Johann Gottfried Schmauk: German-American Music Educator

German influence was especially strong in the development of nineteenth-century American music education. Some of this influence came from the many German Lutheran parochial schools, churches, and singing schools. Even small congregations customarily supported a schoolmaster-organist, and since the positions of schoolmaster, precentor, choir director, and organist overlapped, music inevitably received prominence in Lutheran education. Johann Gottfried Schmauk was a leading schoolmaster-organist in Phila-delphia from 1819 to 1842 and was instrumental in introducing Pestalozzian methods to German-American music instruction. Schmauk's tunebooks, with their theoretical introductions, received widespread use during the mid-nineteenth century, and these books provide an insight into the methods of vocal music instruction in America at that time as well as evidence of the musical competence that was expected of the old German-American school-masters.