“Yankee Doodle” and Nationalism, 17801920
By William Gibbons
Ulysses S. Grant reputedly once said, "I know only two tunes: one of them
is 'Yankee Doodle,' and the other isn't." However apocryphal, this quotation
highlights "Yankee Doodle"'s place in the popular consciousness of nineteenth-century
America. Grant was hardly alone in his affection for the tune: from the
end of the eighteenth century onward, people played, sang, quoted, and
published it in many forms and venues from the concert hall to the street
corner. still, as catchy as the tune was, the enduring popularity of "Yankee
Doodle" relied, of course, not on the music itself but in the historical
and cultural relevance it carried with it from well before the revolution.
Given its powerful symbolic value, composers both in America and abroad
often featured the tune in their works. In what follows I examine various
uses of "Yankee Doodle" from the late eighteenth through early twentieth
centuries. I have two reasons for doing so: first, to shed light on musical
responses to American nationalism's evolution during that period; and
second, to make "Yankee Doodle" a case study for examining how and why
composers continue to use a particular tune over an extended time.
|
|
