Cultivated by Hand

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.

Glenda Goodman is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania who works on the history of music in early America.

List of illustrations
Note on sources
Cast of characters
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Reproducing Music
Laboring Bodies and Technologies of Reproduction
What is a Manuscript Music Book?
Manuscript, Print, and Gender
Chapter 2: Learning Music
Literacies
Literacy as Piety
Print Discipline
Becoming Refined
Rigorous Seminaries
Chapter 3: Consumerism and the Materiality of Music Books
Family Business
Luxury Goods
Global Trade and Raw Supplies
Chapter 4: Economies of Accomplishments
Pleasing Patriarchs and Self-Display
Courtship, Marriage, and the Intimacies of Musical Exchange
Absence and Remembrance
Chapter 5: Appearing Tasteful
Personal Improvement
Cosmopolitan Aspiration, Provincial Anxiety, and the American Galant
Being Seen
Sensibility, Observation, and Connection
Epilogue
Bibliography