MY Business is to Sing: Emily Dickinson, Musician and Poet

By George Boziwick, Chief, Music Division, Library for the Performing Arts
December 9, 2014
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

 Emily Dickinson ca. 1847. Courtesy Special Collections, Amherst College. Used with permission.

We celebrate the birthday of Emily Dickinson  on December 10. This is my second blog post (read the first here) exploring the musical life of one of America’s most beloved poets.

The daily musical activities of poet Emily Dickinson (1830–86) — home performances at the piano, collecting sheet music, and attending concerts—reveal a great deal about the cultural offerings available to a woman of her time, place, and class. For Dickinson, these experiences provided a vital and necessary backdrop for her identity and and more importantly, for her emerging poetic voice. Her encounters with the music of her time, in particular the music-making of the Dickinson family servants, and the New England hymn tradition, encouraged artistic borrowings that had a deep and continuing influence on her personality and her writing.

Village Hymns for Social Worship

“I attend singing school”

Emily Dickinson was immersed in the activities of the singing school and its repertoire of church hymns, carols, and anthems, sung from hymn books such as Village Hymns which the Dickinsons owned. She was also devoted to her musical studies of voice and especially piano, for which she displayed accomplishment and ambition:

“I also was much pleased with the news [your letter] contained especially that you are taking lessons on the ‘piny’, as you always call it,” fourteen year old Emily wrote to her friend Abiah Root in 1845, “but remember not to get on ahead of me. Father intends to have a Piano very soon. How happy I shall be when I have one of my own.” In August of that year Edward Dickinson purchased a piano through his brother William in Worcester.

Dickinson’s musical involvement and enthusiasm is expressed most abundantly in the sheet music that she collected. Over one hundred pieces are in the Dickinson Collection at Harvard University. Published copies of nearly all of the music cited by Dickinson in her correspondence can be found in the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Jenny Lind. Image ID: 1270124

Jenny Lind. Image ID: 1270124

Taubert. Jenny Lind's Birdsong.
  Music  Division.

Taubert. Jenny Lind's Birdsong. Music Division.

“How we all loved Jenny Lind”

As a young musician, Dickinson also enjoyed attending concerts. The most significant and best-documented professional performance that Dickinson witnessed was by the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820–87). On 3 July 1851, Emily (age twenty) along with her father and sister attended Lind’s concert in Northampton.

How we all loved Jenny Lind, but not accustomed oft to her manner of singing did'nt [sic] fancy that so well as we did her – no doubt it was very fine – but take some notes from her “Echo”– the Bird songs from the “Bird Song” and some of her curious trills, and I'd rather have a Yankee. Herself, and not her music, was what we seemed to love – she has an air of exile in her mild blue eyes, and a something sweet and touching in her native accent which charms her many friends.

Group portrait of the Germania Musical Society C. Bergmann, Leader seated in front holding piece of music. Image ID: 2011371

Group portrait of the Germania Musical Society C. Bergmann, Leader seated in front holding piece of music.Image ID: 2011371

Dickinson was also taken with the performance art of another popular ensemble, the Germania Serenade Band:

The Germanians gave a concert here the evening of Exhibition day [at Amherst College]. Vinnie and I went with [cousin] John [Graves]. I never heard [such] sounds before. They seemed like brazen Robins, all wearing broadcloth wings, and I think they were, for they all flew away as soon as the concert was over.

“I can improvise better at night.”

Emily Dickinson was known by family and neighbors to be an expert improviser at the piano. Her cousin John Graves described her late night improvisations as “heavenly music.” When he would visit his cousins and stay overnight, he would be awakened from his sleep by this heavenly music. Emily would explain in the morning, “I can improvise better at night.” Dickinson’s cousin Clara Newman Turner also recalled that “before seating herself at the piano Emily covered the upper and lower octaves so that the length of the keyboard might correspond to that of the old fashioned instrument on which she had learned to play.” MacGregor Jenkins, a Dickinson neighbor during Dickinson's lifetime, noted in his memoir that:

[Emily] went often across the lawn to her brother’s house. It was through him, and his handsome wife the “Sue” of her letters and messages, that she kept in touch with the life of her circle, and to a considerable extent with the village and the world. It was here that she would fly to the piano, if the mood required, and thunder out a composition of her own which she laughingly but appropriately called “The Devil,” and when her father came, lantern in hand, to see that she reached home in safety, she would elude him and dart through the darkness to reach home before him. This was pure mischief and there was much of it in her.

Devil's Dream

Ethiopian Flute Instructor. Boston: Elias Howe, 1848. Music Division.

These anecdotes and observations provide palpable evidence that Dickinson’s improvisations may have been inspired by the traditional music (jigs, reels, and hornpipes) that she collected, performed, and heard as part of the music-making of the Dickinson family servants.

