text: Mrs. Hemans; “The Summer is come; she hath said ‘Rejoice!’” Dedication: Mrs. S[amuel] McClellan, of Philadelphia Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d.

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Melody adapted from the trio section of David S. Browne, “The Marion Grand March & Quick Step” (Philadelphia, G. E. Blake, n.d.) Sheet Music Consortium (University of North Carolina)

Speed, Gallant Bark! Voice and piano Text: Roswell Park; “Speed, gallant bark, to thy home o’er the wave” Published in Sartain’s Union Magazine 2, no. 4 (April 1848): 188–89 American Periodicals HathiTrust

St. George’s 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: Isaac Watts; “There is a Land of Pure Delight” Dedication: Rev. S. H. Tyng, D.D.” Published in the Message Bird 1, no. 6 (October 15, 1849): [99] HathiTrust

Stewart 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: [Augustus] Toplady; “Your harps, ye trembling saints” Published in Book of Praise, ed. Sylvanus Billings Pond (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Prot. Dutch Church, 1866), 255, hymn text no. 361 (split pages).

Strains of Many Lands see Lays of Caledonia The Stranger’s Heart No. 14 2 Voices (SS) and piano Text: Mrs. (Felicia) Hemans; “The stranger’s heart! Oh! wound it not” Dedication: Miss C. Robinson and Miss Ely, of Marion, Missouri Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. Also published in Godey’s Magazine 22, no. 1 (January 1841): 38–39 [symphonies at beginning and end are cut]

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American Periodicals HathiTrust

The Sun Has Set. A Boat Song No. 22 Voice and piano Text: Prof. Roswell Park; “The sun has set, the sky is clear” Dedication: Miss Caroline B. Perry of Beaufort S.C. Philadelphia: Osbourn’s Music Saloon, n.d. The melody is based on an extract from The favorite ballet of La fille sauvage, ou, Le pouvoir de la musique, composed by Michele Mortellari, and published as “La Fille Sauvage” (Boston: D. Browne’s Musical Seminary, n.d.) Held at University of Oregon Library Historic Sheet Music Collection; Bowling Green State University bound sheet music album 13; also listed in binder’s volume at Salem College Library

A Thought of the Departed [inner page title: “Requiem”] Voice and piano Text: Mrs. Robert Balmanno; “Thou art in thy grave beloved” Dedication: Miss Elizabeth R. Cox, of Brooklyn, N.Y. Boston: Henry Prentiss, 1844 Sheet Music Consortium (Indiana University Lilly Library Starr Collection; and Temple [University] Sheet Music Collections)

To Inez in Heaven Voice and piano Text: translated from Camoens by Mrs. Hemans; “If in thy glorious home above” Dedication: Mrs. Luther B. Wyman Boston: Wm. Oakes, 1845 The melody is adapted from Schubert, Originaltänze, op. 9, no. 2 [Erste Walzer], D 365, known as “Trauerwalzer” [or “Sehnsuchtwalzer”] Held at the College of William & Mary Swem Library Special Collections Bound Music Collection circa 1800–1970, vol. 273

Two Favorite Airs, arranged as a Diversement No. 27

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Piano Dedication: Miss Corinna C. Cage and Miss Francis J. Crutcher Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, [ca. 1840] The two airs are “Some Love to Roam” (Henry Russell) and “Spanish Hymn” (Anthony Philip Heinrich) Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, bound sheet music, vol. 63

Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara (The Gypsie’s Wild Chant) No. 11 Piano or harp solo Dedication: Miss Frederica L. McClellan of Philadelphia Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, Property of the Editor, n.d. The theme is “The Gipsey’s Wild Chaunt” from Alexander Lee, Lo Zingaro (1833) Sheet Music Consortium (University of Wisconsin Americana Sheet Music Collection)

‘Vive le Republique!!’ America to France Voice and piano Text: J. A. Utop; “Oh! praise to the land” Published in Columbian Magazine 9, no. 6 (June 1848): 287–88 American Periodicals HathiTrust

The Voice of Spring No. 9 Voice and piano Text: Mrs. F[elicia] Hemans; “I come, I come ye have call’d me long” Dedication: Miss Emily Warren of Boston Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, Property of the Publisher, n.d. Melody from the rondo of Steibelt’s Storm Concerto E Major for Piano and orchestra Held in Washington University Gaylord Music Library sheet music collection (Keck 792); available online through Supplementary Catalog

The Volunteer’s War Song Voice and piano Text: Mrs. Balmanno; “Oh come oh come, oh merrily come”

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Dedication: “Lieut. W. H. Browne, 1st regiment N.Y. Volunteers, now in Mexico” New York: C. Holt, 1847 Based on music for “The Mexican Volunteers Quick Step” Held at the New York Public Library, AM2-I

Voyage of Life. A Sacred Song No. 13 Voice and piano Text: “When for eternal worlds I steer” Dedication: Mrs. S. Lyon, Organist of St. Matthews Church, Wheeling, Virginia Philadelphia: G. E. Blake, n.d. Held at the New York Public Library, AM2-V; and the American Antiquarian Society “Adapted to a Celebrated Maratime [sic] Air,” i.e., William Shield’s song “The Heaving of the Lead” from Hertford Bridge

Wake, Lady Mine. Serenade Voice and piano Text: Mrs. Robert Balmanno; “Wake, lady mine, the stars are bright” Dedication: “to the Poetess” [Mrs. Mary Balmanno] Published in Columbian Magazine 4, no. 3 (September 1845): 142–43 American Periodicals HathiTrust

Wake, Poland, Awake! Voice and piano Text: Augusta Browne; “Wake, Poland, Awake! the day is bright beamings” Published in Sartain’s Union Magazine 3, no. 1 (July 1848): 44–45 American Periodicals HathiTrust

The Warlike Dead in Mexico Voice and piano Text: Mrs. (Mary) Balmanno; “Toll, toll the knell, for the hearts laid low” Dedication: the Hon. Henry Clay New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1848 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860

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Levy https://library.uta.edu/sheetmusic/items/show/153

Watcher at the Gate. Song with Quartette (ad. lib.) solo Voice and 4 Voices (SATB) and piano Text: Rev. William Lindsay Alexander (often attributed to Rev. Dr. Guthrie); “Methinks I hear the Voices of the blessed as they stand” New York: Thaddeus Firth, 1866 British Library H.1780.0. (3)

When the Rosy Morn Appearing—Trio 3 Voices and piano Text: “When the rosy morn appearing” Published in Journal of the Fine Arts n.s. [2,] no. 44 (May 15, 1851): 82–83 Arrangement of music by William Shield

Where Quair Runs Sweet amang the Flowers Voice and piano Text: Rev. James Nichol; “Where Quair runs sweet amang the flowers” Published in Columbian Magazine 9, no. 1 (January 1848): 46–47 Reworked as “Mary Lyle” (1853) American Periodicals HathiTrust

Who has not a Ship at Sea Voice and piano Text: General William Henry Browne Dedication: H[erman] D[aniel] Umbstaetter, Baltimore, Md. New York: Wm. A. Pond & Co., [1879] Levy (cover only)

The Youth’s Parting Song 2 Voices (SB) and piano Text: Augusta Browne; “Hail, brother, hail! In youth’s fair morn rejoicing” Dedication: Hamilton C. Browne

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Published in Sartain’s Union Magazine 7, no. 2 (August 1850): [66–67] American Periodicals HathiTrust

The Youth’s Parting Song Voice and piano Text: Augusta Browne; “Hail, brother, hail! In youth’s fair morn rejoicing” Dedication: “to a Beloved Memory [Alexander Hamilton C. Browne]” Published in Musical World and Times 9, no. 17 (August 26, 1854): Supplement 58–59, “Music by our Subscribers. No. 21” RIPM e-library of Music Periodicals

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Appendix Four Selected Glossary Alberti bass a repeated keyboard figuration of broken chords, usually played by the left hand Augmented-sixth chord a seventh chord built on the lowered sixth degree of the scale Bel canto literally, “beautiful singing”; describes the expressive, legato, heavily ornamented singing of baroque-era operas and early nineteenth-century Italian operas by Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti Brillante piano style from first half of nineteenth century, characterized by rapid, showy figuration with many scales, runs, and keyboard embroidery Cadence harmonic point of pause or completion at the end of a piece, section, or phrase Cadenza improvisational section in which performer can show off impressive skill and speed Character piece a nineteenth-century instrumental composition that explores a scene, a mood, or even an aural portrait of an individual; within this broad genre are works by Felix Mendelssohn (Lieder ohne Worte), Robert Schumann (Kinderszenen), and Frédéric Chopin (nocturnes, impromptus, ballades) Contrafactum (plural, contrafacta) song created by adding new words to existing music Dominant the fifth degree of the scale or the chord built on the fifth degree, with a strong tendency to move to the tonic chord Figured bass baroque-era keyboard notation that indicates with numbers which chord to play above a given bass line Full cadence resting point on the tonic chord Half cadence resting point on the dominant chord Half-diminished chord chord built of two minor thirds plus a minor seventh Half step interval between two adjacent notes on the keyboard, either white key to black key, or white key to white key, if there is no black key between them Homophonic musical texture that moves predominately from chord to chord Interval distance or relationship between two pitches, whether heard one after another or sounding together

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Modified strophic song form in which most verses are sung to the same musical tune, but one or two verses are altered for intentional contrast, such minor key Modulation musical transition from one key to another Plagal cadence cadence that moves from the subdominant chord to the tonic, often used for “Amen” at the end of hymns Primo the treble part of a piano duo Romance short instrumental piece of lyrical, sentimental nature, without any fixed form Rondo form instrumental form with a distinctive returning theme interspersed with contrasting sections or episodes (e.g., ABACA) SATB: four-part vocal ensemble of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass Scotch snap the short-long, dotted rhythm rhythmic treatment often heard in Scottish songs and dances Secondo the accompanying part; the lower part of a piano duo Sequence repetition of musical material at a different pitch level Solfège or solmization a vocal method for teaching scales and intervals using syllables for notes of the scale Staccato manner of attack in which notes are released quickly after sounding Strophic song form in which all verses are sung to the same musical tune Subdominant fourth degree of the scale, or a chord built on fourth degree Submediant sixth degree of the scale, or a chord built on sixth degree Suspension unresolved note held over from the previous chord Ternary form musical form in which a principal section returns after a contrasting section (ABA) Texture density or fabric of musical sound built from harmonic, melodic, and contrapuntal activity in a piece Tonic first degree of a scale (do) or fundamental chord built on the first degree Transcription an instrumental work adapted from another musical medium, such as a song, a choral work, or an orchestral work Tutti played by the full orchestra or ensemble Vernacular music songs or dances widely known and enjoyed by many people and often learned by ear Voice leading smooth transition from chord to chord according to principles developed for vocal part writing in European music during the Renaissance and still taught in music theory

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Abbreviations Augusta Browne used her maiden name until her marriage in September 1855. AB is used in citations and the bibliography to refer to prose and music she published under her maiden name. ABG is used to refer to works published under her married name, Augusta Browne Garrett, which she occasionally hyphenated as Browne-Garrett. Dates are included in the citations for all journals and magazines because many nineteenth-century periodicals were published with multiple volumes per year. A few journals did not run concurrently with the chronological year. Abbreviations are used in notes for periodicals that are frequently cited: AB

Augusta Browne

ABG

Augusta Browne Garrett

HJ

Home Journal

MB

The Message Bird

MRMW

Musical Review and Musical World

MWT

The Musical World and New York Musical Times (running title, The Musical World and Times)

NYMW

New York Musical World

NYO

New York Observer

Abbreviations are used throughout for the following databases of sheet music and books: HathiTrust HathiTrust Digital Library https://www.hathitrust.org

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Levy

Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, https://jscholarship.library. jhu.edu

IMSLP

International Music Score Library Project https://imslp.org

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Notes Preface 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

Historians who look will find lives of many businesswomen throughout nineteenth-century America; see for example, Jepson, Women’s Concerns, and Preston, Opera for the People. Tick, “Towards a History of American Women Composers before 1870.” Tick, American Women Composers, 151. Miller, “Ladies’ Companion,” 156–82. Lerner, Why History Matters, 131–32; see also Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past. Tick, American Women Composers, xvii. In addition, the composer can easily be confused with Sophia Augusta Brown (1825–1909), the wife of Rhode Island book collector John Carter Brown; Augusta Brown, a member of a Cleveland, Ohio, family active in concert life during the 1840s; and Helen Augusta Browne, an author in household magazines of the 1850s and ’60s. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer, provides images of real Americans from Augusta’s lifetime. Severa includes portraits of contemporaneous women similar in age to Augusta as a young woman around twenty (ca. 1840), 28; as a widow in her late thirties (ca. 1858), 172; as a middle-aged woman in a Civil War–era gown, 221; and as an older woman wearing the closely fitted bustle style from about the time of the composer’s death (1882), 399.

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

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Tick, American Women Composers, 216; see also 150. For a description and discussion of binder’s volumes, see Meyer-Frazier and Budds, Bound Music, Unbound Women, 30–36. Ford, “Diverging Currents: Women Composers,” 23. “Married,” Home Journal, September 22, 1855.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 5–7

Chapter One “Communications,” [Boston] Statesman, October 19, 1826. The original article from the [Boston] Courier was reprinted in the Boston Evening Gazette, October 21, 1826, and the Masonic Mirror; or Mechanic’s Intelligencer, vol. 2, no. 44 (October 28, 1826), 347. 2. “New Music,” Boston Courier, June 13, 1839. The review of Augusta’s Brilliant Introduction & Variations on the Favorite Air, “Still so gently o’er me stealing” was reprinted from the United States Gazette. 3. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 99. 4. AB, “On the Expectations and Prospects of a Musical Professor,” 39. Corelli’s Fugue in D was a movement from Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no. 1, arranged by Johann Bernhard Logier in Logier’s Theoretical and Practical Study for the Piano Forte, Comprising a Series of Compositions Selected from the Most Classical Works, Both Ancient and Modern, no. 1 (London: Clementi, n.d.), 12–15. 5. Performances by young children were already familiar in London, as documented by Cowgill, in “‘Proofs of genius.’” 6. Ammer, Unsung, 18. In Boston, émigré musicians such as Gottlieb Graupner and François (or Francis) Mallet introduced their talented children at public events. See Teresa F. Mazzulli, “Music in Boston from Three Immigrants,” The Boston Musical Intelligencer blog, December 2, 2011, http://www.classicalscene.com/2011/12/02/music-in-boston/ (accessed March 20, 2016). 7. Born in Kassel to a French Huguenot family, Logier called himself “John Bernard” in Britain, used “Jean-Bernard” in France, and retained “Johann Bernhard” in Germany. Rather than a French style of pronunciation with a “zh” sound (Low-zhay), the British may have pronounced the name as “lodger” or anglicized it as “low-ger.” Jokes about Logier in the English-language press capitalize on both a soft “g” (“logician”), versus a German hard “g” (“loggerheaded”). Family descendants are no longer certain how the surname was pronounced during his lifetime. 8. “Logierian System of Music,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, February 7, 1835. 9. Peter K. Moran, “To the Public,” New England Galaxy, August 1, 1828. Moran wrote that Browne told him that he had “never studied the piano till his commencement with Logier,” and asserted that Browne could not play well enough to participate in the keyboard ensemble with other music professors at Logier’s home. 10. A London fashion plate from 1826 shows such a mother-daughter pair. See Ackermann’s Repository series 3, vol. 7, no. 3 (March 1826) at http://www. ekduncan.com/2011/09/regency-era-fashions-ackermanns_20.html (accessed March 8, 2013). 1.

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notes to pp. 7–10

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11. Jan Ladislav Dussek, Concerto for the Harp, or Piano-Forte (London: Goulding, n.d.), 18–25, available at International Music Score Library Project https:// imslp.org (hereafter cited as IMSLP). Music for keyboard and harp was often interchangeable during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; repertoire suitable for dual use generated more sheet music sales. 12. Shield composed the folklike song for his 1787 two-act comic opera The Farmer, with libretto by John O’Keeffe. Many variants of the lyrics appeared in nineteenth-century songbooks; see, for example, the many variants of “flaxenheaded cowboy” and “curly-headed plough boy” at http://ballads.bodleian. ox.ac.uk/ (accessed February 20, 2016). 13. See description in Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, 238–39. Hummel published variations on “The Pl ough Boy” as op. 1, no. 1 (London: ca. 1791); he returned to the melody for additional variations later in life in “Thême anglais (‘The Ploughboy’),” Les Charmes de Londres, op. 119, no. 1 (1831). 14. “Duets, Piano-forte,” Harmonicon 7, part 1 (1829), 84. 15. Jan Ladislav Dussek, The Plough Boy, Arranged as a Rondo by J. L. Dussek (Dublin: Browne’s Music Saloon, n.d.). The only other piece connected to Dussek among Browne’s publications was Dussek’s arrangement of Giovanni Battista Viotti’s violin concerto in A major, a less congenial choice for a child. Browne’s Plough Boy is bound in a volume of sheet music held at the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (Eng 18Q 153334). 16. “Communications.” 17. Undated excerpt from the [Boston] Courier reprinted in the Boston Evening Gazette and the Masonic Mirror. 18. AB, “Negro Minstrelsy.” 19. District of Columbia, Certificate of Death no. 31572 (January 11, 1882), Augusta Browne Garrett; Department of Health, Vital Records Division, Washington DC. Certified copy in possession of author. District of Columbia death certificates listed the age at death rather than the date of birth. 20. The 1850 US federal census was the first to include names of every person in the household with their age and profession or status (e.g., “at school”). Before 1850, household members were listed according to age groups; thus, Augusta would have been numbered among females aged five to ten or ten to fifteen in the 1830 census, and among females aged fifteen to twenty or twenty to thirty in the 1840 census. 21. 1850 US federal census, New York, New York, Population schedule, New York City Ward 14; Roll: M432_551; p. 79A (stamped), dwelling 410 (409 crossed out), family 1290; line 15, Augusta Browne; 1860 US federal census, Kings County, New York, population schedule, Brooklyn, 1st District, 4th Ward, p. 717 (stamped), dwelling 157, family 257, line 23, Augusta Garrett; 1870 US federal census, Washington, DC, population schedule, Washington ward 5, District of Columbia, p. 83 (stamped), dwelling 1266, family 1329, line

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364

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 11–13 10, Susan Garrett [sic]; 1880 US federal census, Washington, DC, population schedule, Washington enumeration district 38, District of Columbia, p. [318B], dwelling 1645, family 116, line 27, Susan A. Garrett [sic]. The 1870 and 1880 returns reveal that her given name was Susan Augusta Browne, but she and the family habitually used her middle name. Given the evidence of Elizabeth Browne’s seven successful deliveries during the 1820s, the gap of up to five years between Augusta and her older brothers suggests that Elizabeth may have experienced one or more miscarriages or infant deaths. By July 5, 1820, advertisements in the [St. John] City Gazette announced David’s “Musical Academy and Saloon” in King-Street. “The Logierian System of Music,” reprinted from the Baltimore Emerald in the [Portland, ME] Eastern Argus, August 12, 1828. David Browne, Self Defence, 20. Regarding the cost of commissions, see John Williamson, A Treatise on Military Finance . . . (London: T. Egerton, 1797), 41–51. List of the Officers of the Militia, 1807 ed., 506. The editions for 1804 and 1805 contain the same listing; later editions do not include officers of the Irish volunteer militia. National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Killadoon papers, MS36058/7 (Donegal militia band), letter dated October 26, 1812, quoted in Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military, 79; see also 69 and 132. I am indebted to Herbert and Barlow for sharing the content of letters dated October 26, 1812, and March 1, 1813, from David Browne to Nathaniel Clements, earl of Leitrim. Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military, 32–34, 70–76. David Browne, letter to US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, September 26, 1820, National Archives RG 59: General Records of the Dept. of State, Misc. Letters Received, January 1, 1817–July 30, 1825 (Microfilm Publication M179, Reel 49), File B, entry Browne, D., September 26, 1820. David Browne, “The Grand Martial Troop . . . for the Harp or Piano Forte” (Dublin: Browne’s Music Saloon, n.d.; “Reprinted at his Musical Seminary, Boston”). David Browne to Nathaniel Clements, earl of Leitrim, March 1, 1813, in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Killadoon papers, MS36058/7 (Donegal militia band), quoted in Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military, 69. St. Mary’s Parish records in the Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, cite “Lewis Henry son of David and Eliz. Browne,” baptized at St. Mary’s [Church of Ireland] on November 14, 1813. No corresponding church records survive for Augusta’s birth or baptism. Entry for Louise Wolcott Knowlton Browne, widow of Augusta’s brother William Henry Browne, Matthews’ American Armoury and Blue Book, 128. Many of the details in this entry are incorrect, the result of family lore passed

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notes to pp. 13–16

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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down long after the deaths of the principals. Louise Browne was a social climber who participated in the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution; thus she wanted to sketch the rosiest version of her husband’s forebears. In Wilson’s “Dublin City Directory” in the Treble Almanack Registry Directory (Dublin: Wilson, 1810–20 eds.). David Browne was listed in Dublin City Directories from 1810 to 1815 as an “Agent and Public Accountant” at 46 Bolton St.; he is definitely the “Professor of Music” at 90 Dorset St. in 1816– 18 and at 12 Upper Sackville St. in 1819 and 1820. “Mr. Browne,” New England Galaxy, November 24, 1826. Napoleon Bonaparte is credited as saying, “L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers,” based on a section of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). See Hogan, Anglo-Irish Music. Logier split his time between Dublin and London until 1822, when the Prussian government hired him to teach his innovative method to German professors for three years. He eventually returned to Dublin. “Logier (John Bernard),” in Sainsbury and Choron, Dictionary of Musicians, 2: 78–82. Sainsbury and Choron, Dictionary of Musicians, 2: 79. Logier alleged that Ellen was ready to play in church in six months. Kalkbrenner borrowed many of Logier’s ideas in his 1831 piano treatise Méthode pour apprendre le piano à l’aide du guide-mains, op. 108, and he conducted his music business in Paris on Logier’s and Clementi’s models. Between November 17, 1817, and February 17, 1820, the Times (London) recorded the opening of Logier’s academy with Webbe and Kalkbrenner and announced other London academies that offered the method from professors trained by Logier. An Exposition of the Musical System of Mr. Logier; with Strictures on His Chiroplast, &c. &c. (London: Budd and Calkin, 1818), 7. Arthur Loesser brutally mocks Logier’s system in Men, Women and Pianos, 293–304. The most thoughtful assessment of Logier’s method is Bernarr Rainbow’s “Johann Bernhard Logier and the Chiroplast Controversy.” See also Reginald R. Gerig’s coverage of Logier and Kalkbrenner in Famous Pianists & Their Technique, 124–35. Ann Mounsey Bartholomew (1811–91) was a long-serving organist and composer in London. Ludwig Spohr’s remarks were first published in August 1820 in the Leipziger Musikalischer Zeitung and translated in “Observations on the State of Music in London,” New Monthly Magazine 14 (December 1820): 644– 48; this account of Logier’s method was frequently reprinted in the English and American press. Johann Bernhard Logier’s series of method books for group instruction include: The First Companion to the Royal Patent Chiroplast, or Hand-Director

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366

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 16–20 (London: J. Green, n.d.); Sequel to the First Companion, to the Chiroplast (London: J. Green, n.d.); A Second Companion, to the Royal Patent Chiroplast or Hand Director (London: J. Green, n.d.); Sequel to the Second Companion, to the Chiroplast (London: J. Green, n.d.); and Thirty Four Lessons Arranged as Pleasing Accompaniments to Logier’s First and Second Companions (London: J. Green, 1830). Logier, Explanation and Description, 21. Logier, Explanation and Description, 8. Logier printed letters from Muzio Clementi, Johann Baptist Cramer, Samuel Wesley, Theodore Latour, William Shield, J. A. Stevenson, and others in Companion to the Royal Patent Chiroplast. David Browne reprinted these letters in his advertising materials. Myles W. Jackson expounds on this concept in a series of essays including “Physics, Machines and Musical Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Harmonious Triads, and “Measuring Musical Virtuosity.” Publicity and reviews for these events list repertoire arranged from symphonies and overtures by Haydn, Mozart, and other European masters, in addition to concertos and solos. Baltimore and Philadelphia papers announced music in David Browne’s upcoming academy exhibitions during the 1830s. Reviews of concerts in Dublin during the 1840s and ’50s listed the repertoire at the annual recitals of students of Mrs. E. C. Allen. Gardiner, Music and Friends, 2: 647–49. George Cruikshank, “A German Mountebank blowing his own Trumpet at a Dutch Concert of 500 Piano Fortes!! Or A natural from the “Scale of Nature” according to the LOGGER-head-IAN System!!” (London: Sidebethem, April 1, 1818). A “Dutch concert” meant that everybody sang something different simultaneously. This brightly colored print can be viewed at http://www.loc. gov/pictures/item/2006688917/ (accessed May 15, 2015). “Second Examination,” Boston Courier, December 24, 1827. In a companion print to the debacle of a Logierian exhibition, Cruikshank depicted the outrage of London music professors against Logier and his business partners—the fashionable Kalkbrenner and the solid Samuel Webbe—who proclaim as one, “Honesty is the best policy! We want no private consultation or inventions, let us be judged of according to our works!” Members of the audience shout, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” to Logier and his colleagues. Invective rises in clouds and balloons from the bewigged music professors who are dismayed by the showers of applause for Logier. One professor hisses to a colleague, “Our only chance is now to keep all the Amateurs as much in the dark as we have very wisely done before, by uniting firmly to persuade them that this new discovery is all a take in; for they know so little that they cannot—dare not—form their opinions without consulting us.” See George Cruikshank, “The Logierian System, or Unveiling the New Light to

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notes to pp. 20–22

55.

