As cities grew, first on the East Coast and then farther west, more and more concerts appeared, and with them faithful concertgoers. One such was a New York lawyer and civic leader named George Templeton Strong, who left a four-and-a-half-million-word diary discussing (among other things) all the symphonies, oratorios, and organ music he heard, in unending enthusiastic detail.* By the mid-1800s, all our major cities had their concert halls and opera organizations and amateur choral societies. The 1860s saw the foundation of our first conservatories of music, in Boston, Cincinnati, and elsewhere.

Americans eagerly bought tickets to hear traveling celebrities from Europe, and skilled native composers and performers began to appear. The first American musicians to gain worldwide reputations were the immigrant German composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861), a quirky early Romantic, and the Louisiana piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869).

On the whole, however, Americans were content to look to Italy for opera and to Germany for instrumental music. It is not surprising that the cultivated tradition in American music was essentially German in orientation. Ever since the time of Mozart and Beethoven, German music had earned enormous prestige all over Europe. The mid-nineteenth-century immigration from Germany brought us many musicians who labored for the cause of music in this country.

There were significant native composers at the end of the nineteenth century: John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, and Henry Chadwick of the so-called Boston School, and Edward MacDowell of New York. They wrote symphonies, piano miniatures, and so on, in a competent but conservative German Romantic style. Time has not been kind to their work, despite recent efforts to revive it.

The music of Amy Beach (1867–1944), in particular, has stirred interest in recent years. Active as both a composer and a pianist, she made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of seventeen. “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” (as she always signed her works) contributed to many established genres, such as the piano concerto, the piano quintet, and the symphony. Her Gaelic Symphony of 1896 was the first symphonic work ever composed by an American woman.

The emergence of Charles Ives in the midst of this conservative tradition seems like a miracle of music history (see page 331). Yet Ives profited more than he sometimes cared to admit from the grounding in European concert music he received from his German-trained professor at Yale, Horatio Parker.