When I began to browse university library shelves in 1983 in search of music published in magazines from the past, I was surprised by how many pieces indicated women as the composers.[1] I saw so many examples that I began to compile the names of women and their music that I found in different periodicals.[2] Augusta Browne was one of the names that turned up most frequently in American magazines. Between 1840 and 1850 she published songs and piano solos in at least six different periodical titles.[3] Browne’s keyboard dance The Columbian Quick-Step—published in the Columbian Magazine in December 1844—was one of the first pieces that I selected for use in lecture-recitals about magazine music.[4]
The lively music of The Columbian Quick-Step is a delightful example of Americana, as heard in this audio file. The piece reflects a time when people played and sang together at home for pleasure, and concert programs were a potpourri of genres and performers intended to entertain and please listeners.
The Columbian Quick-Step included a dedication by the composer to the magazine readers. The ternary form (ABA) is simple and typical for dance music of the era. The contrasting “Trio” or B section provides a change of mood, key, and theme before a return to the spirited music of the A section. After the quasi-military salute of the introduction, the phrases of music are four or eight measures long, usually repeated or paired in regular phrases ideal for listening or for social dancing in the domestic parlor, as illustrated in a sheet music cover from the 1850s.
Augusta Browne was a woman who purposefully cultivated magazines as a medium to distribute her music and her prose. Periodicals multiplied dramatically with each subsequent decade of the nineteenth century. Many women found a niche as authors who supplied the stories and poetry that filled out the pages of monthly, fortnightly, or weekly papers and magazines. Women could write from the privacy of home, yet their work could circulate to a wide public. Newspapers and periodicals published similar literary content alongside news, and hard-pressed editors freely copied and reprinted material from one serial to another. Nowadays it is easy to see the Columbian Magazine and many other periodicals with music in digital databases (e.g., American Periodicals) and through open sources such as the online HathiTrust Digital Library (www.hathitrust.org) or Google Books.
The Columbian Magazine published an unusual proportion of music, poetry, and prose by women authors. The magazine was launched as a New York competitor to the leading domestic monthly periodical, Godey’s Magazine, which was published in Philadelphia. Godey’s also included music every month, including two of Augusta Browne’s songs.[5] The twenty-year-old composer, her parents, and siblings moved from Philadelphia to New York City in May 1841. Browne would live in Manhattan or Brooklyn for more than two decades while she worked as a music teacher, church organist, keyboardist, composer, and author. The young composer produced a steady stream of songs and piano solos throughout the 1840s. New York was the hub of the commercial music business, but Browne also published her music and prose in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.
War with Mexico
In 1846 Augusta’s youngest brother William Henry Browne (1825–1900) volunteered to fight in the burgeoning war with Mexico. Out of 100,000 Americans who fought in the Mexican-American War, some 75,000 were volunteers. In recognition of his eagerness to serve in the conflict, Browne republished her Columbian Quick-Step as the Mexican Volunteers Quickstep with a new dedication to her brother (New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1847). Note for note, the pieces are identical. It’s clear why she chose to reuse the dance for a military solo during the war with Mexico. The music readily suggests the trumpets and the galloping horses of the cavalry riding into battle.
The retitled sheet music received enthusiastic endorsements in New York newspapers. The Brooklyn Eagle described the piece as “brilliant, yet easy” and “well worth a trial” in recurring advertisements in January 1847. A longer notice in the weekly Subterranean paper on Jan. 23, 1847, called it “a very excellent piece of music (quick step) composed by a very beautiful and intelligent young lady, Miss Augusta Browne, and dedicated to Lieut. W. H. Browne, of the First Regiment of New York Volunteers, now on his way to Mexico. We advise all our female readers to purchase this and see how sweet a tribute a patriotic sister can render to a gallant and beloved brother.”
In response to the positive coverage, Browne turned the dance into a song. She collaborated with Mary Balmanno, a literary friend and kindred artistic spirit, who provided lyrics for several of Browne’s songs. The British-born Balmanno crafted poetry to fit the existing melodic phrases of the quickstep as closely as possible for “The Volunteers’ War Song” (New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1847). Thicker chords were added to the piano accompaniment, and the trio theme of Browne’s dance became an interlude marked “Bugles” at the end of each verse. The “Volunteers’ War Song” offered hearty encouragement to the New York volunteers to the tune of the Columbian Quick-Step: “Oh come oh come, oh merrily come, March on my lads, to the beat of the drum, With a martial strain, as we cheerily go, Through the sunny vales of Mexico.”
There is a long musical tradition in which earlier works were rewritten for later purposes, a tradition personified by Johann Sebastian Bach, who reworked his earlier cantatas, and George Frideric Handel, who borrowed movements from previous works for use in later ones. Augusta Browne enacted that tradition when she repurposed her attractive Columbian Quick-Step as the Mexican Volunteers Quickstep, then refashioned the musical material into “The Volunteers’ War Song.”
The sheet music cover for the song shows a youthful volunteer in uniform seated beside a table bearing his oversize army cap. The young man pictured on the sheet music was likely Augusta’s brother William Henry Browne. The image used for the lithographed cover probably originated as a studio daguerreotype taken of the young man before he departed for Mexico.
