Newport’s contemporary summer music scene is dominated by three internationally known festivals: Newport Folk, Newport Jazz, and Newport Classical. But the city’s musical heritage runs deep. Live music on the island is a tradition going back almost two hundred years, when classical musicians and military bands entertained summer visitors and year-round residents.
One organization working to honor the city’s musical history is Historic Music of Newport, founded in 2022 by Dr. Mark Stickney. A Portsmouth native, Stickney is the Artistic Director of the Seacoast Wind Ensemble and has taught at colleges throughout the United States, always finding his way back to Newport.
“I always came back summers to work for the Newport Music Festival (now Newport Classical),” he explained in a recent interview. “I’d spend summer in the mansions listening to this incredible music and I began to want to learn more about what our musical history was. Nobody really talks about our musical history, pre-the big festivals. There’s kind of a gray area. What would have been played in The Breakers in the 1890s?”
The Germania Orchestra in 1850 (Photo provided by Historic Music of Newport) 
The Musicians of Fort Adams Cemetery Tour (Photo provided by Historic Music of Newport) 
Rhode Island Wind Ensemble at Touro Park (Photo provided by Historic Music of Newport) 
The Gilded Age Orchestra of Newport at Green Animals (Photo provided by Preservation Society of Newport County) ) 
Josephine McHenry (Photo courtesy of the MacDonald family) ) 
(Photo provided by Historic Music of Newport) Credit: 10009
Stickney began to research music in Newport and found tons of historical material. “The overall scope got big enough that I decided to do a GoFundMe to help me pay for buying the music, both digital and physical copies,” he said.
Soon, Historic Music of Newport was born. “The support was there, so I created a nonprofit. We’re up to over 1,000 pieces of music and have learned the names of almost 1,000 musicians and composers who lived or were born in Newport. It’s staggering and mildly overwhelming,” laughed Stickney.
Through his research, he’s learned a lot about music in historic Newport. Notably, Newport’s musical history goes back even further than the Gilded Age.
“My first real big find was from the 1850s, pre-Civil War Newport, Chateau Sur Mer Newport, which was one of the major hubs of music back then,” he explained. “Southerners would come up here for the summer. There was the Germania Musical Society, that came to Newport as a small orchestra. They were like rock stars. They performed at private parties and public events all over Newport. They wrote almost 200 pieces of music, composed by various members of the orchestra, some of it, about Newport.”
“We pushed back even further into Colonial Newport. Oliver Shaw, who studied here as a young composer, and, Newport Gardiner, who was enslaved and later freed, and was a composer,” added Stickney.
“The Gilded Age has become a huge part of the project, with the Gilded Age Orchestra that we helped to create,” he continued. “They’ve done a number of programs. The sheer volume of music in Newport during that time, not just orchestras, but the bands at Fort Adams, the bands at the Naval Training Station – those were huge performing groups that played at private parties, at people’s mansions, at Touro Park, marched in parades, and performed all over the region, not just Newport.”
Stickney hopes to raise funds to record some of the music he has uncovered. “Some of this music has never been recorded,” he noted. “We can digitally recreate some of the piano music, but as a musician, that breaks my heart. We want it to be done by actual people.”
“We also want to create more programming,” continued Stickney. “We’re doing tours at Fort Adams Cemetery and the Island Cemetery and we’ve done a lot of collaborating with the Preservation Society. We just did a children’s program at Green Animals with the Gilded Age Orchestra.”
Stickney is also seeking to build up the organization’s archives. “There’s some stuff out there that we want to acquire. There’s a book of music that was proposed by Oliver Shaw and a Newporter by the name of Julia Hazard. It’s a bound book of their compositions from the early to mid-1800s. We want to bring them to Newport and have it be available.”
There’s also the long-term goal of opening a museum, for visitors to explore and to store rare documents and artifacts. “Newport needs a place for its musical history, which will include post-1920. There’s so much out there that people don’t know – they’d be blown away learning about Newport’s musical history.”