Timeline of music in the United States (1880–1899)

This is a timeline of music in the United States 

1880[edit]

• George Upton's "Women in Music" is the "first of many articles and reviews by prominent male critics which sought to trivialize and undermine the achievements of what was considered an alarming number of new women composers in the realm of 'serious' classical music".^[1]
• The Native American Sun Dance is banned.^[2]
• John Knowles Paine's second symphony, In Spring, premiers in Boston, and is "received with unparalleled success".^[3]
• Gussie Lord Davis has his first hit with "We Sat Beneath the Maple on the Hill", making him the first African American songwriter to succeed in Tin Pan Alley.^[4]
• Patrick Gilmore's Twenty-Second Regimental Band becomes the first fully professional ensemble of any kind in the country to be engaged in performances full-time, year-round.^[5]

1881[edit]

• Henry Lee Higginson forms the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Higginson would personally run the Orchestra for almost four decades.^[6][7]
• The Thomas B. Harms music publishing company is established solely to publish popular music, then referring to parlor music.^[8]
• Music and Some Highly Musical People: Remarkable Musicians of the Colored Race, With Portraits, by James M. Trotter is the first revisionist look at the minstrel show, chronicling the "extraordinary breadth of black musicianship".^[9]
• Tony Pastor becomes an established theater owner on 14th Street in New York City, where he becomes the first person "to bid... for women customers in the variety theater", bringing that field out of "disreputable saloons" and transforming it "into decent entertainment that respectable women could enjoy".^[10][11]

1882[edit]

• Theodore Baker's Über die Musik de nordamerikanischen Wilden is the first scholarly work to study Native American music;^{[12][13][14][15]} It is Baker's doctoral dissertation, on Seneca music, at the University of Leipzig.^[12]
• The Fisk University Jubilee Singers become the first black choir to perform at the White House, at the invitation of President Chester A. Arthur.^[16]
• A chorded zither called the autoharp is patented in the United States.^[17]
• Rev. Marshall W. Taylor's Plantation Melodies, Book of Negro Folk Songs becomes the first collection of spiritual, put together by an African American.^[18]
• The Bethany Oratorio Society is formed in Lindsborg, Kansas, where a famous annual Easter performance of Handel's Messiah is shown today.^[19]
• The Chinese Exclusion Act greatly limits the immigration of Chinese people to the United States, amid a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, leading to a reduction in Chinese musical practices.^[20]
• Yiddish theatre begins its period of greatest popularity and influence.^[21]

Mid-1880s music trends
The Office of Indian Affairs outlaws a wide range of Native American customs and rituals, having begun with the Sun Dance in 1880.[2] Norwegian American choirs begin to form organizations, putting together festivals and other periodic gatherings to celebrate Norwegian culture and music.[22]

1883[edit]

• The Metropolitan Opera opens in New York City.^[7][23][24]
• C. C. Perkins and J. S. Dwight publish the first history of a musical society in the United States, that of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston.^[25][26]
• John Slocum, who began preaching revelations the year before, is seen as being healed by his wife Mary's prayers; the Slocums' followers come to create the Shaker Church, of which music is an integral part.^[27]
• F. L. Ritter publishes the first comprehensive music history of the United States, Music in America.^[28]
• The Freeman, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based periodical, is founded, soon becoming the primary trade paper for African American theatrical groups.^[29]
• Gretsch becomes the first drum manufacturer in the United States.^[30]
• J. S. Putnam's "New Coon in Town" is one of the first hit coon songs to be published.^[31]

1884[edit]

• The first "thorough representations of German opera" in the United States are held at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, with Tannhäuser.^[32]
• The first "normal school for the preparation of music teachers" is established by Julia Ettie Crane in Potsdam, New York.^[33][34]
• Japanese immigration to the United States increases considerably following the legalization of labor emigration in Japan.^[35]
• The first summer training course for exclusively music teachers is held in Lexington, Massachusetts.^[36]

1885[edit]

• Charles Fletcher Lummis begins one of the earliest collections of Spanish folk songs soon after he arrives in Los Angeles.^[37]
• M. Wittmark and Sons is formed to focus exclusively on publishing popular parlor music.^[8]
• A Hawaiian schoolboy named Joseph Kekuku is credited with inventing the Hawaiian guitar, in which strings are melodically picked and stopped by a metal bar, with the guitar held across the lap.^[38][39]
• Scott Joplin arrives in St. Louis, Missouri and soon becomes a fixture at the Silver Dollar Saloon, beginning his career which will put "his creative stamp on that great body of music that came to be known as classic ragtime".^[40][41] The Saloon is owned by John Turpin, an important patron of ragtime whose son, Thomas Million Turpin is known as the "Father of St. Louis Ragtime".^[42]
• The Chicago Music Company releases the first opera by an American woman to be published, The Joust, Or, The Tournament, by G. Estabrook^[43]
• The Anglo-Canadian Music Publishers' Association is formed to protect the copyrights of European music publishers.^[44]

