I write about several topics related to early American music.
My book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020) looks at a handful of amateur musician women and men who copied their favorite repertoire by hand into manuscript music books. I first found these manuscript books when researching at the American Antiquarian Society in 2010 and was struck by the amount of time and labor that went into their creation. Answering the question “why did they do this?” led me to write a book about how, for white people who were the first generation to grow up in the new United States, amateur music-making allowed them to fashion themselves as cultivated, cultured, genteel, erudite, and pious. In particular, copying music by hand was a practice that, because it was tangible (you could hold the books, show them off, give them as gifts, and so forth), became a socially validated practice. Amateur music-making was particularly significant for women, and my book takes us into the lives of several fascinating characters for whom their own music-making providing a soundtrack to eventful, complicated, and often tragic experiences.
I wrote an article about Sally Brown, the musical daughter of the Rhode Island slave trader John Brown. It appears in the Fall issue of the Journal of the Royal Music Association and is available through open access here. This article is related to my book, and in fact pre-dates the book. It was hard to write because I was trying to sort out how Sally Brown’s privilege as a white woman put her in the same story as the enslaved and/or immiserated laborers whose work supplied her with the means to amass a large library of music.
Early American music tend to be ignored by scholars, but it is fascinating. Music-making was shaped by—and helped to shape—all kinds of intercultural exchanges, political flux, and economic upheaval. The way people turned to music to sort out beliefs and experiences interests me greatly. Some of my work on this includes my article on seventeenth-century Native American psalmody in New England, which examines how the Christian sacred music sung by early converts mediated colonial encounters between Algonquian and English peoples. This article won a prize and is one of my proudest achievements. You can find it here. (Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, which is how much academic publishing works.)
I also just published a new article on Joseph Johnson, a Mohegan Christian who copied out manuscript music books in the eighteenth century, in which I address what I’m calling “archival orientalism” — the tendency to treat primary sources and archives as sites of conquest. This article is part of a special issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music on settler colonialism and Indigeneity.
My new research for my second book builds on this work on Native American Christian music. In 2018-2019 I was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, where I began researching the new project (which is also supported by the ACLS). This new research also develops ideas about Protestant sacred music I wrote about in an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (here’s that article). A handful of other publications related to this project are forthcoming.
Related to all these research areas if my interest in media history, book history, formats, and textuality. I’ve done a fair amount of work on how musical media were important for early American political music. An article I wrote about political song in eighteenth-century United States looks at the practice of contrafacting—taking existing melodies and setting them with new lyrics. This practice was ubiquitous in early America, and was often used to make specific political points (as when the song “God Save the King”—now familiar as “God Save the Queen,” or “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”—was set with lyrics like “God Save George Washington”; or, during the French Revolution, “God Save the Guillotine”!). Interestingly, these political songs circulated in numerous formats, from manuscript to newspaper to by ear. I trace how these various iterations, both contrafacts and formats, elaborated the political changes of the late eighteenth century. Here’s the article.
My work on music and book history intersects with my interest in the history of Native American music and colonial encounter. I wrote a short essay about this, focusing on occurrences of printed transcriptions of Indigenous music in European travelogues, for Eighteenth-Century Studies (linked here), and also oversaw a U Penn undergraduate research project on these travelogues in summer 2018.
Here is a full list of my publications:
Book
Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, New Cultural History of Music series, 2020)
Under contract: American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, co-edited with Rhae Lynn Barnes (University of Pennsylvania Press)
In progress: Strategic Sounds: Native American Music in the Era of Colonial Conquest
Dissertation
American Identities in an Atlantic Musical World: Transhistorical Case Studies (Harvard 2012)
Articles and chapters
Forthcoming
With Rhae Lynn Barnes, co-convener of “Early American Music and the Construction of Race,” a Colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Colloquy participants: Candace Bailey, David Garcia, Bonnie Gordon, Caitlin Marshall, Guthrie Ramsey, Maria Ryan, Sarah Eyerly and Rachel Wheeler
“The ‘Swinish Multitude’ come to America: Political Song and Transatlantic Print in the Age of Revolution.” The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, Eric Drott and Noriko Manabe, eds.
