Month: October 2018

In late 1920, composer and scholar Charles Seeger, father of the late folk singer Pete Seeger, and his first wife Constance, a violinist, set out with their three sons, including young Peter, on a trip to bring good music to the people, towing a trailer equipped with a pump organ behind a Model T Ford. Together they gave recitals and small concerts, sometimes for money and sometimes for free. While in North Carolina the roads became impassable and they parked their trailer for the winter in woods owned by a family named MacDonald. During that season the Seegers played classical music for their hosts and in turn were treated by the MacDonalds and their neighbors to music on banjos and fiddles.

Prior to this Mr. Seeger thought folk music “didn’t exist…except in the minds of a few very old people, who would die shortly and then there wouldn’t be any.”

This encounter seems to have had a profound effect on Seeger. These people had their own music, and it was precious to them. They didn’t need his. Seeger’s many accomplishments include helping to start the Society for Ethnomusicology, which studies the widest possible range of music and seeks to understand why it is important to those who hold it in trust.

This experience and other encounters with folk music seem to have had a profound effect on little Pete Seeger, who went on to be a major force in American music. Through his friendship with Woody Guthrie and his involvement in groups such as the Almanac Singers and the Weavers, he was at the center of the folk music revival.

Achord^SM: a new Musical Alliance is the namesake of The Musical Alliance, created in 1918 by the founder and first editor of Musical America, John C. Freund. Freund called for an alliance to organize “all workers in the field [of music], from the man at the bench in a piano factory to the conductor of the great symphony.”

His efforts were part of a long tradition stretching back to the 1830s that sought to increase the role of music in American life. It inspired social activism by individuals and by local and national groups, who sought to introduce the broadest possible range of citizens to the joy found in making music. Achord will share with these pioneers their belief in music’s ability to facilitate transformational growth in individuals and to build community.

However, unlike that earlier alliance, Achord’s conception of music is as broad and as diverse as America itself. The musical activists of the last century hoped to enlist the broadest possible range of citizens in their campaign for a “musical America,” but limited their vision to promoting “good music”—what we call “classical music” today—and they worked to diminish and even suppress other types of music.