The life and career of Augusta Browne Garrett, one of the earliest professional women composers and pianists in America, was interwoven with struggle and success. Browne composed at least two hundred solo piano pieces, songs, duets, hymns, and sacred settings between her birth in Dublin, Ireland, around 1820, and her death in Washington, D.C., in 1882, but she also published two books, a dozen poems, several Protestant morality tracts, and more than sixty music essays, nonfiction pieces, and short stories. With such a rich creative legacy, Judith Tick celebrated Browne as the “most prolific woman composer in America before 1870,” in her landmark study American Women Composers before 1870.Footnote 1 Browne, however, cast an even more enduring shadow as an author. Women have often been written out of history, but Browne doggedly wrote herself into history, largely through the medium of magazines. By means of her literary publications, especially her music essays, Browne fulfilled contemporary feminist author Hélène Cixous's exhortation that “Woman must put herself . . . into history—by her own movement.”Footnote 2 One particular essay, “The Music of America” (1845), garnered attention through the twentieth century. With enhanced knowledge of her life, music, and prose, “The Music of America” can be better understood to coincide with some opinions of New England musicians and hymnists of the antebellum era—notably the leading advocate of music education of the era, Lowell Mason—while simultaneously reflecting Browne's musical worldview and unique authorial voice.
When Tick published American Women Composers before 1870, she had meticulously uncovered much about Browne's most active decades in New York and Brooklyn during the 1840s and 50s. Despite scouring the best sources available in East Coast special collections and libraries during the 1970s, Tick could learn nothing of the composer's youth or education, and little about her later decades.Footnote 3 The information Browne related in her prose is minimal and selective, following social mores of the era that dictated female modesty. No personal papers or diaries exist to convey Browne's life story, with the exception of a few professional letters.Footnote 4 Sadly, no image of Browne has yet been recovered. This dearth of information forces us to measure her by her works in music, and her words in prose. Through recent digitization and preservation efforts of nineteenth-century materials, enough evidence has emerged from newspapers, magazines, city directories, and advertisements to reveal the full course of Browne's life. Browne's unwavering path as a dedicated musician dating back to her early childhood offers an unfamiliar narrative for a young woman in the antebellum United States. Her substantial legacy of prose and music demonstrates that Browne was a hard-working, disciplined, devout, entrepreneurial music professional whose life was consumed by “Music—the language of Heaven,” and dedicated to “the furtherance of the beloved science which since my earliest infancy has absorbed almost my whole soul.”Footnote 5
A Musical Apprenticeship
Browne was born into a family music business in which she received instruction in piano, voice, composition, pedagogy, and commerce. Augusta's father, David, was an Irishman who joined the Irish volunteer militia as a drum or fife boy during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 6 Although David Browne had little advanced education, he learned to play various instruments in the militia—as many as twenty, he alleged—including French horn, violin, cello, organ, and flute.Footnote 7 After he left military service, he settled in Dublin, and in 1816 he studied the innovative Logierian system of group music instruction in keyboard and theory from John Bernard Logier.Footnote 8 Logier's system, published in a series of method and companion books between 1814 and 1818 in Dublin, blended the beneficial dynamics of group pedagogy with traditional harmony.Footnote 9 Even the youngest students learned chords and voice leading from their first lessons. The method made pioneering use of group teaching and performance on several pianos at once. Beginning students practiced a simple theme, whereas advanced students played more elaborate variations concurrently at other keyboards. Students were immersed in variation as a compositional method from earliest study, while simultaneously building piano technique through keyboard figurations applied in sets of variations. The Logierian method allowed girls to develop the rudiments of figured bass, harmony, and organ playing that many boy choristers learned in British and European cathedrals, opening up careers in music for some young women. The music theory and performance skills embedded through Logierian training helped foster Augusta Browne's success as a child performer, a teenage composer, and an adult concert artist and pedagogue.Footnote 10
David Browne emigrated to North America in 1820 to open a music shop and academy, settling initially in St. John, New Brunswick, but, like many other immigrant musicians, he moved from one city to another over the next twenty years in search of better business opportunities, as evidenced by city directories and newspaper advertisements.Footnote 11 Browne, who called himself the “seventh accredited professor” of the Logierian system, had an unfortunate knack for angering the very clientele he wanted to serve. Americans were not impressed by his assertions of personal study of the method with Logier. Browne's claims infuriated teachers already using Logier's method books in Boston and New York, and irritated customers who thought well of their instructors. Browne would never back down from a war of words in print, with potentially fatal consequences for his business. In 1827 he engaged in a battle of dueling advertisements with Thomas Spear, who had learned the Logierian method second hand, but was a successful and well-liked Boston teacher.Footnote 12 Browne resorted to self-publishing a detailed pamphlet in his own defense that he distributed to leading Boston families, but without success.Footnote 13 Popular opinion favored Spear. Browne announced in fall 1828 that his academy would be closing in May of the following year, “as indispensable business will require his attendance elsewhere at that time.”Footnote 14
Browne settled briefly in Utica in 1829, but by spring 1830 he had established his academy in New York City. Within weeks, he was embroiled in a battle with the Cowan sisters, who advertised that they taught piano and harp according to the Logierian system, “having studied under the celebrated Mr. Logier.”Footnote 15 Miss Anna Cowan sued Browne, for asserting that she had never taken the course of study, and he was arrested and jailed during the case.Footnote 16 The slander suit was dismissed following a deposition by Logier, but the New York public had already decided against Browne, who ceased teaching music in New York by the end of 1830. In 1832, the family moved to Toronto for a season or two, before returning to Boston, then on to Baltimore, where Browne reiterated his version of the New York lawsuit in the press.Footnote 17 Still dissatisfied, Browne pushed on to Philadelphia in 1836, and finally to New York City, the hub of American business and performing arts, in 1841, where the family stayed until events of the Civil War required subsequent moves to Baltimore and to Washington, D.C.Footnote 18
Augusta Browne was in her formative childhood years during the distressing odyssey in Boston, Utica, and New York City, when the family music academy must have been an anxious place. The entire Browne family participated in the music academy as teachers, assistants, piano tuners, or technicians, but Augusta was the star performer. In 1826, the Boston Masonic Mirror noted “a daughter of Mr. Browne's, a child of little more than seven years of age. . . . She is a little prodigy, and bears ample testimony to the Logierian system of instruction.”Footnote 19 She may have been just a child, but Augusta soon acted as an apprentice and miniature adult in the day-to-day proceedings of the academy. At the age when other teenage girls might have attended a female seminary, she was already working in the family business. By fourteen or fifteen, she was assisting in teaching, according to Baltimore newspapers ads, and she was described as a professor of music by 1840.Footnote 20
Augusta Browne often referred to the “scientific” bases of music that were the foundation of the Logierian method; that is, traditional harmony, voice leading, and figured‑bass, introduced to all students from their first lessons. She praised Logier as a pioneer in the science of music, who “has been to music, what Sir Isaac Newton was to astronomy, a disseminator of light on subjects which before were shrouded in mystery.”Footnote 21 The elements of Logier's system were laid out consistently in his many publications, but never more clearly than in the table of contents of his System of the Science of Music.Footnote 22 The contents began with scales and keys, followed by chords, harmonization, chordal inversions, modulation, and on into extended harmony, variation techniques, form, composition, and analysis. By “science” and “scientific,” Augusta Browne, like Logier, referred to knowledge of triads and their inversions, common-practice harmonization with suitable voice leading between chords, and modulation from one key to another through common chords.
