Faculty Seminar: Douglas Shadle
153 views · Published 16 May 2016 · 1:08:52 · Indexed 30 October 2026
Channel: Vanderbilt University · 2016 · Education
Faculty Seminar: Douglas Shadle - When Beethoven Met Santa Claus: The Symphony in Antebellum America Go to an orchestra concert today and chances are high that you will hear music by a German composer. You are equally likely not to hear music by an American. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Nearly one hundred American composers wrote over fifty symphonies during the nineteenth century alone. Some of the most colorful of these works appeared very early in the country’s history, even before the Civil War. This talk introduces listeners to the orchestral music of antebellum America—including a wonderful piece called Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony—and explains why this music has been forgotten for nearly two centuries. Douglas Shadle joined the Blair School of Music in 2014 as Assistant Professor of Musicology. His first book, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016), examines the challenges faced by Americans who sought entry into the pantheon of great composers. He is currently writing a new book that examines the legacy of Antonín Dvořák’s famous “New World” Symphony. His article “How Santa Claus Became a Slave Driver: The Work of Print Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Controversy” won a 2015 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for excellence in musical writing. Follow Vanderbilt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanderbiltu, on Instagram: http://instagram.com/vanderbiltu and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanderbilt. See all Vanderbilt social media at http://social.vanderbilt.edu.
