uky.eduDISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Nikos Pappas
Patterns in the Sacred Musical Culture of the American South and West (1760-1860)
Thesis Statement
This dissertation presents the development of sacred music in the South and West (1760-1870) according to antebellum conceptualizations of: 1) geographical boundaries, 2) denominational identity in its application to sacred music, 3) understandings of music theory in its application to style, intent, and expression, and 4) cultural delineations. Further, a comprehensive index documents every known Southern and trans-Appalachian Western sacred music composition appearing in manuscript and printed sources, and also significant material that directly influenced the compilers of these later sources. Not confined to English-language Protestant tunebooks, this index also includes German-language source material, as well as sacred music appearing in collections for or by African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and Native Americans. Together, the combination of cultural and denominational source material with an index of tune repertories provides corroborative cultural and denominational history, offering an alternative interpretation of the development of sacred music in the American South and West.
Abstract
In one layer of understanding, this narrative chronicles the dissemination of sacred music from the eastern seaboard to the West and South spanning a time frame from the late Colonial period to the Civil War (ca. 1760-1860). However, documentation of musical culture in its migration away from the eastern seaboard also parallels the greater Western and Southern expansion of the United States from its initial configuration of localized regional subgroups to a larger national identity shaped by Reconstruction-era politics. From this broader conceptual base, sacred music performance practice and composition becomes a vehicle for understanding not only religious and musical changes over time, but also the broader maturity of a nation. Focusing on this hundred-year period allows for detailed inquiries both into the development of Middle Atlantic hymnody in the East during the eighteenth century, and the subsequent separate sacred musical developments of the West and South during the antebellum period. Establishing chronological delimitations allows for a discussion of musical practice beginning with formative sacred music developments and continuing to the incorporation of techniques shaped by reform-minded musicians from the eastern seaboard.
Within this area of study, the following topics serve as structural parameters for the construction of this dissertation: 1) explicating how the Middle Atlantic region shaped compositional trends, aesthetic, and performance practice of the music of the American West and South,1 2) identifying the two Southern cultures as understood by eighteenth-century Southerners and its application to sacred music practice,2 3) identifying the musical and cultural borders of the West in contrast to the South as understood by nineteenth-century Americans, 4) understanding Southern and Western music relating to its performance practice unique to individual denominations within these areas, 5) understanding performance practice common to the evangelical and non-evangelical branches of individual sects, and 6) the nature of musical reform in the West and the South and its reflection of those cultural groups settling and emigrating to the West and South.
Identifying patterns of development in American sacred music of the South and West involves documentation of performance practice, denominational aesthetics, and tunebook bibliography, besides the identification of the composers, compilers, and authors of sacred works. While extensive research has been devoted to the musical corpus of New England and to “Southern” books emanating primarily from South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, parallel studies of Midwestern source material remain almost non-existent. This dissertation will demonstrate the relationship between Midwestern practice and that of the original West, as exemplified by Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee.
The study of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century material by twentieth- and- twenty-first-century writers has falsely defined cultural borders of this region according to a post-bellum conceptualization of the boundaries of the “North” and “South.” Eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century antebellum writers defined their borders according to a vastly different set of geographic boundaries than those understood today. Consequently, this thesis differs considerably in terms of geographic and cultural definitions of the “North” and “South” from current scholarship because of this writer’s application of antebellum understandings of American culture to antebellum culture, instead of the current framework that imposes post-bellum definitions on an antebellum United States.
1.The Middle Atlantic region of the Eastern United States encompasses the present states of southeastern New York (south of Albany), New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania east of the Alleghenies (during the Colonial and Federalist periods). The urban centers of this large region include Philadelphia and New York City. See, Patricia U. Bonomi, "The Middle Colonies: Embryo of the New Political Order," in Alden T. Vaughan and George A. Billias, eds., Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honor of Richard B. Morris (1973), 63-92; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); and Douglas Greenberg, "The Middle Colonies in Recent American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 36 (1979), 396-427.
2. Traditionally, many scholars including George Pullen Jackson, in his White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, 1933), characterized these Souths as the Upland and Lowland South. However, some eighteenth and nineteenth-century Americans used the terms cohee and tuckahoe to distinguish between the tidewater and backcountry areas of Virginia. Rhys Isaac, in The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982) characterized these two cultures as split between a non-evangelical and evangelical practice of Christianity. Regardless of the terminology used to distinguish between these groups, all recognize the existence of two main subcultures within white society in the 18th-century area now known as the American South.