The genteel amateur musician is a figure familiar to historians of early American music, most notably from the musical activities of founders like Thomas Jefferson or Francis Hopkinson. Glenda Goodman's study Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic extends and deepens our understanding of the social world musical amateurs inhabited in the generations after the Revolution, which, she rightly notes, are often overlooked by music historians. Although prominent Northeastern families like the Adamses (of Massachusetts) and the Browns (of Rhode Island) appear in her study, its focus is on more ordinary individuals, especially the genteel, mostly white young women and men who created the manuscript music books that lie at the heart of her account.

The roughly 250 music books surveyed allow the author to present a compelling, nuanced portrait of a social world. Examining the books’ physical features as well as their content, Goodman regards them as a kind of ‘material proxy’ for their creators (9): status items that socially elite individuals enlisted in their efforts at self-fashioning in the early years of the Republic. That micro-histories like these are germane to the broader emergence of a post-Revolutionary national society is a contention of the book; but such grand narratives are not where it dwells. Rather, Goodman's study shines most brightly in its attention to material details – a decorative flourish here, a messy hand there – that suggest something of an embodied musicality, as well as a self and a social station that the manuscripts’ makers displayed with their creations.

This is not to suggest that the author neglects larger themes. On the contrary, one of her more striking findings is the persistence of an aesthetic conservatism among this social group (for instance ‘the continued influence of eighteenth-century sensibility and the continued embrace of the sentimental’ (4)), in contrast to contemporary developments in Europe and Great Britain. While it is unsurprising that members of a settler society would look to the home region as a cultural source, doing so in the aftermath of a war of independence is not intuitive. Goodman makes a convincing case that the very conventionalism of the repertories that her amateurs collected was part of their appeal to after-generations of the Revolution, as they sought to cultivate an urbane sensibility they associated with metropolitan Europe.

This is a fascinating analysis that I would love to see the author take further, perhaps in a version of the ‘multinodal comparative analysis’ (5) that she advocates as a future approach. Even here – in a book that is clearly occupied with many other important things – it would have been interesting to see a discussion of these music books as products of a post-Revolutionary settler society, as well as an early Republican one. Both headings are appropriate, but the first highlights a different investment (in colonial expansion versus nation-building per se) and identification that may also be perceptible in these books, as Bonnie Gordon has found in Jefferson's music collections and writings (‘What Mr. Jefferson Didn't Hear’, in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 77–132). Goodman offers a well-grounded account of the involvement of some of her amateurs’ families in the Atlantic slave trade, and it would be enlightening to learn about their relationship to land acquisition and (as relevant) frontier struggles.

With chapter 1, Goodman looks closely at how the materiality of music books expressed social meanings, especially gender norms. One key point is that the act of copying music was itself socially significant, beyond its utility for the collector. In an era of widely available commercial music prints, ‘to copy music was an act that created the gendered, classed amateur subject’ (24), by reinforcing ideologies of gender and the relegation of genteel women to the private sphere. The exploration of materiality in this chapter yields many other points of interest, but I particularly appreciated Goodman's discussion of a page of Elizabeth Todd's music book that shows her practising with her rastrum, an instrument used for lining music staves in manuscripts. Not only is this a wonderfully intimate record of amateur scribal activity that nicely supports her argument, it also elegantly highlights the rastrum research of Eugene (and Jean) Wolf, her predecessor in eighteenth-century music at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the next chapter, music education in the early Republic comes into focus. The chapter revisits some familiar period developments – the Regular Singing reform movement, the rise of the singing master and the inclusion of didactic introductions in published music books – with a view to understanding the material resources that made this possible and the significance of musical training as a marker of social status. This review allows her to scrutinize amateurs’ manuscript music books with a period eye, so to speak, for signs of physical control and the level of musical education they connoted.

Chapter 3 turns to music consumption in the early Republic and approaches music collecting as a consumer practice, albeit one that did not translate neatly into cash value. The labour-intensive nature of manuscript music books qualified them as a kind of luxury good (in the context of commercial print availability), objects whose creation required a good amount of leisure. Furthermore, amateur book makers relied on access to imported raw materials that themselves required considerable global labour, often in exploitative conditions. As case studies, Goodman looks at the music collecting of Sally Brown and Betsey Van Rensselaer, daughters of wealthy Northeastern families. Sally's collecting is of particular interest because of her family's involvement in the slave trade, but the author also argues convincingly that music scribal materials were already entangled with global and national, often unfree labour. As she pointedly notes, ‘the profound privilege of amateurs crystalizes with their role as consumers positioned atop the layers of the labour that went into music book production’ (104).

Musical taste and ability were lauded as a desirable accomplishment for marriageable women, and chapter 4 delves into the complex meanings and economies of that ideal. Genteel, mostly white women, Goodman argues, were caught in a double bind between the general condemnation of ‘useless female leisure’ and the severe limitations placed on ‘useful female work’, especially paid work (136). In response to this situation, many such women threw themselves into accomplishments, like music, that could offer them a sense of agency and self-realization. The author speculates that the personal enjoyment some seem to have found in their own accomplishments may have constituted a subtle form of resistance to demands that women's aesthetic labour should contribute value to others, especially to their fathers, husbands and their families in general.

In chapter 5 Goodman considers the social stakes attached to the acquisition of musical taste, linking it to the contradictions inherent in discourse on female accomplishment she discussed in the previous chapter. Taste, she argues, was an ‘antidote’ to criticism of female musical accomplishment as ‘wasteful vanity’, because it indicated an inherent good judgment not susceptible to the vagaries of fashion. As such, it reflected on the character of oneself, one's family and even – in the newly formed Unites States – one's nation. Displays of taste in musical performances and manuscript books could thus matter quite a bit, as she demonstrates with a fascinating discussion of debates over the American galant style. Associated with femininity and contrasted with learned styles (as in Europe), sentimental galanterie was heartily condemned by some, yet it was also very successful commercially and popular with amateurs. Goodman speculates that collecting and playing galant repertoire, beyond its moral benefits as a conduit for sympathy, allowed genteel Americans to ‘circumvent the problem of provincialism’ by aligning themselves affectively and aesthetically with ‘those across the ocean’ (190).

The ‘Epilogue’ points to historical changes in the economies of musical amateurism and collecting in the antebellum era, among which was the expansion of possibilities for women to engage in paid musical work. Music albums themselves also diminished as an amateur accomplishment in the nineteenth century, removing one of the main bulwarks against hostility to women's leisurely artistic endeavours.

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. As Ruth Solie notes in her work with Victorian girls’ diaries, informal, often highly personal sources like Goodman's invite us to ‘look away from the professional discourse of musicians and toward other arenas in which ordinary “cultural scuttlebutt” is regularly going on’ (Music In Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 2). The micro-histories that emerge in Goodman's analysis are valuable in themselves, and they emphasize the benefit of taking seriously even informal sources like these in prompting a fresh understanding of the past.