56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

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the Musical World—With the Discovery of a General thoro’ Bass/Base Discord in the Old School (London: G. Humphrey, 1818), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006688917/ (accessed May 15, 2015). W. H. Cutler advertised a class for men at his new academy in Broad Street, [London] Times, March 16, 1818, as did Webbe, [London] Times, February 17, 1820. “Plan of Messrs. Logier and Webbe’s Academy,” [London] Times, November 21, 1817. In An Exposition of the Musical System of Mr. Logier; with Strictures on His Chiroplast, &c. &c. (London: Budd and Calkin, 1818), 40n, the authors (“A Committee of Professors in London”) charged that Logier intended to hold classes of twenty students in order to maximize his income at over five thousand pounds per annum, not including entrance fees, chiroplast rentals, or payments by teachers for certification as Logierian professors. Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) developed the Monitorial System, also known as the “Lancasterian” or “Lancastrian” System, in which more advanced students taught less advanced ones, enabling fewer adults to teach many students at low cost. John Bernard Logier, Manual, Chiefly for the Use of Preceptors, Parents, Governesses, &c. (London: J. Green, 1828). “The Logierian Musical Academy,” Boston Courier, July 27, 1833. Advertisement in Cincinnati Directory, for the Year 1831 (Cincinnati: Robinson and Fairbank, 1831), [175]; “Cincinnati Musical Seminary,” Family Minstrel 1, no. 21 (December 1, 1835), 164. ABG, “A Fantasie on the Piano-Forte, Concluded,” 28. O’Connor chronicles the success of the Allen academy in “The Role of Women in Music in Nineteenth-Century Dublin,” 41–45. E. C. Allen died in February 1833, leaving his wife with ten children to support (Freeman’s Journal, February 4, 1833). William Henry Logier (1802–70), called Henry, worked as a teacher, church musician, and conductor. “Dublin,” Musical World 32, no. 28 (July 15, 1854), 478. Browne, Self Defence, 19. Moran spoke derisively of Logier’s “more monied friend, D. Browne,” in “To the Public.” Browne, Self Defence, 17. The figure of one hundred thousand dollars is the calculation from http://www.in2013dollars.com/1830-dollars-to-2014-dollars (accessed April 2, 2016). A worth based on labor value exceeds one million dollars, calculated at https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue. php (accessed April 2, 2016). “Logierian System,” Masonic Mirror; or Mechanic’s Intelligencer 2, no. 41 (October 7, 1826): 323. Browne, letter to John Quincy Adams, September 26, 1820.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 22–25

71. During July 1820, the City Gazette advertised the “Musical Academy and Saloon” at the address of the former James O. Betts’s City-Hotel in King-Street. 72. “Examination,” City Gazette, August 2, 9, and 16, 1820. 73. Bunting, History of St. John’s Lodge, 268. 74. Advertisement in the City Gazette, April 25 through May 1821. Mrs. Browne offered “Drawing in Water Colours, Painting on Velvet, Painting on Glass, &c. &c.,” for three guineas per quarter and one guinea entrance. 75. Land petition of David Brown, May 7, 1821, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Land Petitions RS108, 1821, F4189. 76. Lot 43 was granted to David Browne, Land Petition, New Brunswick RS 108, dated June 16, 1821; also described in Land Grant, New Brunswick RS 686, Grant no. 1789, registered April 26, 1825. Wynn notes that in 1834 the majority of farms in New Brunswick had fewer than fifty acres of land cleared for cultivation; “Population Patterns in Pre-Confederation New Brunswick,” 128. 77. Deeds in the St. John County, New Brunswick, Registry Office Records show that Browne eventually acquired all or parts of lots 44, 45, 46, 47, and St. John city lot no. 1453. 78. ABG, “A Fantasie on the Piano-Forte,” 16. 79. New Brunswick Courier, November 12 and 19, 1825. 80. A copy of Purcell’s Ground is included in a bound music volume (Eng 18Q 153334) at Princeton University. The thick volume bears no owner’s name on the cover or on any of the music, which includes many of Browne’s Dublin imprints. A handwritten addendum in Browne’s Collection of Country Dances, no. 7, altered the name of one dance tune from “L’Autumn” to “New Brunswick Ladies,” along with the note “Dance D[avid] B[rowne]” in script that is markedly similar to other examples of David’s signature. The handwriting, the Dublin imprints, and the reference to New Brunswick strongly suggest that this compilation of music belonged to the Browne family. 81. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 99. 82. AB, “On the Expectations and Prospects of a Musical Professor,” 39. 83. Advertisement for music published by David Browne in Logier’s Companion to the Royal Patent Chiroplast, or Hand-Director (Boston: D. Browne, 1827), 8. 84. See Temperley, ed., The London Pianoforte School. 85. Buckingham, Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, 410. 86. Browne, letter to John Quincy Adams, September 26, 1820. 87. D[avid] Browne, American Independents Grand March and Six National Waltzes (Dublin: published by the Author, n.d.). The intended title may have been the American Independence Grand March. 88. Browne, Self Defence, 18. 89. David Browne, “Ancient Essays on Music,” Euterpeiad or Musical Intelligencer 1, no. 36 (December 2, 1820), 141–42; 1, no. 37 (December 9, 1820), 146–47;

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notes to pp. 25–30

90.

91. 92.

93.

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and 1, no. 38 (December 16, 1820), 150. A letter dated December 9, 1820, from “D. Browne” of the “Musical Academy St. Johns [sic] New Brunswick,” to Parker was also printed in the Euterpeiad 1, no. 40 (December 30, 1820), 160. In Musical Biography, Parker covered seven women—five singers and two keyboardists—among the sketches. He also included a section on the Logierian system, 209–11, reprinted from his Euterpeiad 2, no. 3 (April 28, 1821), 19. “Mr. Browne,” City Gazette, November 29, 1820. “Musical Academy—and Saloon,” City Gazette, July 5, 12, 19, and 26, 1820. Logier cited his Dublin prices in Syllabus of the Third Examination of Mr. Logier’s Pupils, on His System of Musical Education: To Which Is Prefixed, a Prospectus of Its Course of Instruction (Dublin: J. Carrick, 1816), 16. “Piano Fortes,” [St. John, NB] Star, October 8, 1822.

Chapter Two 1.

David Browne cited his arrival in Boston in June 1826 in “The Logierian System of Musical Education,” a letter to the editor, in the Baltimore Gazette, October 25, 1834. 2. “Second Examination,” Boston Courier, December 24, 1827. The American Grand March was probably an arrangement of David’s American Independents Grand March, dedicated to John Quincy Adams. The piece was performed using seven pianos at the second examination of the academy. 3. Browne, Self Defence, [2]. 4. David cited his 1826 interview with John Quincy Adams in “The Logierian System of Musical Education,” a letter to the editor, Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser (October 25, 1834). 5. “Logierian System of Musical Education,” Masonic Mirror 2, no. 34 (August 19, 1826), 267; 2, no. 35 (August 26, 1826), 275; 2, no. 36 (September 2, 1826), 282–83; 2, no. 37 (September 9, 1826), 291; 2, no. 38 (September 16, 1826), 299; 2, no. 39 (September 23, 1826), 306–7; 2, no. 40 (September 30, 1826), 314–15; 2, no. 41 (October 7, 1826): 322–23. 6. New England Galaxy, November 24, 1826; and “The Logierian Musical Academy,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, August 30, 1834. 7. “Musical Department,” [Boston] Evening Gazette, September 9, 1826. 8. AB, “Grand Farewell Concert.” Heinrich’s star continues to rise in recent assessments; see Shadle, Orchestrating the Nation, 35–55. 9. AB, “On the Expectations and Prospects of a Musical Professor,” 39. 10. Parker, Musical Biography, 203–7. 11. In addition to Parker’s accounts, see Johnson, Musical Interludes in Boston, 58–59, 71–73, 84, 94, and 148–49. Eliza Eustaphiève later lived in Paris and

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12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 30–33 studied piano with Frédéric Chopin, with whom she shared a close musical friendship. As Madame Peruzzi, she lived in Florence, where her playing was much admired by British and American expatriates. Parker, Musical Biography, 194. Parker, Musical Biography, 195. For example, Augusta and her father referred to several of the titles in John Bernard Logier’s series, Logier’s Theoretical and Practical Study for the Piano Forte, including no. 1, “Corelli’s 1st Con[cer]to”; no. 2, “Corelli’s 8th Con[cer] to”; and no. 10, “Domenico Scarlatti, [Allegretto, Allemando, and Fuga].” This series offered a tool to study harmonization in keyboard reductions of major symphonic works by master composers. A third staff duplicated the bass line with figured bass numbers, and a fourth staff showed the progression of harmonic roots with their figured-bass numbers. “Music Published by David Browne” (see fig. 1.3). Untitled weekly advertisement in the Boston Courier, November 24, 1826. His assertion of being the seventh accredited teacher was based on a notice printed by Logier in the Freeman’s Journal, July 6, 1816, listing those musicians who were certified to teach using his system. Logier presumably counted himself as number one, with David Browne sixth on the list and thus the “seventh accredited professor.” By 1820 newspaper advertisements in the Times solicited licensed instructors to teach in the British colonies in India and the Caribbean. As early as 1819, a female seminary in Jamaica, New York, advertised a music teacher from London trained in the Logierian method. David may have been the only teacher in America who had studied the method with Logier in Dublin, but others had taken the course in England or Scotland and presumably paid the fee for certification. Far more teachers simply bought a few publications and proceeded to offer “Logerian” instruction as far west as Ohio and as far south as Charleston, South Carolina. “Musical Department,” Evening Gazette, October 28, 1826. “Musical Department,” Evening Gazette, November 25, 1826. Jackson (1757–1822) is one of three English-born musicians highlighted in Temperley’s Bound for America. “Logierian System of Musical Education,” New England Galaxy, advertisement, July 17, 1827, running regularly for several months. Moran’s history with Logier is explained in Browne’s Self Defence, 22–23. “Caution. New System of Musical Education,” New England Galaxy, advertisement dated July 23, 1827, running almost daily for the next month. Browne, Self Defence, title page. Browne inscribed a copy of his Self Defence to Mrs. N[athan] Appleton, now held at the Boston Public Library; a copy to Israel Thorndyke, now held at the Library of Congress; and another to District Judge John Davis, now held at the

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notes to pp. 33–37

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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Boston Athenaeum, which also holds a copy of the pamphlet owned by John Quincy Adams. Browne, Self Defence, [2]. “Concord vs. Discord,” New England Galaxy, July 11, 1828. In “Logierian System, Combined with the Patent Chiroplast,” Moran advertised himself as “the only person in possession of the Logierian System in America,” soon after his arrival in New York from Dublin, National Advocate, November 19, 1817. Moran responded to Browne’s charges in “To the Public,” New England Galaxy, August 11, 1828, claiming that his understanding with Logier had been that if he found success with the method, he would then repay Logier for the instruction. Lowell Mason’s personal music library, now held at Yale University, includes several of Logier’s lesson books and compositions, https://orbis.library.yale. edu/ (accessed August 5, 2013). Christian Register and Boston Observer 21, no. 12 (March 19, 1842), 47. Heller and Livingston, “Lowell Mason (1792–1872) and Music for Students with Disabilities,” 1. Annual reports by the New England Asylum for the Blind (Perkins School for the Blind) appear in newspapers and periodicals during the 1830s. Accinno discusses the use of the Logierian method with details from Perkins School records in “Gestures of Inclusion.” Preface to the 1822 edition of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, printed in Euterpeiad 3, no. 1 (March 30, 1822), 6. Broyles, Music of the Highest Class, 149–50. Additional discussion of Sophia Hewitt Ostinelli’s career is found in Ammer, Unsung, 16–27; and Howe, Women Music Educators, 32–34. “The New System of Music Education,” Western Recorder 6, no. 24 (June 16, 1829), 95. “Second Examination,” New England Galaxy, December 24, 1827, through December 31, 1827; extant issues for the following months are lacking. “Notice,” New England Galaxy, beginning September 12, 1828. “Piano-Fortes, Music, Flutes, Violins,” [Utica] Oneida Observer, June 16, 1829. “New System of Music Education,” 95. Browne, “The Logierian System of Musical Education,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, October 25, 1834. “Music on the Logerian System,” [New York] Evening Post, October 15, 1829, advertisement running for six months. Browne, “Logierian System of Musical Education.” “Musical Notices,” Euterpeiad 1, no. 2 (May 1, 1830): 11, and 1, no. 3 (May 15, 1830): 19. “A Note Too High,” [Boston] American Traveller, March 3, 1830.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 37–43

44. “David Browne, Esq.,” Boston Masonic Mirror 2, no. 15 (October 9, 1830): 118. 45. David Browne, “American Military Bugle Andante for pianoforte or harp, composed and arranged for the Euterpeiad, and dedicated to Andrew Jackson, President of the United States,” Euterpeiad 1, no. 3 (May 15, 1830): 20–22. This piece was republished in January 1836 in the Family Minstrel, also edited by Charles Dingley. 46. “High-Gerians vs. Lo!Gerians!!,” letter to the editor from “Inquisitive,” Euterpeiad 1, no. 11 (September 15, 1830): 87. 47. “The Editor,” Euterpeiad 1, no. 12 (October 1, 1830): 95. The “Editor’s Address” specified that “The publication lends itself to no cabal, system, or name,” in the new series of the Euterpeiad 1, no. 13 (October 15, 1830): 100; and n.s. [no. 1] (November 1, 1830): 112. 48. “David Browne, Esq.” 49. “David Browne, Esq.” 50. Browne, “The Logierian System of Musical Education,” Baltimore Gazette (October 25, 1834). The same statements that had infuriated David continued to appear in the Daily Advertiser for months. 51. AB, Hamilton, 16. A newspaper account of July 4th celebrations in Boston in 1827 mentioned that “master Alexander Hamilton,” the young grandson of the deceased statesman, was a student of the “seventh accredited professor of the Logierian system,” New England Galaxy 10 (July 6, 1827): 2. 52. Advertisement in the Upper Canada Gazette beginning August 8, 1833. 53. AB, Hamilton, 16–17. 54. Reich, Clara Schumann, 289–90. 55. “Clara Schumann’s Father on Music Study,” Etude 30, no. 6 (June 1912): 390. Wieck published his own music pedagogy in Clavier und Gesang (1853); see English translation by Pleasants, Piano and Song. 56. Reich, Clara Schumann, 42–43; Reich, “The Diaries of Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann,” 27–30. 57. Boston City Directory for 1834. 58. Broyles, Music of the Highest Class, 182–214. 59. Boston Morning Post, July 27, 1833. This item was quoted from the Courier. 60. Boston Morning Post, March 6, March 8, and March 10–13, 1834. The ad was dated February 28, 1834. 61. Boston Athenaeum Lg MT 243.L63 1827 v. 1, “Marches”; v. 2, “Songs”; v. 4, “’Waltz’s [sic]”; v. 5, “Airs.” 62. The much admired variations to Oh! Dear! What can the matter be, for the piano forte or harp (Dublin: Browne’s Music Saloon, n.d.; Boston, [Browne’s], n.d.) are part of a binder’s volume held at the New England Conservatory of Music (Vault M1.A15C65).

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63. Binder’s volume Vault M1.A15C65 at the New England Conservatory of Music contains several pieces inscribed to Miss Scott by David Browne. Two bound volumes (Ellen Bigelow #1 and #2, containing only Browne’s imprints) of Ellen Bigelow’s music are held at Rubenstein Library, Duke University, 4to MT222 .L645 1827 and 4to MT243 .L63 1827; two more volumes (Ellen Bigelow #3 and #4, containing a mix of Browne’s and other imprints) are held at the Boston Public Library, Music M1.A15 B54 1818x and Music 21.B76 1827x. Other recipients of music with an inscription by David Browne included Miss Wells, Miss M. A. Parker, and Miss Burroughs. 64. These collections are variously called bound sheet music volumes, binders’ volumes, music binders, keepsake volumes, or albums. 65. David Browne’s “Kinloch of Kinloch” can be viewed in Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu (hereafter cited as Levy). 66. Browne, “The Logierian System of Musical Education,” Baltimore Gazette (October 25, 1834). 67. “The Logierian Musical Academy,” Baltimore Patriot, August 30, 1834, through September 19, 1834. 68. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, September 2, 1834. 69. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, September 2, 1834. 70. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, October 24 and 25, 1834. 71. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, February 7, 1835. 72. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, April 11 through May 2, 1835.

Chapter Three 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

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Advertisement dated July 20 in the Episcopal Recorder, July 30, 1836, and Philadelphia Inquirer, July 30, 1836. “A Course of Lectures,” Episcopal Recorder, November 19, 1836. “New Music,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 10, 1837. Blake’s imprint misspelled Alexander Lee’s opera Lo Zingaro, referring to it as Lo Zangara, thereby making grammatical hash by using “lo,” the masculine article, with “zangara,” a female gypsy. In 1841, Augusta’s Caledonian Bouquet was issued with at least two separate dedications: one, to “Her Friend Mrs. William L. Roy of Brooklyn, L[ong] I[sland]”; the other, to the “St. Andrew’s Society (of New York).” ABG, “Wanted: An Organist,” 323. Augusta also set Hemans’s poetry in “The Song of the Skylark” (1830s) and the duet “The Stranger’s Heart” (1830s), and called her “that poetess of heaven” in “The Music of Our Neighborhood. Morning,” 254. Felicia (Browne) Hemans’s sister, Harriet Mary Browne, usually called “Miss Browne,” was a very successful song composer in Great Britain and America. Miss Augusta Browne

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 47–58 and “Miss Browne” were frequently mixed up even during their lifetimes, but the families were not related. Augusta consistently used her full name, “Miss Augusta Browne,” or, rarely, “Miss A. Browne” on her sheet music and prose, thereby avoiding confusion. Harriet Browne never used her given name on her music; she is usually identified as “Miss Browne” and frequently as “Mrs. Hemans’ sister.” Emily Warren’s father, Dr. John Collins Warren, was not only a noted surgeon—the first to perform an operation on a patient anesthetized with ether (1846)—but also the first dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the founders of Massachusetts General Hospital. Emily Warren, whom Augusta apparently knew during the Brownes’ brief hiatus in Boston in 1833–34, married William Appleton, the son of a prominent Boston merchant family, in 1845. Logier, System of the Science of Music, 152–54. Page numbers differ in the many editions published during the nineteenth century. AB, Hamilton, 27. Ogasapian, Church Music in America, 142. Young, Toadstool Millionaires, 58–74. A portrait painted by John Neagle of Mrs. Swaim and her daughter is held in the Hopkinson Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Mrs. [William] Nixon, Victoria Waltz Air with Variations for the Piano Forte (New York: Dubois and Bacon, n.d.). Augusta dedicated her 1844 piano duet L’Henri, Galopp Brillante to the Nixon children, E. Adela and Wilson K. The Nixons lived in Cincinnati, where several additional examples of music that Augusta inscribed “with the Authoress’s Compliments” to Mrs. Nixon are found in binder’s volumes in the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. See Green, “Dedications,” 26–37. George Coles, “The Stranger and His Friend” (New York: Firth and Hall, 1841). “Literary,” [Philadelphia] Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post, February 23, 1839. Bishop’s “Merry Mountain Horn” can be viewed in Levy. This song came from the stage work Home, Sweet Home! (1829), a show that capitalized on Bishop’s best-known song. The Merry Mountain Horn is Augusta’s only musical work currently available on a commercial CD recording, performed by pianist Helen Beedle, 19th Century Salon & Concert Music (Hellertown, PA: Helen Beedle, 2003). Women composers used this outlet in significant numbers, although they were far outnumbered by their male competitors. See Miller, “Ladies’ Companion.” Organized in 1806, the church is regarded as the first English-language Lutheran church in America. References to the church vary: Saint John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, St. John the Evangelist Luther Church, St. John’s Church (Lutheran), St. John’s Lutheran Church.

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notes to pp. 60–66

ᆥ 375

21. On the popularity of opera in antebellum America, see Preston, Opera on the Road, and Ahlquist, Democracy at the Opera. 22. AB, “The Music of Our Neighborhood. Morning,” “Our Neighborhood. Evening,” and “Our Neighborhood. Evening, Concluded.” The series was revised for the Western Musical World in 1867. 23. AB, “Chapter on Musical Sentiments,” 165. 24. Meyer-Frazier, “American Women’s Roles in Domestic Music Making,” 197–98. 25. Mrs. Wood (1802–63), née Mary Anne Paton, sang as a child and became a leading operatic soprano. She was also known as Lady Lennox before her marriage to Lord William Pitt Lennox was dissolved. Her second husband, Joseph Wood, was a boxer before his career as a tenor. The British pair came on tour with stage productions to New York and Philadelphia in 1833–36. 26. Poriss explores the tradition of aria insertion in Changing the Score. 27. The anonymous review from the Philadelphia United States Gazette was reprinted in the Boston Courier, June 13, 1839. 28. Reich, Clara Schumann, 228–29. 29. Robert Schumann, Tagebücher, ed. Gerd Nauhaus, 3 vols. (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1981–88), 2:162, quoted in Cai, “Clara Schumann,” 58. 30. AB, Hamilton, 143. Augusta gives no details but implies that this brother was lost in a ship disaster. M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory for 1841 listed “Browne, Samuel, music teacher, 29 S. 10th,” along with entries for Augusta, “prof. of music,” David S. “musical academy,” and Louis Henri, “piano manuf.” 31. “Notices,” Protestant Vindicator in Defense of Civil and Religious Liberty Against the Inroads of Popery 3, no. 26 (June 9, 1841): 207; Protestant Vindicator 4, no. 1 (June 23, 1841): 7. The full title varies, but Protestant Vindicator is the running title of this anti-Catholic biweekly.

Chapter Four 1.

2. 3. 4.

Miller.indd 375

Walt Whitman, “The First of May,” published May 1, 1857, reprinted in Whitman, I Sit and Look Out, 123. See also Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 213–16. “Moving Day, a Moving Lay, a New Comic Song,” by “Asmodeus” (New York: C. Christman, 1844) is available in Levy. “Musical Tuition on Broadway,” New York Tribune, June 12, 1841. “Notices,” Protestant Vindicator 3, no. 26 (June 9, 1841): 207; Protestant Vindicator 4, no. 1 (June 23, 1841): 7.

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376 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 67–72 “Music Tuition on the Piano Forte, Organ, Singing, Composition, &c.,” New York Tribune, August 7, 1841; “Musical Tuition on the Piano,” New York Herald, August 13, 1841. Longworth’s American Almanac New-York Register and City Directory for the Sixty-Sixth Year of American Independence (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1841), 133. “Miss Augusta Browne,” New York Tribune, November 17, 1841. Geary explains “finishing lessons” in Musical Education, 59–60. “The Logierian System,” Ladies’ Magazine 1, no. 2 (February 1828): 87. Huneker, Overtones, 289–90. “Musical Tuition on the Piano.” “New Music,” New York Herald, August 6, 1841. David Browne, American Grand Bugle Andante, Euterpeiad 1, no. 3 (May 15, 1830): 20–22. “New music,” New York Mirror 19 (September 25, 1841): 311. Farrar, The Young Lady’s Friend; see also My Daughter’s Manual. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 175. Parker, Musical Biography, 195. Farrar, Young Lady’s Friend, 221. Meyer-Frazier, “American Women’s Roles,” 265. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 99. See also Morgan, “War on the Home Front.” See, for example, Goodman’s discussion of the singer-actress Mary Ann Wrighten Pownall in the 1790s in “The Power to Please.” Parker, Musical Biography, 166, 196. Ahlquist discusses touring singers as chaste moral models in Democracy at the Opera. Caswell, “Jenny Lind’s Tour of America.” Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” “Miss Augusta Browne,” New York Tribune, November 17, 1841; “New Music Store,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 18, 1842, through May 18, 1843; “Miss Augusta Browne,” New York Herald, November 9–11, 1844. “Miss Augusta Browne,” New York Daily Tribune, December 5, 1845. “Removal. Miss Augusta Browne,” New York Tribune, June 15, 1846. New World 3, no. 23 (December 4, 1841): 364. New York Evangelist 12, no. 49 (December 4, 1841): 194. Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:117–18. Advertisements in New World 3 (December 4, 1841): 364; New York Herald and New York Tribune, December 29–31, 1841; New York Tribune, April 4–6, 1842; New York Herald, April 12, 1842, and New York Tribune, April 13–14, 1842; New York Daily Tribune and New York Herald, December 3–6, 1842;

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notes to pp. 72–78

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

Miller.indd 377

ᆥ 377

New York Herald, December 11, 1842; New York Herald, December 20, 1842; New York Morning Courier, December 26, 1842. Strong’s entry for December 7, 1841, in Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:120; see also 128. Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:84. New York Herald, December 29, 1841. “Removal,” New York Herald, May 4, 1842. “Mr. Braham,” New York Tribune, April 5, 1842. “Braham’s Concert,” New York Herald, December 7, 1842; “Grand Vocal Concert at Niblo’s,” New York Herald, December 20, 1842. “The Concert at Niblos’s [sic],” New York Herald, December 21, 1842. Strong noted Braham’s girth (Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:116 and 149). The Hutchinson family performed a similar number called “The Fisher Boy Merrily Lives,” by Henry Russell with lyrics by Eliza Cook (Boston: Oakes and Swan, 1840). The 86 theme comes from Philip Cipriani Hambly Potter, “Introduction and Rondo for Two Performers at One Piano Forte,” op. 8 (London: Clementi, n.d.). See A Selection of Four-Hand Duets Published Between 1777 and 1857, vol. 19, The London Piano Forte School, 1766–1860, ed. Nicholas Temperley (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), in which the theme is introduced in the primo on p. 203 in Temperley’s reprint edition (p. 11 of Potter’s original). “Mr. Braham,” New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 5, and 6, 1842; New York Herald, December 3–6, 1842. Meyer-Frazier, “American Women’s Roles,” 200. “New Music,” Protestant Vindicator n.s. 4, no. 20 (March 23, 1842): 159. Concerts for April 21 and April 28 were advertised in the Brooklyn Eagle on April 18–20 and April 27, 1842. “New Music,” Protestant Vindicator n.s. 4, no. 18 (February 23, 1842), 143; reprinted in New York Tribune, March 22, 1842. The newspapers called it her “Forty-first Musical composition,” but the fantasia title page indicates opus 35. Augusta did not ordinarily assign opus numbers to songs and small keyboard pieces. Moore and Stevenson, Selection of Popular National Airs. The derivation of the melody is not certain, although it is sometimes attributed to the Russian composer Dimitri Bortniansky. The 1818 publication explained in a footnote that Stevenson added the final phrase. For example, Kalkbrenner’s grand fantasia on the Scottish/Irish tune “Robin Adair,” op. 21 (London: ca. 1816), introduces the German folksong “Ach du lieber Augustin” in a later variation as a counterpoint to the theme. Browne praised Kalkbrenner’s music in her essays, and she performed his Grand Fantasia on an Irish Air at a concert in 1842. See Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation, 71, 81, 85, 202, and 235.

