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Cultivated by Hand aligns the overlooked history of amateur musicians in the early years of the United States with little-understood practices of music book making. It reveals the pervasiveness of these practices, particularly among women, and their importance for the construction of gender, class, race, and nation.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
Glenda Goodman is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania who works on the history of music in early America.
Summary
Cultivated by Hand aligns the overlooked history of amateur musicians in the early years of the United States with little-understood practices of music book making. It reveals the pervasiveness of these practices, particularly among women, and their importance for the construction of gender, class, race, and nation.
Additional text
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.
