“On the 12th or perhaps the 13th of September, 1877, I sailed in the second cabin for Europe on the steamship ‘Gellert’ of the Hamburg-American line.” This is how the Memoirs of George Whitefield Chadwick begin; he had used his savings to travel to Germany for study purposes. The ship arrived in Hamburg on 20 September 1877, from where Chadwick at first traveled to Berlin. He finally landed in Leipzig, which his travel acquaintance Sam Hermann, a young man from Philadelphia, had recommended to him. Chadwick's years in Europe—he went back to Boston in March 1880—supply us with rich material on the process of acculturation he went through, a process accompanied by his search for personal identity.

Transatlantic traveling marked—and marks—the boundaries between Old and New World. Travelers toured in both directions, and what they experienced belongs to a hitherto not yet fully explored chapter of cultural history. Whatever motives made people undertake the voyage, they carried their cultural baggage and experienced—even if after a while they returned to their home countries—changes in their acculturation, a phenomenon most obviously noticeable in language and thus studied by linguists.

The history of travel between the continents is an eminent factor in America's musical history of the nineteenth century. Among the hordes of emigrants and tourists traveling overseas were many musicians and music lovers who crossed the Atlantic in both directions, some of them more than once in their lifetime. They brought their musical experiences, their knowledge and their musical memory with them. At the same time, all types of concrete musical material—scores, instruments, books, journals—were shipped to and fro. Thus new music and news about music literally traveled – and that often astonishingly fast.

Of particular importance was the voyage to Europe for young Americans who were passionate about music and wanted to study at one of the famous European conservatories. For many the trip to Europe was an enterprise similar to the Grand Tour, the traditional voyage made by upper class young men for the purpose of study and social education, which emerged in Britain in the mid-Tudor era. Americans like Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Adams, and Henry James had picked up this tradition and had come over to visit historically and culturally famous places, like the antiquities in Italy and Greece. Alternatively, they would come to study.