The “scientific” skills that she learned from the Logierian System, coupled with the music that Browne experienced from childhood—for study, performance, teaching, worship, and pleasure—informed her lifetime of music composition. In her various city environs along the Eastern seaboard, Browne heard military band music; patriotic songs and marches; popular hits of the day played by organ grinders and street musicians, time-honored songs from the British isles; opera airs, often with English words; newly composed and popularized songs and ballads by composers from Great Britain and America; and hymns the family sang in the Episcopal churches that they attended. In her later essays, Browne paid fond tribute to all these popular, national, concert, and pedagogical genres.Footnote 23
Browne's parents were her principal music instructors. In her later writings she mentioned piano pieces that she learned from them as a little child: a ground by Purcell and a fugue in D by Corelli.Footnote 24 The music that she studied would have covered the pedagogical exercises and pieces by Logier in his instruction books, along with his solo and keyboard ensemble arrangements, such as overtures by Handel and Mozart, selected movements from symphonies by Haydn, and concertos by Corelli.Footnote 25 She probably knew all of her father's compositions and the imprints of works by other composers that he published.Footnote 26 The London music firm of Muzio Clementi supplied the music that David Browne sold in New Brunswick, and Augusta likely learned and played many piano works from that repertoire. She recalled the years of study that constituted her notion of true musical training, writing:
The requirements of a regular musical education are numerous and difficult, for . . . every mile-stone of the journey be as inevitably passed over in the musical Pilgrim's Progress. By each one who aspires to be a finished musician, the same five-note drill must be endured by the weary little fingers in infancy . . . the same difficulties in theory and practice be mastered, and the same arduous ploughing through the mazes of fugue and counterpoint must be accomplished ere the title of musician be fairly earned.Footnote 27
Her essays cited European keyboard composers that included Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Baptist Cramer, Muzio Clementi, Carl Czerny, Jan Ladislav Dussek, Ignaz Moscheles, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ignaz Pleyel, and Domenico Scarlatti.
Sheet Music Imprints
With variation technique so prominent in Browne's training in the Logierian system of musical instruction, it was natural that her first published musical works included sets of variations on traditional or well-known songs of the day. The Philadelphia Directory for 1839 advertised that Miss Browne, then in her late teens, “has for sale at the academy, and at all the music stores, her musical compositions, consisting of Songs, Variations, &c. &c.”Footnote 28 Judging by the numbering on a series of sheet music imprints by “Miss Augusta Browne” published by George E. Blake in Philadelphia, fewer than half of about thirty early sheet music publications survive, and these works were evenly split between songs and solo piano variations.Footnote 29 The earliest numbered score located to date, No. 9, “The Voice of Spring,” is a song based on a melody in Daniel Steibelt's well-known piano solo, the “Storm Concerto.”Footnote 30 Numbers 11 and 12 were sets of animated piano variations on songs by Alexander Lee: “Variations on a Favorite Air from the Opera of ‘Lo Zangara’ [sic]” and “Air a la Suisse (‘By the Margin of Fair Zurich's Waters’).”Footnote 31 Both works utilized advanced keyboard figurations including scales, arpeggios, syncopated chords, and passages in octaves. Browne's No. 23, “Brilliant Introduction & Variations on the Favorite Air Still so Gently o'er Me Stealing,” won praise in an effusive review reprinted in the Boston Courier: “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.”Footnote 32
“Musical Bouquet,” an attractive title used occasionally in sheet music publications, was not commonplace in 1841, when Browne began to use the expression in a deliberate way for her medleys of well-known national songs.Footnote 33 Her five “national bouquets” became Browne's specialty in the early 1840s. These collages consisted of patriotic and folk tunes connected by introductions, transitions, and variations. The “French Boquet,” appeared first, according to its opus number, but it was soon followed by the “English Boquet,” “American Bouquet,” “Hibernian Boquet,” and “Caledonian Boquet.”Footnote 34 Not surprisingly, the patriotic “American Bouquet” became the most popular of these medleys in sheet music collections and personal bound compilations of music known as binder's volumes. With the use of this flowery description, Browne differentiated her arrangements of national songs from many competitors who offered similar medleys, and she designated the importance of these five pieces by assigning formal opus numbers between Opus 31 and 41. The leap from “Number” to “Opus” on her title pages accompanied Browne's entrance to the professional tier of musicians and composers in New York City. By the end of 1842, Browne had “nearly fifty” pieces in print, including songs, duets, piano fantasias, medleys, and variations.Footnote 35
The arts were not mere pastimes to Browne; she considered them building blocks of morality. She often returned to the subject of the power of music to arouse the emotions, elevate the mind, and refine the soul. If Americans wanted music that was diverting, then she would publish music that was uplifting as well as pleasurable. Browne tried to intertwine moral intent, musical “science,” and commercial appeal in her music and journalism. She kept an eye on the market and took the pulse of American musical taste, sometimes to her chagrin. Browne pursued what might be called a cultured vernacular style in her music, producing works that were well crafted and elevating but intended for a wide audience to hear, to play, and to enjoy.