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378

ᆥ notes to pp. 78–85

50. Augusta, who asserted that she did not attend plays or operas, may not have realized that Don Giovanni’s serenade in disguise was an attempt to seduce Donna Elvira’s maid. 51. John Rowe Parker, “Miss Eustaphieve” Euterpeiad 1, no. 22 (August 26, 1820): 87; 1, no. 23 (September 2, 1820): 90; and 1, no. 24 (September 9, 1820): 95; reprinted in Musical Biography, 196–207. 52. Parker, “Miss Eustaphiève,” 95. 53. “Bonnie Bessie Green,” New World 4, no. 2 (January 8, 1842): 31. 54. Lawrence cites instance after instance of Watson’s diatribes against New York City musicians in Strong on Music. 55. AB, “Grand Farewell Concert.” 56. Anthony Philip Heinrich, “Divertimento Terzo,” New York Herald, January 17, 1842. Heinrich’s complete tirade is transcribed in Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1: 625–27. 57. Anthony Philip Heinrich, letter to Park Benjamin, New York Herald, December 24, 1841; transcribed in Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1: 623–25. 58. “A Grand Musical Festival,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 26, 1843. 59. “Removal,” New York Herald, May 4, 1842. 60. “Brooklyn Institute,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 30, 1846. 61. Cooke, “Southern Women, Southern Voices,” 69–71; Finson, Voices That Are Gone, 31–33. 62. “A Concert,” New York Herald, December 29 and 30, 1841. 63. In the [New York] Express, July 16, 1841, quoted by Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:140. 64. “The Protestant Reformation Society’s Course of Lectures,” New York Tribune, December 29, 1841. 65. For more on the First Presbyterian organ at the time, see the NYC Organ Project of the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists. http:// www.nycago.org/Organs/Bkln/html/FirstPresbyterian.html#StevensGayetty (accessed August 25, 2015). 66. Protestant Vindicator n.s. 4, no. 15 (January 12, 1842): 119. 67. “New Music Store,” Brooklyn Eagle, daily ad running from May 18, 1842, through May 18, 1843. 68. Browne, Hamilton, 34–35. 69. Browne, Hamilton, 38–41. 70. Rev. James M. Mathews was a prominent Presbyterian minister who served as the first chancellor of the City University of New York. Augusta dedicated the anthem to him and apparently cultivated the acquaintance. Mathews was involved with the ministry at South Reformed Dutch Church, where Augusta later worked. 71. A copy of the centennial program in the New York Public Library lists additional music by Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Handel, Fauré, Alfredo d’Ambrosio,

Miller.indd 378

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notes to pp. 86–99

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Miller.indd 379

ᆥ 379

Heinrich Hofmann, James H. Rogers, Clarence Lucas, and improvisations by the church organist, R. Huntington Woodman. The event was described in the Brooklyn Standard Union, March 11, 1922. New York Herald, December 22, 1842. Wil Smith, organist at First Presbyterian Church, kindly shared with the author information based on payment entries in church treasurer’s books. Holman and Kristofferson, More of a Man, 265. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 310. First Presbyterian Church payment records in treasurer’s books. AB, “Music of the Church,” Home Journal (hereafter cited as HJ), November 6, 1852. “Organs for Sale, Christian Intelligencer, September 24, 1846. “Miss Augusta Browne,” New York Daily Tribune, March 28, 1846; “Removal,” New York Daily Tribune, June 13 and 15, 1846. “Removal,” Brooklyn Evening Star, May 12, 1845; notice dated May 9, 1845. AB, “Miss Augusta Browne, Late Organist of Rev. Dr. Cox’s Church. To her Friends in Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Evening Star, October 3, 1845. “Louis H. Browne Piano Fortes” were advertised in in Boston, corner Washington and Winter Streets, in Sheldon & Co.’s Business or Advertising Directory: Containing the Cards, Circulars, and Advertisements of the Principal Firms of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Etc., Etc. (New York, Sheldon, 1845), 53. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term the “Boston Brahmins” for the city’s commercial and social leaders in Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1861). A Song for New England is titled Song of New England on the inner page, revealing that the engraver of the title page was not the same person who engraved or typeset the music. Imprints of Augusta’s compositions often displayed a title on the ornamental cover at variance with the running title on the pages of music. “Music,” New York Herald, July 25, 1844. “Want of Harmony in the Payment of Harmony,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 17, 1847. “Augusta Browne vs. First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn,” Evening Star, April 17, 1847. This and the three preceding quotes, AB, “To the Public,” New York Daily Tribune, April 24, 26, and 27, 1847. “Removals,” [New York] Morning Express, May 15, 1847. Barger, Elizabeth Stirling. David S. Browne was listed owing property taxes for the “house and lot” in the [New York] Evening Post, November 26, 1845. Rabb, A Tour Through Indiana in 1840, 253. John Parsons mentioned Augusta’s song “The Stranger’s Heart,” published by Blake, but the words that he jotted

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380

93. 94.

95. 96.

97.

98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

ᆥ notes to pp. 99–105 down in his diary were from another song that may have been printed together with it, titled “Dost Thou Idly Ask to Hear,” by J. E. Burt. Musical gems bound by J. Sage (Buffalo: Sage and Sons, n.d.), now in the University of Toronto Music Library. Augusta’s early sheet music imprints “The Voice of Spring,” Variations on a Favorite Air from . . . Lo Zangara, Air a la Suisse, and In the Days When We Went Gipsying were labeled “property of the publisher” or “property of the editor.” Suisman summarizes the development of the US music industry in Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Catalogue of the large and valuable stock of music plates, sheet music, musical instruments, material, &c. being the stock of the late George E. Blake, to be sold at public sale . . . on Monday morning May 22, 1871 [Philadelphia, 1871]. The subtitle was spelled variously “gallop brilliante” and “gallope brilliante.” By 1870 the title was shortened to Henri Galop in the US Board of Music Trade, Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music, 539. See Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 54–79; and Head, “Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship.” Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead, 100. See also Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, and Battersby, Gender and Genius. “The Family Bible” was based on the melody of Hodson’s “He Never Said He Loved” (New York: Atwill’s Music Saloon, n.d.). On the marketing value of a celebrity’s portrait on a sheet music cover, see Gallo, “Selling ‘Celebrity,’” 18–19. The incidence of a composer’s or performer’s “signature” on a sheet music cover was a marketing ploy used on title pages of songs by such popular celebrities as Henry Russell and Stephen Foster. “De Meyer Waltz,” New York Tribune, November 6, 1846. “Elegant Music by Miss Augusta Browne,” Christian Advocate 22, no. 36 (September 8, 1847): 142.

Chapter Five 1.

2. 3.

4.

Miller.indd 380

AB, “Musical Thoughts.” The title page of collected volumes sometimes listed Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, but the short title Columbian Magazine ran throughout each monthly issue. “Died,” Christian Intelligencer, October 23, 1841. The poem that concluded the essay was an excerpt from “The Two Voices,” by Mrs. Hemans. AB may have borrowed the phrase “the morning of a glorious eternity” from the British Methodist minister Jabez Burns (1805–76), whose sermons and books were widely reprinted. This view is expressed in such seminal histories as Branch, Sentimental Years, and Douglas, Feminization of American Culture.

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notes to pp. 105–109 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Miller.indd 381

ᆥ 381

Reynolds, Waking Giant, 127. Ogasapian traces the rise of the Oxford Movement in New York in English Cathedral Music in New York. AB, “Rockets from an Organ Loft,” 4. The story immediately made the rounds of newspapers, sometimes under the title “The Musician’s Midnight Adventure.” Augusta successfully resubmitted the piece as “The Organist’s Ghostly Adventure” in 1849, 1867, 1870, and 1871. In addition there were unauthorized reprints. ABG, letter to Charles Hodge, D.D., dated July 28, 1862, Charles Hodge Papers, C0261, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. Used by permission of Princeton University Libraries. “Lydia Huntley Sigourney,” American Literary Magazine 4, no. 1 (January 1849): 388. Fanny Fern, “The Women of 1867,” New York Ledger (August 10, 1867), reprinted in Fern, Folly as It Flies, 61–65. AB, “Fantasie on the Piano-forte,” 15; Nathaniel Hawthorne, letter to the publisher William D. Ticknor of Ticknor and Fields, January 19, 1855; see Letters of Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 1851–1864 (Newark, NJ: The Cartaret Book Club, 1910), 1:75. “The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Athenaeum,” [Boston] Daily Atlas, July 23, 1842. A single issue of the Lady’s and Gentleman’s Athenaeum, 1, no. 1, for July, 1842, survives at the New York Public Library, but the front matter, music, and illustration plates are missing. Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 611. Child has been best remembered as the reformer who edited Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). See Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. Moseley, “‘Those Songs Which So Much Remind Me of You,’” 390. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 115. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 158. Lucy Stone, 1887 speech, quoted in Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 35. Branch, Sentimental Years, 119. Sartain, Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 220. Advertisements in the HJ during December 1865. The practice of free exchange of newspapers between printers had been common since colonial times and was continued through the congressional Post Office Act of 1792. Kielbowicz, “Newsgathering by Printers’ Exchanges Before the Telegraph”; Kielbowicz, News in the Mail. An excellent summary of the development of US newspapers is available online in https://www.library.illinois.edu/hpnl/tutorials/antebellum-newspapers-country/ (accessed December 14, 2016).

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382

ᆥ notes to pp. 110–117

24. “Lydia Huntley Sigourney,” 388. 25. Cited in Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 277. 26. 1850 United States Federal Census, New York, New York, population schedule, New York City Ward 14; Roll: M432_551; p. 79A (stamped). 27. See Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference; Hughes, Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. 28. New York Ledger, June 8, 1861, quoted in Warren, Women, Money, and the Law, 63–64. See also Warren, Fanny Fern. 29. Edgar Allan Poe, letter to Frederick William Thomas, May 24, 1842, quoted in “Poe in Philadelphia,” 733. Poe made good money writing for such magazines despite his contempt for them. 30. See Masten, “Shake Hands?”; Masten, Art Work. 31. “The Custom House,” Subterranean, January 23, 1847. 32. See Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband. 33. AB, Hamilton, 114, 48. 34. 1850 United States Federal Census, Essex County, Massachusetts, population schedule, Lynn, p. 342A (stamped), dwelling 1457, family 3052, Freeman and Sarah Howes, ll. 37–42, and p. 342B, line 1, Henri M. Browne; 1860 United States Federal Census, Essex County, Massachusetts, population schedule, Swampscott, p. 28, [dwelling illegible], family 4377, Sarah Howes, and p. 29, li. 1, Montgomery Brown. 35. Two analyses of the event and its context are provided by Cliff, Shakespeare Riots, and Moody, Astor Place Riot. 36. AB, Hamilton, 66–69.

Chapter Six 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

Miller.indd 382

“American Female Writers,” The Lady’s Almanac for 1854, 92. Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own” (London: Hogarth Press, 1929; University of Adelaide: ebooks@Adelaide, n.d.), https://ebooks.adelaide.edu. au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/index.html. Augusta did not opt to be “self-supporting,” as posited by Tick, American Women Composers, 151; and Pendle, Women & Music, 211. “Mexican Volunteers,” Subterranean, January 23, 1847. “The Mexican Volunteers Quick Step,” Brooklyn Eagle, daily, January 21 through March 3, 1847; Brooklyn Evening Star, February 9, 1847. Items included an army-issue sword, an officer’s sword captured in Mexico, and some artifacts (rosary, crucifix, handkerchief, etc.) taken from a Mexican home, described in Bird, Mexican War: Souvenir Nation, 112–13. Tick, American Women Composers, 153–60.

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notes to pp. 119–126 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Miller.indd 383

ᆥ 383

“New Music,” New York Daily Tribune, March 11, 1848; and “Song. The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” Columbian Magazine 9, no. 6 (1848), 287. Tick, American Women Composers, 153. Augusta Browne to Henry Clay, November 25, 1847, Henry Clay Memorial Foundation papers, 1777–1991, University of Kentucky Special Collections, https://exploreuk.uky.edu/fa/findingaid/?id=xt769p2w6f6h (accessed December 19, 2019). “American Musical Institute,” New York Evening Post and New York Tribune, February 8, 1848. “Grand Concert,” New York Evening Post, December 14, 1848; “A Grand Concert,” New York Herald-Tribune, December 28, 1848. Smith-Rosenberg discusses the “Home for the Friendless” project in Religion and the Rise of the American City, 206–10. Accounts of one hundred Northeast spinsters, including Augusta’s friends Alice and Phoebe Cary, provide the basis of Chambers-Schiller’s Liberty, a Better Husband. Louisa May Alcott, Journal, February 14, 1868; quoted in Alcott and Cheney, Louisa May Alcott, 197. Anthony Philip Heinrich, letter to an unidentified friend, quoted by Lydia Maria Child, “Memoir of a Remarkable Man,” New York Daily Tribune, November 19, 1845; Lydia Maria Child, letter to editor Horace Greeley, New York Daily Tribune, May 5, 1846. Jepson, Women’s Concerns, 206. “Music Card,” HJ, October 30, 1852, through April, 1853. Smith discusses music lesson fees in Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 150–51. Lessons at the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary cost $5 per quarter for piano or guitar and $25 per quarter for harp lessons; vocal lessons ranged from $6 to $20 per quarter, based on the choice of teacher. A biographical sketch of Faustina Hasse Hodges appeared in Sage and Fairbanks, Emma Willard and Her Pupils, 511–12. Faustina Hasse Hodges, “The Rose Bush” (New York: C. Breusing, 1859), HathiTrust Digital Library, https://www.hathitrust.org (hereafter cited as HathiTrust). See Tick, American Women Composers, 188–91. Miller, “Ladies’ Companion,” 177. See Rohr, “Women and the Music Profession in Victorian England,” 307–46. Ellsworth, “‘A Magnificent Musician,’” 171. Stephen C. Foster, “Gentle Annie” (New York: Firth, Pond, 1856). Stephen C. Foster, Santa Anna’s Retreat from Buena Vista Quick Step (Louisville: W. C. Peters, 1848). AB, “Grand Farewell Concert.”

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384

ᆥ notes to pp. 127–132

28. See Henri L. Stuart, “Watson’s Art Journal. The Management Past and Present,” Watson’s Art Journal 24, no. 7 (December 11, 1875), 82; Dwight’s Journal of Music was financially unstable until Oliver Ditson and Company took over publication in 1858. 29. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 358. 30. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 374. 31. ABG, “Wanted, an Organist,” 324. 32. “Mrs. Augusta Browne Garrett,” New York Daily Tribune, September 23, 1857. 33. ABG, “Musical Revival.” 34. ABG, “Musical Revival.” 35. ABG, “Wanted, an Organist,” 321. 36. ABG, “‘Benedic Anima Mea,’” 206. 37. Clark, Dawning of American Keyboard Music, 255. 38. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 270. 39. ABG, “Musical Revival.” 40. ABG, “Musical Revival.” 41. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 271. 42. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 271. 43. ABG, “Musical Revival.” 44. ABG, “Wanted, an Organist,” 321. 45. See Barger, Elizabeth Stirling, 37–47. 46. Barger, Elizabeth Stirling, 34. 47. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 270. 48. Strong’s entry for March 31, 1840, reprinted in Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:70. 49. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 358. 50. Ogasapian, English Cathedral Music, 170. 51. ABG, “Wanted, an Organist,” 323. 52. AB, “Rockets from an Organ Loft,” 3. 53. ABG, “Wanted, an Organist,” 321–22. 54. The inscribed copy of Hamilton was a gift from the estate of Augusta’s niece Emily A. [Browne] Ballard to the Wisconsin Historical Society. The copy is held in the Kohler Art Library of the University of Wisconsin and can be viewed in HathiTrust. 55. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852). Serial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin began in the weekly National Era during June 1851, but the conclusion and the first complete edition came out in March 1852. 56. See Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 6–7 and 10–11. 57. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 3–4. 58. Augusta thus conformed to the notion that “[n]ineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury women had great difficulty making themselves subjects and objects of their own stories.” See Conway, When Memory Speaks, 88.

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notes to pp. 132–137

ᆥ 385

59. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 24. 60. Morris, ed., Men of the Century, 210. 61. HathiTrust digitized copy of Hamilton, 44. An engraving titled “The Young Artist” was substituted as a frontispiece (missing in the HathiTrust copy). The substitute was a sentimental image of a little boy sketching while his sister looks on, an engraving originally published to illustrate a poem, “The Young Artist,” by H. F. Gould in The Token, for 1832 (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1831), after 82, in the HathiTrust copy of The Token. 62. “Brooklyn Institute—Award of Premiums,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 25, 1845. 63. “Brooklyn Art Union,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 11, 1850, p. 2. Whitman worked at the Brooklyn Eagle from March 1846 to January 1848. Lawrence traces Whitman’s connections to the Brooklyn arts in “‘Ardent, Radical, and Progressive.’” 64. Traubel et al., With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2:506; Bohan, Looking into Walt Whitman, 217n52. 65. ABG, “Artist’s Memorial,” 39. 66. AB, Hamilton, 136. 67. Carbone, American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum, 2:761. 68. AB, Hamilton, 37. 69. ABG, “Artist’s Memorial,” 39. 70. Mathews also gave a file of the artist’s personal papers to the Brooklyn Historical Society. Among other items, the Walter Libbey Papers contain two copies of “The Painter’s Last Rest,” clipped out of an unidentified newspaper and mailed by Augusta to Libbey’s family (Brooklyn Historical Society, accession number 1978.100). 71. Sigourney, Faded Hope, 220. 72. Alice Cary, “Elegiac Stanzas,” in AB, Hamilton, 155; and Mary Balmanno, “To the Beloved Memory of Hamilton A. C. Browne,” in Hamilton, 156. 73. AB, Hamilton, 133. 74. ABG, “Hints for a Sunday-School,” 149. 75. See Brown, Word in the World. 76. See Gerdts, “Daniel Huntington’s ‘Mercy’s Dream.’” Online images of the painting show slightly different versions held in different collections. 77. See Cotter, “A Pilgrim’s Perils in an Ancestor of B-Movies.” 78. “Notices,” Journal of the Fine Arts n.s., [2] (April 15, 1851): 44. 79. “New Music,” New York Chronicle, June 12, 1851, 190. 80. The New York Crystal Palace was not a copy of the London original, but it was similarly constructed, using plate glass in a framework of cast iron columns. A description of the structure was detailed in How to See the New York Crystal Palace: Being a Concise Guide to the Principal Objects in the Exhibition as Remodelled, 1854 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1854), 5–8. It stood on Reservoir Square at 42nd Street, where Bryant Park and the New York Public Library are now located.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 138–143

81. “Music Card,” running for several months in the HJ, starting in April 1851. 82. AB, Hamilton, 153. 83. William Henry Browne, “The Mexican Coquette. A Sketch of Modern Chivalry.” 84. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 186. 85. See, for example, “Lieut. Browne,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 18, 1852; and “Some Brown,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 21, 1852. The misspelling of “Browne” as “Brown” muddled William Henry’s military record. 86. “Salute,” New-York Daily Times, September 15, 1852. 87. The National Archives and Records Administration database Fold3 contains files of letters and follow-ups written by David Samuel Browne and William H. Browne to commissioners of pensions or adjutant generals on behalf of survivors or heirs. https://www.fold3.com/ (accessed October 1, 2015). 88. “Claims upon the United States,” New-York Daily Times, February 15, 1853. 89. For example, David S. Browne was the executor for the estate of Mary Canton of New York City; New York Herald-Tribune, notice running for six months beginning April 26, 1859. 90. This and preceding quote, AB, “The Man Who Nurses the Baby.” 91. “The Man Who Nurses the Baby,” Godey’s Magazine 59, no. 1 (1859): 20–21; also in Robert Kemp Philp, The Interview, Companion Volume to ‘Enquire Within’ (London: Houlston and Stoneman, ca. 1856), 184–86. HathiTrust. 92. Census records, both state (1855) and national (1860), list Sarah Browne and Augusta Emily in Hingham in the household of Alexander King, a tinware merchant. She probably worked as a housekeeper for this widower. Boston city directories (1853–55) listed Louis as a piano maker at 20 Essex and 460 Washington, but boarding at 13 Beach. 93. Emily and her husband, Joseph Ballard, operated a drugstore in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They had no surviving children. As a widow, Emily moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and worked as a live-in chaperone at university sorority houses and the YWCA before moving to San Diego. 94. Harry Montgomery Browne had two daughters. Like Augusta, both of her grandnieces had professional careers. The older daughter, Ethel Browne, was an artist and teacher in Boston; the younger, Marion B. Phinney, served as a Red Cross administrator in Woodstock, Illinois. And, like Augusta, they had no children. Marion was the last surviving descendant of David and Elizabeth Browne. 95. David Browne purchased the house for $7,300 on March 27, 1854 (New York City Land Conveyances, Liber 665, 6–8, in “New York Land Records, 1630– 1975,” FamilySearch, http://FamilySearch.org [accessed April 4, 2019]). 96. “Musical Card,” HJ, May 6, 1854. 97. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 220. 98. Potter, reprinted in Corder, History of the Royal Academy of Music, 54.

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99. “Edwina Dean Lowe,” Inland Monthly 1, no. 4 (June 1872), 154. Lowe studied voice with British singer Anne Seguin; her keyboard and theory study with Augusta probably occurred during Lowe’s early teenage years, ca. 1850.

