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Rayner Taylor.(Chamber Music: Six Sonatas for Harpsichord or Piano Forte with an Accompaniment for a Violin, op. 2; Six Sonatas for Violoncello (with Keyboard Accompaniment))

Article Excerpt
Rayner Taylor. Chamber Music: Six Sonatas for Harpsichord or Piano Forte with an Accompaniment for a Violin, op. 2; Six Sonatas for Violoncello (with Keyboard Accompaniment). Edited by John Metz and Barbara Bailey-Metz. (Recent Researches in American Music, 43.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2001. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xiii; 2 plates; score, 113 p.; crit. report, p. 115-17. ISBN 0-89579-483-3. $70.]

The celebration of America's bicentennial in 1976 was a glittering year of self-congratulation, one in which there seemed to be a fireworks display every evening. Monuments were cleaned and rededicated, our Revolutionary Era leaders were extolled for their vision, wisdom, and self-sacrifice, and the market in colonial costumes and muskets was brisk.

Naturally, musical performances played an important role in the celebration, but the repertoire was usually limited to popular tunes like Yankee Doodle or patriotic anthems like the Star Spangled Banner and America, the Beautiful. Classical musicians looking to perform music of the colonial past therefore faced a particularly difficult challenge. The musical traditions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America were frankly not as sophisticated or firmly established as those found in Europe during the same period. Works by the "Yankee Tunesmiths" such as William Billings (1746-1800) and Supply Belcher (1751-1846, known as the "Handel of Maine") are certainly admirable and were welcomed at many bicentennial events, but they do not compare in quality or richness with the music of George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Many performers found themselves confined to potboilers like the Battle of Trenton by James Hewitt (1770-1827)...