Browne's music found a place, although not in great numbers, in the binder's volumes of sheet music belonging to girls and women who lived from New York to Texas. Her music was published by firms from Boston to Baltimore on the East Coast, and as far west as Cleveland (S[ilas] Brainard & Sons) and Louisville (Peters, Webb, &c.). Approximately 120 of Browne's compositions have known titles or extant scores.Footnote 36 Although her works do not establish innovative styles, they present attractive examples of parlor music of their era. Melodic ideas in regular phrases with strong, clear shapes stand out in her songs, such as “Bird of the Gentle Wing,” which has the lively accompaniment and text painting that characterized German Lieder of the late 1830s.Footnote 37 Browne's piano solos are tuneful and idiomatic, with adept keyboard writing that avoids virtuoso difficulties. Her piano writing nevertheless requires a well-schooled technique of scales, octaves, rapid repeated notes, and arpeggios. Many of her contemporaries, such as the unrelated Francis H. Browne (or Brown; 1818–91), and the prolific Charles Grobe (ca. 1817–79), composed in the same genres of songs, piano dances, and character pieces, but Browne's works were competitive, skillful, and full of ingenious details. Her spirited piano music effortlessly carries the modern listener back 150 years to conjure up the household piano that signified domestic as well as musical harmony in the home.
The “De Meyer Grand Waltz,” which paid homage to the Austrian pianist, Leopold De Meyer (1816–83), may occur in more sheet music collections than any other piano work by Browne.Footnote 38 The glittering virtuoso made his New York debut in October 1845 and played eleven concerts there during the next six months. De Meyer's keyboard prowess thrilled audiences, although few amateurs could master his pianistic tricks. As Browne observed, “The principal aim of the majority of composers and performers of the present day seems to be the perpetration of astounding difficulties.”Footnote 39 In her tribute waltz, Browne made judicious use of arpeggios and octaves to craft advanced, but not intimidating, piano writing. She dedicated the waltz to De Meyer “by permission” and included a portrait of the pianist on the sheet music cover. When she corresponded with the pianist to ask permission for the dedication, she may have acquired an example of his signature. In a clever bit of marketing, an engraved facsimile of his signature was then added to Browne's title page as though it were autographed by the musician himself, a feature that may explain why the score was often retained in music collections (see Figure 1). The keyboard solo sold well enough to justify a second edition, and Browne later added words to create a song from the tune.Footnote 40
Figure 1. Cover page of Augusta Browne's “De Meyer Grand Waltz,” (New York: Firth & Hall, 1846). Courtesy of American Memory, Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/music/sm2/sm1846/792000/792350/001.jpg.
Browne had few female role models to follow among American concert keyboardists. It seems likely that she read John Rowe Parker's 1824 pioneering biographical dictionary, A Musical Biography, in which seven women—five singers of English birth and two American keyboardists—were included.Footnote 41 The keyboardists were the organist “Mrs. Ostinelli, late Miss Hewitt,” and the pianist “Miss Eustaphieve.” Browne would have been aware of Sophia Hewitt Ostinelli, who had been a celebrated organist during the years that the family lived in Boston in the 1820s; Augusta may even have heard her play at the Handel and Haydn Society. Browne also knew of, and dedicated music to, the extraordinary pianist Eliza Eustaphieve Peruzzi, daughter of Alexis Eustaphieve, the first Russian consul general to the United States. Madame Peruzzi was one of Chopin's favorite students and participated with him in salon concerts in Paris.Footnote 42
As a young adult, Browne received praise for “brilliancy and clearness” and “execution and fine taste” as a pianist in New York City.Footnote 43 She performed as a soloist on sacred concerts and charity events and accompanied the famous English tenor John Braham and his son Charles in several recitals in December 1841, April 1842, and December 1842.Footnote 44 She earned a position as organist at the prominent First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and served from May 1842 until May 1845.Footnote 45 Despite evidence of being a gifted performer, Browne's name ceased to appear in New York papers as a pianist in concerts after 1842. Her primary occupation was teaching piano, voice, and harmony, and she directed her other efforts to publication of music and journalism over performance.
Essays and Prose
During 1845, Browne began to publish prose in the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, a monthly family magazine of “polite literature” for the home that already had accepted some of her music for publication (see Figure 2).Footnote 46 Her maiden essay, “Musical Thoughts,” appeared in the January issue, the first of a stream of works that flowed through the magazine in 1845. In June, the Columbian followed up “Musical Thoughts” with a short story, “The Musician's Adventure,” that related an anecdote from the life of her father's mentor Logier; the humorous story of an organist practicing in a seemingly haunted church was promptly reprinted in newspapers from Connecticut to Cincinnati. In July, “The Music of America” addressed the need for wider music instruction under competent teachers in the United States, in a comical, off-the-cuff essay. A poem, “Music from Heaven,” appeared in the September Columbian, along with the song, “Wake, Lady Mine. Serenade.” The October issue led with Browne's serialized essay, “The Divine Origin of Music, and Musical Instruments,” a three-part article, running through December, that amplified the themes of “Musical Thoughts” and discussed instruments used in different eras of history, including their contemporary use at home and in the church. The sheer quantity of Browne's work in the Columbian and reprints in other periodicals demonstrate that her output pleased the magazine editors, subscribers, and readers.Footnote 47
While the exact amounts are not known, Browne received payment for her materials. John Sartain, the publisher of the Union Magazine, another of the household monthlies that contained music and prose by Browne between 1847 and 1851, recalled that he paid $5–$10 for a poem, and $20–$50 for a serial story or essay.Footnote 48 No payment accrued from the copious reprinting of material from magazines and newspapers, both foreign and domestic that was commonplace in the nineteenth-century American periodical press.
