Action Music in American Pantomime and Melodrama, 1730-1913

Abstract

As Cynthia Hoover demonstrates in her article earlier in this issue, and as Julian Mates argues in his recent article in American Music,' American theater of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was predominantly musical. A good deal of their argument is based on the presence of songs and dances composed for or interpolated into everything from ballad opera to Shakespearian drama. Adding songs, even to nonmusical plays, was a well-known practice evidenced in published sheet playbills, and programs. Many such interpolations served as a drawing card for particular performers; for example, a playbill for the 1801 performance of A Cure for the Heart Ache at the Boston Federal Street Theatre reads: In the course of the Evening, the Echo Song of How D'Yedo by Mrs. Graupner Accompanied on the Hautboy by Mr. Graupner.2 Equally prevalent but far less known to historians is the eighteenthand nineteenth-century practice of composing music to accompany specific stage action, especially in the popular genres of pantomime and melodrama. This music, generally wordless and often woven organically into the dramatic continuum, made the musical presence in early American theater still stronger. Action music often escapes the notice of historians. It is not usually published as sheet not described in libretti or announced in playbills, and not often mentioned in reviews. Yet it has been practiced by generations of theater musicians, and, as such, is often formulaic and traditional, relying on known and accepted standards, hence maintaining a greater degree of stylistic continuity than other sorts of theater music which are often intentionally innovative. Because action music is often supplied by local composers, it is also one of the first areas where Americans began to contribute newly composed music for the theater. This article will outline two centuries of action music in the American theater, focusing especially on music for pantomime and melodrama and on the continuity of its functions.

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