American Victorian Choral Music

Book excerpt: This MUSA volume makes an important contribution to American music studies by presenting a scholarly edition of selected choral works by Dudley Buck (18391909). Buck was arguably the finest composer of choral music among the group of musicians who had come of age by the end of the Civil War. The works chosen for this volume, some of which became icons of American Victorian culture, represent the three most popular choral genres during the Guilded Age: the anthem, the sacred and secular cantata, and the partsong. All of the works included here found immediate publication and stayed in print well into the twentieth century. Buck's works became the standards, not only by their intrinsic merit, but owing to their widespread performance throughout the country. His services, canticles, anthems, and hymnsmusically engaging, well-crafted, and often genuinely movingwere considerably more professional than the homegrown music in use when he began his work. Included here are three works, a hymn anthem ("Rock of Ages"), a liturgical text ("Festival Te Deum No. 7 in E-flat"), and a late, through-composed work ("Grant to Us Thy Grace"). Buck's sacred and secular cantatas along with his partsongs also enjoyed widespread success among the growing number of church choirs and community choral groups. The two partsongs come from his earliest and latest periods. "In Absence" represents the early Victorian partsong, and the second, "The Signal Resounds from Afar" is both Buck's longest partsong and the one showing the greatest contrapuntal complexity. Both The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, written for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, and the Forty-Sixth Psalm, from 1872, are in full score and typify some of the finest cantata writing in Victorian America.