Browne's publications during 1845 in the Columbian Magazine set precedents for content and genres that she maintained in essays, poetry, and short stories for the rest of her life. Browne employed a florid literary style intended to be educational as well as witty and entertaining. She asserted her opinions in a manner that complied sufficiently with social mores that her rhetoric was acceptable from a woman in nineteenth-century America. Music journalism and Christian essays dominated her literary works, but she was fond of her poems and anecdotal stories, and successfully resubmitted them to other journals in later years.Footnote 49 Sections from “Musical Thoughts” and “The Divine Origin of Music” were revised and reused in articles during the 1850s in the Message Bird and its sequels, the Journal of the Fine Arts, and the New York Musical World; during the 1860s in the Musical Review and Musical World, and Brainard's Western Musical World; and from 1880 until her death in Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine. Replication of material from earlier essays provided a consistent thread and point of view in much of Browne's nonfiction.
The words that launched Browne's first published prose, “Musical Thoughts,” demonstrate an ardent religiosity, as she invoked, “Music! divine music! celestial visitant, what were life without thee? a dull, plodding space of existence, divested of beauty—to be endured rather than enjoyed. Music! . . . the awakener of high thoughts, the inspirer of hope, the softener of care.”Footnote 50 Using anecdotes from Scripture and from history, “Musical Thoughts” celebrated the place of music in the Old and New Testaments, praised sacred music that uplifted the listener, commended the power of national airs (Irish, Scottish, Swiss, and “Yankee”), honored the harmony of nature, praised the power of hymns and psalmody, and warned against “the low and demoralizing doggerels” in certain popular music.Footnote 51 The conclusion of the essay again entreated, “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.”Footnote 52 In her poem “Music from Heaven,” Browne continued the thought, writing, “There thrills such music through my soul / As cannot, cannot be of earth. . . . Bright angels sent to waft away/My soul to live in endless day.”Footnote 53
Browne maintained in her essays that music wielded tremendous spiritual power, insisting, “Sacred song is not a mere accessory of worship—it is worship.”Footnote 54 She lived in an era of great religiosity in American life, as a tide of Protestant evangelism and revival—the so-called Second Great Awakening—swept through antebellum America. Her family was solidly Episcopal in its affiliation, although Browne also played in Lutheran and Presbyterian churches. The currents of evangelism and revival were evident in urban Protestant churches such as St. George's Episcopal Church, New York, which Browne honored with a hymn setting, “St. George's,” [There is a land of pure delight] dedicated to its charismatic minister, Rev. Stephen H. Tyng (1800–85).Footnote 55 She held deep suspicion of Roman Catholicism and had limited tolerance for Anglican high church practices of all-male choirs and intoned psalmody that came into vogue after the 1850s as a result of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement within the Church of England. Browne adhered to tradition and simple reverence in music for worship. She defended the congregational singing of time-honored hymns as a vital element of the Protestant church service. Browne's better-known contemporaries expressed similar opinions on the power of music and its role in worship—from Thomas Hastings to Lowell Mason and his circle (Mason's brother Timothy, and sons Daniel Gregory and Lowell, Jr.; William B. Bradbury; George F. Root; George J. Webb, A. N. Johnson, and James C. Johnson)—and a number of Browne's articles on music preceded comparable opinions in Nathaniel Gould's 1853 Church Music in America.Footnote 56
Church music was an essential element of Browne's musical worldview, but her horizons were far from limited to church music. Her musical background had been quite broad for an American girl of her era. Although she accorded the highest statues to sacred music, especially large choral oratorios by Handel and Haydn, she embraced the vitality of folk traditions, military music, dance music, and commercial sheet music, as well as European concert repertoire. In her outlook, Browne was democratic in concept, but specific in opposition to anything that she considered vulgar, trite, or poor in quality. She welcomed popular music that did not violate her sense of music's mission: that it should be uplifting, refining, and faith affirming, with positive moral effect. She consistently rejected minstrel songs because of their insulting racial lyrics.
“The Music of America”
A less-studied tone distinguished “The Music of America” from the earlier essay, “Musical Thoughts,” and the three-part article, “The Divine Origin of Music,” that followed.Footnote 57 The informality of “The Music of America” suggests an opinion piece, perhaps written in haste, avoiding the itemization of historical or Scriptural anecdotes that comprised much of her studious essays, such as “The Divine Origin of Music.”Footnote 58 Browne contended that American music in 1845 showed abundant evidence of native talent, but called for wider instruction, better teachers, and higher artistic models. She pointed out the lack of “competent teachers” and conservatories in America and expressed concern for the dissemination abroad of “silly and degrading negro and comic songs.” But the statement that caught the attention of many later critics was the paragraph that began: “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.”
Browne's light, humorous tone has been read as serious rather than comical, as when she derided poorly trained singing school masters who disseminated scant information and poor taste, or expressed mock outrage in her incredulous query, “Cobbling and Music! We just ask how any musical nerves can stand that?” In later essays in the Home Journal, Browne made use of such hyperbole and florid prose to underscore the foibles of society and its figures of authority.Footnote 59 In “The Music of America,” she ridiculed not just singing school graduates, or “Christopher Crotchets,” who considered themselves knowledgeable musicians, but also churchmen who considered music by Handel as “not devotional” and inappropriate for worship, and organists who mutilated traditional hymns.Footnote 60
Although she placed the oratorios of Handel and Haydn at the apex of musical craft and genius, Browne also praised the hymn tunes of American composers William Billings (1746–1800) and Oliver Holden (1765–1844), and expressed hope that New England would lead the effort for better practices in church music. As she would do throughout her career, Browne advocated for congregational singing of traditional hymns and appealed for the reform of music used in Protestant worship. She concluded by explaining that “if we never look beyond Jack Horner we can never understand or appreciate Milton,” and, suggested that higher models must be cultivated for Americans to advance in music. She did not cite the repertoire of “Yankee” singing schools as primitive or inferior, but insisted on the need for teachers and church musicians with better training, which she might have described as “scientific,” like her own years of study and practice. American music, she wrote, would require more competent training to progress beyond “Do. Re. Mi.”
