I’m a musicologist by trade, so I’m doing some academic writing, which I think is best when it tells a story with discernible ramifications. My current project is on New Orleans-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (b. 1829), the first American musician to be recognized as a legit composer by the European musical establishment.
Spoiler alert (or not): Gottschalk’s success was dependent on the finest schooling, musical training, and cultural refinement that money could buy, and that enormous sum of money came from the exploitation of enslaved Black people. Gottschalk’s mother was the heiress to a French colonist family that owned plantations in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), France’s richest colony, and his father, an Englishman of German parentage, came to New Orleans to make his fortune in the slave trade.
Spoiler alert #2 (or not): The single most important factor in Gottschalk’s success as a composer was his appropriation of Black folk tunes (learned directly from the family’s household slaves) and rhythms (ubiquitous in New Orleans) and his incorporation of these elements into European “classical” music.