<i>Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic.</i> By Glenda Goodman

Glenda Goodman's first book, Cultivated by Hand, has turned a page in early American music scholarship. This is in no way a critique of the excellent recent work that has ably proven music history should be taken seriously by historians. However, most of these studies consider public music making, the public meaning of music, or music made by professionals. Goodman's key change signals that music made by amateurs can—and should—be added to the stage.At its center, this is a study of manuscript music books created by (mostly) elite white women in the northeastern United States who came of age after the American Revolution. Though the introduction and “cast of characters” suggests this work is biographically oriented, it is much more. Goodman explores how these books came to be, and how music fit into the everyday domestic lives of first-generation Americans. The author intertwines study of the music books with the experiences of those who made them. The result is an uncovering of what she calls a “hidden layer of music history” in that it “transpired away from the public eye” (xvi).The book's five chapters deal with the materiality of music books, the education of amateurs, taste-making, consumption, and gendered discourse and experience related to musical accomplishments. Goodman's work will be of interest to early American historians of the book, education, consumer habits, gender, nationalism, and the domestic sphere. She situates this music history into multiple historiographies, contributing insights from a previously silent archive. Scholars of the early American republic will find familiar themes explored in new ways.Goodman considers why manuscript music books and related amateur activities have received so little scholarly attention, concluding that “the expectation of print hegemony” has blinded eighteenth-century scholars to the value and use of manuscript music (xvii). The most copied repertoire, the sentimental songs—often saccharine and simple—inspire little scholarly consideration. Yet the individuality, intimacy, and personal musical experiences evidenced in manuscript music, reveal stories of “discipline, creation, collection, love, and loss” that “were at once constitutive of and overshadowed by the epochal events surrounding nation formation in early America” (xvii).Though Goodman discusses repertoire, such as the generational shift in music culture from sacred and vocal to secular, instrumental, and even cosmopolitan, it is not the star of the show. As scholars have shown with other objects, hand-copied music books were used for self-fashioning. Individual taste was shown through the sometimes fraught choices of songs, paper, and binding. The popularity of sentimental English song reveals a developing cosmopolitan identity attempting to overcome accusations of provincialism. The effort devoted to learning to read and write music allowed those with excess time to foster a sense of feminine gentility or masculine sensibility. The sharing of music books and sounds projected class belonging through displays of refinement, which also signaled virtue. Private music created and shaped intimacy.Goodman takes the reader into the music schools, kitchens, and parlors of musicians. The twenty-eight illustrations of manuscript music, practice books, song books and music education manuals, show improving penmanship, frustrated scribbles, and dreamy doodles. Goodman's easy prose immerses the reader in each household studied. This makes Cultivated by Hand a good choice for classroom use. And because Goodman explores a diverse array of topics—opting to pursue “a course that is narrow in scale but broad in scope”—she draws on an equally rich trove of sources (16). The author examines 100 of the extant 250 manuscript music books created in the northeastern United States between 1750 and 1820, and she scrutinizes letters, diaries, account books, periodicals, printed music, and music publications “to discover a musical world that contains many hidden pockets” (15).This is truly an interdisciplinary work that shifts nimbly between musical and historical analysis. Goodman's technical knowledge of music enables unique insights, and creative reading of an overlooked archive provides a deep and extractive analysis of this source base. She uses these untapped sources to explore questions of gender, class, and national identity through the materiality of musical production. She compassionately conveys the inner lives of these mostly young woman musicians, encouraging us to take amateurs seriously. Doing so provides space to study women musicians, as well as the ubiquity of music in early American lives.