Greenwich Street, though close by New York’s financial temples, has seen better times. These days, the neighborhood is home to a financial printer (whose house python once amused lawyers and jaded investment bankers at its feeding time), a two-thousand-car Port Authority carpark, and the Thunder XXX Video. In 1835, however, when young George Templeton Strong lived at 180, Greenwich Street was home to a far tonier crowd than the clientele of Buttman II and On Golden Blonde. A future Wall Street lawyer, Columbia College trustee, founding member and treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission (predecessor of the American Red Cross), and autocrat-at-large, Strong was also to be one of the great diarists in American history, and his pungent chronicles are the point of departure for the highly informative and amusing second volume of Strong on Music. (Resonances, 1836–1849, the first volume in the projected three-volume set, was published in 1988.)

Strong kept his diary for forty years, from 1835, when he was a precocious sophomore at Columbia College, to the year of his death, 1875. It was a lively time, when the country sensed, in differing degrees, economic superiority, cultural inferiority, and its ability to use the advantages of the one to deal with the shortcomings of the other. At midcentury, while novelists like James Fenimore Cooper and artists like Benjamin West had long since presented satisfactory cultural credentials to Europe,