Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1991
Abstract
Histories of American music are largely histories of that part of the United States that lies east of the Mississippi, especially of the eastern seaboard. H. Wiley Hitchcock in his Music in the United States tends to dismiss the area to the west of such cities as Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis as of little importance for American music history, but because almost no research has been done on the music of that area, he has nothing on which to base his assumptions. For the researcher who troubles to look for it, there is ample evidence in the periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that what Hitchcock calls a "cultivated tradition" in music existed and was pursued with remarkable vigor in the towns and cities of the Great Plains. 1
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 11:4 (Fall 1991). Copyright © 1991 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.