Timeline of Music in The United States To 1819 - 1818

1818

• Music teacher, keyed bugler and bandleader Frank Johnson publishes Six Sets of Cotillions, establishing a career that will make him the leader of the "Philadelphia School", the first African American "school of classically trained composers". He also becomes the first African American to publish sheet music this year, and will later become the first widely acclaimed composer, both at home and in England, first to innovate a style or school elaborated upon by other individuals, first to give formal band concerts, and the first to perform with white musicians in public and the first to tour widely in the United States. He may be the first American of any race to tour abroad, in 1837.
• Richard Allen publishes a hymnal, the first for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which became the world's "first black denomination" when it was founded in 1816.
• African Americans begin organizing their own camp meetings, start with one held this year by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
• Bohemian composer Anthony Philip Heinrich comes to the United States and is so impressed by the "natural scenery, (America's) exciting history, and the music of the Native American" that he began composing a string of works on these topics.