“There is sweet music here”: The Overlooked Part-song for Mixed Voices in the United Kingdom and United States

The August 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “‘There is sweet music here’: The Overlooked Part-song for Mixed Voices in the United Kingdom and United States 1850–1925″ by David Anderson . You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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In 1881, Charles Leslie, his wife, and twenty-eight assistants traveled to seventy-three towns throughout Kansas holding one-week musical conventions. Attendees came together by wagon, carriage, stagecoach, horse, and mule to learn musical skills and participate in convention choirs. During August 1-2, the “Kansas State Musical Jubilee” was held at Bismarck Grove, a two-day program with four concerts in which all choruses joined together in a choir of 1,800 sopranos, 1,600 altos, 1,200 tenors, and 1,400 basses. This extraordinary event in the Wild West of Dodge City was part of significant musical currents in nineteenth-century United Kingdom and the United States.

Socio-economic changes, philanthropic and music literacy movements, the influence of continental music trends, and a progressing musical culture fostered a popularity for choirs of mixed voices in amateur and professional music making. Choirs and musical societies sprang up in towns, music conventions, normal schools, festivals, and concerts; the “Village Choir” was often an active part of social fabric. With a few still active today, these nineteenth-century mixed choirs can be viewed as ancestors of today’s school and community choirs.

The need for appropriate literature accessible to singers and audiences brought demand for new music written for the “modern” mixed choir apart from large-scale works. Publishing houses produced more printed music, aided by advances in production technology, economic conditions that made production cheaper, and improved marketing and distribution practices. Increased opportunity to create music inspired many musicians to take up their pen and compose for mixed choir. With halcyon years about 1850–1925, the genre reached an apex in the early twentieth century, and, though changes in a post-war world brought evolving musical trends, the off spring of these songs remained popular. Their influence is still evident today—they are the great-grandparents of modern choral song.

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Read the rest of this article in the August 2022 issue of Choral Journal.