“Land and Conversion: New Frameworks for Colonial Hymnody,” in Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City, Iain Fenlon, Marie-Alexis Colin, and Matthew Laube, eds. (Turnhout, Belgium: Epitome Musical Series of Brepols Pub., 2021)
Published
With Sam Parler, “White Noise: Historiographical Exceptionalism and the Construction of a White American Music History,” in Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol Oja, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), pp. 207-238
“‘Hideous Acclamations’: Captive Colonists, Forced Singing, and the Incorporation Imperatives of Mohawk Listeners,” in Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick eds. (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021), pp. 83-105. Open access here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1238
“Conditioned Ears: How to Listen to Mohican-Moravian Hymnody,” in a Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly (Summer 2020), pp. 380-386
“Bound Together: The Intimacies of Music Book Collecting in the Early American Republic,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association Vol. 145, No. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 1-35
“Joseph Johnson’s Lost Gamuts: Native Hymnody, Materials of Exchange, and the Colonialist Archive,” Journal of the Society for American Music special Issue on Indigeneity and Colonialism, edited by Gabriel Solis and Jessica Bissett Perea (Fall 2019)
“Sounds Heard, Meaning Deferred: Music Transcription as Imperial Technology,” Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 52, No. 1, Special Issue: Empires in the Eighteenth Century (Fall 2018): 39-45
“Transatlantic Contrafacta, Musical Formats, and the Creation of Political Culture in Revolutionary America,” Journal of the Society for American Music Vol. 11, no. 4 (Fall 2017), pp. 392-419
“The Power to Please: Gender and Celebrity Self-Commodification in the Early American Republic.” Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730-1830, Emily Green and Catherine Mayes, eds. (University of Rochester Press, 2017), pp. 176-202
“Transatlantic Music Studies.” In Oxford Handbooks Online, Oxford University Press (2015)
“Musical Sleuthing in Early America: ‘Derry Down’ and the XYZ Affair.” Common-Place, Special Issue on Music, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2013)
“‘The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy Church’: Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the English Atlantic World.” Journal of the American Musicological Society Vol. 65., No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 691-726
“‘But they differ from us in sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651-75.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. 69., No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 793-822
Not refereed
“Women Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic,” published in The American Historian, the magazine of the Organization of American Historians (February, 2019), pp. 20-28
“Ear to the Page: Music Literacy in Early America.” Out of Bounds (collection in honor of Kay Shelemay), eds. Ingrid Monson, Carol Oja, and Richard Wolf (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 227-237
“Music.” In Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment. Mark Spencer, ed.. New York and London: Continuum, 2014
Psalms and Silence: The Soundtrack of John Williams’s Captivity. The Appendix: a New Journal of Narrative & Experimental History, “Out Loud” Issue 1.3 (2013), pp. 36-40
Puritans and Organs at Harvard and in New England, in Proceedings from the Organ in the Academy, Issued by the Harvard Music Department, 2013
“Society for American Music,” co-authored with Carol J. Oja. In The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition. Charles Garrett, Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013
Reviews
Review of Sarah Justina Eyerly, Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania. William and Mary Quarterly
Review of Laura Lohman, Hail Columbia! American Music and Politics in the Early Nation. Eighteenth-Century Music 18:1 (March 2021), pp. 191-194
American Music before 1800, Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press). Journal for the Society for American Music, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Fall 2015), pp. 470 - 476
“Mozart in America”: a review of Dorothy Potter, Food For Apollo: Cultivated Music in Antebellum Philadelphia. Common-Place Vol. 13, No. 2.5 (2013)
EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE
Guest editor, American Music vol. 33 no. 3 (Fall 2015), Special Issue on Transatlantic Perspectives