"Popular" and "Classical" in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Americans in general now accept the casual division of music into two categories, classical and popular. Though they may debate the wisdom of organizing the musical universe in this fashion and choose to avoid these terms in formal discourse, the terms are familiar and may crop up regularly in informal circumstances. The exact age of these and similar distinctions has not been firmly established. John Spitzer observes that historians of American music have long recognized the importance of the growing separation between highbrow and lowbrow music in nineteenth-century America. He cites H. Wiley Hitchcock, who locates the split between 'cultivated' and 'vernacular' traditions.. . well before the Civil War... and Nicholas

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