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Question:

Did kids from the 1830s learn to play instruments in school?

Answer:

When I was a kid (a few years ago, but not in the 1830s!) I took trombone lessons at school for a while. I wasn't very good, but renting an instrument and trying it out was something that lots of my classmates did. Back in the 19-th century, this didn't happen in school. If you wanted to learn to play an instrument, you had to find a teacher and an instrument.

If your father, brother, or uncle played an instrument, they might well be your teacher. If you were a boy, you might have learned to play the fife or the drums this way (so that you might play and march with the town militia) or the fiddle, which was usually played to accompany dancing. In every town, there were some men and boys who could play the fiddle and the fife and drums, or a simple instrument like the "twanging" mouth harp.

Unfortunately for girls, these fairly common instruments were usually reserved for men and boys. "Feminine" instruments (other than the voice!) included the pianoforte (what we simply call a piano today), the flute, or even the "Spanish guitar." The problem was that these instruments were all very expensive, so that only girls whose parents were quite prosperous could give them an opportunity to play.

Many kids today complain about practicing the piano, but Sally Towne, who grew up in the Village's Salem Towne House, loved to play. We even have the sheet music she used, carefully bound in leather volumes with her initials on them. Her parents actually sent her to Boston to board for several months while she took lessons with a music teacher from Italy.

Most teen-agers would have had a chance to learn to sing; there were singing masters traveling around the countryside who would stop in a town and offer a "Singing School" -- several weeks of lessons, often in the local schoolhouse at night -- if enough people subscribed. He would then teach them four-part choral singing, and the Singing School would end with a concert or exhibition of their talents. Many young people eagerly attended Singing School, both to sing and to socialize. Some of them may have been as young as 12 or 13. Most of the music they sang was "church music," but they appear to have enjoyed it greatly.