Steve Schwartz wrote:

>...Read Bamboula! by S. Frederick Starr, on the life and times of Louis
>Moreau Gottschalk.  Among other things, he traces the rise in the 19th
>century of the churchly notion of concertgoing, an attitude that got going
>around Boston, on the fringes of American Transendentalism.

I view this as part of Romanticism in general.  The American-music
version of it stressed emulation of European musical culture (certainly
from the early 1800s) and consciously pushed it as "better" or "higher"
than homegrown efforts.  I think this contributed to the emerging notion
of high vs. low culture.  The musical writings of John Sullivan Dwight
carried this attitude to unprecedented heights.  I seem to recall that
Dwight hung out with the Transcendentalists.

Chris Bonds