Epilogue

Abstract

IN THE DECADES leading up to the Civil War, the realms of classical music, Protestant Christian song, and mass-market popular music vibrantly converged in a single American repertoire. That convergence, the topic of this book, was temporary. Few of the cultural conditions that brought this repertoire into being persist to the present day. The notion that the United States is a normatively Christian nation is far from extinct, but its ultimate extinction seems likely. And most of Protestantism’s cultural trappings have thankfully lost whatever veneer they once enjoyed of unselfconscious universality. Choral music, meanwhile, is still performed in professional, ecclesiastical, convivial, and domestic settings alike. But most music enjoyed by Americans in daily life is recorded music, and when they make music themselves, it is mostly other kinds of music they make. Perhaps most important, that gulf that separated antebellum Americans’ nascent awareness of European classical music as a thing of value from opportunities for the actual experience of that music—the gap whose bridging comprised a core justification for this repertoire of psalmodic adaptations—has closed. For the great majority of Americans who care to seek them out, almost any of the European works tabulated in ...