Stephen Foster's High Art

"Sound and Sentimentality: Nostalgia in the Songs of Stephen Foster" by Susan Key, in American Music (Summer 1995),Sonneck Society for American Music, P.O. Box 476, Canton, Mass. 02021.

Stephen Foster's many immensely popular songs, from "Beautiful Dreamer" to "My Old Kentucky Home," are rarely considered much more than sentimental, albeit artfully constructed, crowd-pleasers. In Foster's day, however, argues Key, a graduate student in musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park, no rigid barriers separated high and low culture, and Foster's ballads were much esteemed in refined circles.

In the first half of the 19th century, improvements in transportation and manufacturing stimulated the growth of a sheet' music industry. By the Civil War, publisher Oliver Ditson boasted thousands of popular ballads, instrumentalized for voice and piano.

Inspired by the strongly egalitarian sentiments of the day, many American parlor music composers "sought to provide music for everyone," Key says. Their favorite device was "the portrayal of bittersweet emotions stimulated by the contemplation of something lost." Most often, as in Foster's "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair," an idealized past was juxtaposed with an alien pre- sent; but sometimes, as in "Old Folks at Home," an idealized "far" and an alien "near," or, as in "Beautiful Dreamer," an idealized night and the "rude world of the day, were used.

For Americans in the throes of change-first with the advent of Jacksonian democra- cy then with the westward expansion and sectional con-flict that led to war--the nostalgic songs of Foster (1826-64) and others were a tonic. But they were "cultivated as well as popular, Key points out.

"The romantic notion that music could transcend earthly limitations and lead to a better world," she writes, "was conflated with the sentimental notion that people who bought and sang this 'better' class of music could somehow acquire more refinement, taste, and gentility. For one short historical moment, mass appeal was seen as complementary to moral elevation." Reformers used the sentimental ballad to advance such causes as abolition and temperance.

Gradually, however, "absolute instrumental music from the European sym-phonic repertory" came to be most highly valued, Key says. By the end of the century, "music's aura of idealism and moral improvement was dispensed from above--in the highest achievements of fine-art music--and from abroad, principally Germany." As an 1891 contributor to the Atlantic Monthly lamented, "Song-singing finds it hard to stand its ground against the musical culture which insists upon the highest artistic excellence or nothing at all."