Classical Mythology, 7th Edition - obinfonet: dia logou

CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN MUSIC, DANCE, AND FILM 759
ments of jazz, blues, and ragtime to give to their works a particularly American originality
and flavor.
10. Gilbert Chase, America's Music, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1966), identifies
(in Chapters 5 and 6) these artists as emigrant professionals and gentlemen amateurs;
among the best known of the latter are Thomas Jefferson, not a musician but
an aristocratic patron; Benjamin Franklin, a practicing musician who may have composed;
and Francis Hopkinson.
11. The dedication is reprinted in The American Composer Speaks, A Historical Anthology,
1770-1865, ed. Gilbert Chase (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966),
pp. 39-40.
12. Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition, Essays in
Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 142-143.
13. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall
1969), p. 5.
14. His well-known Battle of the Kegs includes a prefatory metaphor of the Trojan horse.
"A poem of 1762 on the benefits of science opens with a Horatian tribute, making
mention of the muses, Helicon, Maecenas (in the guise of Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton),
and Aeneas, with descriptions of an ideal college curriculum"; Gummere, The
American Colonial Mind. While admitting that Hopkinson is not a poet of great prominence,
Gummere calls him "almost a cross between Horace and Petronius." See also
George Everett Hastings, The Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1926).
15. Oscar Sonneck wrote the pioneering work on Hopkinson: Francis Hopkinson, the First
American Poet-Composer (1737-1791) and James Lyon, Patriot, Preacher, Psalmodist
(1735-1794); Two Studies in Early American Music (Washington, D.C.: H. L. McQueen,
1905). For Sonneck the music that accompanied Hopkinson's libretto was not extant.
Gillian B. Anderson, however, has been responsible for a realization of the score,
which she has recorded (The Colonial Singers and Players, Gillian B. Anderson, Director.
LP Musical Heritage Society, MHS 3684). Her notes explain that she discovered
documents that enabled her to identify almost all the music that Hopkinson
chose with excellent taste, for it is beautiful and sophisticated, drawn from composers
such as Handel and Arne. Anderson also warns that musically "we know with certainty
only the names of the tunes to which most of the words were sung," and refers
to a performing edition of the work "for a discussion of the different choices of performing
forces" that may be made: Francis Hopkinson, America Independent, or, The
Temple of Minerva (Washington, D.C.: C.T. Wagner Music Publishers, 1977).
16. A description of this first performance of America Independent appeared in The Freeman's
Journal, Philadelphia, December 19,1781.
17. Sonneck, quoted in Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theater, A Chronicle (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978). p. 6.
18. Bordman, American Musical Theater, pp. 78-79.
19. Hitchcock, Music in the United States, pp. 17-18; three versions of the anthem (from
among the many variations) are printed as Nos. 113-115 in Music in America: An Anthology
from the Landing of the Pilgrims to the Close of the Civil War, 1620-1865, ed.
W.Thomas Marrocco and Harold Gleason (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1964).
20. Converse wrote a fairy tale opera, The Pipe of Desire, the first American opera to be
produced at the Metropolitan (1910).