CO Arts Music

The American Guides Project

Certain solemn authorities have asserted rather dogmatically that Colorado enjoyed no music until 1861 when Bishop Machebeuf came from Santa Fe to Denver with a wheezy little melodeon. The fact is, however, that for two years every better gambling saloon in the Territory had boasted of an orchestra and had resounded day and night to the combined strains of a banjo, fiddle, and jangling piano, with a cornet or piccolo on occasion. In a spirited but usually vain endeavor to drown the clamor from the bar and gaming tables, musicians lustily played and sang "Lily Dale," "Oh, Susanna," "Sweet Betsy from Pike," and other favorite songs of the day. At the Denver House, a hastily erected log structure roofed and partitioned with canvas, described by Horace Greeley in 1859 as "The Astor House of the Gold Fields," orchestra leader Jones and his spirited men were interrupted by sporadic but not unforeseen bursts of gunfire that sent them diving for shelter behind a low iron-plated enclosure. Before the smoke had fairly cleared away, they were up again desperately playing and singing:

Denver sat through its first concert in 1864 when selections from Mozart's L'Enchantress were rendered as a solo on the cornet by Alex Sutherland, who as a boy had sounded the bugle for the storied charge of the Light Brigade of Balaklava. A few more cultivated settlers had transported pianos to the Colorado frontier, but respectable Denver depended in large part for its music upon Sutherland and the St. John's Episcopal Choir until 1866 when the first choral society, the Denver Musical Union, was organized. In 1869 the first shop exclusively for the sale of music and instruments was established, and German residents organized the Denver Maennerchor the next year. In 1872 the Denver Choral Union sang Handel's Esther, reputedly the first cantata to be sung west of the Mississippi; one of the seven performances was attended by Wilhelm Meinhardt, an itinerant German musician, who pronounced the performance equal to any that he had heard in Europe, but to him it seemed "a shame that good technique is floating westward and burying itself in this sandy desert." Few professional musicians visited Colorado before 1872, and those who came were pronounced "very ordinary, only second rate." But a concert by Blind Tom impressed Denver in 1872—the Negro musician "exciting the wonder of the people as he always does." Joseph Wieniawski, Polish pianist, appeared late in the 1870’s and inaugurated a new era by demonstrating that "an artist could visit the West without being scalped by Indians or buried in a dust storm."

In 1877 the first company of Colorado amateurs presented The Bohemian Girl in Denver, and Welsh miners in the mountains were soon forming choral societies to sing their traditional airs. In 1881 the Denver Opera Club was organized and presented the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in several Colorado towns. The next year Pinafore was played in Denver at a benefit for the Ladies' Relief Association, with all expenses borne by the Carbonate King, H. A. W. ("Haw") Tabor (see Leadville). But all this "levity" aroused the wrath of the churches; every pulpit rang with violent denunciations of opera and opera singers; amateur performers, most of whom were church members, hastily deserted their public, and operatic scores gathered dust as Haydn, Gounod, Mendelssohn, and Handel (his Messiah, particularly) were offered to suddenly chastened audiences. But light opera had become popular, and in 1882 Colorado's first "native" opera, Brittle Silver, had its premiere at the Tabor Opera House in Denver. The score was composed by W. F. Hunt of Leadville, and the libretto by Stanley Wood, a newspaper man of Colorado Springs; with the nefarious practice of "jumping" mining claims as its theme, the operetta struck a responsive chord:

Dr. Leopold Damrosch, father of Walter Damrosch who later directed the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, brought his orchestra to Denver in 1882, as did the renowned Theodore Thomas of Chicago; for a week, with season tickets priced at $25, Denverites and other Coloradoans who could afford it "sat quiet and gave themselves up to the full enjoyment of an unparalleled treat." At the same time the orchestras of the Tabor Grand Opera House and Ed Chase's noted and rather notorious Palace Theater, a complete pleasure resort, joined with members of the Ladies Orchestra in giving recitals of "good music" under the direction of Frank Damrosch, another son of Dr. Damrosch. Joseph Weber, now president of the National Federation of Musical Unions, was a member of the clarinet section of this group.

Bands early won popular favor, and in the middle 1880’s Denver appropriated $2,500 for free summer concerts in the parks, an institution that has been maintained. In 1918 an $80,000 organ, one of the finest in the country, was installed in the Denver Municipal Auditorium. Denver instituted Music Week programs in 1920, being the second city to do so.

Founded in 1922, the Denver Civic Symphony Orchestra of 110 pieces is directed (1940) by Horace G. Tureman. The Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Philadelphia Symphonies have given concerts in Denver for many years, but no other city in the State had enjoyed symphony concerts until 1938 when the symphony orchestra of the Colorado Music Project of the Work Projects Administration toured eleven towns and cities in eastern Colorado. In 1934 the first open-air opera was presented in Denver and has since become an annual event. Thousands attend the three evening performances given in Cheesman Park each July by local players, both amateur and professional. At the Central City Play Festival, held for three weeks each summer, many musical comedies and operas popular in the boom days have been revived and presented by stellar professional casts (see Tour 6).

Colorado has produced no original music reflecting the color, "feel," or characteristic manner of life of the plains and mountain country. The songs sung by Colorado cowmen were importations, and no songs came from the mines. Of those to which the State lays claim, the best known is "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," which originated in Cripple Creek, where its tune is said to have been crooned by an old Negro mammy, a town character. Fitted with bawdy lyrics, it was sung in the variety theaters of the mining camp. During the Spanish-American War a Colorado regimental band adopted and arranged it; it became popular and was carried through the country by soldiers on their return from the Philippines. Of aboriginal music, only a few songs of the Southern Ute are still sung; their Sun Dance with its eight songs, and the Bear Dance with seventeen, are still performed each year at Ignacio (see Tour 11D and E).

Well-known musicians born in Colorado or resident in the State for many years include John H. Gower (1855-1922), organist, and composer of the music for Kipling's "Recessional"; Jean Allard Jeancon (1874-1936), authority on Indian music; and Paul Whiteman (1891-), Denver-born "King of Jazz"; Henry Houseley (1851-1925), English composer of operas, cantatas, and works for orchestra, string quartet, and organ; a founder of the American Guild of Organists, Houseley was for 37 years organist at St. John's Cathedral, Denver. Monsignor Joseph Bosetti (1886- ), composer of numerous masses and motets, once organist at St. Peter's in Rome, has trained a Denver male choir in the Gregorian tradition. Charles Wakefield Cadman, although he lived but a few years in the State, completed his opera The Land of Misty Water in Estes Park, and his operatic cantata Sunset Trail had its premiere in Denver in 1924. A young Denver musician, Edwin McArthur (1908- ), accompanist of Kirsten Flagstad, directed the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra as it accompanied the great Norwegian singer in a series of concerts in New York City early in 1940.