Second New England School
organization
The Second New England School or New England Classicists (sometimes specifically the Boston Six) is a name given by music historians to a group of classical-music composers who lived during the late-19th and early-20th centuries in New England, United States. More specifically, they were based in and around Boston, Massachusetts, then an emerging musical center. The Second New England School is viewed by musicologists as pivotal in the development of an American classical idiom that stands apart from its European ancestors.
Origin of the name
The Boston Classicists were first referred to as a "school" in the second edition of Gilbert Chase's America’s Music (1966).
We must attempt to define the prevailing New England attitude toward musical art, that is to say, the attitude that dominated the musical thinking of those New England composers who, in the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, succeeded in forming a rather impressive school variously known as the “Boston Classicists” or the “New England Academicians.” It might be denied that they formed a “school” in the strictest sense of the term.... I think it can be shown that it stemmed from a fairly homogeneous cultural and aesthetical background.
The full-fledged term "Second New England School" was used by H. Wiley Hitchcock soon afterwards, in 1969, generating the term "First New England School" as a by-product.
No actual organization or conscious association of composers existed in the Second New England School, though some male members of the group did gather socially, so its "membership" can only be approximated by musicologists who draw aesthetic and philosophical links between composers.
Members
The specific "Boston Six" are named as John Knowles Paine (1839–1906), Arthur Foote (1853–1937), George Chadwick (1854–1931), Amy Beach (1867–1944), Edward MacDowell (1861–1908), and Horatio Parker (1863–1919). Other composers associated with the group include Edgar Stillman Kelley (1857–1944), George Whiting (1861–1944), and Arthur Batelle Whiting (1861–1936).
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This entry incorporates text from “Second New England School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.