Music in the Early American Republic

On June 6, 2021, Bach Society Houston will present a concert called “Music in the Americas at the Time of Bach," which can be streamed online. The concert’s theme—“eighteenth-century music” outside the European geographical context and repertoire typically implied by the term—might raise questions for BSH audiences. Our episode today will explore some of those questions with Dr. Glenda Goodman, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Cultivated By Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press). Dr. Goodman joins us to discuss how her book—and concerts like the one I just mentioned—can help us consider, and then expand, some of our assumptions, definitions, and labels around European-derived music during Bach's lifetime and in the generation or two following him.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Image from an 18th-century American music notebook at Dr. Goodman’s website

“Notes on Bach” episodes with Dr. Andrew Talle about his book Beyond Bach and the Anna Magdalena notebooks

Vast Early America episode of the history podcast “Ben Franklin’s World,” featuring Dr. Karin Wulf and other scholars

Dr. Candace Bailey, Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South (University of Illinois Press)