1886[edit]

• (Approximate) Wovoka, a medicine man of the Northern Paiute, articulates the messianic message of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which fused Christian (particularly Presbyterian and Mormon) teachings with those of Wovoka's father, Ta'vibo, which revolved around traditionalism and resurrection.^[45]
• Several Swedish American choirs join together to form the Union of Scandinavian Singers, which becomes a major part of the Swedish American music industry.^[22]
• John Philip Sousa's "The Gladiator March" sells more than a million copies, marking a turning point in his career.^[46]
• The principal international agreement on copyright, the Berne Convention, is signed; the United States will not sign until 1989.^[47]

1887[edit]

• The Dawes Act establishes the reservation system and distributes land to Native American families, destroying the traditional social setup of many indigenous cultures, leading to a reduction in traditional music and dance.^[2]
• Emile Berliner invents the first disc recording method and the gramophone.^[48][49]
• Abraham Goldfaden, the father of Yiddish theater, immigrates to New York City.^[50]
• Wax cylinders replace tinfoil as a recording medium.^[51]

1888[edit]

Late 1880s music trends
The Metropolitan Opera becomes financially solvent as it specializes in German opera.[23] The modern form of Native American powwow traditions begin to evolve.[2]

• The American Folklore Society is formed, modeled after the Folklore Society of Britain, and dedicated to gathering and publishing the folk songs and stories of North America.^[52][53]
• Arthur W. Foote's The Wreck of the Hesperus is, along with his The Skeleton in Armor (1893), "regarded as a culmination of the long productive tradition of the dramatic cantata in America".^[54]

1889[edit]

• Antoni Mallek forms the Polish Singers Alliance, an influential national Polish American organization.^[55]
• The composer Edward McDowell premiers his Piano Concerto No. 2 in New York, establishing him as one of the most prominent composers of the era.^[56]
• W. S. B. Matthews' A Hundred Years of Music in America is the first attempt at a history of "popular and the higher music education" in the country; it hails Lowell Mason as the founder of American music.^[25][57]
• The first African American woman to compose a produced opera is Louisa Melvin Delos Mars, with Leoni, the Gypsy Queen.^[58] She is also one of the three women who each became the first to have an operetta they composed produced, along with Emma Marcy Raymond's Dovetta and Emma Roberts Steiner's Fleurette.^[43]
• John Philip Sousa's "The Washington Post" establishes his reputation as the country's foremost composer of marches.^[59]
• Ethnologist J. Walter Fewkes becomes the first to use a phonograph, a treadle-run machine, to record Native American music and speech^[60]
• Harriett Gibbs Marshall becomes the first African American woman to graduate with a degree in music from Oberlin College. She will go on to found the Washington Conservatory of Music.^[61]
• Louis Glass installs a coin-operated phonograph in a saloon in San Francisco,^[62] the first predecessor of the jukebox.^[63]
• Columbia Records releases the first catalog of recordings, consisting of ten pages worth of cylinder recordings. The catalog is intended primarily for jukeboxes.^[64]

1890[edit]

• An era that has been called a "golden age" begins, centered around a group of composers in Boston including John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, Arthur Foote and Amy Beach. This group is variously called the Second New England School, the Boston Classicists or the Boston Academics^[65]
• Native American music is recorded for the first time.^[66]
• The Tin Pan Alley neighborhood begins to form in New York City, and Oliver Ditson & Co. becomes the most prominent music publisher of the era.^[67]
• A Trip to Chinatown is a historical theatrical production, running for a record 657 performances.^[8]
• Jesse Walter Fewkes makes the first musical field recordings, specifically of Passamaquoddy songs and stories, performed in Calais, Maine by Peter Selmore and Noel Josephs.^[17][68]
• The Ghost Dance, a Native American spiritual movement, of which music and dance were integral parts, is banned after the Wounded Knee Massacre.^[45]
• Sam Jacks' Creole Burlesque Company opens in New York, and is a popular novelty act, unusual for a time in that the cast includes both men and women, and the show's format is more variety than minstrel show.^[69]
• Samuel W. Cole leads what is probably the first high school production of a full oratorio in the country.^[70]

