In the theater opened at Houston in 1838 an orchestra and singers from Europe and the United States performed excerpts from popular operas and other music. Dick also played the drums during the Mexican War at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista.Ī scant two years later, classical music was becoming more formalized, especially in urban centers and in the Church. He and three fifers constituted the Texas army's band.
#Tchia classical music portable#
On the more portable side, at the battle of San Jacinto, musicians played "Yankee Doodle" and "Will You Come to the Bower?" Dick the Drummer was one of two free Blacks who participated in that decisive battle. In 1834 the elder Robert Justus Kleberg imported a piano and music books to Harrisburg (now part of Houston). Following the first fiddles and flutes, the first heavy instruments, especially pianos, came during the 1830s.
Later in the century came colonies of French and Swiss that included musicians for example, Allyre Bureau, a Parisian composer and director, settled in the Dallas area.Īfter 1820 Anglo-Americans introduced music from the United States, especially songs of the English, Scots, and Irish. The French music that came to Texas first around the beginning of the nineteenth century-with the opening of the West after the Louisiana Purchase-came mainly from New Orleans, where a sophisticated culture had developed, but also from a Black Creole culture that has had an incalculable effect on Texas music. Spanish folk music and guitars came with soldiers and settlers to the missions. In the missions around El Paso, in East Texas, and near San Antonio, music attracted Indians to the Church and formed an integral part of the liturgy. The work of University of Texas at Austin musicologist Robert Joseph Snow toward the end of the twentieth century helped to illuminate this music. The first European music was that of the Catholic Church, which came by way of Mexico City, where a European music school was established in 1525. When the Spaniards arrived on Texas soil, they found Native American peoples whose ceremonies employed the music of singing, rattles and percussion devices, and simple wind instruments. Prescinding from later concepts of "classical," one may say that Texas music began with Texas Indians. But even with these caveats in place, it is possible to trace the beginnings of classical music in Texas, and its development in various important musical activities and persons.īeginnings. "Classical," always hard to define, had become even more elusive. The softening attitude of the haute couture crowd toward lower-brow music had long before been adumbrated by such composers as Gershwin, Charles Ives, and Claude Bolling. At the beginning of the new millennium, for instance, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra performed with the Light Crust Doughboys (or vice versa), and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which produced an "Amazing Jazz" television show in 1999, accompanied the "folk" trio Peter, Paul and Mary. The crossing-over that "crossover" musicians chose to participate in became ever more athletic, ever more of a stretch.
#Tchia classical music professional#
The town bands and scattered opera houses of 1900 yielded to a handful of sophisticated orchestral ensembles and opera projects by 1950, and by the year 2000 virtually every standard metropolitan statistical area in the state had one or more professional or semiprofessional musical organizations.Īlong with this growth, however, came a significant blurring of the boundaries between "classical" music and other forms. During the twentieth century, the proliferation of musical activities in Texas mirrored that of the entire country. Classical music found such a congenial culture in Texas that it flourished and grew, from small beginnings among European colonists of numerous nations to an important pursuit of countless citizens.
It is truly said that music of virtually every Western genre has flourished in Texas, from before the advent of Europeans through the times of colonization, settlement, and revolution, until the present-the outgrowth of a fusion of races and nations.
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