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Courtesy of Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune
Above: Jean-Baptiste Lully; Lestudier Lacour, painter; Tony Johannet, drawing; (2012.0273, MSS 655)
Left: I he Bayou; painting by George D. Coulon; between 1885 and 1904; Laura Simon Nelson Collection (N950728.1.279)
Louisiana, whether plant samples or astronomical observations. Composers sought to feed this curiosity by producing works inspired by the territory’s plants, animals, and people.
In 1725 a delegation of Native Americans from the Mississippi Valley visited France. The September 1725 issue of Le Mercure carried a report of their performances of dances from “la Louisiane” given at the Theatre-Italien in Paris. The impact of the visit was so great that 42 years later the account was reprinted in the Dictionnaire des theatres de Paris (1767):
Monday, 10 September, 1725
Les Comediens Italiens, before their departure for Fontainebleau, staged at their theatre a new piece of the most unusual sort. Two natives recently arrived from Louisiana, tall and good looking, around 25 years of age, performed three sorts ot dances, together and individually, and in a manner that left no doubt that they had learned the steps and jumps that they did very far from Paris. That which they mean to portray is doubtless quite easy to understand in their country, but here, nothing could be more difficult to fathom.
(translated by Howard Margot)
Jean-Philippe Rameau, a court musician and composer for Louis XV, witnessed these dances and subsequently composed his Les Sauvages for keyboard based on the rhythms and melodies he heard. Rameau would return to the melody and rhythms of Les Sauvages in the fourth act of Les indes galantes (1736). The melody subsequently served as inspiration for composers throughout the 18th century.
Though some of the most famous musical depictions of the region were written by Europeans who had never set foot in Louisiana, local artists also won acclaim. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, for instance, transformed melodies he heard as a child in New Orleans into concert-hall favorites. European critics hailed his work, which transported them to an exotic land. And Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak, who arrived in New York in 1892 steeped in the folk music of his native Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), soon became interested in American melodies and rhythms. Dvorak’s American-themed works, the most famous of which is From the New World (also known as the New World Symphony), reveal that he envisioned the future of American music in the rich traditions of Native American and African American music.
—Alfred E. Lemmon
The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 11