Chapter Seven 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

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See Barratt, “Mapping the Venues.” See Bohan, “Walt Whitman and the Sister Arts.” “Married,” New-York Daily Times, September 25, 1855. “Married,” HJ, September 22, 1855. “Paris, New York & Philadelphia fashions for spring & summer 1855, published & sold by F. Mahan, No. 186 Chesnut Street, Philadelphia,” [Philadelphia]: P. S. Duval, 1855 (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress). He is identified as “John Walter B. Garrett,” in ABG, Precious Stones, xi. He is listed as “Garrott, Martin R.,” in Daniel Lindsay Grant, ed. Alumni History of the University of North Carolina: Electronic Edition (2nd ed., 1924), 215, http://docsouth.unc.edu/true/grant/menu.html (accessed June 2, 2013); “Married,” [Raleigh] Star, February 4, 1820. “Stony Hill Academy,” Raleigh Star, May 31, 1834, quoted in Charles L. Coon, North Carolina Schools and Academies 1799–1840: A Documentary History (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and Broughton, 1915), 268–69. A bill was passed on December 18, 1832, to incorporate Stony Hill Academy on Martin R. Garrett’s lands in Nash County, in North Carolina, General Assembly, Senate, Journals of the Senate And House of Commons of the General Assembly of North Carolina At the Session of 1832 (Raleigh, NC: Charles R. Ramsay, 1833), 174–75, 219. 1830 United States Federal Census, Nash Co., North Carolina, population schedule, District 1, Arringtons township, p. 169, line 16. Martin R. Garrett’s family comprised three males under 5, two males 5–10, one male 30–40, and one female 30–40. The household included eight slaves (two under 10; the remaining six 10–25), resulting in more enslaved than white family members. John C. Davis v. Martin R. Garrett, in Iredell, Reports of Cases at Law Argued and Determined In the Supreme Court of North Carolina . . . 3:459–66. The petitioners appealed unsuccessfully against the initial judgment, summarized thus: “Upon the trial of the issue, his Honor instructed the jury that seven-eights [sic] of one-fifth of the slaves levied upon belonged to the petitioners as trustees for Garrett’s children, and were not liable to the satisfaction of the plaintiff ’s recovery.” “Auction,” Tarrboro [NC] Free Press, October 12 and 19, 1839. Nash County, North Carolina, Deed Book 16, p. 507.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 146–148

14. 1840 United States Federal Census, Fayette Co., Tennessee, population schedule, Civil District 8, p. 134, line 15. “Martin R. Garret” was listed with one male under 5; two males 5–10; two males 10–15; one male 40–50; two daughters 5–10; one female 40–50; and eight slaves (four males under 10; one male 10–23; one male 24–35; one female 10–23; and one female 24–35). 15. [The Weekly] Raleigh Register, and North Carolina Gazette, November 17, 1847. 16. “New Paper at Hillsborough,” [Fayetteville] The North-Carolinian, March 25, 1848. The paper was also known as the Hillsborough Democrat and the North Carolina Democrat. 17. “Prospectus of the Orange Ratoon, to be Published in Hillsboro, N.C.,” NorthCarolina Standard, March 15, 1848. 18. “The ‘Orange Ratoon,’” [Raleigh] North-Carolina Standard, March 15, 1848. 19. North-Carolina Standard, May 3, 1848. 20. “The Ratoon,” [Wilmington, NC] Tri-Weekly Commercial, September 16, 1848. 21. US Superintendent of Documents, 31st Congress, 1st session, Ex. Doc. No. 29; Report of the Secretary of State, showing the names and compensation of the clerks and other persons employed in that department during the year 1849, 29. 22. Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, 134; Groce, Wallace, and New-York Historical Society, New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 250; Whitley, Kentucky Ante-Bellum Portraiture; Haverstock et al., Artists in Ohio, 326. 23. “A Specimin [sic] of the Arts,” [Cincinnati] Daily Enquirer, August 28, 1852, in the John W. B. Garrett vertical file in the Smithsonian American Art and Portrait Gallery Library. Judge Matthews (1824–89) later held a seat in the Senate and served on the Supreme Court (1881–89). 24. Garrett vertical file at the Smithsonian American Art and Portrait Gallery Library. 25. This was the case for the painters James Hart and William Browning Cooper; see Kelly, “Portrait Painting in Tennessee”; Masler, “Art and Artists in Antebellum Memphis.” 26. “Garrett’s Portrait Gallery,” Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer, April 7, 1854. 27. “J. W. B. Garrett, Portrait Painter,” Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer, daily advertisement from May 16, 1854 through April, 1855. 28. “J. W. B. Garrett, Portrait Painter.” 29. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, December 14, 1854. The numerals are indistinct and the loss could have been three thousand dollars or five thousand dollars. 30. “J. W. B. Garrett,” copied from the Louisville Journal in the Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer, May 15, 1855. 31. Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer, April 13, 1855. 32. “Little Or-Nothings,” HJ, August 4, 1855. 33. “Mere Mention. An Artist’s Studio,” HJ, November 1, 1856.

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notes to pp. 148–152

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34. In the exhibition records of the National Academy of Design, Garrett listed his address on 27th Avenue in 1857 followed by 222 Adams in spring, 1858, while city directories for 1856/57 and 1857/58 list 71 W. 14th Street. 35. “An Artist’s Studio”; ABG, “The Mind is a Kingdom.” 36. “Artist’s Memorial,” 38. 37. “New York, New York City Municipal Deaths, 1795–1949,” database, FamilySearch https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F6MB-VPJ: (accessed October 27, 2015); Lucretia A. H. Garrett [sic], September 11, 1856; citing Death, Manhattan, New York, New York, United States, New York Municipal Archives, New York; FHL microfilm 447,559. 38. New York Herald-Tribune, October 14, 1856; New York Herald, October 15, 1856. The first Republican candidate for president was John Frémont, who was defeated by James Buchanan. 39. Shelby County [Tennessee] Register of Deeds, Book 0022, p. 405. 40. Lucretia A. M. Garrett, will, September 8, 1856, recorded in New York, Wills and Probate Records, 1659–1999, New York Wills, vol. 0118-0119, 1856– 1857, images 330–31, ancestry.com (accessed February 7, 2018). 41. Louise Wolcott Knowlton Browne (died 1904), Last Will and Testament, codicil of April 8, 1903, Box 259, District of Columbia Archives, Record Group 2, Records of Superior Court. 42. The image shows a teenager in uniform seated at a table and looking toward the viewer with an American flag in the background. The sheet music is held in the music collection AMS-1 at the New York Public Library. 43. “An Artist’s Studio,” HJ, November 1, 1856. 44. Cowdrey and National Academy, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1:177; Louise W. K. Browne, Last Will and Testament, codicil of July 12, 1901. 45. ABG, “Crotchets of Comfort for ye Seekers of Fame.” 46. New-York Daily Times, September 23 and 26, 1857, and October 3, 1857. 47. Kings County, New York, Land Conveyances, Liber 444, pages 447–50, in “New York Land Records, 1630–1975,” FamilySearch, http://FamilySearch.org (accessed November 2, 2015). 48. Description of 222 Adams Street in a running advertisement during February and March, 1865, in the Brooklyn Eagle. David Browne paid $4,650 for the property in 1857. 49. Johann Bernard Logier, Strains of Other Days: Being a Selection of Favorite Irish Airs . . . (Dublin: J. B. Logier’s Music Saloon, n.d), IMSLP; Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans, Lays of Many Lands, 1826, in The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans: Complete in One Volume (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1836), 24–38, HathiTrust. 50. Farmer’s Cabinet 55, no. 42, May 21, 1857; Newport [RI] Daily News, May 16, 1857.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 153–159

51. “Second Examination,” Boston Courier, December 24–28, 1827. David Browne advertised that his students would “perform exercises by natural and abrupt modulations, . . .[and] Obstruse Modulation &c.” 52. “Musical Card,” HJ, February 6 to May 1, 1858; “Musical Card,” New York Musical World (hereafter cited as NYMW), June and July 1858. 53. The Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer, November 20, 1855, listed Garrett at the Worsham House hotel in Memphis. 54. [Tarboro, NC] Southerner, April 10, 1858. 55. “Died,” New York Tribune, August 28, 1855; and “Died,” HJ, September 11, 1855. 56. Nicole McCaffrey, “Mourning Rituals and Customs in the Victorian Era,” parts 1 and 2, https://slipintosomethingvictorian.wordpress.com/2006/04/06/ mourning-rituals-and-customs/ (accessed December 2, 2019). 57. ABG, Precious Stones, xv. 58. Revised essays in Precious Stones were “Trinity Chimes,” “Visions in Twilight,” “Reveries in Starlight,” and “Springs of Association”; Augusta’s poems were “A Thought of the Departed,” “Coelum et terra,” and “An Artist’s Farewell to Time.” 59. ABG, Precious Stones, xv. John Bunyan devoted a section of his Holy City; or the New Jerusalem to a discussion of each verse from the same scriptural passage. 60. Patterson describes Precious Stones as “a series of bad poems and dull sermons stretched on the framework of the twelve jewels,” in “Emily Dickinson’s Jewel Imagery,” 500, but her judgment reflects twentieth-century opinion rather than nineteenth-century reception. 61. See, for example, “Early Christian Songs in the East and West,” North British Review 27, no. 63 (August 1857), 210–11. 62. Advertisement, American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette 5, no. 18 (April 30, 1859): 218. 63. J. W. B. Garrett, “Reverie in a Forest of North Carolina,” Precious Stones, 148–49. 64. National Era 13 (May 19, 1859): 78. The word “fanciful” cropped up in several other reviews, suggesting critical assessment of Precious Stones as a work of poetic liberties rather than scriptural authority. 65. “Literary Miscellanies,” Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 47, no. 2 (June 1859): 284. 66. “Reviews,” Baptist Magazine 51 (August 1859): 504. 67. Boston Post, April 28, 1859. 68. Both copies are available in HathiTrust. 69. “Literary Notices,” Godey’s Magazine 58, no. 6 (June 1859): 564. 70. ABG, Precious Stones, xv. 71. The sixth edition of Leaves of Grass (Boston: James Osgood, 1881) has become the standard for Whitman’s poems in their final forms. 72. ABG, letter to Charles Hodge, D.D., July 28, 1862.

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ᆥ 391

Chapter Eight 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

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“Musical Card,” New York Observer (hereafter NYO), October 17, 1861. The ad ran through November. Louis H. Browne held Patent No. 8,383, dated September 23, 1851, relating to the sounding board, cast-iron frame, and action; and Pat. No. 32,972, dated August 6, 1861, relating to piano-key construction. Louis is credited as the first-known American piano builder to incorporate the “capo tasto” or “capo d’astro” bar as an integral part of the cast-iron frame in grand pianos. The capo d’astro bar defines the speaking lengths of strings in the upper register of the instrument. See Koster, Kirk, and Germann, Keyboard Musical Instruments, 309–10. ABG, “Trumpets and Drums,” 525. Another William Henry Browne (1836–64) was a West Point cadet from Tazewell Country, Western Virginia, who left the US Military Academy to fight for the Confederacy in 1861 and was mortally wounded in Piedmont, Virginia, in June 1864. The two men have sometimes been confused, with Augusta’s brother erroneouly described as a West Point ex-cadet. Powell, ed., Officers of the Army and Navy, 12. “A Great Rush, Cost what it may, The Nation must be Saved!” http://memory.loc.gov:8081/ndlpcoop/nhnycw/ac/ac03/ac03149v.jpg (accessed April 17, 2017). Posters nos. 146 and 147 (“$204 in Bounties!”), no. 148 (black and white), and no. 149 (“A Great Rush!”), in Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society, http://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p16694coll47/id/2807 (accessed January 11, 2016). ABG quoting William H. Browne in “The Stove-Pipe Battery,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 12, 1861. See, for example, Bailey’s examination of known music by Confederate women in Music and the Southern Belle. Elizabeth Sloman, “Sumter: A Ballad of 1861” (Charleston, SC: H. Siegling, 1861) is available in the Library of Congress digital collection Civil War Sheet Music Collection. See History of the Brooklyn and Long Island Fair, February 22, 1864 (Brooklyn: Executive Committee, 1864), 165–65. HathiTrust. Jane S. Torry and Jennie Torry, Brooklyn Athenaeum. Programme of Mrs. Torry’s Private Musical Reception, in Aid of the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, on Monday Evening, Feb. 8th, 1864 (Brooklyn, NY: s.n., 1864), holdings of New-York Historical Society. Elizabeth Sloman, “Barbara Frietchie” (New York: William A. Pond, 1874) is available in the Levy Sheet Music Collection. ABG, “Raid on the Enemy’s Camp,” 349–50.

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392

ᆥ notes to pp. 163–168

15. This and the preceding two quotes, ABG, “Fantasie on the Piano-Forte,” 15, then 28, and 28. 16. Henry Harbaugh’s speculations on heaven were reprinted year after year during the 1850s. Many of his titles, such as The Heavenly Home; or, The Employments & Enjoyments of the Saints in Heaven (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1853), are available in HathiTrust. 17. ABG, letter to Charles Hodge, DD, July 28, 1862 (Charles Hodge Papers, C0261, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, used with permission of the Princeton University Library). 18. ABG, letter to Hodge, July 28, 1862. 19. Hoffecker, Charles Hodge, 25. 20. This and the preceding quote, ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 14 then 13. 21. Tick, American Women Composers, 153, and 161–62. In the preface to the second edition, xvii, Tick emphasized that discovering this article was a thrilling moment in her doctoral research. 22. ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 13. 23. Tick, American Women Composers, 162. 24. ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 19. 25. Advertisement for the Knickerbocker, [Gloucester, MA] Cape Ann Light, December 27, 1862. 26. The mechanics of publication and distribution by the American Tract Society are traced by Nord, Faith in Reading; and Brown, Word in the World. 27. Can I Attend the Theatre? No. 146. This pamphlet is part of the NineteenthCentury Children’s Chapbook Collection in the Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University. 28. “The Churches and the Religious Press,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 27, 1869. 29. ABG, “Can the Theatre be Purified?” “The Devil’s Ground,” “The Way to the Pit,” and “The Episcopal Church and the Theatre.” 30. AB, Can I Attend the Theatre? 9–10. 31. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1:99. 32. “May a Christian Go to the Theatre?” Ladies’ Repository 19, no. 29 (August 1859): 462. 33. ABG, letter to Henry E. Pierrepont, September 25, 1874 (Box 32, ConstablePierrepont Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations). Pierrepont was one of three lay delegates from Grace Church in Brooklyn to the Episcopal General Convention. 34. ABG, “Card-Playing Christians,” 675. 35. This and the preceding quotation, “A.B.G.,” [sic] Can I Play Cards? 3, 6, 17. This tract is held in the Methodist Library at Drew University.

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notes to pp. 168–173

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36. During the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan spearheaded the “Just Say No to Drugs” initiative to discourage children from experimenting with marijuana and harder drugs. 37. ABG, letter to Henry E. Pierrepont, September 25, 1874. 38. 1 Cor. 14:33–35. 39. This and the preceding two quotes, ABG, “A Few Wordy Griefs.” 40. Advertisements in other sources identify the author of “Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman?” as “Augusta Garret Brown.” The American Monthly was the retitled Knickerbocker. 41. Chesterfield, Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman. 42. Chesterfield, Letters to His Son, 1:170. 43. AGB, “Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman?” 117, 118. 44. ABG, “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” republished as an appendix in Memoirs of Rev. Benjamin C. Cutler, D.D.: Late Rector of St. Ann’s Church (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1864), 438–39. 45. ABG, “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth.” 46. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 374–75. 47. AB, “Music of America,” 37. 48. ABG, “Musical Revival.” 49. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 391; ABG, “Wanted, An Organist,” 322. 50. ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 206. 51. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 390. 52. ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 208. 53. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 391. 54. ABG, “Musical Revival.” This paragraph appeared in an earlier form in ABG, “A Raid on the Enemy’s Camp,” 351. 55. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 375. 56. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 269. 57. ABG, “Are We to have a Saint Jonathan?” 58. “Protestant and Popish Music,” American Protestant Magazine 3, no. 10 (March 1848): 307, 308. 59. This and the preceding quote, AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 391, 390. 60. Jackson, White Spirituals, 16–17, 21. 61. ABG, “Stewart,” in The Book of Praise, ed. Sylvanus Billings Pond (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1866), 255, music and hymn text no. 361; ABG, “Excelsior,” in The Book of Praise, 336, music, and hymn text no. 344. The Book of Praise used the “split page” (or “Dutch-door”) format in which melody and lyrics were on separate pages that could be flipped independently to the correct tune and the specific text for the service.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 173–180

62. See “Olmutz” in Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, 9th ed., 174. 63. “Chaunt,” meaning song or chant, was an archaic variant of the neo-Gothic sort that Augusta used to flavor her prose. 64. Hobbs, “I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent,” 103. 65. “Watcher at the Gate” was listed in the Cyclopaedia of Favorite Songs, 36. 66. A summary of William Henry’s service appears in Swinton, History of the Seventh Regiment, 393–94. 67. ABG, “A Wounded Soldier’s Experience of Music.” 68. Swinton, History of the Seventh Regiment, 349–72. For a modern account, see Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 279–88. 69. See, for example, “Took His Name Away: Gen. W. H. Brown’s Story of the Capture of a Rebel Spy,” Washington Post, August 9, 1891. 70. A portrait in civilian dress stands out in the MOLLUS collection because the great majority of officers were in uniform. The distinctive top-button closing of the coat, broad cravat tie, and stand-up collar—seen in fashion plates in issues of the London Gazette of Fashion, and Cutting-Room Companion—date the photo to the years 1864 to 1866. 71. William Henry’s eyes appear unmistakably light in color in the photo. Augusta described Hamilton’s eyes as “liquid-blue” (AB, Hamilton, 35). 72. Description in Brooklyn Eagle, February 11, 1865, 3. 73. Sale recorded on May 2, 1865, for April 20 sale of 222 Adams from David S. Browne to Eliza Balsdon for six thousand dollars, Kings County New York Land Conveyances, Liber 664, pp. 106–8, in “New York Land Records, 1630– 1975,” FamilySearch, http://FamilySearch.org (accessed November 2, 2015). 74. “Five Shillings worth of Talent,” Western Musical World 2, no. 9 (September 1865): 131; previously published with the same title in 1849. “Five Shillings worth of Talent” recounts an anecdote from Logier’s life, in which a stingy nobleman is furious when he hires only as much of a musician as he is willing to pay for. Logier explains that his lordship “could not expect horses worth one hundred pounds for five pounds”; the lord finally perceives that “you sent me five shillings worth of talent.” 75. “New Music for May,” Western Musical World 3, running advertisement May through October, 1866. The interior title in the sheet music is Chant of the Sea. Transcription. 76. “New Music for May.” 77. “New Music for May.” 78. “A Lullaby” (“Suantrai”) is no. 233 in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland. The tune is titled “Lulleby” in James Hyde, New and Complete Preceptor for the Royal Kent or Keyed Bugle (London: J. Balls, 1818), and in G. Gilfert, Gentleman’s Pocket Companion for the German Flute or Violin (Philadelphia: G. Gilfert, 1802).

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ᆥ 395

79. “New Music,” NYO, January 17, 1867. 80. Translated excerpts from Eugénie de Guérin, Journal et lettres, in Littel’s Living Age, 295. 81. Von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener, 28–29. 82. See Bomberger, MacDowell, 205. Bomberger writes that MacDowell’s Sea Pieces brought “the grandeur and infinity of the ocean” into descriptive character pieces that explored “new artistic territory.” 83. “New Music,” NYO, January 17, 1867. 84. National Archives, Louis H. Browne, application for invalid pension No. 92,479, filed October 10, 1865, in Washington, DC; response from adjutant general’s office dated March 1, 1866. 85. National Archives, William Henry Browne, response from adjutant general’s office dated February 19, 1867, for pension application No. 122,186. His file also contains a deposition of his service to receive back payment of pension and various papers regarding the pension for his widow, Louise Wolcott Knowlton Browne. 86. Senate Report No. 961 to accompany S. 3396, 52nd Cong., 1st Sess. (1892). 87. Letter from Major-General John Sedgwick to Colonel W. H. Browne, August 17, 1863. 88. Theresa La Bianca, staff member at Green-Wood Cemetery, letter to author, March 22, 1994. 89. ABG, “The First Paterfamilias,” New York Weekly Review 18 (March 2, 1867): 2. 90. “Died,” Baltimore Sun, July 23, 1867. 91. Augusta repeated the story of the aged Christian gentleman in “Departed This Life.” 92. Stephen H. Tyng, “Fellow Citizens with the Saints,” Meditation no. 17 in Christian Titles: A Series of Practical Meditations (New York: R. Carter and Brothers, 1853), 121, HathiTrust. The original sermons were delivered at St. George’s Church during Lent in 1852/53. 93. “Died,” [Washington, DC] Evening Star, January 12, 1882; Washington Post, January 12 and 13, 1882; and [Washington, DC] Evening Critic, January 12, 1882.

Chapter Nine 1. 2. 3.

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“Patent Office Matters,” Scientific American n.s., no. 19 (September 30, 1868): 218. “Episcopal Churches,” [Washington, DC] Evening Star, April 8, 1871. John Kelly, “These inspired spires could have been part of the Smithsonian,” Washington Post, January 5, 2014.

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396 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 186–195 “Episcopal Churches.” AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 269; AB, “Chapter on Musical Sentiments,” 148. Evening Star, March 28, 1875 [“Miss Ada Moxar”]; Evening Star, April 16, 1876; “Major and Minor,” Musical Record 53 (October 4, 1879), 4; [Washington, DC] Evening Critic, September 19, 1881. Miss Ada Moxon was listed as a clerk in the Post-Office Department dead letter office in 1879. ABG, “Music in Washington City.” “The Proposed Music Hall. Organization of the ‘National Philharmonic Society,’” Evening Star, October 22, 1878. For more background, see “Liszt schede” (materials pertaining to Liszt in the Sgambati Archive of the Biblioteca Casanatense) at www.casanatense.it (accessed December 10, 2013). The manuscript is also described by Cavarra in Donna è— , 230. Because of Augusta’s slanted handwriting, both Cavarra and the anonymous “Liszt Schede” record the city as “Washington, D. C. N. S. A.” The Aurora title page has been cut down from a larger sheet that is attached to the music with a blue ribbon threaded through two holes punched with a large needle through the score. This operation makes it impossible to open the pages fully. That Augusta would have sewn shut the very music she wanted Liszt to evaluate seems most unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that Sgambati or his daughter-in-law, Giuseppina, who maintained his Rome apartment as an archive and monument until her death in 1993, attached the dedication half page to the music with the ribbon to keep the small leaf from being lost (see Carboni, “Grieg and Sgambati in Rome,” 1–2). In “Music in Washington City,” Augusta expressed the hope that the Philharmonic Society might soon perform Elijah. Thomas Gray (1716–71), “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” completed June 12, 1750, and first published as an anonymous pamphlet, “An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard” (London: R. Dodsley, 1751). Obituary for Elizabeth M. Browne, Christian Intelligencer, October 23, 1841. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 74; revised as “Reveries in Starlight,” in Precious Stones, 303; and extracted as “The Christian in Death,” Pacific Christian Advocate, March 10, 1869. This and the preceding quote, William Henry Browne, “The Proprietors,” 221. William Henry Browne, “Trade-Mark Legislation,” New York Herald-Tribune, December 10, 1878, 5. Browne, “Trade-Mark Legislation.” “Patent Office Changes,” Scientific American 32, no. 19 (May 8, 1875): 296. After leaving the Patent Office, William Henry’s law office was listed at 452 Louisiana Avenue, NW; then, 505 D Street, NW; 344 D Street, NW; and 902 F Street, NW. His name was often preceded by “General” or “Gen.” to avoid

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notes to pp. 195–198

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Miller.indd 397

ᆥ 397

confusion with another lawyer, also named William Henry Browne, who was a traveling attorney for the Department of Justice, with a law office at 632 F Street, NW and a residence at 1321 10th Street, NW during the 1870s, and a law office at 458 Louisiana and a residence at 1718 5th Street, NW during the 1880s. William Henry Browne, “The Proprietors,” 222. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 6, 1879; “Gossip at Home,” [Chicago] Inter Ocean, June 21, 1879. The cover page is held in Levy. Newspaper advertisements help to date the song (Inter Ocean, June 21, 1879; Hartford Daily Courant, July 31, 1879; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 6, 1879. The dedicatee, H[erbert] D[aniel] Umbstaetter, was the advertising chief at Vogeler Oil Company, a drug manufacturer that William Henry defended in a prominent court case. 1870 United States Federal Census, Washington, DC, population schedule, Washington ward 5, District of Columbia; p. 83 (stamped), dwelling 1266, family 1329, lines 8–11. “Building Permits,” Evening Star, June 6, 1877. “Season’s First Buds. The Misses Dodge Formally Presented in a Pretty Tea,” Washington Post, December 6, 1895. The two girls were the oldest daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison H. Dodge. Dodge served as the superintendent of the Mount Vernon estate for more than fifty years. United States Centennial Commission. et al., . . . International Exhibition, 1876. [reports], 11 v. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 1:98–99. HathiTrust. International Exhibition, 1876, 1:103. Karen Ahlquist, “Listening to 1876: Themes in Musical Reception at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition,” lecture delivered at the Catholic University of America, October 29, 2014. Augusta’s lecture was subsequently published as “Hints for a Sunday-School.” An obituary for William Henry Browne in the [Washington] Times, September 18, 1900 mentioned his Bible class at Epiphany, but his funeral was held at St. John’s Episcopal Church, often called the “President’s Church,” where he had worshipped with his second wife. “Old Epiphany’s Choir,” Washington Post, October 15, 1904. See also “A Life Without a Discord,” Washington Post, March 26, 1890, and Conn, Washington’s Epiphany. Quail married Q[uincy] A[dams] Pearson, a music lover and bass soloist in the choir. She was probably the organist listed erroneously as “Mrs. Q. A. Pierson, Boston,” among the recitalists at the Philadelphia Centennial, International Exhibition, 1876, 1:103. United States, Memorial of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, 48.

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398

ᆥ notes to pp. 198–210

32. Descriptions of the event in the Evening Star, April 17, 1872, noted music played by the US Marine Band and two selections performed by the Choral Society: a Volkslied by Mendelssohn and the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” sung with William Henry’s words. 33. Board of Health, District of Columbia, No. 4104, death certificate for Elizabeth Montgomery Browne. 34. District of Columbia, Register of Wills, Last Will and Testament of Augusta Browne Garrett, of Washington, District of Columbia, widow, August 6, 1875, Box 78, Probate Records, 1801–1930, Church of Latter Day Saints Family History Library microfilm FHL US/CAN Film 2057051. 35. ABG, “Painter’s Last Rest.” 36. See LaPlante, Marmee & Louisa. 37. ABG, “Christian Slumber Song,” 183. 38. “Died,” Evening Star, July 14, 1875. 39. Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Commandery of the District of Columbia, “In Memoriam Companion William Henry Browne,” Circular No. 24 (September 17, 1900). See also biographical entries in Morris, Men of the Century, 210; Powell, Officers of the Army and Navy, 12. 40. “Our Music Pages.” 41. ABG, “Hints for a Sunday-School,” 147. 42. This and the preceding two quotes, ABG, “Wanted: an Organist,” 323. 43. “Our Music Pages.” 44. The copyright date for the Appendix is 1875. 45. Tick, American Women Composers, 150. 46. Moore, Appendix, 22. The errors in specific titles could easily have resulted from transcribing Augusta’s handwriting. Her script was a rapid, flowing scrawl that is hard to decipher, rather than the fine copperplate hand that ladies were supposed to master. 47. Moore, appendix, 22. Sainsbury, for example, compiled brief biographies for his 1825 Dictionary of Musicians by requesting materials in 1823 from composers or their representatives (Lenneberg, Witnesses and Scholars, 68–73). 48. Cheney, American Singing Book, 310. 49. See, for example, Mattfeld, Variety Music Cavalcade, 42; the “Tyrolese Evening Hymn” was also attributed to Augusta, 38. 50. Tick, American Women Composers, 150. Many library entries still attribute songs composed by Mrs. Hemans’s sister to Augusta Browne. 51. Boyd’s Directory for the District of Columbia for 1882 for Washington lists several residents at 1326 L Street, NW. In addition to the Wilcox family were a lodger, Phillip G. Russell (a clerk at the Patent Office); and Dr. Robert Fletcher (US Army) and his wife, Anna. 52. “Died,” Evening Star, January 12, 1882; Washington Post, January 12 and 13, 1882.