1891[edit]

• The Chicago Symphony Orchestra forms, with income from backers who pledged $1000 for each of three years. The backers formed an Orchestral Association, which hired a music director. Many cities subsequently used the same model, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Minneapolis.^[6][7]
• Leopold Vincent publishes the Alliance and Labor Songster, a pioneering early collection of labor songs.^[71]
• Carnegie Hall is built in New York City as a venue for classical performances.^[72] It will become the foremost concert stage in the city.^[73]
• Changes in copyright law under the International Copyright Act of 1891 make it impossible to publish foreign music without payment to the original composer or publisher.^[74] This stimulates the establishment of American subsidiaries of foreign publishing companies.^[75]
• A Trip to Chinatown is first published; it can be considered one of the first examples of American musical theater, as it consists of a single plot that the entire production revolves around.^[7]
• Charles Davis Tillman (1861–1943) publishes "The Old Time Religion" to his largely white audience.^[76]

1892[edit]

• Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák arrives for a stay in the United States as director of the National Conservatory in New York.^[77] He becomes a fierce advocate for cultural and musical nationalism, and is very interested in American music incorporating African American and Native American music.^[7][12]
• Papa Jack Laine, a white drummer and saxophonist from New Orleans, claims that he is the first to use the first saxophone in the proto-jazz bands of New Orleans. He is sometimes said to have formed the first ragtime band as well.^[78] Laine is considered one of the first white jazz musicians.^[79]
• John Philip Sousa forms a band that set a new standard for American professional bands, having left the U.S. Marine Band.^[80] He and his band will be the most prominent and influential professional symphonic group at the peak of popularity for bands of that sort.^[7]
• Charles K. Harris premiers "After the Ball", a waltz typical of the time,^[8] which is said to be the most popular song of the decade,^[81] and the biggest hit of the century.^[82] It is interpolated into a play, and the sheet music is said to have sold more than five million copies.^[8]
• Harry Lawrence Freeman becomes the first African American to have an opera he wrote produced, his first work, Epthelia. He will become known for combining secular and sacred African American music with traditional Western opera.^[83]

Early 1890s music trends
Irish-American dominance in musical theater ends.[84] The husband-and-wife duo Dora Dean and Charles E. Johnson, inSam T. Jack's Creole Show, become probably the first African Americans to perform the cakewalkonstage.[85]

1893[edit]

• Alice Fletcher begins her prolific scholarly career with a study of the music of the Omaha tribe of Native Americans.^[86][87] The study, done with the assistance of Francis La Flesche, took ten years to complete.^[25]
• The World's Columbian Exposition, a watershed in American culture,^[88] attracts attention to the Chicago ragtime scene, led by patriarch Plunk Henry and exemplified in performance at the Exposition by Johnny Seymour^[89] and Scott Joplin^[90] Violinist Joseph Douglass achieves wide recognition after his performance there, and will become the first African American violinist to conduct a transcontinental tour, and the first to tour as a concert violinist.^[91][92] The first Indonesian music performance in the United States is believed to occur at the Exposition.^[93] At the same event, an ensemble of musicians with a dancer known as Little Egypt, is the first exposure to Middle Eastern culture for many Americans,^[94] while a group of hula dancers leads to an increased awareness of Hawaiian music among Americans throughout the country.^[38]
• Katherine Lee Bates writes "America the Beautiful" at Pike's Peak, Colorado. Though "The Star-Spangled Banner" will be chosen, "America the Beautiful" will be the other major option for a national anthem when it is chosen in 1931.^[95]
• Czech composer Antonín Dvořák calls spirituals "all that is needed for a great and noble school of music".^[96]
• Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago is the first music school connected to the settlement work.^[97]
• Philosopher Richard Wallaschek sparks the "origins" controversy when he puts forth the claim that African American spirituals are primarily derived from European music.^[98] This will not be solved conclusively until the 1960s, when scholars showed that spirituals were "grounded in African-derived music values yet shaped into its distinctiveness as a direct result of the North American sociocultural experience".^[99]
• The first Chinese opera theater in New York City is opened in Chinatown.^[20]
• The murder of Ellen Smith in Mount Airy, North Carolina leads to the composition of "Poor Ellen Smith", set to the melody of "How Firm a Foundation"; the subsequent controversy regarding the trial of Peter DeGraff for her murder leads to the song's spread across the state, so much so that Forsyth County, North Carolina banned the singing of "Poor Ellen Smith".^[100]
• Ruthven Lang's Dramatic Overture is presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, marking the first time that institution had performed the work of an American woman composer.^[101]

