Music: Singing Land

Let me go where'er I will I hear a sky-born music still.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the calm and cloistered air of 19th century New England, the Sage of Concord tuned his inner ear to the faint, sweet sounds that issued from his Transcendental trees and rocks. If he could hear sky-born music wherever he went, his friends and neighbors were less fortunate; they had to depend on the uncertain efforts of a handful of local groups, supplemented by occasional trips to Boston. In null century Concord, New Englanders do not find themselves so hampered—and...