Miller.indd 398

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notes to pp. 210–214

ᆥ 399

53. District of Columbia, Register of Wills, Last Will and Testament of Augusta Browne Garrett, August 22, 1881, Box 78 in Probate Records, 1801–1930, Church of Latter Day Saints Family History Library microfilm FHL US/CAN Film 2057051. 54. “Sudden Death of a Lady,” Evening Star, January 12, 1882, 1. 55. Board of Health, District of Columbia, death certificate for Augusta Browne Garrett, No. 31572. 56. “Died,” Evening Star, Washington Post, and Evening Critic, January 12, 1882. 57. This and the preceding two quotes, “In Memoriam.” 58. William Henry Browne, “In Memoriam: Augusta Browne Garrett.” 59. “Wills Filed Yesterday,” Washington Post, January 21, 1882. Sarah Morrow retired to live in Rahway, New Jersey, after more than thirty years working in the Browne household. She passed away on November 10, 1900, just two months after William Henry’s death. 60. William Henry married Louise Turner of Richmond (Staten Island), New York, on July 19, 1882. After her death in 1887, he married Louise Wolcott Knowlton of Washington, DC, on November 15, 1888. Both women were years younger than William Henry, but there were no children from either marriage. 61. “Funeral of General Browne,” [Washington, DC] Times, September 18, 1900. Both William Henry and Garfield belonged to the Knights Templar, a branch of the York Rite of Freemasonry. 62. William Henry Browne, “In Memoriam.” 63. Last Will and Testament of Augusta Browne Garrett. 64. William Henry’s handsome memorial at Arlington National Cemetery can be seen at the website http://www.findagrave.com/ (accessed March 20, 2007). Another burial in the family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery was that of Louise E. (Turner) Browne, William Henry’s first wife, according to cemetery records. His second wife, Louise W. K. Browne, was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, DC. 65. ABG, “Blessed Company,” 154. 66. AB, “Music from Heaven,” 110.

Chapter Ten 1. 2. 3.

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AB, “Fantasie on the Piano-Forte,” 27. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 328. Tick, American Women Composers, 153; see also 126 and 139. Tick might have reached a different conclusion about women’s publications of variations if she had had access to the reams of American sheet music from the 1830s and ’40s now available in digital collections.

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400 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 214–227 ABG, “Fantasie on the Piano-Forte,” 15. See also Smith’s study of repertoire at the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A comparative study of a Southern female seminary is the subject of Rumbley’s “Ornamental Music and Southern Belles at the Nashville Female Academy, 1816–1861.” The single known copy of Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara (The Gypsie’s Wild Chant), no. 11, is held in a binder’s volume at the University of Wisconsin Music Library. The volume contains the typescript note, “Used by Sophia and Catherine Ehle, in Cazenovia, N.Y. about 1838.” Clark, Dawning of American Keyboard Music, 82. Clark devotes more than a hundred pages to discussion of variations. See Montgomery, “‘Brilliant’ Variations on Sentimental Songs,” 38–40. Grobe published “The Little Old Cabin in the Lane,” op. 1995, in 1878, prompting the comment “Not many can boast of Two Thousand different compositions!” in the Musical Record 1, no. 1 (September 7, 1878): 15. See Coolidge, “Francis Henry Brown [sic].” Board of Music Trade, Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music. AB, “Chapter on Musical Sentiments,” 211. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 220. Sand, Consuelo, 331. The phrase became current in the mid-1840s when a London music publishing firm that operated until 1917 opened in 1845 under the name of “Musical Bouquet Office.” Augusta may have picked up the phrase from the Baltimore music publisher Samuel Carusi, whose scores included the wording “Boquet” and “Bouquet de Mélodies.” “Caledonian Bouquet,” Evening Post, January 18, 1842. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 311. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 185. Moore and Stevenson, Irish Melodies, 1:1–2. The Irish Melodies were issued serially in ten volumes, plus a supplement, from 1808 to 1834. The first edition of Irish Melodies presented “Carolan’s Concerto” as a duet for two pianists, but subsequent editions substituted a solo keyboard version. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 220. The fingering is original but has been updated to modern style, 1–5, rather than a plus sign for the thumb and 1–4 for the fingers. “The Mexican Volunteer’s Quick Step,” Brooklyn Eagle, January 21–March 3, 1847. “The Custom House,” Subterranean, January 23, 1847. Yaraman, Revolving Embrace, 119. Yaraman believes that women were uncomfortable with the sensual whirling embrace and resulting sexual overtones of

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notes to pp. 227–240

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

Miller.indd 401

ᆥ 401

the waltz. Other historians assert that Queen Victoria’s liking for the waltz helped to popularize the dance. This and the preceding quote, AB, “Chapter on Musical Sentiments,” 211 and 212. See guides with repertoire graded for difficulty, such as Magrath, Pianist’s Guide. Carl Löbe, Lindianna, or Jenny Lind’s Dream Waltz, op. 172 (Philadelphia: E. Ferrett, 1847). The showman P. T. Barnum cultivated “Lindomania,” or media hype, prior to the 1850 concert tour of the United States by the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind. AB, Hamilton, 20. Berlioz, Journal des Debats, December 15, 1844, cited in Gradenwitz, “Félicien David,” 471. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 27. Locke, Musical Exoticism, 118–21. Locke concludes that Mozart’s “Alla Turca” movement is not a rondo but more of a ternary form with a recurring refrain (Musical Exoticism, 123–26). See Starr, Bamboula! 468n40. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 145. This score is now held by the Rauner Library Special Collections, Dartmouth College. AB, “Olive Leaf for the Message Bird.” AB, “Our Neighborhood. Evening, Concluded.” Anderson, “Putting the Experience of the World at the Nation’s Command,” 115n16. This and preceding quotes in this paragraph, AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 185. Tawa, Music for the Millions, 37. Some scholars have limited the meaning of “ballad” to traditional Scots-Irish songs that narrate a story, but nineteenth-century music publishers used this term much more widely. The five published works that Augusta subtitled “ballads” came from the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s, and show no common theme or style. Hamm, Yesterdays, 254–55. Hamm, Yesterdays, 255. Carman et al., Art Song in the United States, 61. The anonymous verses appeared as a poem for Valentine’s Day in Hone, Everyday Book and Table Book, 1:230. Hone republished this anthology of day-byday miscellany annually from 1827 until his death in 1842. For further discussion of “Wake, Lady Mine, see chapter 12. Tawa, Sweet Songs for Gentle Americans, 158.

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402

ᆥ notes to pp. 242–257

48. The documentary film Alive Inside explores this phenomenon. Michael Rossato-Bennett, Alexandra McDougald, Regina K. Scully, Dan Cohen, Bobby McFerrin, and Oliver Sacks, Alive Inside (Pottstown, PA: MVD Visual, 2014), DVD. 49. A copy of the imprint of La fille sauvage (Boston: D. Browne’s Musical Seminary, n.d.) is held at the Boston Athenaeum in a binder’s volume owned by the Henry Cabot family of Boston, Lg MT243 .L63 1827, v. 5. 50. AB, “Olive Leaf for the Message Bird.” 51. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 9. 52. Lowell Mason, Manual of the Boston Academy of Music (1834), reprinted in Mark, ed., Music Education: Source Readings, 70–75; Boston School Committee, Report of Special Committee, August 24, 1837, also reprinted in Mark, Music Education, 75–86. 53. Moore, “Ballad,” in Complete Encyclopaedia of Music. 54. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 65. 55. New York Evangelist 22, no. 29 (July 17, 1851): 116. 56. “Bonnie Bessie Green,” 31; see chapter 4. 57. Broadway Journal 1, no. 12 (March 22, 1845): 190. 58. AB, “Picture-Critic’s Portrait.” 59. “New Music,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 26, 1845. Augusta had submitted “A Thought of the Departed,” “The Marvellous Horn,” “The Chieftain’s Halls,” and a choral work, “Grand Vesper Chorus,” to the Eagle. 60. Roswell Park, Jerusalem: And Other Poems, Juvenile and Miscellaneous . . . with a Brief Memoir of Mrs. Mary Brewster Park (New York: Thomas N. Stanford, 1857), 10–12. 61. Luther Wyman (1804–79) served as president of the New York Sacred Music Society. He was a founding member of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and later president of the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn. See Bullard, Brooklyn’s Renaissance. 62. “Music and Musical Intelligence,” Anglo American 9, no. 1 (April 24, 1847): 21. 63. [Mary] Balmanno, “To the Memory of a Friend,” in Poems (London: n.p., 1830), 19. She published the poem again, retitled “Sorrow,” in Pen and Pencil (New York: D. Appleton, 1858), 271–72. 64. Hamm considers this opening gesture to be shared by a family of melodies in Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies; many American composers followed Moore’s models in their own songs; see Yesterdays, 55–57. Sarah Gerk calls this theme the “sentimental longing motive,” in “‘Common Joys, Sorrows, Adventures, and Struggles,’” 173–74. 65. Saunders, “The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies,” 286. 66. AB, “Music of America, 38.

Miller.indd 402

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notes to pp. 257–266

ᆥ 403

67. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 270; repeated in ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 206. 68. ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 206. 69. AB, “Music of the Church.” 70. ABG, “Raid on the Enemy’s Camp,” 352. 71. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 391. 72. ABG, “Raid on the Enemy’s Camp,” 352. 73. ABG, “Blessed Company,” 155. 74. Augusta’s list of hymns mirrors the four types of core American psalmody (European common tunes, English parish tunes, English Methodist-inspired styles, and tunes by American composers) described in Crawford, ed., Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody, 11–12. 75. AB, “Music of the Church.” 76. ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 208. 77. Augusta used the same graceful chain of descending first-inversion chords in several songs, including “Oh lassie dear! I maun awa,’” “Where Quair Runs Sweet,” “The Reply of the Messenger Bird,” and “Mary Lyle.” 78. ABG, “A Standard-bearer of Christendom—Bishop Ken,” 445. 79. ABG, “‘Nearer, My God, to Thee!’” 80. “New Music,” New York Chronicle, June 12, 1851. 81. ABG to Hubert P. Main, November 11, 1879, Manuscripts Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. 82. Bell and Main, eds., Book of Praise. 83. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 271. 84. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 270. 85. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 310. 86. William Henry Browne, “In Memoriam,” 438.

Chapter Eleven 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

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Dobson and Zagarell, “Women Writing in the Early Republic,” 364. Warren, “Introduction: Canons and Canon Fodder,” 2. Warren, “Introduction,” 3. Reynolds, Mightier than the Sword, xi. A hastily handwritten note from Augusta to George Pope Morris, HJ editor, December 14, 1861, requested the Journal to print verses by William Henry that he sent home from the front, Sec. A Box 96, Small Manuscript Collections, Duke University Special Collections. Kelley, Designing a Past for the Present, 316. This and the preceding quote, Branch, Sentimental Years, 135, 107.

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404 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Miller.indd 404

ᆥ notes to pp. 266–272 https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/poetry/the-poet-atwork/publications-in-dickinsons-lifetime/ (accessed December 13, 2019). Two poets easily confused with the composer-author Augusta Browne are Helen Augusta Browne, who published in periodicals such as Peterson’s Magazine during the 1850s and ’60s, and Augusta Moore, who published poetry in Arthur’s Magazine and Ladies’ Repository. A poem credited to Augusta Browne, “The Temptation,” in the Boston Post, March 3, 1855, is more likely Moore’s work. AB, “An Unearthly Banquet,” Romance: Being the Tales of the New York Story Club 6, no. 3 (July 1892): 357. AB, “A Ghostly Banquet,” Florida Agriculturist 19, no. 32 (August 10, 1892): 508–9; Los Angeles Herald, August 7, 1892. “A Providential Escape” was reprinted in such papers as the [Boston] Christian Watchman and Reflector, February 5, 1863, and the [Middletown, CT] Constitution, March 25, 1863. The Novelette, a magazine of fiction, picked up the tale without attribution in its April, 1863, issue. All quotes in this paragraph, ABG, “Story of a Dog-Hero.” AB, “Enchanted Piper,” 60. Some of Logier’s British military service as a regimental musician took place in Kilkenny. AB, “Irish Curiosity.” AB, “The Rival Fiddlers,” 14–15. Williams, ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream, 48. AB, “Musical Reveries,” 105. After 1850, family members described themselves as British or English. William Henry Browne (1848), St. John Browne (1850), and David S. Browne (1852) each entered “Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” under “Former Nationality,” according to naturalization papers in the Fold3 database https://www.fold3.com/ (accessed October 1, 2015). Women rarely applied for citizenship during an era when they did not have the right to vote; accordingly, there are no such papers for Augusta. Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in The Writings of George Eliot, 22:186. Dobson, “American Renaissance Reenvisioned,” 167. Townsend, “Women in Male Attire,” 179. Hamilton’s poem, “A Lamente for Harolde,” in AB, “The Secret Letter,” 128–29. AB, “The Olden Time and the New,” 169–70. AB, “Love versus Law.” Warren, “Introduction,” 7. Conway, When Memory Speaks, 14. ABG, “On the Rights of Quadrupedal Musicians,” 99, 100. ABG, “All Good Persons Love Dumb Animals.” This and the preceding quotes in this paragraph, ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 12.

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notes to pp. 272–279

ᆥ 405

31. ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 15. 32. Tyler, Grandmother Tyler’s Book, 15; Fern, “A Whisper to Gentlemen,” Port Tobacco Times, and Charles County Advertiser, July 14, 1852, p. 1, https:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89060060/1852-07-14/ed-1/seq-1/ (accessed December 15, 2019). 33. ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 18. 34. This and preceding quotes in this paragraph, ABG, “A Woman on Women,” 19–20. 35. Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” 36. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 185. 37. This and the preceding two quotes, ABG, “Crotchets of Comfort,” 631. 38. This and the preceding quotes in this paragraph, ABG, “The Mind is a Kingdom.” The poem “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” has customarily been attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (1543–1607). 39. This and the preceding quote, ABG, “Crotchets of Comfort,” 631. 40. ABG, Precious Stones, xiii. 41. ABG, “Three Autumns.” 42. “War News,” Brooklyn Evening Star, August 1, 1862, retracted the earlier announcement. 43. This and the preceding quote, ABG, “Lord Chesterfield,” 111, 112. 44. ABG, “Lord Chesterfield,” 121. 45. ABG, “The Devil’s Ground.” 46. Warren, “Introduction,” 8. 47. ABG, “Card-Playing Christians,” 676. 48. See Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America. 49. This and the preceding quote, Morse, Foreign Conspiracy, 6. 50. This and the preceding quote, ABG, “Are We to Have a St. Jonathan?” 51. This and the preceding quote, ABG, “Is the Fire of Hell Material, or Immaterial?” 514. 52. ABG, “Standard-bearer of Christendom,” 445. 53. See Thompett, “Women in the American Episcopal Church.”

Chapter Twelve 1.

2. 3.

Miller.indd 405

By the decade of Augusta’s death, prominent English female musicians (e.g., Arabella Goddard, Fanny Davies, and Clare Macirone) were writing columns and instruction articles in the Girl’s Own Paper; see Barger, Music in “The Girl’s Own Paper,” 7–11 and 36–42; and McNeely, “Beyond the Drawing Room.” McClendon, “Harmonizing the Nation,” 54–55. McClendon, “Harmonizing the Nation,” 61. In “Composing the Nation,” McClendon argues that the idea of the power of music to move listeners’

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406

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

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ᆥ notes to pp. 280–284 emotions as a reformative agent of communal harmony was also a persistent theme for Walt Whitman, John Sullivan Dwight, Herman Melville, and William Wells Brown. They believed that harnessing the emotions of Americans could move the nation toward moral reform or political action, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done. “American Female Writers,” Lady’s Almanac for 1854, 91–97. The British actress and songstress Mrs. (Maria) Gibbs was also mentioned, presumably the British-born singer Maria Gibbs, née Margaretta Graddon (1804–ca. 1855), who composed a few songs, two of which were published in the Ladies’ Companion during 1839. Helgert, “Criticism,” 482. Henry C. Watson (ca. 1818–75) wrote for one literary newspaper after another: the Broadway Journal, the New World, the Albion, and his own Watson’s Art Journal, later the American Art Journal; in 1863 he became music critic for the New York Tribune. Richard Grant White (1822–85) wrote for the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer (later the New York World) and ultimately for the Century magazine. Lawrence, Strong on Music, 1:123. Cited in Upton, William Henry Fry, 137. Chmaj, “Fry versus Dwight,” 70. “Introductory,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 1, no. 1 (April 10, 1852): 4. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 122. AB, “Musical Echoes,” 3. Samuel A. Eliot, “First Annual Report of the Boston Academy of Music. 1833,” 79, cited in Broyles, Music of the Highest Class, 206. Broyles argues that by the early 1840s orchestral music replaced oratorio as the perceived “highest class of compositions” in Boston through the efforts of gatekeepers such as Eliot and Dwight. ABG, “Musical Revival.” AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 185. AB, “Musical Thoughts,” 68. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 185. David Browne, “Dissertation on Vocal Accompaniment,” 81. McClendon, “Composing the Nation,” 5. Whitman, Brooklyn Daily Times, July 28, 1858, reprinted in I Sit and Look Out, 173–74. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 63. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 26. This and the two preceding quotes, AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 77. She used the same thought to conclude her series “Musical Echoes” in 1865 in the New York Weekly Review. AB, “Musical Thoughts,” 68.

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notes to pp. 284–291

ᆥ 407

25. ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 206. 26. AB, “Musical Thoughts,” 68. 27. Some significant examples are discussed by Baur in “Music, Morals, and Social Management,” 81–84. 28. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 9, 63. 29. AB, “Divine Origin of Music,” 269, 218. 30. AB, “Olive Leaf for the ‘Message Bird.’” 31. See, for example, ABG, “Blessed Company,” 155. 32. AB, “Musical Reminiscences,” 390; ABG, “Is the Fire of Hell Material, or Immaterial?” 515. 33. This and the preceding quote, ABG, “Musical Revival.” 34. AB, “Musical Thoughts,” 68. 35. ABG, “Trumpets and Drums,” 523. 36. ABG, “Wounded Soldier’s Experience of Music,” 136. 37. ABG, “Trumpets and Drums,” 521. 38. ABG, “Trumpets and Drums,” 522. 39. AB, “Reveries of a Musician,” 187. 40. ABG, “Trumpets and Drums,” 523. 41. AB, “Grand Farewell Concert.” 42. Chmaj, “Fry versus Dwight,” 63; see also Shadle, Orchestrating the Nation. 43. AB, “Music of America,” 137. 44. “Present State of Music in Our Country.” 45. AB, “On the Expectations and Prospects of a Musical Professor,” 39. 46. Cited in Chmaj, “Fry versus Dwight,” 74 and 80n7. 47. “The Light Is Spreading.” 48. Pemberton, Lowell Mason: A Bio-Bibliography, 26–27. 49. AB, “The Music of America,” Boston Musical Gazette 3, no. 2 (February 14, 1848): 12–13. 50. Stopp, “A. N. Johnson, Out of Oblivion,” 153–54; Stopp, “James C. Johnson and the American Secular Cantata,” 245. 51. Jackson, White Spirituals, 19–20. 52. Chase, America’s Music, 183; America’s Music, 2nd ed., 183. The first two editions of America’s Music contained Chase’s reference to “inferior Yankee music,” but it was omitted from the third edition. 53. Chase, America’s Music, 183. 54. Cobb, Sacred Harp, 63; Osborne, Music in Ohio, 86. 55. Mark and Gary, History of American Music Education, 90; Mark, ed., Music Education: Source Readings from Ancient Greece to Today, 2nd ed., 70; Music Education: Source Readings, 3rd ed., 79. For reasons of space the excerpt was dropped in the fourth edition (2013). 56. Chase, America’s Music, 3rd ed., 161. 57. Tick, American Women Composers, 153.

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408 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

ᆥ notes to pp. 291–301 Tick, “Towards a History of American Women Composers before 1870,” 204. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry for “Augusta Browne.” AB, “Artistic Associations.” “Negro Minstrelsy” was reprinted in Christian Advocate and Journal 29, no. 4 (January 26, 1854), 13; and Anti-Slavery Bugle 9, no. 24 (January 28, 1854), 4. Stephen Foster to Edwin P. Christy, May 25, 1852, cited in Saunders, “The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies,” 278. AB, “Negro Minstrelsy.” This and the preceding quote, AB, “Negro Minstrelsy.” All quotes in this paragraph, AB, “Negro Minstrelsy.” All quotes in this paragraph, AB, “Negro Minstrelsy.” “New Music,” New World 4, no. 2 (January 8, 1842), 31. Review of Bell and Main, eds., Book of Praise, NYO, October 28, 1875. AB, “Chapter on Musical Sentiments,” 212. This and the preceding quote, “The Negro Melody Question,” 28. Howard, Stephen Foster, 216–17. Tawa, Sweet Songs for Gentle Americans, 98. ABG, “Musical Echoes.” ABG, “Benedic Anima Mea,” 206. AB, “Random Strains in Prose,” 94. AB, “Music of Our Neighborhood. Morning,” 256, 253. AB, “Our Neighborhood. Evening, Concluded.” AB, “The Musical Critic’s Portrait.” AB, “Picture-Critic’s Portrait.” AB, “Musical Critic’s Portrait.” She may have meant Domenico rather than Alessandro Scarlatti. Augusta knew and played D. Scarlatti’s Sonata in G Minor, K. 30, the “Cat’s Fugue,” from Logier’s Theoretical and Practical Study for the Piano Forte, no. 10. All quotes in this paragraph, AB, “Picture-Critic’s Portrait.” Gamboge is a saffron-yellow pigment that is also used as a laxative. Carmine is a red pigment. AB, “Picture-Critic’s Portrait.”

Chapter Thirteen 1. 2.

3.

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Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, chap. 6, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/ virginia/w91r/chapter6.html. See Temperley’s group biography, Bound for America, in addition to monographs such as Jones, Francis Johnson (1792–1844), and Sciannameo and Budds, Phil Trajetta (1777–1854). Quoted in Broyles, “Music and Class Structure in Antebellum Boston,” 466.

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notes to pp. 302–304

ᆥ 409

4.

The trio of Anglo-American professional women in music (Browne, Hodges, Torry) offers analogies to the careers of European émigré musicians (Selby, Taylor, Jackson) whose stories are told in Temperley’s Bound for America. Of five composers whose careers Tick outlined, only two were American-born: Marion Dix Sullivan (1802–60) and Susan McFarland (Mrs. E. A.) Parkhurst (1836–1918), each of whom achieved commercial success with a few “hit” songs (Tick, American Women Composers, 145–216). 5. AB, “Musician’s Adventure,” 235. 6. AB, “Music of America,” 37. 7. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 161. 8. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, ix. 9. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 153. 10. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 6. 11. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 875.

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Selected Bibliography Appendix 3 contains publication information for all music by Augusta Browne Garrett known at the time of publication of this book. Details for scores by other composers are found in the notes. Because many nineteenth-century periodicals were published with multiple volumes per year, or volumes did not align with the chronological year, dates are included in all entries for journals and magazines. Citations for nineteenth-century newspaper articles are found in the notes. Accinno, Michael David. “Gestures of Inclusion: Blindness, Music, and Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century Thought.” PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2016. Ahlquist, Karen. Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 1815–60. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Alcott, Louisa, and Ednah Dow Cheney. Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889. HathiTrust Digital Library, https:// www.hathitrust.org (hereafter cited as HathiTrust). Ammer, Christine. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music. Contributions in Women’s Studies 14. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980. Anderson, Gillian B. “Putting the Experience of the World at the Nation’s Command: Music at the Library of Congress, 1800–1917.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 42, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 108–49. Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bailey, Candace. Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Barger, Judith. Elizabeth Stirling and the Musical Life of Female Organists in Nineteenth-Century England. Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2007. ———. Music in “The Girl’s Own Paper”: An Annotated Catalogue, 1880–1910. London: Routledge, 2017. Barratt, Carrie Rebora. “Mapping the Venues: New York City Art Exhibitions.” In Art and the Empire City, edited by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, 47–81. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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selected bibliography

Bashford, Christina, and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, eds. The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930. Music in Society and Culture. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2016. Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: Women’s Press, 1989. Baur, Steven. “Music, Morals, and Social Management: Mendelssohn in Post–Civil War America.” American Music 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 64–130. Beecher, Catharine Esther, Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home. Edited by Nicole Tonkovich. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Bell, George A., and Hubert P. Main, eds. Book of Praise: for the Sunday School. With Hymns and Tunes appropriate for the Prayer Meeting and the Home Circle. New York: Biglow and Main, 1875. Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Blackwell, Alice Stone. Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Women’s Rights. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1930. HathiTrust. Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Board of Music Trade of the United States of America, New York. Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music and Musical Works Published by the Board of Music Trade of the United States of America. 1870. New York: The Board, 1871. Google Books. Bohan, Ruth. Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. ———. “Walt Whitman and the Sister Arts.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16, no. 3 (Winter 1999), 153–60. https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1620. Bomberger, E. Douglas. MacDowell. Master Musicians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music. 9th ed. Edited by Lowell Mason. Boston: Richardson, Lord and Holbrook, 1830. HathiTrust. Branch, Edward Douglas. The Sentimental Years, 1836–1860. American Century Series. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. Brooklyn Museum. American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876. Edited by Teresa Carbone. 2 vols. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2006. Brown, Candy Gunther. The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Browne (Browne-Garrett or Garrett), Augusta. “All Good Persons Love Dumb Animals.” Episcopal Recorder n.s., 11, no. 45 (February 7, 1877): 159. ———. “Angelology and Demonology, Ancient and Modern.” National Quarterly Review 5, no. 9 (June 1862): 25–42. ———. “Are We to Have a Saint Jonathan?” New York Observer, March 21, 1878.