Next to the sheet music image is a daguerreotype (ca. 1846) of Second Lieutenant Bezaleel W. Armstrong in a similar pose in a studio setting (National Archives). The Mexican American War was the training ground for many U.S. officers who led armies during the Civil War (Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, George McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman), but Armstrong was not one of them. He succumbed to illness in 1849 at the age of twenty-six. William Henry Browne went on to serve as a volunteer in the Union army throughout the Civil War and ultimately earned the rank of brigadier general by brevet in 1865.
Sheet Music and Wartime
Songs and piano pieces celebrating the victories of the Mexican War rolled off the sheet music press. In December 1847 the Richmond, Virginia, music shop of Nash & Woodhouse led their advertisment for sheet music with “The Volunteers’ War Song” in the Richmond Commercial Compiler. Also on the list were the Buena Vista March, by W. C. Peters, and Santa Anna’s March, as heard on the Battlefield of Buena Vista, likely the work of William Ratel. Augusta’s better-known contemporary Stephen Foster (1826–64) also contributed to the swell of patriotic music inspired by the conflict in Mexico with his own quickstep, Santa Anna’s Retreat from Buena Vista.
Along with praise for the heroes came laments for the fallen. One of the dead at Buena Vista was the politician Henry Clay’s son Henry Clay, Jr. Augusta Browne composed an elegiac song of mourning for the “valiant dead in Mexico,” and wrote to the Senator to ask whether she could dedicate the song to him. Clay responded, “I need not say that the affecting subject of the song touches me both as a father and I hope a patriot.” The dirge-like “Warlike Dead in Mexico” was an elaborate setting suitable for a public occasion, with lyrics provided again by Mrs. Balmanno.
In February 1848 the new song was included at a concert of the American Musical Institute in New York City.[6] The tenor William D. Comes sang the number, possibly with Augusta Browne accompanying at the piano, or perhaps with the music arranged for Dodworth’s band, which also played that evening. The chromolithographed sheet music cover featured illustrations of the battle of Buena Vista, Monterey, Cerro Gordo, Veracruz, and Mexico City. Owing to its brilliant colors and military subject, the sheet music for “The Warlike Dead in Mexico” has been retained in several archives, for example: https://library.uta.edu/usmexicowar/item?content_id=1617&format_id=5&ofst=11&ni=14.
The barrage of topical music published in response to the Mexican War would be amplified into a deluge during the Civil War. Some of America’s most familiar national songs, like the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” originated in the War Between the States.
Curiously, Augusta Browne did not contribute any songs or piano pieces that were specific to the Civil War. War with Mexico had been a faraway event, but the Civil War took place all too close to home. Anxiety about the safety of her brother on the battlefield overshadowed enthusiasm for his volunteer service. The youthful exuberance of the Columbian Quick-Step became as distant as the war in Mexico. Aside from composing a few hymns and parlor songs, Browne turned her attention to prose writing in magazines like the monthly Knickerbocker and the weekly New York Observer during the Civil War. Her music publications may have lagged, but her presence in magazines remained strong.
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[1] This topic grew out of my doctoral dissertation, a study of a piece by Arnold Schoenberg (Herzgewächse, op. 20) published in Der blaue Reiter, a periodical of German Expressionism (1912). I soon found a flood of music in magazines before and after. The earliest magazines in which I encountered music scores came from England and France in the late seventeenth century. As early as 1678 the courtly periodical Le Mercure included airs by Mlle. Sicard. During the eighteenth century, songs by the British composer Miss Eliza Turner (d. 1756) appeared in several London monthly magazines.
While men far outnumbered women composers in most of these magazines, it was a revelation to see so much evidence of women’s activity in creating as well as performing music. For more about Eliza Turner in the Lady’s Magazine, see Bonny H. Miller, “Education, Entertainment, Embellishment: Music Publication in the Lady’s Magazine,” in Beyond Public and Private: Re-Locating Music in Early Modern England, ed. Linda Austern, Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2017), 238–56. See also Bonny H. Miller, “A Mirror of Ages Past: The Publication of Music in Domestic Periodicals,” Notes 50 (1994): 883–901; and Bonny H. Miller, “Household Periodicals: An Unstudied Source of American Music,” Fontes Artis Musicae 42 (1995): 311–19.
[2] Some women preferred to remain anonymous (e.g., “Music by a Lady” or “Lady of Virginia”), but instances of women using male pseudonyms or men using female pseudonyms are not numerous. The most successful American composer using a pseudonym may have been Septimus Winner (1827–1902), who published songs under his own name and his mother’s name, Alice Hawthorne.
[3] See Bonny H. Miller, “Ladies’ Companion, Ladies’ Canon? A Century of Women Composers in American Magazines,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994), 156–82.
[4] Augusta Browne, Columbian Quick-Step, in the Columbian Magazine 2 (1844): 284–86.
[5] Augusta Browne, “The Stranger’s Heart,” Godey’s Magazine 22, no. 1 (January 1841): 38–39; Augusta Browne, “Bird of the Gentle Wing,” Godey’s Magazine 23, no. 6 (December 1841): 290–91.
[6] [New York] Evening Post, Feb. 8, 1848.
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