Mid 1890s music trends

The massacres of numerous Armenians in Turkey leads to the first wave of large-scale Armenian immigration to the United States, and the beginning of Armenian American music.[94] The public exhibition of motion pictures, almost always with live music played locally, begins.[102] The bands of John Robichaux andBuddy Bolden in New Orleans become the top dance bands of the era, and frequently competitive, both economically and in actual performances. These bands are a significant precursor of jazz.[103]

1894[edit]

• The Standard Quartette of Chicago becomes the first commercial recording of an African American singing quartet.^[104]
• The Black Extravaganza, an outdoor concert in New York City, featuring the Four Harmony Kings, the Old South Quartette and other popular African American musicians, a "breakthrough" show in the history of African American music.^[105]
• Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert begins presenting concerts of Slavic music Harvard University, one of the first American composers to incorporate Slavic elements.^[106]
• Orville Gibson begins selling guitars, his technical innovations helping to spread the instrument throughout the United States.^[107]
• New Orleans, Louisiana passes a law requiring Creoles to live uptown, thus bringing them and their music into closer contact with African Americans.^[103]
• Approximate: Dee Dee Chandler is the first "dance drummer to use the foot pedal.^[108]
• Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hire George Thomas to "illustrate" through Magic lantern glass slides the lyrics of their song "The Little Lost Child" being performed by a group of Primrose and West minstrels. This was probably the first-ever example of a "music video".^[109][110]
• E. B. Marks forms a music publishing company, which will become one of the first to publish African American songwriters with great success.^[111]

1895[edit]

• The Octoroon becomes the first "important black (theatrical) production".^[8]
• Charles L. Edwards publishes Bahama Songs and Stories, featuring spirituals collected in the Bahamas, much of the population of which, at the time, was descended from African American slaves.^[112]
• Alice Fletcher makes the first known recordings of the Ghost Dance, specifically the songs of two Southern Arapaho men who were visiting Washington, D.C., Left Hand and Row of Lodges.^[27] Some of her previous research had inspired Frances Densmore, who began series of very successful lectures on Native American music.^[113]
• The first permanent orchestras are established in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.^[7]
• John Philips Sousa's El Capitan is his most successful operetta, and will run continuously from 1896 to 1900 in North America.^[114]
• The murder of William Lyons by Lee Shelton in St. Louis will inspire a ballad called "Stagger Lee", which will be recording more than 150 times since 1897, making Lee the most prominent criminal in American folk music.^[115]
• With The Wizard of the Nile, Victor Herbert launches a string of forty successful operettas, several of which have become staples of the American repertoire and produced a "lasting heritage of popular songs".^[116]
• The American Federation of Musicians is founded.^[117]
• Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium (Dynamophone) is one of the earliest, and possibly still the largest, electric instrument.^[118]
• Aeolian introduces the Aeriola player piano.^[62]

1896[edit]

• The American Federation of Musicians is founded.^[119]
• Edward McDowell's Indian Suite is premiered; it is an influential work that incorporates aspects of Native American music.^[120] He is also offered the first music professorship at Columbia University, whose nominating committee praises him as "the greatest musical genius America has produced".^[121]
• Six booking agents pool their resources to form the Syndicate, which came to control theaters in New York and across the country.^[122]
• The first "distinctively syncopated songs (are) published under the 'ragtime' label".^[123] These include "My Coal Black Lady" by W. H. Krell and Ernest Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me".^[124]
• The Church of God and Saints of Christ is founded in Oklahoma by William Saunders Crowdy. The Church is known in part for a "self-sufficient musical tradition without equal that consumes more than half of any service".^[125]
• James Mooney publishes a monograph of Native American Ghost Dance songs, which are first commercially released this year by the National Gramophone Company; it is probable that the recordings are of Mooney or his brother Charles.^[27]
• Ernest Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me" is an immediate hit,^[126] and launches a fad for syncopated coon songs that lasts until World War I.^[127] The published version carries a caption, describing the second chorus, which is the "earliest association of the word rag (as in ragtime) to instrumental music".^[128]
• Gussie L. Davis, the most successful African American songwriter in Tin Pan Alley, has his biggest hit with "In the Baggage Coach Ahead".^[129]
• Amy Cheney Beach's Gaelic Symphony is the first symphony composed by a woman to be performed, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.^[101] Beach will be accepted as the first American female "composer of significance" in the country.^[130]
• Homer A. Norris publishes Practical Harmony on a French Basis, a precursor and harbinger of American classical music's upcoming move from a German-oriented style to a French one.^[131]
• Tom Turpin's "Harlem Rag" is the first published ragtime song.^[132]
• Vaudeville shows begin using motion pictures.^[133]
• John Phillips Sousa's El Capitan becomes the first major American operetta.^[134]