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selected bibliography

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413

———. “Artistic Associations.” Home Journal, November 1, 1851. ———. “An Artist’s Memorial.” New York Musical World 17, no. 303 (January 17, 1857): 38–39. ———. “‘Benedic Anima Mea.’ A Voluntary on Sacred Music.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 7, no. 2 (February 1880): 205–8. ———. “‘The Blessed Company of All Faithful People.’” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 11, no. 2 (February 1882): 154–55. ———. “Burial Customs and Obitual Lore.” National Quarterly Review 4, no. 7 (December 1861): 63–76. ———. Can I Attend the Theatre? Gems of Truth 146. New York: American Tract Society, 1869. ———. Can I Play Cards? [Methodist Episcopal Church Tract] 137. New York: Hunt and Eaton, n.d. ———. “Can the Theatre Be Purified?” New York Observer, February 15, 1866. ———. “Card-Playing Christians.” Evangelical Repository and United Presbyterian Review, n.s., 12, no. 10 (March 1874), 676; printed again in Evangelical Repository and United Presbyterian Review, n.s., 12, no. 11 (April 1874), 742. ———. “A Chapter on Musical Sentiments and Sympathies.” Pts. 1 through 4. New York Musical World 6, no. 10 (July 9, 1853): 148; 6, no. 11 (July 16, 1853): 165–66; 6, no. 14 (August 6, 1853): 211–12; 6, no. 16 (August 20, 1853): 244. ———. “The Christian Slumber-Song.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 8, no. 2 (August 1880): 182–83. ———. “Coelus et Terra.” Home Journal, October 11, 1851. ———. “Crotchets of Comfort for ye Seekers of Fame.” New York Musical World 18, no. 340 (October 3, 1857): 631–32. ———. “Departed This Life.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 7, no. 6 (June 1880): 655–56. ———. “The Devil’s Ground.” New York Observer, October 1, 1868. ———. “Died.” Christian Intelligencer, October 23, 1841, 3. ———. “The Divine Origin of Music, and Musical Instruments.” Pts 1 through 3. Columbian Magazine 4, no. 4 (October 1845): 145–48; 4, no. 5 (November 1845): 218–20; 4, no. 6 (December 1845): 236–37. ———. “The Enchanted Piper.” Columbian Magazine 6, no. 2 (July 1846): 56–61. ———. “The Episcopal Church and the Theatre.” New York Observer, December 31, 1868. ———. “Epitaphs and Cemeteries.” New York Observer, November 14, 1861. ———. “A Fantasie on the Piano-Forte. For the special delectation of its admirers.” Pts. 1 and 2. Musical Review and Musical World 13, no. 2 (January 18, 1862): 14–16; 13, no. 3 (February 1, 1862): 27–28. ———. “A Few Wordy Griefs.” New York Weekly Review, September 29, 1866. ———. “Five Shillings Worth of Talent.” Message Bird 1, no. 5 (October 1, 1849): 76.

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selected bibliography

———. “Grand Farewell Concert of Anthony Philip Heinrich.” New York Musical World 4, no. 16 (December 18, 1852): 251. ———. Hamilton, the Young Artist. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852. HathiTrust. ———. “The Heart and the World.” Knickerbocker 35, no. 3 (February 1850): 202. ———. “Hints for a Sunday-School.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 5, no. 2 (March 1879): 146–49. ———. “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth.” New York Observer, June 23, 1864. ———. “Irish Curiosity; or, the Story of Shane Mac Teig O’Callaghan and His Wife Nelly.” [Philadelphia] M’Makin’s Model American Courier, August 12, 1848. ———. “Is the Fire of Hell Material, or Immaterial?” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 10, no. 5 (November 1881): 514–15. ———. “Kate Darlington.” Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine n.s., 22 (March 1847): 89–94. ———. “Love versus Law.” Home Journal, June 16, 1855. ———. “The Man Who Nurses the Baby.” Home Journal, November 22, 1851. ———. “The Mind is a Kingdom.” Home Journal, November 8, 1856. ———. “Music from Heaven.” Columbian Magazine 4, no. 4 (September 1845): 110. ———. “Music in Washington City.” Brainard’s Musical World 7, no. 76 (April 1870): 76. ———. “The Music of America.” Columbian Magazine 4, no. 1 (July 1845): 37–38. ———. “The Music of Our Neighborhood. Morning.” Union Magazine 3, no. 6 (December 1848): 253–58. ———. “Music of the Church.” Home Journal, November 6, 1852. ———. “Musical Association.” Home Journal, July 12, 1851. ———. “The Musical Critic’s Portrait.” Home Journal, February 28, 1852. ———. “Musical Echoes.” Pts. 1 through 3. Musical Review and Musical World 15, no. 20 (September 24, 1864): 307–8; 15, 15, no. 21 (October 8, 1864): 323; 15, no. 27 (December 17, 1864): 403–4. ———. “Musical Echoes.” New York Weekly Review 16, no. 2 (January 14, 1865): 1; 16, no. 3 (January 21, 1865): 3; 16, no. 13 (April 1, 1865): 3; 16, no. 14 (April 8, 1865). ———. “Musical Reminiscences.” Pts. 1 through 7 [sic]. Message Bird, n.s., 1, no. 16 (March 15, 1850): 263–64; 1, no. 17 (March 30, 1850): 279–80; 1, no. 19 (May 1, 1850): 310–12; 1, no. 20 (May 15, 1850): 328; 1, no. 21 (June 1, 1850): 344; 1, no. 22 (June 15, 1850): 358–59; 1, no. 23 (July 1, 1850): 374–75; 1, no. 24 (July 15, 1850): 390–91. ———. “Musical Reveries.” Ladies Garland and Dollar Magazine 13, no. 5 (May 1848): 104–5. ———. “A Musical Revival.” New York Observer, December 16, 1875. ———. “Musical Thoughts.” Columbian Magazine 3, no. 1 (January 1845): 68–69.

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415

———. “The Musician’s Adventure.” Columbian Magazine 3, no. 5 (June 1845): 235–36. ———. “The Mysteries of Dreaming.” Hours at Home 10, no. 5 (March 1870): 439–47. ———. “Nearer My God to Thee.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 10, no. 6 (1881): 642. ———. “Negro Minstrelsy.” Home Journal, January 14, 1854. ———. “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” Churchman, July 3, 1880. ———. “The Olden Time and the New. A Jeu d’esprit.” In The Iris: An Illuminated Souvenir for MCCCLI, edited by John S. Hart, 161–72. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1851. HathiTrust. ———. “An Olive Leaf for the Message Bird.” Message Bird 1, no. 3 (September 1, 1849): 37. ———. “On the Abuse of Church Music.” New York Observer, June 27, 1867. ———. “On the Expectations and Prospects of a Musical Professor (By Carl Maria von Weber).” Musical World and New York Musical Times 8, no. 4 (January 28, 1854): 39–40. ———. “On the Rights of Quadrupedal Musicians.” New York Musical World 19, no. 7 (February 13, 1858): 99–100. ———. “Our Neighborhood. Evening.” Pts. 1 and 2. Home Journal, December 8, 1849; December 15, 1849. ———. “The Painter’s Last Rest. In Memory of the Late Walter Libbey.” New York Musical World 6, no. 6 (June 11, 1853): 85. ———. “The Picture-Critic’s Portrait.” Pts. 1 and 2. Home Journal, May 29, 1852; June 5, 1852. ———. The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations. New York: Sheldon, 1859. HathiTrust. ———. “A Raid on the Enemy’s Camp.” Knickerbocker 61, no. 4 (April 1863): 349–53. ———. “Random Strains in Prose.” Pts 1 through 7. Journal of the Fine Arts n.s., [2], no. 43 (May 1, 1851): 63–64; [2], no. 44 (May 15, 1851): 76–77; [2], no. 45 (June 15, 1851): 99–100; [2], no. 48 (July 15, 1851): 160–61; 3, no. 1 (September 1, 1851): 9–10; 3, no. 4 (October 15, 1851): 73–74; 3, no. 5 (November 1, 1851): 9; 3, no. 7 (December 1, 1851): 122. ———. “Reveries of a Musician.” Pts. 1 and 2. Columbian Magazine 8, no. 1 (July 1847): 26–27; 8, no. 4 (October 1847): 185–87. ———. “The Rival Fiddlers.” Union Magazine 2, no. 1 (January 1848): 11–16. ———. “Rockets from an Organ-Loft.” Pts. 1 through 3 [sic]. New York Musical World 10, no. 17 (December 23, 1854): 204; 11, no. 1 (January 6, 1855): 3–4; 11, no. 6 (February 10, 1855): 63–64; 11, no. 7 (February 17, 1855): 75–76. ———. “Romanism Among Us.” Advance 2, no. 73 (January 21, 1869): [2].

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———. “The Sacred Mission of Genius.” Journal of the Fine Arts n.s., [2] (April 15, 1851): 33–34. ———. “The Secret Letter.” In The Iris: An Illuminated Souvenir for MDCCCLIII, edited by John S. Hart, 121–35. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853. HathiTrust. ———. “A Standard Bearer of Christendom—Bishop Ken.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 9, no. 4 (April 1881): 445–47. ———. “The Sory of a Dog-Hero.” New York Observer, November 27, 1862. ———. “Sunday Concerts.” Western Musical World 4, no. 3 (March 1867): 35. ———. “A Tale of the Supernatural. Erin go bragh!” Holden’s Dollar Magazine 5, no. 4 (April 1850): 219–22. ———. “The Three Autumns.” New York Observer, October 24, 1861. ———. “Trumpets and Drums.” Knickerbocker 62, no. 6 (December 1863): 521–25. ———. “The Vacant Chair.” Sartain’s Union Magazine 6, no. 5 (May 1850): 340. ———. “The Village Organist. A Musical Portraiture.” Brainard’s Musical World 14, no. 158 (February 1877): 17–18. ———. “Visions in Twilight. (In Memory of Mrs. Jessie Willis).” Pts. 1 and 2. New York Musical World 19, no. 21 (May 22, 1858): 327–28; 19, no. 22 (May 29, 1858): 343–44. ———. “Wanted: An Organist.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 9, no. 3 (March 1881): 321–27. ———. “Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman?” American Monthly 65, no. 2 (February 1865): 111–22. ———. “The Way to the Pit.” Advance 3, no. 116 (October 22, 1868). ———. “‘When the Hurly-Burly’s Done.’ No. III.” Episcopal Recorder 10, no. 48 (March 1, 1876): 198. ———. “A Woman on Women; With Reflections on the Other Sex.” Knickerbocker 61, no. 1 (January 1863): 10–20. ———. “A Wounded Soldier’s Experience of Music.” Musical Review and Musical World 14, no. 12 (June 6, 1863): 136. Browne, David Samuel. “A Dissertation on Vocal Accompaniment.” Lyre 1, no. 6 (November 1, 1824): 81–85. ———. “An Essay on the Derivation and Progress of the Music,” Lyre 1, no. 5 (October 1, 1824): 65–71. ———. “Introduction.” Lyre 1, no. 4 (September 1, 1824): 49–53. ———. A Self Defence, with a Refutation of Calumnies, Misrepresentations, and Fallacies . . . Boston: Browne’s Musical Seminary, 1828. Browne, William Henry (brother). “In Memoriam: Augusta Browne Garrett.” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 11, no. 4 (April 1882): 438.

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417

———. “The Mexican Coquette. A Sketch of Modern Chivalry.” In The Iris: An Illuminated Souvenir for MDCCCLIII, edited by John S. Hart, 65–88. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853. HathiTrust. ———. “My Spiritual Experience.” Knickerbocker 51, no. 2 (February 1858): 143–46. ———. “The Proprietors.” In Proceedings of the National Wholesale Druggists Association, transcribed by Geo. B. Bower, 219–22. Minneapolis: Swinburne Printing, 1891. HathiTrust. ———. A Treatise on the Law of Trade-Marks and Analogous Subjects (Firm Names, Business-Signs, Good Will, Labels, Etc.). Boston: Little, Brown, 1873. Google Books. Broyles, Michael. “Music and Class Structure in Antebellum Boston.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 451–93. ———. Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Buckingham, James Silk. Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Other British Provinces in North America with a Plan of National Colonization. London: Fisher, Son, 1843. HathiTrust. Bullard, Melissa Meriam. Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. New York: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017. Bunting, William Franklin. History of St. John’s Lodge, F. & A.M. of Saint John, New Brunswick Together with Sketches of All Masonic Bodies in New Brunswick, from A.D. 1784 to A.D. 1894. Saint John, NB: J. and A. McMillan, 1895. HathiTrust. Cai, Camilla. “Clara Schumann ‘A Woman Must not Desire to Compose. . . .’” Piano Quarterly, no. 145 (Spring 1989), 55–61. ———. “‘Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn’ (Review).” Notes 67, no. 3 (March 2011): 537–40. ———. “Texture and Gender: New Prisms for Understanding Hensel’s and Mendelssohn’s Piano Pieces.” In Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis, edited by David Witten, 53–93. Perspectives in Music Criticism and Theory. New York: Garland, 1997. Carbone, Teresa, ed. American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876. 2 vols. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2006. Carboni, Domenico. “Grieg and Sgambati in Rome; Sgambati No Longer Lives Here.” Paper presented at the International Edvard Grieg Society Conference, Rome, June 2004. http://griegsociety.com/domenico-carboni-paper-2004/ (accessed June 23, 2016). Carman, Judith E., Gordon Myers, William K. Gaeddert, and Rita M. Resch, eds. Art Song in the United States, 1759–1999: An Annotated Bibliography. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2001.

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Caswell, Austin. “Jenny Lind’s Tour of America: A Discourse of Gender and Class.” In Festa Musciologica: Essays in Honor of George U. Buelow. Edited by Thomas J. Mathiesen and Benito V. Rivera, 319–37. Festschrift Series, no. 14. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995. Catalogue of the large and valuable stock of music plates, sheet music, musical instruments, material, &c. being the stock of the late George E. Blake, to be sold at public sale . . . on Monday morning May 22, 1871 [Philadelphia, 1871]. Cavarra, Angela Adriana. Donna è— : l’universo femminile nelle raccolte casanatensi. Milano: Aisthesis, 1998. Cazalet, William Wahab. The History of the Royal Academy of Music. London: T. Bosworth, 1854. Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America; The Generations of 1780–1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Chase, Gilbert. America’s Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present. New York: McGrawHill, 1955. ———. America’s Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Cheney, Simeon Pease, compiler. The American Singing Book. 1879. New York: Da Capos, 1980. Chesterfield, 4th Earl of (Stanhope, Philip Dormer). Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman. Edited and with an introduction by Oliver H. Leigh. London: Navarre Society, 1926. HathiTrust. Chmaj, Betty E. “Father Heinrich as Kindred Spirit, Or, How the Log-House Composer of Kentucky Became the Beethoven of America.” American Studies 24, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 35–57. ———. “Fry versus Dwight: American Music’s Debate over Nationality.” American Music 3, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 63–84. Citron, Marcia J. Gender and the Musical Canon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93. Clark, J. Bunker. The Dawning of American Keyboard Music. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Cliff, Nigel. The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Random House, 2007. Cobb, Buell E. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Conn, Stetson. Washington’s Epiphany, Church and Parish, 1842–1972. Washington: Church of the Epiphany, 1976. Constable-Pierrepont Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Index The present index does not include the appendices. An italicized page number indicates a figure or musical example. Abel, Frederick L., 34, 288 abolition. See slavery absolute music, 281, 282, 283 Adams, Pres. John Quincy, 27; and David Browne, 25, 26, 33 Adams, Sarah Flower: “Nearer My God to Thee,” 173–74, 258 African Americans: and New York City draft riots, 176–77; oratory, 293; songs, 282. See also minstrelsy; slavery Alcott, Louisa May, 111–12; as author, 268; An Old-Fashioned Girl, 123; and parents, 201 Allen, Mrs. E[dmund] C[hristopher] (née Ellen Logier), 21, 366n50, 367n64 Amateur Cornet Club of New York, 227 amateur music-making, 216, 227, 238, 240, 242 American Art-Union, 133, 144 American Journal of Music, 288 American Literary Magazine, 110 American music, 288, 301–2; American composers and musicians, 2, 217, 280, 299–300, 409n4; Americanism in music, 280–81, 287; military and wind bands, 27, 117, 175, 286;

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national songs, 220, 286, 287; vocal music, 237–38. See also Browne, Augusta, literary works, “The Music of America”; Chase, Gilbert; sheet music American Musical Institute, 122 American Sunday-School Union, 166, 276 American Tract Society, 166, 167, 276 Anderson, Gillian, 238 Anglicanism: High and Low Church, 52, 105. See also Oxford (Tractarian) movement Anglo American, 252 Anthony, Susan B., 123 Anti-Slavery Bugle, 292 Appleton, Mrs. William (née Emily Warren), 47, 93, 374n8 art music, 260–61, 301 artists, 144; Hudson River School, 281; portrait painters, 147. See also specific artists Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post, 53 Astor Place Opera House, 114 Astor Place Riot (Shakespeare Riots), 114, 115, 167, 266 Atwood, Margaret, 101 Auber, Daniel François Esprit, 60; Fra Diavolo, 62

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438

ᆥ index

Austen, Jane, 7, 296 Augustine, Saint, 156, 189 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 47, 85 Ballard, Emily Augusta (niece; née Augusta Emily Browne), 142, 211, 384n54, 386n93 Balmanno, Mary, 112, 136; death of, 201; as poet and lyricist, 248, 250, 252 Balmanno, Robert, 248 Baltimore Gazette, 44 Baltimore Sun, 183 Barger, Judith, 98 Barnum, Phineas Taylor, 70 Bartholomew, Ann Mounsey, 15, 365n44 Barton, Clara, 123 battle pieces, 70 Beecher, Catharine, 107, 112, 166 Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, 168 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 47, 243, 261, 274, 279; and Heinrich (Anthony Philip), 30; pedaling in “Waldstein” sonata, 220; piano music, 143; symphonies, 273, 281, 282 Beeton, Isabella, 112 bel canto, 60, 61, 302. See also operas Bellini, Vincenzo: La Sonnambula, 60–62 Bérat, Frédéric: “Ma Normandie,” 53 Bible and Scripture, 273–74, 275, 284 Biblioteca Casanatense, 188 Bigelow, Ellen. See Williams, Mrs. J[ohn] D. W. Biglow & Main, 260, 294 Billings, William, 258, 288 binder’s volumes, 2, 43–44, 99, 216, 217, 368n80, 373n64 Bishop, Henry R.: “Home, Sweet Home,” 287; “The Merry Mountain Horn,” 55, 374n18

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blackface minstrelsy. See minstrelsy Blackwell, Elizabeth, 123 Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine, 110 Blake, George E., 46–47, 100 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 14, 286, 365n36. See also Napoleonic Wars Boston, 5, 9, 27, 28, 31, 33, 92–93, 142; Boston Brahmins (leading families), 29, 33, 43, 93 Boston Academy of Music, 42 Boston Courier, 1, 5, 10, 29, 34 Boston Daily Evening Transcript, 300 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Sacred Music, 33, 35 Boston Musical Gazette, 289–90 Boyce, William, 171; “Heart of Oak” (Harlequin’s Invasion), 243 Braham, Charles, 73 Braham, John, 71–73, 75, 82, 83 Brainard, Silas, 179, 180; and Brainard’s Musical World, 187–88 Branch, E. Douglas, 266 Broadway. See New York City Broadwood, John, 21, 25. See also pianos Brooklyn (New York), 84, 85, 152, 156, 162–63, 179, 296 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 123, 162 Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library, 264 Brooklyn Eagle, 97, 112–13, 161, 225, 248 Brooklyn Female Academy, 124 Brooklyn Institute, 84 Brooklyn Lyceum, 72 Brooklyn Mozart Association, 75, 122 Brooklyn Museum, 133, 136, 264 Browne, Alexander Hamilton. See Browne, Hamilton Browne, Arthur St. John. See Browne, St. John Browne, Augusta (later Augusta Browne Garrett or Browne-Garrett):

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index advertisements as composer, 46, 68, 71, 153, 300; advertisements as teacher and organist, 67, 83, 116, 142, 151, 153, 156, 160; advertisements with parents, 42, 44, 45, 46, 66–67; appearance, xiii, 73, 177; audience and consumers, 301; as author, 2–3, 107–8, 109–10, 156, 163–64, 179, 264–65; in Baltimore, 44, 179; and binder’s volumes, 99, 216; birth of, 10–11, 22, 364n32; in Boston, 29–30, 42–43, 92–93; in Brooklyn, 153, 156; as businesswoman and entrepreneur, 100–101, 124, 300; career vs. marriage, 113, 123, 144; as caregiver, 111, 131, 183, 187; Catholicism, opposition to, 172, 188, 269, 276–77; as child performer, 5, 6–7, 9–10, 44; Christian faith of, xii, 71, 104, 202, 277–78; Christian mission of, 164, 166, 168–69, 303, 304; chronology of music and prose publications, 311–28; in city directories, 58, 59, 67, 195, 196; and Civil War, 160, 161, 162, 163–64, 177, 179, 275–76; conduct expected of, 30, 69–70, 208, 278; as daughter, 122; death and burial of, 210–13; on death and salvation, 104; death of husband, 155; dedications of music, 47, 52–53, 93, 121–22, 188, 205, 211; earliest publications of music, 46, 47; early years, 10–11, 22, 30, 38–39, 41, 209, 302; as editor, 107; evaluation as composer, 2, 125, 207–8, 260–62, 301, 302; “excelsior,” meaning of, 254, 257; family story retold, 10, 40, 132, 364n33; family tree, 307–9; female role models, 30, 75; as feminist, xii, 271, 304; finances of, 86, 92,

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ᆥ 439

109, 116, 124, 127, 196; and Foster (Stephen), 126; friendships with women writers, 112, 136; gifts of sheet music, 43, 374n14; health of, 137; on hymns, 172, 257–58; last will and testament of, 201, 210, 211; and lawsuit against First Presbyterian Church, 97–98; as letter writer, 126; marriage of, 144–45, 270; as memoirist, 131, 132, 273, 384n58; minstrelsy, opposition to, 106, 138, 150, 291–94, 295; miscarriage or pregnancy of, 152; on music and art critics, 297–98; on music education, 288–89; as music journalist, 279; as music student, 10, 23, 30, 31, 40, 43; as music teacher, 20, 42–43, 44, 45, 142; in New York City, 66, 71, 98, 110–11, 112, 123–24, 142; as organist, 44, 58, 64, 83, 98, 128–29, 197, 257; as organist at First Presbyterian Church (Brooklyn), 84, 85, 86, 92; as organist at Trinity Episcopal Church (Washington, DC), 185–87; in Philadelphia, 49, 51, 52, 64; as pianist, 71, 73, 82–83, 102–3, 214, 218; as poet, 266–67; and politics, 111; popularity of, 1–2, 99; on poverty experienced by artists, 149, 274; on power of music (moral or spiritual uplift), 104, 245, 260, 283, 284–85, 288; prejudices of, 109–10; public persona and public image of, 61, 70–71, 98, 113, 124, 264; reception as author, 106, 157, 278, 290; reception as composer, 62–63, 78, 80, 143, 246–48; relationship with father, 38–39, 45, 65, 183, 184, 300; relationship with mother, 201; republications of music, 100, 152, 225; as reviewer, 187; and Schumann (Clara Wieck),

