Today, the first "recorded" concert in America. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Virginia Larkin Redway
described the first recorded American concert in a
1936 Musical Quarterly article. Of
course there were no tape recorders in 1936. She
was talking about the first American concert of
which we have any record. This concert took place
at 6:00 PM, January 21, 1736, at a tavern in New
York City. The cost was four shillings and the
performer is a surprise. He was Theodore Pachelbel.
Theodore was the 46-year-old son of Johann
Pachelbel. He'd shown up in Boston six years
before. We all know the elder Pachelbel for his
famous canon -- one war-horse I never quite tire of
hearing. I can still listen to it long after I've
grown sick to death of the Hallelujah Chorus and
Johann Pachelbel wrote a lot of nice music that we
don't often get to hear. He was a close friend to
the Bach family, godfather to one of Bach's
sisters, and music teacher to a brother. So
Theodore, the youngest Pachelbel son, had known
Bach, who was only five years his senior.
Theodore's elder brother stayed in Germany and went
on to a minor career as a musician. The second son
also emigrated to America and worked here as a
musical-instrument maker. Young Theodore played
keyboard instruments and composed music. But only
one of his compositions survives. It's a choral
Magnificat he wrote in Europe. Although it's not
well known, it happens to've been performed here in
Houston just the other night.
Skimpy Colonial records say little about Theodore
Pachelbel's first few years here. But he was well
enough known by 1733 to be called from Boston by
wardens at Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
They'd bought an English pipe organ and wanted him
to install it. He stayed on two years as the
Next followed two concerts in New York City. Then
he turns up at St. Philip's Church in Charleston,
South Carolina. He shows up now and again in
newspaper accounts there, until his death in 1750.
That was the same year his old friend, Johann
Sebastian Bach, also died.
Theodore married soon after he arrived in
Charleston. Two years later a son was born. The
papers also tell that he gave money to the local
Negro School House. But, when he died, the primary
assets in his estate were two slaves, valued at 330
That strikes a discordant note, because the German
Protestant world of the seventeenth century -- the
world that spawned the Bachs and the Pachelbels --
was one place in the Western world where slavery
had gained no foothold. Theodore had, it seems,
adapted fully to the local culture.
But with him, young Pachelbel had brought the music
that would eventually do as much as politics ever
could to civilize the harsh new world -- that he
had chosen to make his own.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Nolte, E. V., Pachelbel, Johann, and Pachelbel,
Wilhelm Hieronymus. The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians (Stanley Sadie, ed.). New
York: MacMillan Publishers, Ltd., 1980, Vol. 14, pp.
Redway, V. L., A New York Concert in 1736.
The Musical Quarterly, Vol. XXII, No.
1, January 1936, pp. 170-179.
Redway, V. L., Charles Theodore Pachelbell,
"Musical Emigrant." Journal of the American
Musical Society, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring 1952,
Stevenson, R., Pachelbel [Pachelbell], Charles
Theodore [Carl Theodor]. The New Grove
Dictionary of American Music (H. W.
Hitchcock and S. Sadie, eds.). New York: MacMillan
Press Ltd., 1986, Vol. 3, p. 458.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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