“And we broke up with a dance.”

During Emily’s lifetime, over 80 servants worked for the Dickinson Family. The activities of the domestic servants and Emily’s interactions with them are well documented in her correspondence. Upon occasion, Emily (as indicated in this letter from 1854) would visit the homes of the servants: "Then I worked until dusk, then went to Mr. Sweetser’s to call on Abiah Root, then walked around to Jerry’s [African American stablemen Jeremiah Holden] and made a call on him—then hurried home to supper." On 22 June 1851 Dickinson (age twenty) wrote to her brother: “Our Reading Club still is, and becomes now very pleasant—the last time Charles came in when we had finished reading, and we broke up with a dance—”

“Charles” was Charles Thompson, an African American man who for decades was a janitor for Amherst College and a laborer for the Dickinsons. Thompson played the fiddle and taught some of the local children his tunes. We know from published accounts that Thompson played the tune “Money Musk.” He likely would have also played “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and the minstrel tune “Old Dan Tucker” which was immensely popular. These were tunes that Dickinson knew and are among the music that she collected.

Photo of Charles Thompson courtesy of the Jones Library, Amherst, MA. Used with permission.

Fishers Hornpipe, Music Division.

"Musicians wrestle everywhere"

By the early 1860s, Dickinson had begun to set aside music and was intensely pursuing her poetic calling. As part of that process, she was able to use her musical experiences and sensibilities as an aid to her emerging poetic voice. Perhaps the most significant poem that captures the music that Dickinson knew is “Musicians wrestle everywhere.” Written at the outbreak of the Civil War, her poem is a catalog of past musical experiences, stacked up, and exploding onto the page one by one. Here Dickinson may be using these images to herald the oncoming cataclysmic “silver strife.” Amherst had a massive recruitment program and it is interesting to imagine the deployment of these masses of young men – waking – long before the morn – /Such transport breaks opon the town/ I think it that “New life”!

Many of the highlights of Dickinson’s musical experiences are distilled into this poem; the birdsongs of Jenny Lind, the Germanians “in brass and scarlet,” the tambourines of minstrel music, and hymns such as “Morning Star” led by the choir’s treble voices remind us of the Village Hymns of her youth. All of this music she knew, and loved, and collected. In this way, Emily Dickinson used her poems such as “Musicians wrestle everywhere –“ to enable her to surrender her musical identity to what she must have felt as a “new life,” as one of America’s most renowned and cherished poets.

Musicians wrestle everywhere –
All day – among the crowded air
I hear the silver strife –
And – waking – long before the morn –
Such transport breaks opon the town
I think it that “New life”!

It is not Bird – it has no nest –
Nor “Band” – in brass and scarlet – drest –
Nor Tamborin – nor Man –
It is not Hymn from pulpit read –
The “Morning Stars” the Treble led
On Time’s first afternoon!

Some – say – it is “the Spheres” – at play!
Some say – that bright Majority
Of vanished Dames – and Men!
Some – think it service in the place
Where we – with late – celestial face –
Please God – shall ascertain!

_____________________________________________

Since my initial LPA presentation "The Musical Parlor of Emily Dickinson" in 2012, I have been privileged to present or write on Dickinson and music at national and international conferences, and in published articles, specifically on her personal collection of published bound sheet music, which is in the Dickinson Collection at Harvard University.

Along with my Red Skies Music Ensemble, (co-founded with Trudy Williams PhD), we have presented our Dickinson programs at LPA, in Amherst, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum, and at Harvard University in 2015. Our upcoming LPA program ‘“MY Business is to Sing:’ Emily Dickinson, Musician and Poet” will be presented in the Bruno Walter Auditorium on Saturday January 31, 2015. The third floor reading room exhibit will run through March 6, 2015.

More information, as well as music and video clips of our Dickinson performances can be found at the Red Skies Music Ensemble's website: redskiesmusic.com.

Sources

The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge,Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, 1999.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.

Bingham, Millicent Todd. Emily Dickinson’s Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family. New York: Harper, 1955.

Boziwick, George. “My Business is to Sing”: Emily Dickinson's Musical Borrowings. Journal of the Society for American Music / Volume 8 / Special Issue 02 / May 2014, pp 130 – 166.

-“Finding a Life at The New York Public Library: Emily Dickinson, the Avid Music Collector.” NYPL blog post,
December 10, 2013

Early American Sheet Music Collections, Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Jenkins, MacGregor. Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1930.

Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1955.

Lee, Abigail Eloisa (Stearns). Professor Charley: A Sketch of Charles Thompsonby A. E. L. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1902.

Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960.

Meyer Frazier, Petra. “American Women’s Roles in Domestic Music Making as Revealed in Parlor Song Collections, 1820–1870.” Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1999.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Murray, Aífe. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009.

Sewall, Richard Benson. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.

Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.