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440 ᆥ index Browne, Augusta—(cont’d) 40–41, 63–64, 65, 100–101, 125, 261, 302; and slavery, 150–51; and Spencer (Lilly Martin), 113; and Sunday-school activities, 49, 197; in Toronto, 40, 42; and travel, 64, 114, 228; in Washington, DC, 185–86, 187–88, 195, 196, 197, 201, 210; as widow, 156, 159, 160, 195; women confused with Augusta Browne, xiii, 209, 240, 361n7, 373n7, 404n9; and women’s magazines, 109, 113, 265; and worship music, 170–72, 257–58, 260, 295–96 Browne, Augusta, literary works: “The Abuse of Church Music,” 285; “Are We to Have a St. Jonathan?,” 277; “An Artist’s Memorial,” 133, 149; “Benedic Anima Mea,” 202, 285; “The Blessed Company of all Faithful People,” 202, 211, 258; “Can I Attend the Theatre?,” 60, 167–68, 276; “Can I Play Cards?,” 168, 276; “Card-Playing Christians,” 276; “Coelum et Terra” (“Heaven and Earth”), 266–67; “Crotchets of Comfort for ye Seekers of Fame,” 151; “The Devil’s Ground,” 276; “The Divine Origin of Music,” 106, 285, 292, 291; “The Enchanted Piper,” 268–69; “A Fantasie on the Piano-Forte,” 163; “A Few Wordy Griefs,” 169; and fiction, 267–71; “Five Shillings Worth of Talent,” 179, 394n74; Hamilton, The Young Artist, 131, 132, 136, 208, 266; “The Heart and the World,” 210, 267; humor, use of, 165, 269, 271–72, 289; “I Have a Glorious Hope,” 183–84, 210; “Irish Curiosity,” 269; “Is the Fire of Hell Material or Immaterial,” 202; “Kate

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Darlington,” 110, 113–14, 138, 270; “Love Versus Law,” 270; “The Man who Nurses the Baby” (“The First Paterfamilias”), 183, 264–65; “The Mind is a Kingdom, 149; on music as metaphor for life and nature, 283–84; “Music from Heaven,” 106, 213; “The Music of America,” 106, 287–91, 292, 303; “The Music of Our Neighborhood, Morning,” 109, 123, 296–97; “The Musical Critic’s Portrait,” 264, 297–98; “Musical Echoes,” 179; “Musical Reminiscences,” 131, 285; “A Musical Revival,” 285; “Musical Sentiments and Sympathies,” 143, 179, 294; “Musical Thoughts,” 106, 284; “The Musician’s Adventure,” 106, 267; “The Mysteries of Dreaming,” 198; “Negro Minstrelsy,” 138, 292–94, 295; obituary for sister Elizabeth, 115, 189; “The Olden Time and the New,” 270; “On the Rights of Quadrupedal Musicians,” 271–72; “Our Neighborhood, Evening,” 296–97; “The Painter’s Last Rest,” 133, 267, 385n70; “The PictureCritic’s Portrait,” 297, 298; poems, 203, 266–67; The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations, 156–59, 164, 208, 267, 274, 390nn58–60; “Random Strains in Prose,” 285; revisions of earlier articles, 179, 285; “The Rival Fiddlers,” 269; “Rockets from an Organ Loft,” 131, 143; “Romanism among Us,” 277; satire, use of, 138, 265, 275, 278, 289, 297–98; “The Secret Letter,” 138, 270; “A Standard-bearer of Christendom—Bishop Ken,” 202; “The Story of a Dog-Hero” (“A Providential Escape”), 268; “A Tale

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index of the Supernatural” (“An Unearthly Banquet,” etc.), 268; “The Three Autumns,” 163–64; “To a Departed Spirit,” 266; transition to Christian devotional literature, 276; “Trumpets and Drums,” 163, 275; unpublished book manuscript on death and burial customs, 159, 164, 165; “The Vacant Chair,” 266; “Wanted: An Organist,” 203, 302–3; “Was Lord Chesterfield a Gentleman?,” 169–70, 275–76; “The Way to the Pit,” 276; “A Woman on Women,” 165–66, 272–74; “The Youth’s Parting Song,” 267 Browne, Augusta, musical works and compositional features: accompaniments for songs, 243; Air a la Suisse with Impromptu Variations, 52–53, 54; The American Bouquet, 68, 83, 220; and American taste, 300–301; Angels Whisper, 216; anthems, 85, 257; Arietta Napolitana, 114, 234; arpeggios, 75; arrangements, 220, 228, 237; ascending sixth as musical signature, 254, 256; augmentedsixth chords, 49, 86, 117, 234, 250; Aurora, 188–89, 190–93, 192, 208, 219–20, 219, 237; Aurora manuscript, 188, 189, 396n10; “Autumn of Love,” 180; “Babes in the Wood,” 102; bel canto, 60, 61, 302; “Bird of the Gentle Wing,” 55, 68, 243, 245; “Bonnie Bessie Green,” 78, 80, 81, 238; bouquets (national bouquets), 68–69, 208, 220–21, 222, 225, 400n15; Brilliant Introduction and Variations on the Favorite Air, “Still so Gently o’er Me Stealing,” 58, 61, 62–63, 63, 75; La brise dans le feuillage, 208, 220, 234, 235–36, 237, 208; cadenzas for piano, 53, 54, 78,

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ᆥ 441

79–80, 138, 152; cadenzas for piano and voice, 47, 48, 60, 96; cadenzas for voice, 73, 76, 175, 239; The Caledonian Bouquet, 221, 373n5; Chant d’amour, 138, 139–40, 254; Chant of the Sea, 180, 181–82, 182; character pieces, 231, 234; “A Chaunt of Home,” 173; “The Chieftain’s Halls,” 93, 243; “The Christian Slumber-Song” (“Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”), 203; chromatic chords, 117, 119; “The City of Delight,” 156–57, 158; The Columbian Quick-Step, 116, 225, 226, 400n21; The Cornet Grand Waltz, 137, 227; counterpoint, 73, 225, 234; “The Courier Dove,” 239–40, 241–42; Crystal Palace Waltz, 137, 227; “Day of Judgment, Day of Wonders,” 203, 205, 207; The De Meyer Grand Waltz, 102–3, 173, 253, 255; duets, piano, 100, 374n14; duets, vocal, 245; The English Boquet, 73, 221; “Esperanza,” 254, 258, 259; The Ethereal Grand Waltz, 92; “Excelsior,” 172–73; “Fairest Flower so Palely Drooping,” 101, 250, 252; “The Family Bible,” 102; “The Family Meeting,” 73, 75, 77, 115, 213; Fantasia and Variations on a Celebrated Air, a la Russe Vesper Hymn, 75, 78, 79–80, 208, 220, 377n47; fantasies, 208; “The Fisher Boy’s Song,” 73, 74–75, 76, 238; “Forever Thine,” 197–98, 199; The French Boquet, 99, 221; galop, 225; German Air, with Variations, 106; “Gloria tibi,” 186; “Grand te deum,” 186; “Grand Vesper Chorus,” 86, 90–91, 186; Grande marche arabique, 102–3, 114, 228–29, 230, 231, 232–33; The Haunted Spring,

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442 ᆥ index Browne, Augusta—(cont’d) with Variations, 53, 55, 56, 57; Hear, Therefore, O Israel, 85, 86, 87–89; L’Henri, Gallope Brilliante, 68, 100, 374n14; The Hibernian Bouquet, 220, 221–22, 222, 223–24, 225; Himmels Grand Vienna Waltz, 228; hymns, 172–73, 203, 205, 257; “I Have a Glorious Hope,” 203, 205, 206, 210; “I Would I Were a Fairy,” 69; improvisations, 31, 53; It is Better to Laugh than be Sighing, 228; Jenny Lind’s Dream, 228; keys, choice of, 73, 117, 216; Lays of Caledonia, 152–53, 154; list of musical works, 329–56; lyricists, 125, 195, 248; Ma Normandie avec variations, 53; “Marvellous Horn,” 238, 245, 252; “Mary Lyle,” 125–26, 127, 128; medleys, 68, 69, 220; melodic forms, 225, 227, 239; The Merry Mountain Horn, 55, 374n18; metronome markings, 53; The Mexican Volunteers Quickstep, 102, 116–17, 126, 225; modulations, 49, 75, 96, 153, 225, 243; “The Music We Love Most,” 249–50, 250, 251; musical forms, 215, 225, 227, 231, 234, 239; musical genres, 101, 216, 217; national music, use of, 220, 228; Neapolitan sixth chords, 234; octaves, 75, 189; “Oh! Lassie Dear I maun awa,’” 239, 248; “The Old Clock’s Warning,” 173, 253–54, 255; “Once Upon a Time,” 93, 246–47, 248, 249; opus numbers, use of, 102, 220, 229, 237, 377n46; “The Orange Bough,” 49, 50; organ music, 129, 237; ornamentation, 215; “Persian Lover’s Song,” 114; piano figuration, 218, 227–28; piano pedaling, 218–20, 225; “Pleasure! Naught but

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Pleasure,” 246; polkas, 225; program (programmatic) music, 138, 282–83; quickstep, 225; recitative, 78, 85, 93; “Reply of the Messenger Bird,” 240; rolled chords, 247; romance, piano, 188–89, 234; “A Song for New England,” 93, 94, 95–96, 96; “Song of Christiana,” 137; “Song of Mercy,” 137, 260; “Song of the Redeemed,” 53; “Song of the Shepherd Boy,” 203, 204–5; “Song of the Skylark,” 52; “St. George’s,” 254, 258; staccato, articulation of, 215; “Stewart,” 172–73, 174; Strains of Many Lands, 152; “The Stranger’s Heart,” 55, 245, 379n92; “The Sun Has Set,” 82–83, 243; ternary form, 117, 215, 234; text setting, 117, 119, 121, 245, 247, 253–54; texture and keyboard color, use of, 222, 225; themes and variations, 47, 53, 55, 214, 215, 216, 301; themes borrowed from other composers, 47, 49, 73, 86, 243; “A Thought of the Departed” (“Requiem”), 92, 252, 253; “To Inez in Heaven,” 243, 244; topics of songs, 238–39, 245; traditional music, use of, 14, 80, 220–22, 228; Two Favorite Airs, arranged as a Divertissement, 68; variation as compositional technique within larger forms, 214, 234, 237; Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of Lo Zangara, 215; “Vive le Republique,” 111; “The Voice of Spring,” 47, 48, 93; “The Volunteer’s War Song,” 102, 151; “Wake, Lady Mine,” 240, 291; “Wake, Poland, Awake,” 111; waltzes, 225, 227, 400n24; “The Warlike Dead in Mexico,” 117, 118– 19, 120–21, 121–22; “The Watcher at the Gate,” 174–75; “Where Quair

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index Runs Sweet amang the Flowers,” 126, 127; “Who has not a Ship at Sea,” 195, 397n21; “The Youth’s Parting Song,” 136 Browne, David Samuel (father): advertisements and notices in the press, 22, 29, 32, 36–37, 42, 44, 58, 59; as agent for Augusta Browne, 46, 71, 97, 300; as agent in Dublin, 13, 141; as agent in New York, 39, 141; American Independents Grand March and Six National Waltzes, 25, 368n87, 369n2; American Military Bugle Andante, 68; “Ancient Essays on Music,” 25; attacks in the press on, 32–33, 44, 184; as author, 25, 264, 283; background in Ireland, 11–13; and binder’s volumes, 43, 373n63; Browne’s Selection of Rondos Waltzes and Airs with Variations and Military Pieces, 43–44; certification in Logierian system, 31–32; in city directories, 39, 58, 59; as composer, 12, 14, 25, 31, 32, 43–44; death of, 183; dedications of music, 12, 37–38, 68; Donegal Royal Patent Bugle Short Troop and Slow March, 12; emigration, 21–22; as father, 65, 141, 183; La fille sauvage, 243; as Freemason, 22, 38; gifts of sheet music, 43; The Grand Martial Troop, 12; Kinloch of Kinloch, 43–44; and land holdings and sales in New Brunswick, 22, 39, 58; and lawsuit by Cowan sisters, 37, 38–39, 44, 194; as lawyer, 141; in London, 21; and Mason (Lowell), 35; marriage of, 12; mental illness, symptoms of, 45, 65, 184; military service in Irish volunteer militia, 11–12, 19; music business in Baltimore, 44–45; music business in Boston, 6, 27, 29, 31,

Miller.indd 443

ᆥ 443

32, 35–36, 42, 44; music business in Brooklyn, 84; music business in Dublin, 13, 14; music business in New York, 36–37, 67; music business in Philadelphia, 49, 58; music business in St. John, 11, 22, 25–26; music business in Toronto, 39–40, 41, 42; music business in Utica, 36–37; as music publisher, 23, 24, 30–31, 243; and music students in Boston, 43, 44; music study with Logier, 13; as pianist, 6–7, 362n9; on power of music, 283; public exhibitions of music academy, 6, 19, 29, 31, 36, 37, 44, 366n50; A Self Defence, 33, 370n24; as teacher, 10, 23, 71; and US citizenship, 141; and Wieck (Friedrich), 41 Browne, Augusta Emily (niece). See Ballard, Emily Augusta Browne, Elizabeth M. (sister), 104, 115 Browne, Elizabeth Montgomery (mother), 11, 12–13, 22, 23, 31, 36, 39, 201, 364n22; as art instructor, 12, 22, 84; death of, 201; as music instructor, 12, 20, 42, 44, 45, 66–67 Browne, Ethel Rogers (grand-niece), 21, 211, 386n94 Browne, Francis H. (not related), 216, 217 Browne, George Washington (brother), 111; birth of, 37; death of, 114–15, 167, 266; and Marche maroccaine (De Meyer), 229 Browne, Hamilton (brother), 111, 266– 67; appearance in likely portrait, 132–33, 135; as art student, 84; as author and poet, 264, 270; birth and early years, 39; death of, 115, 131

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444 ᆥ index Browne, Harriet Mary (not related; sister of Felicia Hemans): and confusion with Augusta Browne, 209, 373n7, 398nn49–50; “The Messenger Bird,” 240; “The Pilgrim Fathers,” 209 Browne, Louis Henri (brother), 160; as apprentice with Chickering, 31; birth of, 12; as Civil War volunteer, 160–61, 162; death of, 201; patents for piano manufacture, 160, 391n2; pension application, 183; as piano manufacturer, 58, 93, 142 Browne, Henri Montgomery (nephew; “Harry”), 114, 142, 211 Browne, Louise Turner (first wife of W. H. Browne), 399n60 Browne, Louise Wolcott Knowlton (second wife of W. H. Browne), 365n33, 399n60 Browne, Marion Blanchard (grandniece). See Phinney, Marion Browne Browne, Phoebe (née Howes; sister-inlaw), 114 Browne, Sarah (née Barker; sister-inlaw), 142, 211, 386n92 Browne, St. John (brother): as apprentice, 92–93; birth of, 23; death of, 149; as piano builder, 31, 142 Browne, William Henry (brother): appearance, 177, 178, 389n42; as author and poet, 138, 194, 195, 262, 264; birth of, 23; as Civil War volunteer, 160–61, 175, 177, 179, 183, 275; death and burial, 213, 397n28, 399n64; as Freemason, 202, 211, 399n61; injury in battle, 175, 177, 183; as lawyer, 141, 150, 151, 195, 396n18; marriages of, 399n60; men confused with W. H. Browne, 391n4, 397n18; as Mexican-American War volunteer, 116, 117, 138,

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140, 151, 225; “My Campaign Reminiscences,” 138, 140; “My Spiritual Experience,” 198; and Patent Office, 194; pension application of, 183; relationship with sister, 138, 195, 201–2, 211; Sunday-school activities of, 197; A Treatise on the Law of Trade-Marks, 194–95 Brownlee, Rev. William Craig: assistance to Augusta Browne, 106; Catholicism, opposition to, 105; as publisher of Protestant Vindicator, 105–6 Broyles, Michael, 406n13 Buckingham, James Silk, 23, 25 Bunyan, John. See Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) Burr, Aaron, 39 Burtis, Margaret Keen, 52 Cabot, Anna Sophia. See Lodge, Mrs. John Ellerton Cabot, Henry S., 43 Cabot, Mrs. Henry (Anna): gifts of music to, 43 Camões (Camoens), Luis Vaz de: Os Lusiadas, 243 canon, musical, 2, 171 Carolan. See O’Carolan, Turlough Cary, Alice and Phoebe, 112, 136, 198 Catholicism: Jesuits, 188, 277; opposition to, 105–6, 172, 269, 276–77; practices of, 52, 105 Centennial Exposition: organ and piano recitals at, 196–97 Chaminade, Cécile, 261 character pieces, 208, 215, 217, 231, 301, 302 Chase, Gilbert: America’s Music from the Pilgrims to the Present, 290–91 Cheney, Simon Pease: The American Singing Book, 209

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index Chesterfield, 4th Earl of. See Stanhope, Philip Dormer Chickering, Josiah, 31 Child, Lydia Maria, 107, 108, 381n14 child performers, 5, 362n5, 362n6 chiroplast, 16, 17, 17, 19, 19, 29, 34. See also Logier, Johann Bernhard; Logierian System of Musical Education choirs: boy choirs, 105; church choirs, 171, 203, 303; quartet of soloists, use of, 92, 174–75. See also worship music Chopin, Frédéric, 60 Choral Society of Washington, 188, 198, 201 chorus: movements in oratorios or stage works, 49, 131, 198, 200, 243; refrains in popular songs, 54, 239. See also choirs Christian Advocate, 102–3, 292 Christian devotional literature, 275; sermons, 156, 168, 169, 202, 264; tracts, 276. See also condolence (consolation) literature Christian Intelligencer, 104 chromolithography, 102 church music. See worship music Church of England, 52 Church of Ireland, 12 Church of the Epiphany (Washington, DC), 197 Cincinnati (Ohio), 20, 53, 147, 167, 289 City Gazette (St. John), 22 Civil War, 159, 160; Antietam, Battle of, 161; Bull Run, First Battle of (First Manassas), 161; divided loyalties within Sloman family, 162; Fair Oaks, Battle of (Seven Pines), 275; Gettysburg, Battle of, 173, 175, 176, 286; Marye’s Heights, Battle of, 175,

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176; in Maryland, 162, 177; militia bands, 175; New York City draft riots, 176–77; Peninsular campaign, 161; Reconstruction, 185; recruiting posters, 161; songs of, 161; Veteran Reserve Corps (Invalid Corps), 177, 183. See also Long Island Sanitary Fair; pensions Cixous, Hélène, 304 Clark, J. Bunker: on antebellum organ music, 129; on antebellum piano music, 214–15 class, social, 2, 12, 13, 70, 93, 96 Clay, Henry, 121–22 Clementi, Muzio, 21, 23, 31, 47, 366n48 Clements, Nathaniel (2nd Earl of Leitrim), 11–12 Coles, Rev. George, 53 Columbian Magazine, 104, 106, 107, 109, 119, 289, 290, 291; music published in, 99, 126, 225, 239, 240, 246 Comes, William D., 122 Comstock, Anthony: Comstock Act, 168 concerts: benefits for charity, 71, 72, 82, 122; multi-keyboard concerts, 17, 44; programming of, 218, 282; sacred concerts, 75, 122, 260 condolence (consolation) literature, 136, 165, 274 copyright: deposits of music in Library of congress, 152, 216; intellectual property, 194–95. See also trademarks Corelli, Arcangelo, 5, 298, 362n4, 370n14 Cowan, Anna, and sister: suit against David Browne, 37, 38, 44, 194 Cox, Elizabeth R. (Mrs. Stephen Howard Thayer), 252

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446 ᆥ index Cox, Rev. Samuel Hanson, 84, 97, 252 Cramer, Johann Baptist, 23, 47, 142, 366n48 Crosby, Fanny: “Blessed Assurance,” 174 Cruikshank, George, 17, 18, 19, 20, 366n52, 366n54 Currier, Charles, 251–52 Cutler, Rev. Benjamin C., 105, 166–67, 170 daguerreotypes, 147, 151 Daily Atlas (Boston), 107 Daily Enquirer (Cincinnati), 147 dances, dancing, 217, 225, 227 David, Félicien: Le désert, 229, 283 Day, Hartley W., 289 death: antebellum concept of good death, 131–32; on battlefield, 275; and burial customs, 164; as homecoming, 73; and salvation, 133, 189, 192; and spiritualism, 198; as subject of songs, 250, 252–53; from tuberculosis, 131–32, 133, 281. See also heaven dedications of music, 47, 52, 53, 93, 234. See also Browne, Augusta, dedications of music; Browne, David Samuel, dedications of music Democrats. See politics Dial (periodical), 273, 279 Dickinson, Emily, 116, 266; “Musicians Wrestle Everywhere,” 297 Dingley, Charles, 37–38 Ditson, Oliver, 152, 153, 209, 384n28 Dodworth’s Band, 122, 225 Donegal Militia, 11, 12 Donizetti, Gaetano: brindisi from Lucrezia Borgia, 228; Lucia di Lammermoor, 60 drum and fife boys: in British military, 11–12

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Dublin (Ireland): commerce, decline of, 14; music publishing in, 13–14. See also Ireland Dussek, Jan Ladislav, 5, 7, 23, 31, 47, 363n15; The Ploughboy Arranged as a Rondo, 7, 9, 8–9 Dwight, John Sullivan, 127, 281–83 Dwight, Rev. Timothy, 281 Dwight’s Journal of Music, 281, 384n28 Ecclesiological Movement, 105. See also Oxford (Tractarian) Movement Eclectic Magazine, 157 Eliot, George, 169, 269–70 Elliott, Charlotte: “Just as I Am,” 173 English national songs, 31, 221, 243 Ethiopian songs. See minstrelsy European music, 34, 170, 288; arrangements of, 30, 33 Eustaphiève, Alexis, 30 Eustaphiève, Eliza. See Peruzzi, Eliza Eustaphiève Euterpeiad: in Boston, 25, 78; in New York, 37–38. See also Parker, John Rowe Evangelical Repository, 276 Evening Gazette (Boston), 29 Evening Post (New York), 221 Evening Star (Washington, DC), 186, 210 exoticism, 102, 228, 229; alla turca style, 231 fantasia, fantasy, 60 Farrar, Eliza Ware, 69 Farrenc, Louise, 261 feminism. See Browne, Augusta, as feminist; gender issues; women Fern, Fanny. See Parton, Sarah Willis Fillmore, Rev. Augustus, 289 First Presbyterian Church (Brooklyn), 84–86, 92; centennial of, 83,

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index 378n71; and lawsuit filed by Augusta Browne, 96–98, 187 folk music. See Irish traditional music; Scottish traditional music Forrest, Edwin, 114 Fosdick, William W., 125–26 Foster, Stephen, 2, 27, 126, 150, 262, 292; Camptown Races, 242; Gentle Annie, 126, 128; Old Folks at Home, 295 Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, 202–5, 210, 211, 213 French national songs, 221 Fry, William Henry, 280–81, 283 Fuller, Margaret, 111; as music journalist, 279; and New York Tribune, 273, 279; on power of music for uplift and reform, 279–80, 286; Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 273, 303 Gaelic language, 14 Gardiner, William, 17 Garfield, Pres. James A., 205, 210, 211 Garfield, Lucretia, 211 Garrett, Augusta Browne. See Browne, Augusta Garrett, John Walter Benjamin, 144; as artist (portrait painter), 146, 147– 48, 151, 155, 298; death of, 155; early years, 145–46; as journalist and Democrat, 146–47; marriage of, 144, 145, 270; and music, 156–57; “Reverie in a Forest of North Carolina,” 157; and slavery, 148, 150, 155 Garrett, Lucretia A. M. (sister), 149–50, 151 Garrett, Lucretia A. Burt (mother), 146 Garrett, Martin R. (father), 145–46 gender issues: conduct expected of Victorian-era women, 2, 3, 69–70, 108, 123–24, 273; “cult of true

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ᆥ 447

womanhood,” 70–71; education of women, 166, 272; equality of women with men, 165, 166, 273; exclusion of women, 35, 122–23, 165, 169; genres of literature acceptable for women to write, 107, 110, 263–64; genres of music acceptable for women to compose, 101, 216, 245, 260; music study for women, 20, 383n18; professionalism in music, 299; proscription against public speaking, 20, 108, 304; public image for actresses, singers, and performers, 61, 70–71; suffrage and women’s rights, 2, 111, 166, 404n19. See also women genius, 101; and popularity, 293; and poverty, 149, 274; and simplicity in art, 203; in women, 261, 273 genres: in literature, 107, 110, 263, 278; in music, 101. See also gender issues gift books, 157 Godey’s Magazine, 55, 58, 107, 142, 157 Gospel hymns and songs. See hymnody Gothic Hall (Masonic Hall), 72 Gothic Revival. See Victorianism, and Neo-Gothic style Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 2, 213, 231; L’Union, Paraphrase de Concert, 220 Grace Episcopal Church (New York City), 130 Gray, Thomas: Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, 189 Great Famine, 269; and anti-Catholic rhetoric, 277 Great Revival (Second Great Awakening), 104–5 Greeley, Horace: and New York Tribune, 273, 279 Greenwood, Grace. See Lippincott, Sara Jane

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448

ᆥ index

Green-Wood Cemetery, 115, 136, 198, 201, 296; Browne family memorials, 212, 213, 399n64 Grobe, Charles, 216, 217 group keyboard teaching. See Logierian System of Musical Education, group instruction Guérin, Eugénie de, 180 guitar: English, 20; lessons, 383n18 Hagen, Theodore, 173 Hale, Sarah J., 67, 107 Hamilton, Alexander, 39, 372n51 Hamm, Charles, 239, 304 Handel, George Frideric, 31, 47; Judas Maccabaeus, 86; The Messiah, 170, 171, 187, 279; oratorios, 288 Handel and Haydn Society (Boston), 33, 35, 287 Harbaugh, Rev. Henry, 164 Harmonicon, 7 harp: as emblem of Ireland, 44; as instrument appropriate for women to play, 20; works for harp or pianoforte, 215, 363n11 Hastings, Thomas, 36; “Rock of Ages,” 258 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 107 Haydn, Franz Josef, 47, 289; in Consuelo, 218; oratorios by, 171, 288; symphonies by, 30, 366n50 Hayes, Pres. Rutherford B., 180 heaven, 156, 157, 164, 266–67; music of, 106, 171–72, 213, 284, 285; reunion in, 73, 213 Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 132 Heinrich, Anthony Philip, 29–30, 287; and Browne (Augusta), 82, 126; as teacher, 123 Hemans, Felicia: Lays of Many Lands, 152; poems used for song texts, 49, 209, 243; popularity of, 47, 72, 248,

