Type: Exhibition case

Name: Case 1: No Lack of Musical Talent" in New Brunswick

Detail: Like many railroad towns, New Brunswick’s early musical years were marked by a revolving door of traveling performers, community brass bands, notorious buskers like fiddler Jakey Wearts, amateur orchestras, church choirs and organists, and a few sheet music and instrument stores. The state of musical life was such that in March 1858, the New York Musical Review and Gazette lamented that “there is no lack of musical talent” in New Brunswick, “only a want of interest and application in the right direction.” No sooner had this critique appeared, however, than performers, performances, and music began to receive attention in the Hub City’s press and to be discussed in private diaries and letters. The literature of the period provides evidence of a growing consciousness of quality and style in public performance and of concern with community musical life. This exhibition traces the way that New Brunswick surpassed its contemporaries to boast its own conservatory of music, a beloved state-of-the-art opera house, the greatest number of theaters in the state, and the largest manufacturer of musical strings in the world.

In the early twentieth century, the baton passed from Town to Gown when the locus of the music scene changed from active city residents and local venues, to Rutgers student and faculty musicians, university spaces, and sponsored events. Simultaneously, new technology like movies and the radio eroded the importance of the live music that had reigned in the 1870s when the Opera House was first built. This exhibition will highlight the multitude of ways in which the people of New Brunswick and the faculty and students of Rutgers built a flourishing musical culture.