On the Fourth of July, 1826, Augusta Browne strolled along the streets of Boston with her siblings and parents. The day held special significance since it was the fiftieth anniversary of Independence Day, the day the Continental Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. Bands were marching and performing in parades and celebrations throughout Boston. Augusta’s father had even persuaded Mr. Kendall’s Brigade Band to play his American Grand March in one of the events.
The Browne family had only arrived in Boston a few weeks earlier. It was Augusta’s first taste of America after living in St. John (New Brunswick, Canada) since she was a toddler. The Boston Commercial Gazette reported that the “glorious day was celebrated in this city with every becoming demonstration of joy and gratitude.” The little girl drank in the sights and sounds of the grand celebration in Boston. Memory of the festive, patriotic music heard that day may have lingered in Augusta’s mind as one of her earliest impressions of the United States. That memory may have been a catalyst years later for her American Bouquet.
As a young professional of twenty or twenty-one in New York City, Augusta published a patriotic medley that would have been sure to please many amateur music makers. The piano solo was not too difficult and contained three familiar national tunes: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle.” These arrangements weren’t intended for singing. There are no song lyrics, and keyboard elaboration sometimes takes precedence over the melodic line. But this was a musical number with good market potential. Arrangements of patriotic tunes were always in fashion and sold well in antebellum America. Augusta hit on the name The American Bouquet to offer a fresh title that would be appealing to girls and women, who made up a solid share of U.S. sheet music buyers and consumers. The prominent dedication to “Miss Sarah E. Wise” is the subject of Part 2 of this blog.
A Bouquet of National Songs
Within weeks of Augusta Browne’s arrival in New York City in May 1841, the New York Herald announced four of her publications for sale at the family business at 700 Broadway. The August 6, 1841, advertisement named the American Bouquet among the four titles, and urged, “We cannot render our female readers greater service than by advising them to call on Miss B. and purchase the above.” “Bouquet” was not common in music titles in 1841, when Augusta began to use the expression in a deliberate way for her medleys of national songs. The label became a personal brand for the emerging composer. She followed her American Bouquet with French, English, Caledonian (Scottish), and Hibernian (Irish) bouquets.
Each “bouquet” contained three to five familiar songs from the source country, such as the “Marseillaise” in the French Bouquet or “God Save the Queen” in the English Bouquet. Interludes and variations connected one tune to the next. The medleys appeared in print between 1841 and 1844, although the sheet music items listed no year of copyright. This was a marketing strategy; without a specific date, sheet music could always appear to be recent publications. Newspaper announcements and advertisements offer the best evidence for when each piano bouquet came onto the market.
The American Bouquet begins with a straightforward rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.” “Hail Columbia” receives the greatest prominence in the medley with the presence of a lively variation before “Yankee Doodle” concludes the piece. “Hail Columbia” was played frequently for national events before the “Star Spangled Banner” became the official U.S. anthem in 1931. Augusta’s arrangement of “Hail Columbia” makes use of scales and keyboard figuration, while “Yankee Doodle” suggests the sounds of band instruments, noting “Fifes and Drums” when “Yankee Doodle” is played high in the piano with low, rolled bass chords. “Horns” (“Corni”) are noted when the tune is repeated in the middle of the keyboard.
You can hear the American Bouquet (3 min. 40 sec.) by clicking on the audio file below. Osbourn’s original edition of the American Bouquet is viewable and downloadable in a copy held by the Boston Public Library at https://archive.org/details/americanbouquetc00brow.
The American Bouquet was first published in Philadelphia by James G. Osbourn’s “music saloon” (i.e., salon). Osbourn conducted a music shop and printing business in addition to teaching music lessons. He seems to have taken an interest in Augusta as an up-and-coming composer and published several of her works between 1839 and 1841. He also supplied music to Godey’s Magazine during the same period, including two of Augusta’s songs in 1841.
Osbourn published at least three editions of the American Bouquet, indicating that the piano solo enjoyed good success and sales. Osbourn’s third edition is available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015096699858&view=1up&seq=1. Another Philadelphia firm, Lee & Walker, also printed the piece, and so did the New York publisher Horace Waters. The number found a place in anthologies of music for the home, including J. C. Beckel’s 10 Home Amusements (Lee & Walker, 1852; available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015096461721&view=1up&seq=1).
Augusta took the step of revising and republishing her bouquets of national airs in 1857 with the Boston firm of Oliver Ditson, which still listed her piece in 1880. The price of the four-page piano solo was twenty cents, about the cost of two pounds of rice or sugar. The trail of reprints and republications suggests that the American Bouquet enjoyed the longest sales of any of Browne’s sheet music.
