How Santa Claus Became a Slave Driver: The Work of Print Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Musical Controversy

DOUGLAS W. SHADLE

doi:10.1017/S1752196314000388

How Santa Claus Became a Slave Driver: The Work of Print Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Musical Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014

DOUGLAS W. SHADLE

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Abstract

The transnational character of the literate musical community in the United States created an environment in which language barriers, ideological biases, and other potential sources of misunderstanding caused print items to change shape quickly as they were transferred from one reader to the next. The aesthetic controversy between William Henry Fry and Richard Storrs Willis surrounding the 1853 premiere of Fry's Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony provides a rich case in point. The controversy at times seemed to draw from a parallel debate in Europe, often called “The War of the Romantics,” which concerned the future of symphonic composition and music's capacity for representation. At others, the controversy seemed to diverge from its European counterpart as central concepts were articulated in new intellectual contexts. The vagaries of print culture help explain these discrepancies. This article outlines the central arguments of the debate, situates them within their transatlantic contexts, and examines how print culture played a significant role in the controversy's unfolding as early as 1839, fifteen years before it took place. More broadly, it constructs a new framework for examining the function and meaning of nineteenth-century music periodicals by illustrating how an antislavery newspaper became an unlikely voice in a debate over program music.

Type: Research Article
Information: Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , November 2014 , pp. 501 - 537

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196314000388 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Society for American Music 2014

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