The Parlor Music Craze

In the latter decades of the 19th Century, as Americans were exposed to more and more musical entertainment in halls, restaurants and at dances, they were inspired to produce music for themselves in their homes.  A number of factors conspired to facilitate this trend.  First came improvements in the piano whereby it was transformed from a fragile, subtle instrument into a sturdy, resonant music-maker of a size that would fit conveniently into the family parlor.  In 1887 a spokesman for the Music Teachers' National Association estimated that there were then a half million piano pupils in the U.S., out a population of 60 million [Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, p. 540].  To fuel the musical demands upon the piano, a sheet music industry sprang up that smoothed the distribution of piano scores for the latest popular tunes to all corners of a nation rapidly expanding nation-wide.  Finally, minor composers and poets suddenly discovered the call to become tunesmiths and lyricists to meet the insatiable demand for new tunes that appealed to the taste of the moment.

Jonas Chickering Tinkers with the Piano

The prime mover in the transformation of the piano in America was a New Hampshire cabinet-maker named Jonas Chickering,

who apprenticed in the piano trade in Boston and went into business as partner to a sea captain who conveniently went down with his ship and left Chickering as sole owner of the enterprise.  Whether Chickering or Alpheus Babcock in another Boston piano atelier was first to support the piano's mechanism with an iron frame is unimportant; what matters is that Chickering was first to successfully manufacture pianos on that principle, and string one bank of wires over the other (overstring) so that that the case could fit in a modest space.  By 1851 Chickering was the leading American piano firm, producing ten percent of the 9,000 pianos built in the U.S. that year (Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life, p. 235).  The Chickering company was bought out by Knabe pianos in 1908 (Wurlitzer now owns the Chickering brand name). 

Sheet Music Feeds the Piano Frenzy

By 1871 80,000 pieces of sheet music were on sale to play on all those pianos, although of those only twelve hundred were "good-selling pieces" (America's Musical Life, p. 233).  The pacesetter in the explosion of the sheet music industry was the Oliver Ditson Company, like Chickering based in Boston.  The business strategy of Oliver Ditson

was simplicity itself: to dominate the industry.  From the 1850s on, Ditson bought out the catalogues of over fifty other publishers, and set up or bought out firms from Philadelphia to Cincinnati that made musical instruments.  The Ditson catalogue of 1867 listed 33,000 pieces of music on 360 close-printed pages (Men, Women and Pianos, p. 507).  Every item in the Ditson catalogues were sold out of the Boston store and shipped across the country via the rapidly spreading network of railroads.

In order to register the copyright for a piece of music, publishers like Ditson were required to send a copy to the Library of Congress. 

Fortunately the Library has made hundreds of these examples of popular music of the period accessible on the Internet. A search by title or composer brings up the score, and often a graphic of the cover. 

Much of the music of the time was written to be sung around the piano.  The mawkish sentimentality that typified many lyrics gave the period a bad name musically.  Henry Russell pandered to this taste with "Woodman, Spare That Tree."  Stephen Foster conveyed sincerity in melodies with strong melodic appeal, but his "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" echoes the common theme of loss and yearning that tugged at susceptible heartstrings.

John Watson avoided the quagmire of sentimentality by writing music without lyrics: some marches, but mainly to the rhythms of dance steps like the waltz, schottische, gavotte, polka, galop and redowa.  Fascinating information on the origins, execution and lore of these and many other popular dance forms at at the dance history archives of Streetswing.com:

Joining the piano in the parlor was a bargain alternative, the reed organ, which produced organ-like sonorities from metal strips that resonated when a bellows forced air across them at the command of the keyboard. 

If no one in the family had the will or talent to learn basic keyboard skills, there was the pianola, or player piano, that came along in the 1890s.  You simply inserted a perforated piano roll, stepped on a pair of pedals, and the instrument would play any tune you liked.

With the marketing of the Victrola, home music-making began an inevitable decline.