Ear-Catching Details
When you listen to the audio file of the American Bouquet, you may hear some aspects of the song melodies that seem odd or unfamiliar.
In Browne’s bouquet, the “Star Spangled Banner” begins with three strokes of the same note (do-do-do), rather than the falling figure (sol-mi-do) that we are accustomed to hearing today.
This repeated note pattern occurs in the earliest publications of the “Anacreontic Song,” a British drinking song that provided the melody for the “Star Spangled Banner.” For more about the “Anacreontic Song,” read Nic Butler’s recent blog at https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/star-spangled-spirit-charleston.
Augusta’s medley followed the early outline of the “Star Spangled Banner.” The repeated note opening remained common in sheet music publications of the “Star Spangled Banner” as late as the 1850s.
“Yankee Doodle” also appeared in quite a few variants from the Revolutionary era through the Civil War. The melody in the American Bouquet uses several less familiar notes in the second half of the melody (“Yankee Doodle keep it up…Mind the music and the step…). The variants are clear from the use of accidental and sharp signs in the second line of the melody.
When Augusta arranged the patriotic songs in the bouquet medley around 1840, she was living in Philadelphia. George Willig was one of the music publishers active in the city between 1800 and 1850. Willig’s imprint of variations on “Yankee Doodle” shows the same pattern of naturals and sharps in the second half of the tune.
The notes in the American Bouquet that may sound strange to a modern listener were familiar to Americans in her lifetime.
National Airs in Concert
Many composers published medleys of national airs in Europe and America during the nineteenth century. The great piano virtuosi of France and Germany created brilliant variations on tunes during their concerts. Franz Liszt famously improvised on “Rule Britannia” when he toured England as a teenager.
Some composers published their virtuoso renditions in which they wove together several tunes as a finale. Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed and published (1862) his thundering Union: Paraphrase on National Airs during the Civil War based on the same three tunes (in the same order) as the American Bouquet (listen to a Youtube performance such as Michael Brown’s sizzling rendition at Alice Tully Hall in 2016: https://www.chambermusicsociety.org/watch-and-listen/video/2016-video-archive-3/gottschalk-the-union-concert-paraphrase-on-national-airs-for-piano-op-48 ). You can hear “Yankee Doodle” combined with “Hail Columbia” at about 6 min. 48 sec. Just as Augusta had done twenty years earlier, Gottschalk placed the “Yankee Doodle” tune in the high treble of the keyboard to suggest fifes.
Another national medley on patriotic American airs is Henri Herz’s fantasy on “Jackson’s March,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle.” Augusta greatly admired the Parisian pianist’s elegant keyboard writing and probably heard him perform when he toured the U.S. during the second half of the 1840s. An excerpt from Herz’s variations on “Yankee Doodle” demonstrated his dazzling treatment of the homespun tune.
Herz’s American medley was published at least five years after the American Bouquet.
Augusta’s bouquet was never meant to overwhelm audiences with marvels of keyboard wizardry like Herz or Gottschalk. Nonetheless, when Augusta performed the American Bouquet as a solo number during a concert with the English singer John Braham in December 1842, she may well have improvised more keyboard embroidery than found in the print version. The amateur pianist at home was the intended consumer of her American Bouquet, and her direct presentation of the three national songs reflected that objective.
Another American Bouquet
A further manifestation of Augusta Browne’s unusual title occurred in a far more recent time and place. In 1996 the American composer George Rochberg (1918–2005) composed his own American Bouquet (Versions of Popular Music), a thirty-minute guitar solo for Eliot Fisk based on melodies from several popular songs from the 1920s and ’30s (“My Heart Stood Still,” by Richard Rodgers; “I Only Have Eyes for You,” by Harry Warren; and several others). The vintage songs became the source for new music created with free composition growing out of the old melodies. Rochberg incorporated music from other composers and eras in a number of works, especially during the 1970s.
How Rochberg hit upon “American Bouquet” as a title is less clear. He may have seen and remembered the striking phrase during his years in Philadelphia as a music professor at the University of Pennsylvania. It is fitting that Philadelphia would be the connection between Augusta Browne’s piano solo composed ca. 1840 and Rochberg’s guitar composition completed in 1996, some 150 years later. Both works were created and published in Philadelphia.
Part 2 of this blog takes up the question of who was Sarah Wise, to whom Augusta Browne’s American Bouquet was dedicated.