Browne specified that “We, of course, can have no allusion to the educated professors of vocal music from New England,” carefully avoiding any insult to the prominent circle of musicians led by Lowell Mason, who had been president of the Handel and Haydn Society from 1827 to 1832; who had established the Boston Academy of Music in 1833; who began teacher training in annual conventions—later called normal musical institutes—in 1834; who won a place for music in the Boston public school curriculum in 1838; and whose publications of tunebooks for schools and churches were ubiquitous. Browne shared many fundamental tenets expressed by Mason: Music had a powerful influence for morality, with intellectual, physical, and emotional benefits for humanity. Church music was essential to worship, and sacred music was a form of worship. Congregational participation in singing enhances worship and should be revived and reinvigorated. Sacred music observance belonged in the home, the parlor, the schoolroom, and the concert hall, as well as in the church sanctuary. Ancient hymns and chants provided a body of great music to use in the church, and vulgar music should always be shunned in worship.
Mason was the most famous and influential music teacher in nineteenth-century America, yet his name is strikingly absent from Browne's literary output, despite their common beliefs. She surely knew Mason's work, if not the man himself. It seems likely that there was some past acquaintance between her father and Mason, who ascended to the top musical positions in several Boston churches in addition to the Handel and Haydn Society, just at the time when David Browne, who considered himself a choral conductor, was struggling to establish a niche in the city. Mason seemed to possess a golden touch, whereas Browne experienced more than his share of bad luck. Mason was living in Boston and must have been aware of the feud of advertisements that David Browne carried on in Boston newspapers during 1827–28, which culminated in Browne's pamphlet of self-defense and subsequent departure from the city. David Browne may have held some grievance toward Mason or toward the Boston Brahmins who elevated Mason to leadership in the foremost musical venues of the city. This could explain why Augusta Browne steered carefully around Mason and never mentioned him by name in her prose. She would have had no wish to create friction with this musical eminence, or to bring pain to her father by bringing up old battles. Mason did not include David Browne or Augusta in his circle of collaborators, but he did make an effort to learn about the Logierian system. Mason owned several of Logier's method books in his music library, now housed at Yale University. Mason's name was even included with his colleagues George F. Root and A. N. Johnson in advertisements for lessons “in classes of from four to eight, on the Logierian system,” in Boston in 1842.Footnote 61 One might suppose that there was much common ground between Logier's group method and Mason's public school teaching. Both were class approaches for young people that relied on method books developed using original materials along with arrangements of music by European composers. Both musicians believed in the superiority of the “science of music.” However, Logier's group method was a keyboard approach that incorporated notation and reading from the first lessons, while Mason claimed Pestalozzian theories of children's education as the basis for his juvenile music pedagogy through the sensory experience of singing, learning first by ear, then by eye.Footnote 62
Mason believed that he was bringing the benefits of “scientific” music to improve and reform church music by suppressing indigenous hymnody and fuging tunes used in eighteenth-century America, and replacing them with smooth but bland harmonizations of melodies, some original, and others derived from adaptations of European music. Browne protested against adaptations that distorted works of composers she respected, complaining in “The Music of America” that “the unlucky authors could scarcely know their own property.” Her approach to reform “the state of music in most of our churches” was to utilize powerful traditional hymns, to enhance congregational singing rather than relying on a choir, and to “employ only capable persons” as organists and teachers.
Browne entreated New Englanders to replace the “musical heresy” of Yankee singing schools with a “musical reformation.”Footnote 63 Perhaps by the notion of “reformation,” she was referring obliquely to the ongoing efforts of Mason's juvenile music education and teacher training. The normal musical institutes run by Mason and his collaborators that radiated out from Boston during the 1850s offered training to future music teachers for schools and churches, and thus set in motion a movement that began to address the need for “national interest” and “capable persons” that Browne called for in “The Music of America.” Both Mason and Browne were dedicated to the “advancement of the heavenly art” through a higher level of education among a wider citizenry than just the “more enlightened, and scientific portion of the community.”Footnote 64
The tone in “The Music of America” was critical but optimistic, stating from the outset that Americans were a musical people with great potential. The essay attempted to use humor and hyperbole with mixed success to make serious points about music instruction, secular music, and sacred music in antebellum America. Browne may have simply been venting her pet peeves, but the essay resonated with readers and soon began a journey of its own.
Reception History of “The Music of America”
The complete text of Browne's “The Music of America” began to appear in reprint just a few weeks after the Columbian publication. An extract from “The Music of America” was seized by editor Hartley W. Day in an unsigned article, “The Light is Spreading,” published in his American Journal of Music. Browne's humorous description of Yankee singing schools seemed to be confirmation of the “humbuggery” of such “miserable instruction.”Footnote 65 Day espoused the science of music, but he had ill will toward Mason. In “The Light is Spreading,” the author, presumably Day, referred belligerently to “musical Popery” and “the bubble of monopoly.” He used his journal to air grievances and complaints that led to a six-month suspension of duties for Mason in 1845.Footnote 66
In February 1848, “The Music of America” appeared in full in the Musician and General Intelligencer of Cincinnati, a periodical edited by Augustus Fillmore, a minister from a musical family active in revival circles.Footnote 67 The British-born Nixon family—William, his wife Charity, and his sister Isabella—established a Logierian academy in Cincinnati in 1830 and knew Augusta Browne, probably through correspondence. Augusta even exchanged dedications of piano music with the family.Footnote 68 William Nixon and his sister published music and essays in the Musician and General Intelligencer in 1848, so they could well have brought Browne's article to the attention of the editor of this Cincinnati periodical.Footnote 69 The Boston Musical Gazette immediately reprinted the Cincinnati version of the article in the 14 February 1848 issue. This periodical was published by the Johnson brothers, A. N. and James C., who were not only protégés of Mason, but also collaborated with him for many years before they parted ways in a disagreement about choral methods in 1849.Footnote 70 Although she republished many of her other essays, Browne never reprinted “The Music of America” herself. The article may have become a liability when it was reprinted by both detractors and advocates of Mason's teaching.
