St. Cecilia Society - Musical Repertoire

Musical Repertoire

Despite the long distance between Charleston and London, the repertoire of the St. Cecilia Concerts (as the society’s performances were known) generally kept pace with the musical fashions of contemporary Britain. The constant commercial trade between the two cities, augmented by Charleston's fervent desire to follow English fashions, encouraged the importation of musical works by the most "modern" and "fashionable" European composers, or at least the works of composers then favored in London. Among the composers whose works were heard in Charleston between 1766 and 1820 are Carl Friedrich Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn, Leopold Kozeluch, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Josef Mysliveček, Ignaz Pleyel, Johann Stamitz, and many others.

London musical fashions did not completely monopolize the concert repertoire heard in Charleston during this period, however. Thanks to the influx of French musicians in the 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, the works of composers such as François Adrien Boieldieu, Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac, André Ernest Modeste Grétry, Étienne Méhul, and others were also heard in Charleston.

Although several of the musicians residing in Charleston during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are known to have composed some music, the St. Cecilia Society made no effort to encourage the creation of a local musical style. Since the society measured its musical success by its ability to replicate contemporary European practices, the cultivation of a “native” musical language would have seemed too provincial for an organization that strove to appear as cosmopolitan as possible.

In keeping with British practices of the day, each of the St. Cecilia Society’s concerts included a mix of musical genres. Orchestral works opened and closed each of the “acts” or “parts” of the concert, while a varied succession of concertos, pieces for small instrumental ensembles, and vocal selections filled the rest of the bill.