while students may giggle when the first clip begins, they really do listen to and enjoy the music.

The enthusiasm some sailors showed for reproducing American racial spectacle overseas suggests not only their own warm embrace of the era’s popular theatre, but also their aspiration to familiarize foreign societies with the nation’s cultural landscape.

Once the students begin actively listening to the songs, their enthusiasm for the material grows.

Next to Stephen Foster, William Henry Fry was arguably the most important American composer working before the Civil War.

In a dance, movement and steps are like words and sentences.

Increase Mather’s primary target was “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” of men and women together.

Although the Shakers’ material culture has received the most modern attention, arguably the most vital facet of Shaker life was not the production of material objects, but rather the production of music.

As the century wore on, commercial music figured increasingly in the musical lives of Americans, significantly multiplying the choices available to audiences and elevating their aesthetic sophistication.

Not everyone in colonial Philadelphia was pleased about having the hours rung on the state house bell.

How Philip came to figure in the Grand March involves a story of music’s complex intertwining with memory in colonial contexts.

In a world where not everyone could read or even speak a common language, everyone could make music, and did.

What distinguished these musicians […] was their firm belief that music, particularly the large instrumental works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, not only symbolized the ideals of social harmony and equality, but also instantiated these ideals in performance.

Though hard to fathom in a twenty-first century devoid of such an entrenched dance ethos, in 1804, the French and Americans continued to battle over the form and shape of public musical life.

Considering figures as diverse as Bach, Jefferson, Beethoven, and Frederick Douglass, Catherine Jones explores the interaction of two major art forms over the course of a century.

Providing the gamut of contexts for specific musical expressions in America’s past makes them all the more comprehensible, and conveys an appreciation for the ubiquitous importance music had for people long before the age of electronics.

As the preceding slides suggests, Confederate songsters did not shy away from “foreign” material. For instance, “Mary of Argyle” is […]

While the lyrics conveyed forceful messages to the eighteenth-century public, the music also spoke to listeners.

Because psalmody was transmitted through a fluid mix of printed books, manuscript compilations, and oral tradition, hymn tunes and texts were frequently mixed and matched, and tune names likewise varied.

Eighteenth-century French armies marched at one of two tempos.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson On a chilly weekend shortly before Christmas, the Stunning Significant Other (hereafter, SSO) and I took […]

Having been involved in different levels of reenacting for 30 years, from the French and Indian War to the Western […]

Dancers and musicians, who work primarily with physical knowledge and sensation, perceive jigs differently than historians who rely on written evidence.

Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels in recent years, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.

McIntosh championed the soprano-led ensemble, softer singing style, proper enunciation, and a more affected style of performance characteristic of both liturgical-based denominations such as Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans, as well as members of polite society.

How should we understand the major role European classical music has played in American cultural history?

All the essays in this issue treat music that registers quintessentially American processes of cultural change-encounter, innovation, contestation, reconfiguration, transfusion.

Norumbega Harmony is a choral ensemble organized at Wellesley College in 1976. Since the beginning we have sung weekly in […]

Hesperus was founded as a baroque ensemble in Arlington, Va., in 1979, but quickly expanded its repertoire to include colonial […]

African American worshippers were carefully responding and interacting with each other exactly because each individual was free to shape the collective sound.

I am trying to be a serious person in these serious times, but permit me to take moment to follow […]

“In part, the recurring taste for folk music has to be explained by a recurring desire in American culture: the desire to strip away the awful effects of consumer culture and return to a simpler, harder, more authentic time.”

I am driving off to the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) annual meeting in beautiful downtown Springfield, […]

The Newberry Consort presents historically informed programs of early music, often drawn from the collections at the Newberry Library, through […]

What makes American music American? Is there a distinctive American music? What is the relationship between American music and music […]

October 2008

David and Ginger Hildebrand co-founded the Colonial Music Institute, which conducts and promotes research and offers information and resource materials […]

In answer to Ben’s comment, of course Sir Lord Baltimore counts, and who could forget Paul Revere and the Raiders, […]

    Databases Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources, 1589-1839: An Index http://www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/Index.htm The Hymn Tune Index. All hymns […]

In these two almost random cases, the sounds created by African Americans induced in white observers a sense of cultural dissonance, prompting feelings of confusion, disgust, and even horror.

“‘And in what walk of life, or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!'”

[T]his wasn’t a time to be an “objective historian.” This was a time to indulge, for a moment, the warm, vaguely melancholy feeling that comes from connecting to the past and to remember why I became an historian in the first place. And it was time to learn more.

Or How the Puritans Boogied Down, Down, Down Derry Down

Converts’ spirits were stirred by impassioned preaching and hymn singing, and moved by holy laughter and ecstatic barking at revival meetings; some claimed to hear mysterious voices in otherwise empty rooms or angelic choirs at their deathbeds; still others tried to describe their new spiritual perceptions as in some ways analogous to listening.

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