Browne's persona was interpreted negatively during the twentieth century, as snippets of her prose were disseminated without any accompanying information on her life. An excerpt of “The Music of America” from the Cincinnati reprint appeared in George Pullen Jackson's 1933 book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands.Footnote 71 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. Jackson selectively printed only the comic paragraph describing singing schoolmasters and the outcry, “Cobbling and Music! We just ask how any musical nerves can stand that?” He cited “one Miss Augusta Brown” as an example of the “urban sentiment and musical reform” of those who opposed singing schools and who championed “Europe's tonal superiorities.”Footnote 72 Gilbert Chase's America's Music from the Pilgrims to the Present (1955) began a chapter on shape-note singing titled “The fasola folk,” with words by “a certain Miss Augusta Brown,” using Jackson's excerpt from “The Music of America.”Footnote 73 “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.”Footnote 74 Browne herself 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.”Footnote 75 Subsequent authors repeated the excerpt from Jackson and Chase, along with their accretion of American inferiority.Footnote 76 After more than thirty years, in his third revised edition (1987), Chase dropped the Yankee singing school anecdote in view of the very different portrait suggested by Tick's research and assessment of Browne as a professional musician.Footnote 77
Perhaps most significantly for music pedagogy in the United States, the excerpt lived on in A History of American Music Education (1992), and Music Education: Source Readings from Ancient Greece to Today (2002 and 2007 editions).Footnote 78 The phrase “The Inferiority of Yankee Music” was presented as though it were part of Browne's text. The Cincinnati excerpt ran without explanation or context through three editions of this anthology of primary source readings. Browne was presented as an emblem for all that was genteel and snobbish in nineteenth-century American musical life.
A reassessment of “The Music of America” based on a complete reading should acknowledge Browne's positive intentions and her informed background as a teacher and church musician. Every jest was motivated by a serious concern as Browne tried to marry humor and earnest opinion in this essay, but she took on too many subjects, veering from government support for the arts, to sacred and secular music, singing schools, and the church choir. Her first attempt at a humorous essay resulted in mixed messages and styles. She nevertheless achieved an opinion piece in which every music lover will still find something to approve or to dispute passionately.
An important sequel to “The Music of America” picked up the thread from its first paragraph regarding “the silly and degrading negro and comic songs originating in this country.” Browne's “Negro Minstrelsy” remains less familiar, but is arguably more significant in the historical discussion of American music than “The Music of America.” First published in January 1854 in George Pope Morris's Home Journal, “Negro Minstrelsy” appeared in reprints within days in the religious and abolition press.Footnote 79 In this essay Browne asserted that minstrel songs didn't present the music of African Americans accurately, and that the lyrics of such songs 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. . . . 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.Footnote 80
Browne cited the elevated style of educated Negro oratory, a style utterly antithetical to the “buffoonery and profanity” that she abhorred in the lyrics of popular minstrel songs. She warned that “The 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.”Footnote 81 She used comical anecdotes to caution, “Through the medium of amusement, pernicious lessons may be conveyed with double facility,” and argued, “We should strive to raise the intellect, not to debase it.”Footnote 82 This important document of an educated musician's assessment of minstrelsy has been overlooked, perhaps because the best nuggets were buried in full-blown purple prose. Browne's anxieties about minstrelsy and the harmful influence of popular music were part of a larger concern with public morality that grew into an evangelistic mission.
Beyond the Parlor
By 1850 Browne no longer published in magazines intended for the women's market like the Columbian or Sartain's Union Magazine. Many of her essays bristled with quotations from Scripture, mythology, and British historians and authors, perhaps to anchor her essays in unassailable authority so that her work could not be dismissed as so-called “lady literature.”Footnote 83 She sought out musical magazines and periodicals that aimed at a readership not limited to women, such as the Western Literary Messenger and the Knickerbocker Magazine. Browne's first book was a tribute to the Christian faith and fortitude of her brother Hamilton, who died in 1850 from tuberculosis.Footnote 84 In 1855, Browne, then in her mid-thirties, married the young portrait painter John W. B. Garrett. Her second book was a collection of devotional readings dedicated to the memory of her husband John, who died suddenly after just three years of marriage.Footnote 85 During the obligatory period of mourning—as long as two-and-a-half years for a widow—Augusta completed Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations and a third manuscript on angels and demons that was never published in full.Footnote 86 The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 followed on the heels of widowhood, further reducing her professional activities.
The struggle for recognition culminated in 1863 in one of Browne's longest articles, in which she wrote passionately, “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. . . . If man could but warble soprano, the sum of her tribulations would be full; he would soon hustle her out of that poor specialty of singing.”Footnote 87 “A Woman on Women; with Reflections on the Other Sex” contained one anecdote after another in a ten-page tribute to woman's virtues versus her mischaracterization, beginning, “A most delicious voluntary rung on the chimes of man's vanity, is the inferiority of woman. We hear it in all keys and moods,” and celebrating, “The equality of woman must not be considered a neoterical whim, a modern heresy—by no means; from the dawn of history she has asserted her prowess.”Footnote 88 Tick wrote about the immediate connection she felt when she first encountered this essay a century later, hearing a latent feminist in the derisive tone and pointed anecdotes.Footnote 89 The satirical tone was not out of the ordinary for Browne, who used barbed humor in several essays since “The Music of America.” Clearly she believed that men and women were equally gifted in talent and intellect, but she did not devote her support to the causes of suffrage or women's rights, two topics that she never mentioned in her writing. Tension between nascent feminism and entrenched Protestant faith may have produced conflict in her mind, and “A Woman on Women” was the first and last time that Browne addressed the subject of gender. After the Civil War, she chose to write predominantly on religious subjects for Protestant periodicals.
