Nineteenth-Century Music

Musicological research on nineteenth-century music blossomed during the 1970s. The surge was solidified with the founding of the journal 19th-Century Music in 1977, roughly a year after the establishment of the Sonneck Society and a decade before the appearance of AmeriGrove I. During this decade, the journal published seven articles on nineteenth-century American subjects (all on the United States, not other American regions or countries). By contrast, the official journal of the Sonneck Society, American Music, published nearly twice that number between 1983 and 1986 alone. Although this simple metric has sociological explanations exceeding the scope of this review, it suggests that work on nineteenth-century music in the Americas stood at some remove from general musicological discourse in the Sonneck Society's early days.