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Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the banjo occupied a very specific set of circumstances in the United States. Adapting the instrument from its African roots, black slaves on southern farms and plantations played it in their meager spare time for entertainment and distraction.1In addition, white musicians then appropriated the banjo, featuring it during blackface performances on the minstrel stage.2In contrast, the piano inhabited a very different pair of settings: the middle- to upper-class white parlor, where amateur (usually female) players practiced and entertained family and friends, and the concert hall, as both a solo and accompaniment instrument.3The music performed in these four contrasting cultural spaces sometimes overlapped: black slave songs were heard in minstrel shows, and newly composed minstrel songs were occasionally re-appropriated by black slaves for their own entertainment or published as sheet music for performance in the parlor; European art music was performed both in the parlor and the recital hall, and it was often lampooned on the minstrel stage. However, it was rare that music from either the slave tradition or from minstrelsy found its way into the concert hall.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk used the piano to lift the banjo and its playing styles out of its familiar contexts and place it in a new setting: the concert hall. In the early 1850s composer and pianist Gottschalk was establishing himself in New York as a virtuoso performer following his years of training and concertizing in Europe. Although other banjo-themed piano works were performed and published in the mid-nineteenth century, it was Gottschalk's inimitable and appealing performance style that brought the piece to the fore and fostered what became an enduring popularity. While some critics denounced him for playing "only his own music," a fact that he lamented in his memoirs, published as Notes of a Pianist, Gottschalk was among the first American performers to build a career around playing original compositions.4Deliberately drawing attention to the contrasts and similarities between the banjo and the piano, Gottschalk's piano composition The Banjo complicates and permeates the boundaries among musical styles, performance spaces, and social hierarchies that were just being constructed by critics and audiences engaged in the initial stages of instituting an...