St. Cecilia Society - Historiography

Historiography

The earliest known published description of Charleston's St. Cecilia Society and its legacy of musical patronage is found in Charles Fraser's Reminiscences of Charleston (first published in 1854), which contains a brief but highly influential synopsis of the history of the society. Although Fraser (1782–1860) had been admitted to the society in 1803, and his father, Alexander Fraser, had been among its founding members, his brief 1854 account of the society's concert activity is vague and contains several factual errors that may be attributed to the fading memories of events that transpired some three or four decades earlier. Despite these shortcomings, Fraser's flawed description of the St. Cecilia Society's concert era has been cited and repeated by numerous authors since 1854 as the definitive (and only) published first-person account of this musical phenomenon.

Oscar Sonneck's influential text, Early Concert-Life in America (1907), was the first scholarly publication to acknowledge the musical prominence of Charleston's St. Cecilia Society, but Sonneck also lamented that the early history of this organization appeared to have been lost. Subsequent twentieth-century musicologists merely repeated Sonneck's assessment of the society without adding further insight or detail.

Outside of musicological circles, Harriott Horry Rutledge Ravenel's Charleston: The Place and the People (1906) was the first local history text to offer a brief glimpse into the history of the St. Cecilia Society, based largely on her own first-hand experiences. Despite having attended the society's balls since the early 1850s, Mrs. Ravenel's brief assessment of the St. Cecilia Society's concert era is based entirely on Charles Fraser's 1854 synopsis. In the course of the twentieth century, scores of books and articles about Charleston and its cultural heritage have included some mention of the St. Cecilia Society. With very little variation, such works routinely echo the words of Fraser, Sonneck, and/or Ravenel, and offer no new factual information. Nicholas Butler's recently-published monograph Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766–1820 (2007), represents the first scholarly effort to reconstruct the details of the St. Cecilia Society's fifty-four years of concert activity, and is based entirely on extant archival materials from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.