Late 1890s music trends
The first music festival celebrating Finnish American culture are organized by various Finnish temperance societies.[22]

1897[edit]

• The "golden age" of composition in the Second New England School ends.^[65]
• The Library of Congress creates a section for music-related materials.^[135]
• Bob Cole and Billy Johnson compose A Trip to Coontown, one of the productions that helped to establish the field of African American musical comedy.^[58] It is the first black show to appear on Broadway.^[136]
• Buddy Bolden's band begins performing; some will consider this the first jazz band,^[127] and Bolden the first jazz musician.^[137] Bolden is an influential cornetist in the early history of jazz,^[138] and his band innovates the use of the string bass in place of the tuba.^[139]
• Paul Dresser writes "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away", one of his most popular songs and later the state song of Indiana.^[140]
• William H. Krell copyrights "Mississippi Rag", the first "published piano piece to include the word rag (as in ragtime) in its title". It is advertised as the first ragtime song.^[141] However, Theodore Northrup's "Louisiana Rag", published later in the year, is sometimes considered the first "genuine piano rag".^[134][142] Tom Turpin's "Harlem Rag", the first rag composed by an African American to be published, is also published in this year, and the first ragtime recordings are made by Vess L. Ossman and the Metropolitan Band, while Ben Harney, pianist-composer, publishes the Rag-time Instructor.^[143] The first actual use of the word in a popular media ragtime is in a Chicago newspaper article this year.^[144][145]
• New Orleans, led by Alderman Story, sets up a prostitution district called Storyville. Musicians gravitate there, and the area becomes a hotbed of innovation and a major part of the origins of jazz.^[103][146]
• Henry Sloan, a legendary, little-known bluesman, played the blues as early as this year. He will go on to mentor Charley Patton, one of the earliest bluesmen.^[147]

1898[edit]

• Ragtime songs begin to appear on the stage.^[148]
• Will Marion Cook's Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk and Bob Cole's A Trip to Coontown are the first musicals "written, directed and performed by African American artists".^[8] Clorindy, a ragtime operetta, introduced "syncopated 'hot' music to Broadway" and starred Ernest Hogan.^[83] A Trip to Coontown is the "first full-length musical play written and produced by blacks on Broadway",^[149][150] and the first black operetta in the modern syncopated style.^[151] It is a harbinger of a new style: the American musical theater.^[136]
• Music education is first introduced into the public school system of New York City.^[152]
• Victor Herbert's "Romany Life" is the first major American composition in the Hungarian "Gypsy" style.^[7]
• Puerto Rico becomes a part of the United States, leading to the arrival of numerous immigrants and with them, Puerto Rican music in New York City and elsewhere.^[153]
• The first African Methodist Episcopal hymnal to contain written music is published.^[154]
• The first African American nationalist composer, Harry T. Burleigh, "to achieve national distinction as a composer, arranger, and concert artist" begins composing.^[155]
• The National Federation of Music Clubs, the largest music teachers association in the country, is founded.^[152]
• The William Morris Agency is founded. It will be the largest agency in the country by the end of the 20th century.^[156]
• Wurlitzer builds the first coin-operated player piano.^[62]

1899[edit]

• Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" is published by John Stillwell Stark in Sedalia, Missouri; the song is a "landmark in American music history" and is a great commercial success, unprecedented for a black composer.^[157][158] It remains the most famous and popular piano rag,^[127] and "establishe(s) a model for classic ragtime that (will be) emulated by all rag composers interested in serious composition". Since its first publication, Maple Leaf Rag has never been out of print. ^[159][160]
• The wildly popular "My Wild Irish Rose" continues the popular Irish song tradition within the United States.^[7]
• Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag" is published; it is his "first and most famous ragtime piece", and it will establish his career as one of the top composers of Eastern ragtime.^[161]
• African-English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor attends a concert held by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, inspiring him to create a collection of African-derived melodies, arranged for the piano. The Bamboula becomes the most popular, and his works make a "marked impression on the American public, particularly in black communities".^[162]
• Perry J. Lowery becomes the "first black musician to take his vaudeville acts into the circus", with his group's performance in Madison Square Garden for the Sells and Forepaugh Brothers Circus.^[163]
• The Jewish chorister's union strikes for wages rather than profit shares.^[164]