Overview

"Scattered in archives and historical societies across the United States are hundreds of volumes of manuscript music, copied by hand by eighteenth-century amateurs. Often overlooked, amateur music making played a key role in the construction of gender, class, race, and nation in the post-revolution years of the United States. These early Americans, seeking ways to present themselves as genteel, erudite, and pious, saw copying music by hand and performing it in intimate social groups as a way to make themselves—and their new nation—appear culturally sophisticated. Following a select group of amateur musicians, Cultivated by Hand makes the case that amateur music making was both consequential to American culture of the eighteenth century and aligned with other forms of self-fashioning. This interdisciplinary study explores the social and material practices of amateur music making, analyzing the materiality of manuscripts, tracing the lives of individual musicians, and uncovering their musical tastes and sensibilities. Author Glenda Goodman explores highly personal yet often denigrated experiences of musically ""accomplished"" female amateurs in particular, who grappled with finding a meaningful place in their lives for music. Revealing the presence of these unacknowledged subjects in music history, Cultivated by Hand reclaims the importance of such work and presents a class of musicians whose labors should be taken into account."

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9780197776995

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Reviews

Both Goodman's knowledge of her material and her mosaic-like theoretical framework are impeccable. She has chosen not to engage in theoretical digressions, but rather to write a clear, dispassionate, often elegant prose that would be accessible to any reader and that could therefore be used in American studies, early American history, and music classes. Goodman merits con-gratulations both for daring, as her first book, to rewrite the standard narrative of elite musical life in this countrys first two generations, and for making that narrative so thought-provoking and pleasurable to read. * Suzanne Cusick, Journal of the Early Republic * ...Goodman's study reveals the meaningful role of amateur music making in everyday life in the early years of the republic. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * P. D. Sanders, The Ohio State University at Newark, CHOICE * Goodman's loving, careful documentation of an overlooked archive represents a stellar contribution to US women's music history, as well as to the broader history of eighteenth-century music. * Olivia A. Bloechl, Eighteenth-Century Music * In Cultivated by Hand, Glenda Goodman foregrounds amateur musicking in the first decades of the Republic to formulate a new narrative of music history in the United States. An erudite move away from a valuation of music based on traditional European historiography, this book will unequivocally reshape the way the scholars interpret musical sources. * Candace Bailey, North Carolina Central University * InÂCultivated by Hand, Glenda Goodman brilliantly illuminates the heretofore unseen world of amateur musicking in the early Republic. Reading the hand-copied music books of women and men with care and insight, Goodman opens our ears to the sounds and lived intimacies of the post-Revolutionary generation, most especially the lives of white women who wove music through their labor, leisure, and self-fashioning as raced and gendered individuals. Recuperating the amateur as a key figure in the history of early American music, Goodman's work is moving, revelatory, and shimmering with insights that draw us deeply into the world of the early United States. * Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, author of A New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 * The audacity of [Goodman's] scholarship lies in locating musical meaning not in the creativity of the composers' works contained in the manuscripts, nor even in the expressiveness of amateur performances at home or in social settings. Rather, as Goodman shows, the handwork of the copied music itself was what mattered the most to the copyist to whom it belonged. * David S. Shields, ^ *

Author Information

Glenda Goodman is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

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