As public school music education and appreciation have declined in neoliberal reforms, a narrative has emerged that the mid-century peak of American participation in amateur music – investment in public school music lessons, amateur quartets, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, record sales – was a unique and irreplicable moment in US history, one that, like the explosion of the middle class and its wider civic culture, was the result of a postwar immigration pattern, modernism and Keynesian consumerism that we will never see again. Glenda Goodman’s Cultivated by Hand reminds us of the much deeper history of American amateur music making and the important role it played in the creation of new middle-class cultures in the post-Revolutionary era. The book revives a Tocquevillian image of the Early Republic as replete with middle-class hobbyists and civic associations. The Englishman William Strickland, travelling through rural upstate New York, overheard a woman playing a piano and commented that ‘such occurrences could only take place in America’, where people ‘very far in the wilderness’ were interested in ‘cultivating musical skills, good taste, and the ability to sustain amusing conversation’ (p. 166). Music making wasn’t only a high-brow urban activity, exclusively for a wealthy, Anglophile elite.
Music books, which form the primary source base of this excellent history, provide a thickly descriptive source for re-examining the role of amateurism in the Early Republic’s almost exceptionally large middle class as they distinguished themselves through their hobbies and the consumption associated with those hobbies, rather than exclusively through their labour or occupation or their material display of class identity. Their consumption was still a form of display, as Goodman explains, but it was one for distinguishing sub-groups of like-minded men and women. This was a form of identity formation through the hobby community.
Goodman’s book is focused on a selection of music books produced by six individuals in the North-eastern United States in the decades after the American Revolution. These books are used to illustrate a society in transition. Printed music was taking off. A new political culture sought out new meanings from music making. Drawing on ideas from book history, formal music history and the social history of the Early Republic period, Goodman situates this practice of music-book creation – effectively copying out music by hand into notebooks kept especially for this purpose – in the social world that produced these objects. Chapter 1 of the book delves into the history of music reproduction. Jeremiah Gooden, for instance, copying a book of sacred music, included ‘composers’ names and piece titles as well as notes on the sources from which he copied’ and sometimes ‘where he had heard the piece performed’ (p. 28). Music books like those of the Wadsworth siblings or of Sally Brown and her daughter ‘were often co-created, used by sequential family members across multiple years, or disturbed haphazardly with extra space filled in by any number of people’ (p. 46). The materiality of the music books is a core part of Goodman’s argument about the way these amateurs used music as a means of ‘self-fashioning’.
Throughout the book, I kept making notes in the margin whenever a certain music-book-making practice reminded me of the 1990s art of making mixtapes. Waiting for your favourite song to come on and then pressing Record as quickly as you could. Recording songs at shows in friends’ basements or church halls. Building up a tape that was about your own taste, but also something that was about sharing that taste with friends. Bringing your enthusiasms to them, but also shaping a reputation as someone with good taste, and maybe someone who knew about good songs before other people. The pleasure of introducing someone to something that you think they’ll like. The self-satisfaction within a group of scene kids that you have the real musical taste.
The material that Goodman uses to explore this phenomenon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, like those mixtapes, deeply personal. Daniel Wadsworth, who contributed to a music book with his siblings Harriet and Caty, was sceptical of ‘the deceitfulness of polite appearances’ (p. 199), and he worried about the ‘affectations of cosmopolitan sociability’ (p. 200) unconnected with real intellectual engagement with the music and other accomplishments that wealthy merchants’ children were supposed to participate in. In other words, he was worried about what my friends would have called posers. Self-fashioning and displays of taste sound like an argument about refinement and class formation in the Early Republic. And certainly there were some aspects of that at play, particularly coming from the Wadsworths’ father, who was an unremitting cultural snob (and, unsurprisingly, a Federalist). But the overwhelming impression from Goodman’s sources is not of an elite in the Old World, aristocratic sense. Instead, she situates these wealthy individuals within a broader social world, where churches, music schools, individual tutors, female seminaries, assemblies and family correspondence were all part of a wider culture of music consumption and creation. And within that culture, there were individuals like Sally Brown, who became known as keen amateurs, whose friends and family would see music to buy and think of her, or take her to a concert. Her love of music was more than just a class affection or a decorative ‘accomplishment’: it was an aspect of her personality as an individual.