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266; as sister of Harriet M. Browne, 209 Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn, 101, 302 Herz, Henri, 75, 227 Hewitt, James, 5 Hewitt, John H.: “The Old Family Clock,” 173 Hewitt, Sophia. See Ostinelli, Sophia Hewitt History of American Music Education (Mark), 290 Hodge, Rev. Charles, 159, 165–66, 272 Hodges, Edward, 130, 131 Hodges, Faustina, 124, 125, 131; “The Rose Bush,” 124 Hodson, George Alexander, 102 Holden, Oliver, 258, 288 Holden’s Dollar Magazine, 268, 270 Home Journal, 109, 112, 161, 264, 266, 292, 294; and J. W. B. Garrett, 144, 148, 149, 151 Howard, John Tasker, 295 Howe, Julia Ward, 123 Howes, Freeman, 114 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 7, 47, 78 Huntington, Daniel. See Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) Hutchinson Family (singers), 246, 283, 377n40 hymnody, 34, 257–58, 288; arrangements of European melodies as hymn tunes, 33, 172; at camp meetings, 105; Gospel hymns and songs, 173–74, 175; hymn tunes, 258. See also specific hymn composers immigration: from Germany to US, 122, 234; from Ireland to Canada, 25; from Ireland to US, 25, 176–77, 269 Inman, Henry and John, 106

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index Ireland: Act of Union, 14; Catholics, 13; Church of Ireland (Anglican), 12, 364n32; emigration from, 277; Erin, 269; famine, 269; and Napoleonic Wars, 13; Protestant ascendancy in, 13, 14. See also Browne, David Samuel, military service in Irish volunteer militia; Dublin; Great Famine; Irish traditional music Iris (literary annual): for 1853, 138, 264, 270. See also gift books Irish Melodies. See Moore, Thomas Irish traditional music, 14, 220–22, 223, 224, 225, 238, 269, 286. See also Moore, Thomas; O’Carolan, Turlough Jackson, Pres. Andrew, 27, 38, 68 Jackson, George K., 32 Jackson, George Pullen, 172, 290, 304 Jesus: as friend, 105, 173, 174; as Savior, 258, 272, 284 Johnson, A. N. and James C.: as associates of L. Mason, 33, 34; as editors of Boston Musical Gazette, 289–90 Journal of the Fine Arts, 110, 137 Kalkbrenner, Friedrich, 15, 75, 365n41, 366n54, 377n48 Kelley, Mary, 265 Ken, Bishop Thomas, 202, 203 Kendall’s Brigade Band, 27 Kerner, Justinus, 245 King, William A., 122 Kirkland, Caroline, 107, 109 Knapp, Phoebe: “Blessed Assurance,” 174 Köstlin, Christian Reinhold, 125 Knickerbocker Magazine, 138, 141, 165, 264, 272, 303 Kotžwara, František, 47; The Battle of Prague, 70

Miller.indd 449

ᆥ 449

Ladies’ Magazine, 67 Ladies’ Repository, 167 Lady’s Almanac, 116, 280 Lady’s and Gentleman’s Athenaeum (periodical), 107, 381n13 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 284 Lancasterian System (Lancastrian), 367n58 Lang, Josephine, 125 Latour, Theodore, 366n48 Lawrence, Abbott, 93 Lawrence, Mrs. Abbott (née Katherine Bigelow), 93 Lawrence, Vera Brodsky, 72, 280 lawsuits. See Browne, David Samuel, lawsuit by Cowan sisters; Browne, Augusta lawsuit against First Presbyterian Church; Browne, William Henry, as lawyer Lee, George Alexander, 47, 60; “By the Margins of Fair Zurich’s Waters,” 52, 54; “The Gipsey’s Wild Chaunt,” 215; Lo Zingaro, 215, 373n4 Leitrim (County in Ireland), 11 Leitrim, 2nd Earl of. See Clements, Nathaniel Leslie, Mrs. Frank (née Miriam Follin), 107 Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, 1, 3 Libbey, Walter, 3, 133, 144, 145, 177, 267; portraits, 132, 134, 135, 136 Lieder, 245 Library of Congress, 1, 216 Lincoln, Pres. Abraham: assassination of, 167, 179 Lind, Jenny, 70 Lippincott, Sara Jane (pseud. Grace Greenwood), 107, 112 Liszt, Franz, 188, 189, 227, 237, 303; improvisation, 78, 218; operatic fantasies, 62, 228; Les préludes, 284

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450

ᆥ index

liturgical music. See worship music Löbe, Carl: Jenny Lind’s Dream, 228 Locke, Ralph P., 231 Loder, Kate Fanny (Lady Thompson), 261 Lodge, Mrs. John Ellerton (née Anna Sophia Cabot): and Augusta Browne, 93; and David Browne, 43 Logier, Adolphe R., 234 Logier, Ellen. See Allen, Mrs. E[dmund] C[hristopher] Logier, Johann Bernhard, 14–15, 38, 44, 67, 106; attacks in press on, 15, 367n57, 362n7, 404n14; pedagogical publications of, 16, 29, 30, 49, 365n45; Strains of Other Days, 152. See also chiroplast; Logierian System of Musical Education Logier, Henry (William Henry Logier), 21, 367n64 Logierian System of Musical Education, 10, 14–16, 20, 23, 67, 214, 366n54; certification for professors of, 13, 20–21, 32, 370n17; chiroplast, use of, 16, 29, 245; in Germany, 32, 40, 365n38; group instruction, 16, 45, 71; harmony and theory instruction, 15, 21, 153; piano ensembles in concerts and public exhibitions of, 6, 15, 17, 19, 37, 366n50; as trademark, 38, 194. See also chiroplast London: Crystal Palace, 137; music business in, 21 London Pianoforte School, 23 Long Island Sanitary Fair, 162–63 Louisville Journal, 147–48 Lover, Samuel, 269; “Angel’s Whisper,” 216; “The Haunted Spring,” 55, 56 Lowe, Edwina Dean, 143, 387n99 Luther, Martin, 285 Lyre (periodical), 26

Miller.indd 450

MacDowell, Edward, 301; Sea Pieces, 182, 395n82 Macready, William, 114 Maeder, James G., 295 magazines and periodicals. See magazine music; reprinting between newspapers and periodicals; women, magazines for magazine music, xi–xii, 55, 58, 83, 125, 173, 202–3, 240, 246 maids, 71, 122. See also Morrow, Sarah Männerchor, 201 Mason, Lowell, 33–35; attacks on, 289– 90; and Boston Academy of Music, 42; and Boston school curriculum, 33, 245; as hymn composer, 172, 173; normal musical institutes, 34, 282, 288 Masonic Mirror, 29, 38 Mathews, Bessie C., 136 Mathews, Rev. James M., 85, 98, 378n70 McClellan, Frederica and George B., 52 McClellan, Mrs. Samuel, 52 McCloskey, Cardinal John, 277 McIlwraith, Andrew, 86 Meignen, Leopold, 217, 280 M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory, 58, 59 Melville, Herman: Moby Dick, 263–64 Memphis Daily Eagle and Enquirer, 148 Mendelssohn, Fanny. See Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn Mendelssohn, Felix: “Lift thine eyes, O lift thine eyes” (Elijah), 189, 192, 396n11 Message Bird (periodical), 110, 131, 179, 228, 258 Mexican-American War, 281; music of, 116–22, 126 Meyer, Leopold de, 102–3; Marche marocaine, 229; operatic fantasies, 228

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index Meyer-Frazier, Petra, 62 middle class. See class, social military music, 175, 221, 275, 286 Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS), 202 minstrelsy: opposition to, 106, 138, 150, 282, 291–96 Mitchell, Maria, 123 Moore, John W., Appendix to Complete Encyclopaedia of Music, 205, 398n47; on Browne (Augusta), 209; on power of music for moral uplift, 245–46 Moore, Thomas, 269; Irish Melodies, 221; A Selection of Popular National Airs, 78 moral uplift of music, 35, 106, 245–46, 279–80, 283, 288, 405n3 morality, 2, 70, 166, 167–68, 169, 246, 275–76 Moran, Peter K., 32, 33, 362n9, 367n67, 370n21, 371n27 Morning Courier (New York), 36–37 Morris, George Pope: as editor, 109, 112, 179; as poet and lyricist, 102, 125, 249, 264, 295 Morrow, Sarah, 122, 211, 399n59; and service in Browne household, 201–2; as witness to legal documents, 150, 151 Morse, Richard and Sydney E.: Catholicism, opposition to, 106; and New York Observer, 164, 182–83, 277 Morse, Samuel Finley Breese: as artist and founding member of National Academy of Design, 105–6, 277; Catholicism, opposition to, 105–6, 276; death and memorial service of, 198, 200, 201, 398n32; and telegraph, 198, 201, 237 Mortellari, Michele: La fille sauvage, ou Le pouvoir de musique, 243 Moscheles, Ignaz, 47, 75, 78

Miller.indd 451

ᆥ 451

Mounsey, Ann. See Bartholomew, Ann Mounsey Mount Auburn Cemetery, 115 mourning. See Victorianism, mourning rituals of Moving Day, 66 Mozart, Leopold, 5 Mozart, Maria Anna (“Nannerl”), 5 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 5, 30, 47, 78; Don Giovanni, 62, 78, 378n50; Rondo alla turca, 231, 401n32 music criticism. See music journalism music education: in US, 33, 34–35, 245–46, 287, 288. See also music pedagogy Music Education: Source Readings from Ancient Greece to Today (Mark), 290 music journalism, 279, 280. See also individual journalists and critics music pedagogy: advanced music study in Europe, 122, 237; repertoire for use in piano study, 142–43, 217; Suzuki instruction, 194. See also Logierian System of Musical Education music publishers: in Boston, 93; in Dublin, 13–14; in New York City, 93, 99; in Philadelphia, 99. See also individual publishers music publishing in the US, 217–18, 238; during Civil War, 172; royalties paid to composers, 100; simultaneous publication in different cities, 126. See also sheet music Music Teachers National Association, 237 Musical Review and Musical World (Musical Review and World), 173, 179 Musical World (Musical World and Times), 110, 295 Musician and General Intelligencer, 289

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452

ᆥ index

Napoleonic Wars, 11, 13 National Academy of Design, 84, 113, 133, 144, 151, 277 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 108 National Quarterly Review, 165 national music, 31, 285–86. See also American music; Irish traditional music; Scottish traditional music nature: depiction in music, 189, 192, 234; sounds of New York City, 237–38, 296–97 Negro songs. See minstrelsy Neukomm, Sigismund, 130, 170 New Brunswick, Canada, 22, 25, 26, 58, 196, 368n76, 368n80 New England Asylum for the Blind, 34, 371n31 New England Galaxy (Boston), 29, 32, 33 New World, 71, 78 New York City: as art capital, 144; Broadway, 37, 66, 67, 110–11, 148, 149; Crystal Palace, 137, 281, 385n80; Home for the Friendless, 122; University of the City of New York, 116, 202 New York City draft riots, 176–77 New York Evangelist, 246 New York Female Reform Society, 122 New York Herald, 68, 73, 82, 93, 97 New York Ledger, 112 New York Mirror, 69 New York Musical Times, 126 New York Musical World, 110, 143, 282 New York Observer, 106, 170, 182–83, 268, 276, 277, 294 New York Philharmonic, 123 New York Public Library, 264 New York Sacred Music Society, 123, 287 New York Society Library, 72, 264

Miller.indd 452

New York State: Erie Canal, 36; Finger Lakes, 296; state motto “Excelsior,” 254, 257 New York Tribune (New York Daily Tribune), 66, 67, 83, 102, 119, 279 New York Weekly Review, 110 New-York Daily Times, 144 Niblo’s Gardens, 72, 83 Nixon, Isabella, 20 Nixon, William, 20 Nixon, Mrs. William (née Charity Kirchhhofer), 20, 53, 374n14, 100 Normal Musical Institute. See Mason, Lowell, normal musical institutes North Carolina. See Garrett, John Walter Benjamin, in North Carolina O’Carolan, Turlough: “Carolan’s Concerto,” 221, 222; as character in fiction, 268; as harpist, 221 Ogasapian, John, 130 operas, 58, 59–60, 243; aria substitutions (“trunk” arias), 62; bel canto, 60; immorality in plots of, 70, 167 oratorios, 171, 189, 282, 288, 301, 406n13 organists: in churches, 128, 131, 187, 285, 302–3; unpublished organ music by, 129. See also Browne, Augusta, as organist; Hodges, Edward; women, as organists; worship music organs, 128; at Centennial Exposition, 196–97; at First Presbyterian Church, 84; pedaling, 129–30. See also worship music Orientalism. See exoticism Osbourn, James G., 53, 55 Ostinelli, Sophia Hewitt, 5, 30, 35, 70 Oxford (Tractarian) Movement, 105, 130

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index Paganini, Niccolò, 269 Panic of 1837, 58 Panic of 1857, 274 Parepa-Rosa, Euphrosyne, and ParepaRosa English Opera Company, 187–88 Park, Roswell, 248 Parker, John Rowe: and Euterpeiad, 25, 37, 78; A Musical Biography, 25, 30, 369n90 Parkhurst, Mrs. E. A. (née Susan McFarland), 246 parlor music: family participation in, 70, 250; hymns and religious songs, 246, 260; pianos in, 261, 262; song style, 240–41. See also amateur music-making; songs Parton, Sarah Willis (pseud. Fanny Fern), 112, 272 Patent Office, 185, 194 patents: for piano manufacture, 391n2. See also trademarks patronage, 5, 21, 26, 41, 46 Pearson, Katherine Quail, 167, 397n30 Pearson, Quincy Adams, 397n30 pensions: applications for Civil War soldiers, 183; applications for widows of soldiers, 141 Perkins Institute for the Blind. See New England Asylum for the Blind Peruzzi, Eliza Eustaphiève, 370n11; as pianist, 78; as role model for Augusta Browne, 30, 75 Peruzzi, Simone Luigi, 78 Philadelphia, 49, 52; city directory, listing in, 58, 59. See also Centennial Exposition Philadelphia Inquirer, 46 Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn, 123, 162 Philharmonic Society (Washington, DC), 187–88

Miller.indd 453

ᆥ 453

Phinney, Marion Browne (grand-niece), 386n94 piano technique: bravura style, 189; brillante style, 67, 75; pedaling, 218; virtuosity, 70, 218 pianos, 20, 163, 214; construction of, 160, 391n2 Pierrepont, Henry E., 392n33 Pilgrim Fathers (H. M. Browne): 209. See also Browne, Harriet Mary Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 136–37, 203 Pleyel, Ignaz, 31, 47; Pleyel’s Concertante, 43 Poe, Edgar Allan, 113, 382n29 politics: abolition, 150, 162; Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Act, 111; Democrats, 146, 147; Republicans, 150; secession, 275; Whigs, 121, 140 polkas, 225, 292, 294. See also dances, dancing Potter, Cipriani, 73; on piano repertoire used at Royal Academy of Music, 142–43 Prentice, George D., 147, 148, 155 Princeton Review, 159, 165, 166, 303 printer’s exchanges. See reprinting between newspapers and periodicals prodigies, musical. See child performers program (programmatic) music, 38, 281, 283 Protestant Episcopal Church, 52 Protestant Reformation Society, 83–84 Protestant Vindicator, 66, 75, 78 Protestantism, 278; activism, 166, 169, 278; “feminization” of, 105, 173; need for revival, 285 Purcell, Henry, 47, 50, 171; Purcell’s Ground, 23 Quail, Katie. See Pearson, Katherine Quail

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454

ᆥ index

Rainer family (singers), 53 Renwick, James, 185–86 reprinting between newspapers and periodicals, 2, 106, 109, 110, 268– 69, 289–90, 381n23 Republicans. See politics revival meetings: camp meetings, 105; and Gospel music, 173; urban revival meetings, 105 Reynolds, David S., 105 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholicism Romance (periodical), 268 Rome (Italy), 188 Root, George F., 33, 34, 42, 242 Rosa, Salvator, 180 Rossini, Gioachino: La Cenerentola, 60 Royal Academy of Music, 15 Royal Society of Female Musicians, and Royal Society of Musicians, 125 Rubinstein, Anton, 272 Russell, Henry, 380n101; “The Fisher Boy Merrily Lives,” 377n40; “The Old Armchair,” 173 Rutgers Female Institute, 72 sacred music. See worship music Sand, George: Consuelo, 218 Saroni, Hermann: Saroni’s Musical Times, 127 Sartain, John: fees paid to writers, 109 Saunders, Stephen, 254 Scarlatti, Alessandro and Domenico, 297–98, 408n80 Schubert, Franz, 243, 245 Schumann, Clara Wieck, 40–41, 63–64, 100–101, 125, 261, 302; pedaling, 220 Schumann, Robert, 41, 288; pedaling, 220 science of music (scientific music), 34, 214, 283, 288

Miller.indd 454

Scotch snap, 80, 126 Scott, Derek B., 246 Scottish traditional music, 14, 31, 80, 152–53, 154, 155, 283, 286 Scripture. See Bible and Scripture sentiment, sentimentality. See Victorianism, sentimental language and sentimentality in Sgambati, Giovanni, 188, 396n10 Sgambati, Giuseppina, 396n10 Shakespeare, William, 115; Measure for Measure, 297; Macbeth, 114 Shakespeare Riots. See Astor Place Riot sheet music: autograph signatures duplicated on sheet music covers, 380n101; Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music, 217–18, 238; gifts of, 43; illustrations on covers of, 44, 73, 93, 102, 121, 228–29, 251–52; as products in commercial marketplace, 101–3, 238, 260, 298, 299; with title pages in French, 229, 234 Shield, William, 60, 366n48; “The Ploughboy” (The Farmer), 7, 363n12 Shirreff, Jane, 70 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 136, 266 singing schools, 34, 287–88, 289, 290 slavery, 111; and Browne family, 150– 51; and Garrett family, 145, 146, 148, 150, 387n11 Sloman, Elizabeth and Anne, 83, 125, 162 Sloman, Jane, 124–25, 162; as pianist, 83 Sloman, John, 83 Smith, Cyrus P., and First Presbyterian Church contract, 97 Smyth, George Stracey: and David Browne, 22; death of, 26 sonatas, 217–18 songs, 238, 240, 242; accompaniments, 243; ballads, 401n41; duets, 238, 245; interludes (“symphonies”), 49,

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index 258; melodic forms of, 239; minstrel songs, 291–92; in pseudo-Scottish style, 80, 83, 126; religious songs, 246; topics of, 238, 245, 254; yodeling and echo songs, 52–53, 55, 245. See also magazine music; minstrelsy; parlor music South Reformed Dutch Church (New York City), 98 Southern Literary Messenger, 147 Southerner (Tarboro, NC), 155 Spear, Thomas Truman, 32, 33 Spencer, Lilly Martin, 113 Spohr, Louis, 15 Spurgeon, Rev. Charles H., 168 St. Ann’s Episcopal Church (Brooklyn), 166–67 St. George’s Church (New York City), 184 St. John Evangelist Lutheran Church (Philadelphia), 58, 64, 66, 374n20 St. John (New Brunswick): commerce, 25, 26; navigation, 23 St. John’s Episcopal Church (Washington, DC), 397n28 St. Paul’s Church (Baltimore), 44 St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church (Philadelphia), 49, 51 Stanhope, Philip Dormer (Chesterfield, 4th Earl of ), 169–70, 275 Statesman (Boston), 29 Steibelt, Daniel, 31; Storm Concerto, 44, 47 Stevenson, John, 78, 221, 366n48 Stirling, Elizabeth, 98 Stone, Lucy, 123 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 131, 264, 384n55 Strong, George Templeton, 72, 130 suffrage. See gender issues, suffrage and women’s rights

Miller.indd 455

ᆥ 455

Sunday Magazine. See Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine Sunday school: music for, 203 Suzuki, Shin’ichi, and Suzuki method, 194 Swaim, Elise (Eliza), 53 Swaim, Mrs. William, 52–53, 374n13 Swaim, William, 52 symphonies: as genre discouraged for women composers, 260; keyboard transcriptions of, 30; as metaphor for society, 279–80 Tabernacle, 72 Talmage, Rev. Thomas DeWitt, 202–3, 205 Tawa, Nicholas E., 238, 295 telegraph, 109, 198, 201, 237 Thalberg, Sigismond, 227, 228 theater: Astor Place Riot (Shakespeare Riot), 114–15; religious antipathy toward, 60, 115, 167–68; women on the stage, 70 Tick, Judith, 1, 117, 121, 166, 214, 291, 304, 399n3; on confusion of Augusta Browne with Harriet Mary Browne, 208, 209 Times (London), 15, 20 Timm, Henry C., 122 Toronto (York), Canada, 39–40 Torry, Jane Sloman. See Sloman, Jane Torry, Jennie, 162 Torry, William B., 124–25 Townsend, Miss F. L., 270 Tractarian Movement. See Oxford (Tractarian) Movement trademarks, 32, 38, 194–95 Traveller (Boston), 37 Trinity Episcopal Church (New York City), 105, 130

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456

ᆥ index

Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church (Trinity Episcopal Church, Washington, DC), 185–87 Trollope, Frances, 167 Troy Female Seminary, 124 Tyng, Rev. Stephen H., 125, 183–84 United States, 109, 265. See also American music Union Magazine, 99, 109, 240 United States Gazette, 62 variation: as compositional technique, 16, 214; and improvisation, 218; and keyboard technique, 16; themes and variations, 216. See also Logierian System of Musical Education vernacular music, 253, 261, 301, 304 Victorianism: exalted language, use of, 108, 254, 265, 284; mourning rituals of, 156, 160; and neo-Gothic style, 108, 248, 270; sentimental language and sentimentality in, 108, 141–42, 245, 264, 266, 285 Vindicator. See Protestant Vindicator virtuosos, 75, 78, 227; improvisations of, 41, 218; operatic fantasies of, 228 vocal music. See operas; songs Wagner, Richard: “Pilgrims’ Chorus” (Tannhaüser), 198, 200, 201 waltzes, 400n24. See also dances, dancing Warner, Anna and Susan: “Jesus Loves Me,” 173 Warren, Emily. See Appleton, Mrs. William Warren, Joyce, 263–64 Washington, DC, 185, 186, 196 Watson, Henry C., 122, 406n6; on Augusta Browne’s music, 80,

Miller.indd 456

246–48; as composer, 82; as critic, 80, 82, 280; on minstrel songs, 294; as publisher of Watson’s Art Journal (American Art Journal), 127 Watts, Alaric Alexander, 197–98 Webb, George, 33, 35 Webbe, Samuel, the younger, 15 Weber, Carl Maria von, 47, 52 Wesleyan Female Seminary, 217 Western Musical World, 180. See also Brainard, Silas Western Recorder, 36 Whigs. See politics White, Richard Grant, 280, 406n6 Whitman, Walt, 66, 133, 144; at Brooklyn Eagle, 112–13, 385n63; Leaves of Grass, 157, 159; on power of music for uplift and refinement, 283 widows. See Victorianism, mourning rituals of; women, as widows Wieck, Clara. See Schumann, Clara Wieck Wieck, Friedrich, 40, 41, 65 Willard, Emma, 125 Williams, Mrs. J[ohn] D. W. Williams (née Ellen Bigelow), 43–44, 93, 243, 373n63 Willis, Nathaniel P., 109, 112 Willis, Richard Storrs, 112, 282–83; and New York Musical World, 282 Willis, Sarah. See Parton, Sarah Willis Winner, Septimus (pseud. Alice Hawthorne), 242 women: as authors, 106–7, 263–64, 269–70; and careers vs. marriage, 113, 123; as composers, 216; as concert performers, 70, 369n90; as daughters, 122; as domestic musicmakers, 70; as editors, 107; as hymnists, 173, 174; as journalists, 107; magazines for, 113; as memoirists, 132; music societies for, 125; music

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index study for, 20, 67; as organists, 98, 130; as publishers, 107; as readers, 114, 263; and social causes, 123; and songs, 245; stereotypes of, 116, 263; as subjects of Augusta Browne’s short stories, 270–71; as teachers in seminaries, 124, 217; as widows, 141, 156, 160. See also gender issues women’s rights. See gender issues, suffrage and women’s rights Wood, Joseph, 62, 375n25 Wood, Mary Ann Paton, 62, 70, 375n25 Woodbridge, William Channing, 42 Woolf, Virginia, 116, 299

Miller.indd 457

ᆥ 457

worship music, 34–35, 170–72, 260, 289; anthems, 85, 257; congregational singing, 105, 257, 284, 285; hymns, 257–58; organ music during worship, 129; secular music, use of, 129, 130–31, 171, 295–96. See also Browne, Augusta, and worship music; choirs; hymnody; organists; organs Wylie, Rev. Samuel, 52, 83 Wylie, Susan J. M., 52 Wyman, Luther, 250, 402n61 Wyman, Mrs. Luther (née Cecilia Warren), 101, 250, 252 Young Lady’s Friend, The (Farrar), 69, 70

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