Browne lived in an era in which public activism for women was largely limited to Christian social issues such as temperance, abolition, orphanages, and missions. Prominent educator Catherine Beecher (1800–78), born a generation earlier but an influence Browne would have known well, advocated “aggressive Protestantism” for women. Browne stepped up to the role of Christian reformer in her chosen areas of interest: morality and reform. Her tongue became sharper in the 1860s, as she sermonized on the evils of cards, the theater, and even the immorality of stories used for opera libretti. Religious tenets had always been prominent in her writing, but increasingly Browne used periodicals, such as the New York Observer, as the pulpit for her evangelical mission. She found a congenial platform in Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine, a ponderous compendium of suitable reading for the Sabbath. Frank Leslie supplied a literary product for every taste, from newspapers to children's magazines. From 1879 until her death in 1882 from a pulmonary embolism, Browne used the Sunday Magazine as her preferred venue to publish hymns, essays old and new, and her favorite poems.Footnote 90
Browne may be most entertaining to modern ears when she used her sharp wit to underline the foibles of authority figures and societal norms, but the sincerity of her faith and the gravitas of her Christian mission were uppermost in her intent. Browne was a modern, entrepreneurial woman in some ways, but she was corseted by restrictive Victorian modes of thought and conduct. Through her own agency, Browne maintained a public presence in the periodical press for some forty years in a writing career that spanned poetry, fiction, humor, memoir, music journalism, and Christian devotional literature. She never lived by her pen as a means of financial support, but writing provided a means to go out of the parlor, into the world, and, ultimately, into history.
Assessment and Legacy
Browne may have contributed much of her own entry in John W. Moore's Appendix to Encyclopedia of Music.Footnote 91 Tick noted that the two paragraphs about Browne in Moore's Appendix may have been one of the first occasions for an American woman “to be acknowledged in the literature as a composer in her own lifetime.”Footnote 92 Browne and Moore both had the same publisher, Oliver Ditson of Boston, during the 1870s. Moore, perhaps with assistance from Ditson, probably solicited information from Browne for his appendix to a forthcoming second edition of the Complete Encyclopædia of Music, and, thus, the statement may not only provide her own self-assessment, but perhaps expressed largely in her own words:
BROWNE, AUGUSTA, or Mrs. Augusta Browne Garrett, late of New York, now residing in Washington, D.C., 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 [sic] 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 [sic].” Many of her articles on church-music have elicited much interest. Footnote 93
The style here is consistent with Browne's writer's voice, and the entry contained information that could only have come from Augusta herself, such as the statement of “some two hundred” musical works. Browne identified her unpublished “Aurora. Romance,” as Op. 200 on a manuscript sent to Franz Liszt and dedicated to the master.Footnote 94 Of the music titles specified in Moore's entry, “Air à la Russe, a fantasy on the “Vesper Hymn” was advertised in 1841, but had been out of print for decades, and no score is known to exist today.Footnote 95 The 1849 romance “La Brise dans le Feuillage” exists in a copyright deposit and in a presentation copy inscribed to St. John Browne, a younger brother of the composer.Footnote 96 Three of the national bouquets—the “American Bouquet,” “Hibernia, and “Caledonia,” all published by Ditson—were still listed in print in the 1870 Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music.Footnote 97 In this evaluation, music took precedence over prose, and Browne's longer piano fantasies and romances seemed to garner the highest artistic status.
A modern assessment of Browne's life and works must address the questions that stem from her abundant creative legacy: How famous was she? How influential was her writing? How popular was her music? Was she an important figure in the music of her era?
Had Browne been truly famous, celebrated, influential, or important, her name would have recurred frequently and prominently in the works of other journalists and musicians over many years, but such evidence is lacking. The newspaper reviews of Browne's early compositions and accounts of her concert performances soon faded into perfunctory announcements of new music publications with an occasional comment. Advertisements, along with the chronology of her prose publications, provide the best record of her activities.
Browne's keen observations illuminate the feelings and opinions that grew out of a gifted woman's struggles to succeed within the prevailing culture of her era. Her efforts demonstrate how a nineteenth-century American woman strove to widen her audience and sales, not always successfully. She sought out and corresponded with sympathetic magazine editors to cultivate their interest in her work. Dedication and perseverance, rather than celebrity, generated her publications. The many reprints of her essays indicate neither fame nor influence, as reprinting was ubiquitous in the periodical press. If Browne's opinions on music and morality had been influential in her era, her name would have occurred more conspicuously in the writings of others during the second half of the century.
Although Browne never became a household name, her lyrical, harmonious music and skillful piano writing vividly illustrate the melodious style of song and lively piano music found in American homes during the nineteenth century. It may be easy to belittle her works as parlor miniatures, but few nineteenth-century American composers from Browne's lifetime remain in the popular memory with the exception of Stephen Foster—because of his beloved parlor songs and minstrel tunes (“Beautiful Dreamer”; “O Susanna”)—and, for pianists, Creole performer Louis Moreau Gottschalk—because of his dazzling, exotic virtuoso creations (“The Banjo”; “Bamboula”). Yet hundreds of other composers published an avalanche of sheet music in mid-century, most of it not only forgotten but also despised by modern musicians and historians for its square-cut, predictable tunes and cloying, sentimental lyrics. Browne's songs contain graceful vocal writing, and her piano solos offer attractive period dances—quicksteps, waltzes, and gallops—and variations with sparkling keyboard figuration. Her fantasies, romances, and national bouquets displayed the sophisticated piano technique of a skillful, fluent performer capable of brilliant scales, sweeping arpeggios, rapid repeated notes, and armfuls of octaves.