The music books as material object are also reflective of the technology at hand, while sharing a common trait with other hobbies of the industrial age: a sense of nostalgia about earlier technologies. Cheap paper, ink and quills were available, as Goodman details, because of the global supply chains that Early Americans were able to participate in. This made the ability to participate in this hobby an act of consumption, and it also made it plausible for a vast swathe of middle-class Americans. But these music books were also, fundamentally, unnecessary. The music they were copying was already printed in many cases – although some of the music books also include original compositions or aural transcriptions. The technology of printing had made the need to hand-write what was now called ‘manuscript’ music obsolete. Like record collecting or sailing or action-figure collecting or antiquing, part of what made this an industrial-age hobby was the rejection of easy consumerism in favour of a more rarefied collecting of obscure or not-easy-to-source or specifically taste-approved goods that were not part of contemporary mainstream culture. The music-book creators were making and engaging with a smaller community defined by a shared interest. And, as Goodman tells it, it was a surprisingly inclusive community, given the assumptions about gendered culture that both infuse the historiography of the Early American Republic and the mainstream prescriptive literature of this period. Music making was a hobby that was theoretically possible for men and women, and for a broad swathe of the large middle class. Immigrants and even Black music teachers (though not Black girls wanting to learn side-by-side with their white peers) were a crucial component of the tutoring apparatus that supported these amateurs. Goodman explores, for instance, the popularity of singing schools in the Early Republic. Hobbies and civic associations were used to create and sustain smaller communities – with their own measures of value and belonging – in a society that was diffuse and constantly changing. This understanding of the role of taste and community in shaping individuals is testament to Goodman’s sophisticated social history.
In fact, Goodman is, I think, too cautious about her characters. She is correct that they are not ‘representative’, in that they are wealthier than average and therefore their papers have been preserved so that historians have access to them. But the storytelling she does makes it clear that she is encountering these people as individuals. They are not meant to be representative, because they are individual lives, and their very specific tastes and thoughts and self-fashionings are the subject of the book. They were ‘doodling humorous cartoons and random notes’ (p. 41). They were trying things out and abandoning what didn’t work. They were responding to their particular friends. What is representative is that even those whose records we don’t have still could have thought about and self-fashioned through their musical tastes. Who doesn’t have a favorite song?
Well, maybe not the writers of the scolding prescriptive literature that make up one of the sets of interpretive sources Goodman works with. Falling firmly within that other American tradition, the tension between industrial and liberal education, these tracts cautioned against the frivolity and pointlessness of music making. They were particularly concerned for women, who had to navigate the Scylla of frivolous ‘accomplishments’ and the Charybdis of failing to become an educated Republican mother. But this literature also aimed at the creation of American genteel masculinity: piano, for men, was too feminine. The gendered strictures these tracts promoted called to mind another contemporary parallel in the kinds of prescriptive gender norms outlined in books like 10 Rules for Life. These aren’t the realities people are living with; they are idealised notions that reflect, in fact, the very loosening of gender ideology that people are living in reality. Goodman deals with this Early Republic literature by unpacking its anxieties and what those anxieties mean for our understanding of the age. But she is not lulled into their view of the world or into thinking that they were in anyway descriptive of the realities of the period. ‘Polemical prescriptive literature cannot be read as evidence for actual behavior’ (p. 139). Instead, she relies on the realities of the music books themselves, as well as letters amongst the friends and families of the music book creators. As she puts it ‘music literacy was a sign of piety for some and gentility for others, and for many it was a combination of the two’ (p. 63). Some amateurs embraced the trend for ancient music, distinguishing their taste by writing out excerpts from Handel. Others followed the ‘vogue for Scottish topics’ or ‘Native subjects’ in the more popular galant style (p. 187). It is a major triumph of this book that Goodman uses these cultural and material history sources to highlight the ways that real people lived, thought and engaged with music as a community-making and identity-shaping pastime, overcoming the prescriptive literature’s tenacious hold on the historiography of gender roles, leisure and class projection in the period.
