Re: If You Lived Two Hundred Years Ago...

[Florestan]

Which means 1822, any geographical area depending on your actual location.

What music could you have access to, and enjoy?

Discuss.

[SimonNZ]

1822 in New Zealand? I'd be listening to the singing of sailors or the singing of missionaries. Maybe a few had small instruments.

But not in Christchurch, which wasn't settled until the 1840s, so the only music I'd hear would be Maori waiata.

And if I wind my family history back to 1822 that puts "me" in farming villages around Cornwall in the southwest of England. So whatever family singalongs and community dance music making was being done. There would have been no trips to more cosmopolitan centers or concert halls.

[KevinP]

'if'??

[Jo498]

Not sure; as a peasant or artisan I'd probably only get some music in church and I am not sure what this would have been in rural/small town Lutheran churches at the time. If as a gifted boy I had become a schoolteacher, a parson, a merchant or with more luck or a sponsor a civil servant or professor in the next small university town I might have had some access to published classical music of the time. I don't think there was any permanent opera/theatre going on in the next three larger towns at the time (I don't know about the other two but at the closest town the local theatre was built in 1907) but there would probably have been some semi-professional performances or wandering troupes.
Goethe's Werther was inspired by his work as a law clerk in the 1770s in a city (Wetzlar) fairly close to where I live, and there certainly was some cultural activity among the local bourgeoisie [you would expect Werther or Lotte to be able to play some Bach sons or Haydn on a harpsichord or clavichord for home entertainment] and this would probably have been similar a few decades later.
The next big city (about a day's travel with a stagecoach or probably 1.5 days walking, the travel times before the railroad and motor cars are really sobering, it's about an hour or less of driving/train ride today...) would have been Frankfurt (where Mozart played for the coronation in 1790) and there would have been far more options for some classical music, even for people with petit bourgeois background.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

1823 in northern Illinois? There were a few settlements here and there. I suppose I might be able to hear occasional hymn-singing in church. I don't think anyone knew at the time that a huge city was about to start growing here. If I made it to extreme old age, I could hear the Chicago Symphony, founded in 1891.

[JBS]

1823 in South Florida--there were some Seminoles around, but not many, so it would be only whatever music I played for myself or heard from them.
[In fact if my memory is correct, there were no EuroAmericans around here until a few years later. So I would not be here unless I was a Seminole myself].

[amw]

I have no idea where my family was living in 1823. I know for certain it wasn't any of the cities I live in. (That said, 1820s New York would probably have a lot more music and culture than 1820s Auckland.) In general, though, given our overall level of religiosity and class background, I would not have been exposed to much music outside the synagogue and the various religious feasts & holidays.

If I was 31 in 1823, had showed musical talent at a comparable age to when I started studying music in real life, and was born in one of the relatively well-off branches of my family based in various mid-size cities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Wilno/Vilnius, Kalisz, Częstochowa), I probably could have moved to Warsaw for musical training and/or in the hope of finding a husband, and thus become part of the highly provincial musical culture that Chopin moved to France to escape. In the other branches of my family (presumably based in rural areas of Poland-Lithuania, Moravia, Galicia, the Russian Empire, and the Kingdom of Hungary) this would not have been possible.

[Jo498]

1823 in South Florida--there were some Seminoles around, but not many, so it would be only whatever music I played for myself or heard from them.
[In fact if my memory is correct, there were no EuroAmericans around here until a few years later. So I would not be here unless I was a Seminole myself].

While I probably knew this at some stage when I read books about the discovery and exploration of the Americas as a kid, it still feels a bit surprising to be reminded how recent the European settling of many regions of North America (or Australia/New Zealand) was. In European history 1823 feels recent to me (after the French revolution, the end of the HRE and Napoleon).
Although I don't know myself exactly where my ancestors lived 200 years ago, I never did any research and don't know further back than great-grandparents (born in the 1870s or so, two generations later than 1823). But I am pretty sure that earlier generations from my mothers's and my paternal grandmother's side lived roughly in the region I used as reference above (My paternal grandfather's father came from a totally different region that would have been more remote and rural.)

[Todd]

If I lived in the same place I do now, I would hear whatever songs and music the Atfalati performed, and maybe the occasional French or English folk tune performed by wandering trappers.  I don't know where my European ancestors lived in 1823.

[Florestan]

To answer my own question.

i have no idea where my ancestors lived in 1823, but an educated guess is certainly not in Bucharest and most probably in a village or small town. As for their social status, another educated guess is either peasants or artisans. Thus, besides church music (strictly vocal), I'd have been able to hear the music sung and played by those humble people at parties, weddings, baptisms, funerals and trade fairs --- Romanian folklore music, that is.

