From "Hawk-Eye March and Quick Step" to "Caprice Hongrois": Music Publishing in Iowa

Abstract

Most studies of American music publishing have described either the general overview or the activities of specific major publishers or the work in a particular city. Few of them have considered the activity outside the major commercial centers. Before radio and sound recordings, mass media, and nationwide cultural uniformity, how did people in the rural areas of our country fill their piano benches? It would be wrong to assume that music published in the cities was unavailable in the rural Midwest; but this was not the only music of interest to the people living outside the cities. This study of music publishing is based on the holdings in the major public and private collections in the state.' In all over 600 sheet-music titles have been seen or are advertised with imprints, as well as forty extant hymnals or songbooks and at least seven music periodicals, several with printed music. No fewer than 225 different publishers are named in sixty-six municipalities. Iowa's earliest music imprint is an Iowa Quickstep, composed and respectfully inscribed to His Pupils by Asa Hull, published jointly by Russell and Richardson of Boston and Asa Hull of Davenport, (Figure 1). F. Gockeritz is identified as the engraver beneath the closing system of music. The piano solo was registered for copyright by Russell and Richardson in Massachusetts in 1857 and assigned the plate number 3068. A decorated title page is followed by five pages of music and a back cover devoid of the advertising frequently found on nineteenthcentury sheet music. Local music publishing without any distant auspices began in 1869 with a second printing of the eighth edition of the Davidisches Psalter-Spiel der Kinder Zions by the Amana Church Society in Amana, Iowa. After fleeing to the United States to settle near Buffalo, New York, in 1842 the German immigrants first printed the eighth edition of the hymnal in New York in 1854. Between 1855 and 1865, they resettled in a cluster of small communities in east-central Iowa, where their stereotype press produced four additional printings of the eighth edition from Amana in