As many as half of Browne's 200 or more musical works are missing without a trace. Only a handful of titles went into second editions. Some scores exist in only a single copy. The meager numbers of extant scores hardly suggest widespread sales or popularity. Browne methodically used magazines to disseminate her songs and hymns, but music published in magazines wasn't necessarily the result of celebrity of the composer, or a craze for a song; rather, it was often an effort to circulate music that might become popular, or might make a composer better known.Footnote 98
Augusta Browne offers a valuable voice from a past century, yet her greatest importance may be her significance for subsequent generations of musicians and Americanists who find inspiration in her creative legacy, and for women and girls in the arts who identify with her life and struggles. Tick concluded that Browne “was a true Victorian by temperament as well as musical taste,” yet her determined, lifelong campaign to get her works into print and into the press has a uniquely American flavor of self-made, entrepreneurial achievement.Footnote 99 Her life chronicles a “bravely singular” forebear who persevered in creating and circulating her music and prose within a marginalized, gendered status in society.Footnote 100 Browne's music and writing reveal a woman of intelligence, talent, craftsmanship, self-confidence, and an unwavering core of faith, a woman whose life was a “musical Pilgrim's Progress” through nineteenth-century America.Footnote 101
Appendix
Text of Augusta Browne's “The Music of America,” as originally printed in July 1845 in the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, 37–38.
It must be a matter of serious regret to every lover of music and the fine arts generally in this country that, while such great and rapid improvements are making in other things, there should seem to be so little national interest in them. Look at the institutions of Europe, supported at the expense of the government, for the improvement and polish of society. That enough native talent exists among us for music, if drawn out and encouraged to gain for Americans the title of a musical people no one can for a moment doubt; but even native talent must be cultivated by competent teachers, or how shall its aspirations be directed aright. 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.
We know of only two respectable associations in this country devoted to the public performance of music; “The Handel and Haydn,” of Boston, and “The Sacred Music Society,” of New York. Thanks to their exertions for the many Oratorios, and other standard works with which the public have been favored. The former is of long standing, and supports its high character to its own credit, and the pleasure and profit of its many friends; but it is a pity that both do not extend their aims to promote a higher tone among the community in general.
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. 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. We have heard of one of these cute geniuses who ‘set up’ in a town away down east as cobbler! and what? Professor of Music! On his sign, under the announcement of his profession, as a provider for the wants of the bodily understanding, was the following choice couplet, setting forth that, as a musician, he did not neglect to provide also for the wants of the mental.
Cobbling and Music! We just ask how any musical nerves can stand that? But jest or earnest, this is a true specimen of the class of gentlemen who are busily employed in disseminating a musical taste—a true specimen of the class of gentlemen who, in the capacity of choristers, and one-fingered organists, have been allowed to mutilate (we humbly beg pardon, improve) our church music until scarcely a good old tune can be heard in its purity, if heard at all. As for Handel, Haydn and Co., they are “not devotional.” Oh, no! not good enough for us Illuminati; only fit for the Goths and Vandals of Europe. (We deeply regretted hearing a distinguished clergyman in a neighboring city publicly express these incautious sentiments; of course it was without due consideration.) Not devotional! Many of whose strains might cause the hearts of seraphs to glow as they stoop to recognize in them the echoes to heaven's own music. “He was Despised,” “I know that my Redeemer Liveth,” “The Heavens are Telling,” “The Hallelujah Chorus,” not devotional ? Ah! but in spite of all efforts to persuade the public mind to the contrary, these glorious names shall soar higher and higher throughout time.
Now, as this musical heresy had its origin in New England, the musical reformation should begin there also; she has produced illustrious men in almost all the arts and science;—a host of luminaries of whom not only their birth place, but the whole world may be proud.
Even in music, has she not given us Billings and [Oliver] Holden, a blessing be on their memories! What honest heart does not warm at the sound of “Majesty,” “Jordan,” “Coronation,” glorious airs.
We love and honor the land of the ‘Pilgrims;’ our full sympathies are with it, and we cannot bear to have it ridiculed as it is, by scientific musicians, for the sake of these ‘Cristopher Crotchets,’ and their generalissimos, whose aim it is, so to depreciate true music, that their own ignorance may not be apparent; in one thing however, they deserve unlimited eulogium, and that is, for the adroit manner in which they appropriate and cement together, the various parts of different airs, so that the unlucky authors could scarcely know their own property. Indeed in the present state of music in most of our churches, it might save the congregation the trouble of rising, if the minister would preface the reading of the hymn, with the following notice: “The Choir will sing to the praise and glory of God,” &c. &c. There is for instance, Old Hundred; that the people will join in singing. Now we should not wonder in the least, if one of the jealous songsters should undertake to ornament, or set variations to it, and its brethren of holy memory. Just put a stop to such presumption. If the community would employ only capable persons for their organists, choristers, and teachers, these aspiring gentlemen would soon be driven to the musical necessity of becoming what nature fitted them to be, and we might be favored with a little congregational singing, which is now very scarce, and without which there can be little devotion. Some persons may be disposed to consider us too fastidious, but apropos, we beg leave to refer them to specimens of the two schools of poetry, as now acknowledged, viz: the “Jack Horner,” and the “Miltonian.”
Now it is plain if we never look beyond Jack Horner we can never understand or appreciate Milton; and the comparison is in the same ratio in regard to music. If we always remain at the Do Re Mi, we can never make any advancement in the heavenly art, whose watchword as she upward points, is Excelsior. In thus expressing our own sentiments, we are confident that we also express those of the more enlightened, and scientific portion of the community. If a few of the dillitanti would interest themselves in the subject, a reform might soon be brought about, which we most fervently hope may be the case.
