The
Bell Polka (1855) was published in Detroit as a "Remembrance of the Germania Musical Society" and "dedicated to the Ladies of Detroit." Link to the Library of Congress page for this piece:
link. According to Nancy Newman, the composer—who is listed here only as "Buchheiser"—was William Buchheister, a violist in the Germania orchestra, a group of German and Irish musicians who came to the United States in 1848 and were active in New York and Boston till they disbanded in 1854. Buchheister and his colleague Carl Stein then moved to Detroit to establish the Boston Music Store, renamed Weiss & Buchheister after Stein left in 1865; Buchheister died sometime after 1869; the store closed in 1880 (Newman 249).
The design is a very common one: dance-trio-dance da capo, where the dance has two repeated eight-bar strains -- each shown below -- and the trio, in the subdominant key, has the same. The da capo repeats the dance but then adds a coda which is still another repetition of the two strains with a slightly altered cadence to close -- see the third example below. The alteration consists of a simple rising line, followed by a brief codetta.
second strain:
coda:
text
Reference: Nancy Newman,
Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010.
