St. Cecilia Society - Historical Significance

Historical Significance

The St. Cecilia Society’s importance as a musical institution is considerable, though this aspect of the society’s heritage it is often overlooked in favor of its relatively more recent fame as an elite social organization. While the society’s existence is not unknown to music historians, few details of its concert activity have heretofore been available to facilitate comparisons with European or other early American musical phenomena. For more than a century, musicologists have been inclined to characterize eighteenth-century American concert life in general as a "feeble imitation" of European practices. In contrast to this conclusion, however, Nicholas Butler’s recent reconstruction of the St. Cecilia Society’s concert era demonstrates the existence of a robust and long-term effort in Charleston to replicate Old World models, and portrays the society as the most significant example of concert patronage in the United States before the advent of the New York Philharmonic in 1842.

Memories of the society’s musical heritage soon faded after its records were lost during the Civil War, however, and subsequent writers have since focused on the Society’s social activities and the glamour of its annual debutante ball. At the end of the nineteenth century, many Charlestonians began to view the St. Cecilia Society as a valuable link to their city’s "golden age" of prosperity in the preceding century. To many observers, however, it also stood as a symbol of Charleston’s rigid insularity and its resistance to a broader democratic philosophy. Despite such friction, inclusion in the society’s activities is still widely believed to represent the achievement of the ultimate insider status in Charleston.