[JBS]

While I probably knew this at some stage when I read books about the discovery and exploration of the Americas as a kid, it still feels a bit surprising to be reminded how recent the European settling of many regions of North America (or Australia/New Zealand) was. In European history 1823 feels recent to me (after the French revolution, the end of the HRE and Napoleon).
Although I don't know myself exactly where my ancestors lived 200 years ago, I never did any research and don't know further back than great-grandparents (born in the 1870s or so, two generations later than 1823). But I am pretty sure that earlier generations from my mothers's and my paternal grandmother's side lived roughly in the region I used as reference above (My paternal grandfather's father came from a totally different region that would have been more remote and rural.)

As it is, you know more than I know about where my family lived.  I'm in the same general situation as AMW. I know my father's parents (and therefore my great grandparents) lived in or near Chișinău in Moldava (which they knew as Kishinev in Bessarabia) c 1900 before coming to the US.  My mother's family is considerably vaguer: anywhere in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, the parts of Poland which were part of the Tsarist Empire, and the areas of contemporary Russia adjacent them to would all fit the bits of information I know. I've never made a sustained effort to trace them via US immigration records.  One great grandfather was born in or close to 1855 (with his wife, my great grandmother, the only two of that generation who left Europe; the other three grandparents came here as teens/young adults); the others could have been born anytime in the 1850s to 1870s.

The music my ancestors in 1823 would have experienced would have been the local folk music, Gentile or Jewish, and probably little exposure to anything we now call classical.

[SimonNZ]

To answer my own question.

i have no idea where my ancestors lived in 1823, but an educated guess is certainly not in Bucharest and most probably in a village or small town. As for their social status, another educated guess is either peasants or artisans. Thus, besides church music (strictly vocal), I'd have been able to hear the music sung and played by those humble people at parties, weddings, baptisms, funerals and trade fairs --- Romanian folklore music, that is.

It hadn't occurred to me when I answered, but it would have been at the local church every Sunday that much of the music in my ancestors lives was heard and made.

I wonder now what the most familiar pieces would have been for Anglican services in the 1820s.

Edit: a quick glance at wikipedia:

"In parish churches, musical worship was limited to congregational singing of metrical psalms, often led by a largely untrained choir. A great quantity of simple tunes were published in the 18th and early 19th century for their use."[...]

"The tradition of a robed choir of men and boys was virtually unknown in Anglican parish churches until the early 19th century. Around 1839, a choral revival took hold in England, partially fuelled by the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive Catholic liturgical practice in Anglican churches. "[...]

"The singing of hymns was popularised within Anglicanism by the evangelical Methodist movement of the mid-18th century, but hymns, as opposed to metrical psalms, were not officially sanctioned as an integral part of Anglican Orders of Service until the early nineteenth century.[24][25] From about 1800 parish churches started to use different hymn collections in informal service like the Lock Hospital Collection[26] (1769) by Martin Madan, the Olney hymns[27] (1779) by John Newton and William Cowper and A Collection of Hymns for the Use of The People Called Methodists(Wesley 1779) (1779) by John Wesley and Charles Wesley.[24][28] In 1820, the parishioners of a church in Sheffield took their parish priest to court when he tried to introduce hymns into Sunday worship; the judgement was ambiguous, but the matter was settled in the same year by Vernon Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, who sanctioned their use at services"[...]

[pjme]

Possibly this - also in transcriptions for hurdy gurdy, with rommelpot, accordeon, violin.
Alongside hymns of course,  plenty of bawdy songs, performed by wandering street musicians and street singers....

interesting videos on Belgian traditions at:

https://www.mim.be/fr/la-musique-traditionnelle-en-belgique

I suppose that in Brussels, Amsterdam , Antwerp or Ghent, well to do families had a piano or harmonium and played, eventually accompanying a flute, cello or violin, transcriptions of some Mendelssohn, Rossini, Kuhlau...

The old building (ca 1700) of La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels was...
....replaced by a new neoclassical building designed by the French architect Louis Damesme. Unlike Bombarda's building, which was situated along the street and completely surrounded by other buildings, the new theatre was placed in the middle of a newly constructed square. This gave it a more monumental appearance, but it was primarily the result of safety concerns since it was more accessible to firemen, reducing the chance that fire would spread to surrounding buildings. The new auditorium was inaugurated on 25 May 1819 with the opera La Caravane du Caire by the Belgian composer André Ernest Modeste Grétry.

As the most important French theatre of the newly established United Kingdom of the Netherlands, La Monnaie had national and international significance. The theatre came under the supervision of the City of Brussels, which had the right to appoint a director charged with its management. In this period, famous actors like François-Joseph Talma and singers like Maria Malibran performed at La Monnaie. The Corps de Ballet was reintroduced and came under the supervision of the dancer and choreographer Jean-Antoine Petipa, father of the famous Marius Petipa." (Wiki)