Appearing Tasteful

Americans in the new nation wished not to appear provincial and thus took pains to cultivate refined appearances and good taste. Discernment and the appreciation of beauty was essential for musical taste, which in turn was scrutinized by critics and musical entrepreneurs who espoused a particularly elitist and Anglo-centric view. Much of the popular repertoire was in a galant style that was deemed less than tasteful by critics but which, due to its sentimental song topics and technical accessibility, was agreeable to amateurs. Musical taste was judged by appearances as well as sounds, however. The experiences of Daniel and Harriet Wadsworth demonstrate the importance of tasteful appearances, from penmanship to dress to dancing abilities. The sensibility displayed by their refined tastes was mirrored by the intimacy of their sibling relationship, particularly when Daniel cared for the ailing Harriet leading up to her death at a young age.

Consumerism and the Materiality of Music Books

Well-to-do amateur musicians were consumers of luxury goods. Consumer culture in the early American republic was heavily reliant on imports. Not only was sheet music imported, often from Britain, but the raw materials out of which manuscript books were made relied on global trade. Although amateurs’ music books were not particularly fine, making the books required time, expense, and effort—all of which meant they were considered luxuries. The music books of Sarah Brown [Herreshoff] and Elizabeth Van Rensselaer demonstrate the importance of consumer expertise and decision-making, while their elite upbringing in wealthy homes contextualizes their collecting habits. Furthermore, Sarah Brown’s family wealth stemmed from overseas trade, including the transatlantic slave trade, implicating her privileged music consumerism with regimes of oppression. The refined and leisurely labor of collecting and creating music books is contrasted with the invisible, immiserated labor of foreign workers who produced the raw materials of those same books.

Introduction

Amateurs musicians and their manuscript music books provide valuable insights into the nature of music in everyday life in the post-Revolutionary United States. Examining the cultural practices of amateur music-making allows us to see the instrumental role music played in the construction of gender, social class, race, and the nation. Much of the repertoire popular among white amateur women and men was imported from Britain and reflected an aesthetic conservatism that belied the impulse toward cultural nationalism in the early republic. Moreover, this repertoire was avowedly conventional and eschews the traits heralded as innovative by musicologists who work on the Classical and early Romantic periods. As nonprofessionals, as people engaged in manuscript copying in the age of print, and in their choice of repertoire, amateurs’ contributions have been triply obscured. Nevertheless, the experience of learning, copying, and performing such repertoire was critical for amateurs’ self-fashioning as genteel, erudite, pious, and cosmopolitan.

Epilogue

The biographies of amateur musicians unveil how gendered ideologies functioned in lived experiences: didactic prescriptions pertaining to consumerism and luxury, and to patriarchy and marriage, are complicated when we attend to individuals’ pleasures and hopes. The next generations of amateur musicians operated within the patterns established by the post-Revolutionary generation. The epilogue casts forward into the antebellum period to consider the similarities and differences with what came before. Most notably, a shift in attitudes toward female music teachers represents a marked change in the nineteenth century. However, separate gender roles remained entrenched. A summary of how manuscript music books’ materiality intersected with gendered experiences of music in amateurs’ daily lives in the early republic reminds us how this came to be the case.

Reproducing Music

Amateur musicians played an important role in the material reproduction of musical texts in the eighteenth century. Their work represents the coalescence of technological, bibliographical, and cultural forces in the early national period. Print and manuscript were mutually informing technologies for music reproduction, and both entailed manual and creative labor and expertise. Yet, unlike print, chirography (handwriting) focused attention on the creation of unique, personalized items; moreover, the practice of copying music by hand challenged the primacy of the author by emphasizing an effort to re-cord (to take material to heart). Thus, manuscript music books can be linked to earlier modes of book production, such as commonplace books. Yet they also align with other genres, such as anthologies. Finally, gendered expectations informed books’ creation: like other forms of handwork, musical penmanship expressed femininity. The work of copying music was subject to the same gendered evaluations that minimized the significance of (and yet relied on) women’s domestic work.

Economies of Accomplishments

Amateur music-making was often labeled a feminine “accomplishment”—a designation that carried ambivalent connotations. The extensive and contradictory prescriptive literature about accomplishments, and the broader discussion about women’s education of which it was a part, deemed musical ability at once essential and frivolous. The justifications for accomplishments cohered primarily around the theme of patriarchal authority: pleasing fathers and husbands and attracting potential mates. Warnings regarding accomplishments stemmed from scenarios where such justifications went awry (with foolish fathers and rakish suitors). Yet the lived experiences of amateur musicians show that young women took pleasure in the self-fashioning opportunities musical performances afforded. Moreover, in courtship and marriage, music served not simply to please and entertain others, but, as Sarah Brown’s experiences demonstrate, also was a critical mode through which family intimacy was built and maintained.

Learning Music

As the eighteenth century witnessed an expansion of educational opportunities, learning to read and write music imbued amateurs with erudition and discipline. Printed instructional volumes utilized archaic abstract visualizations that encouraged a cerebral approach to learning music, and singing school classes relied on rote memorization of the “rules of music.” The potential drudgery of this approach was mitigated by the sociability of the schools. By the end of the century, volumes of instruction for instruments were increasingly available to American amateurs; these, too, relied on charts that abstracted musical knowledge. The expansion of secular instrumental instruction shifted the emphasis of education from piety (for sacred singing) to refinement. Even as printed instructions pushed toward standardized “rules,” manuscript music books reveal that amateurs embraced a wide range of literate practices, from quite rudimentary to highly advanced. Manuscripts also reveal individuals’ gradual improvement in the technical ability, aural skill, and knowledge of musical vocabulary.