Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic by Glenda Goodman (review)

Glenda Goodman’s Cultivated by Hand investigates personal collections of hand-copied music compiled during the decades after the American Revolution. Goodman undertakes a journey of exploration through collections of music manuscripts copied by the daughters and a few sons of the merchant and professional classes in New England and New York. Her goal is to show how scholars can adduce historical meanings by studying materiality, temporality, implicit knowledge about the gamut and harmony, tastes in consumption, gender politics, and suggested community found inscribed on the pages. The audacity of her 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, for that work crafted a personal mirror in which to discover her (or his) sensibility, cosmopolitanism, and allegiance to galant style. Goodman explictly departs from many of the traditional concerns of musicology of the United States, such as glossing the cultural functions of genres, appreciating the character of masterworks, or measuring the transatlantic tides of influence. Of work in the field, her scholarship most resembles Susan L. Porter’s With an Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America 1785–1815, which explores how theatrical music and performance style traversed the Atlantic and instilled a taste for elegance, lightness, wit, and urbanity in postrevolutionary American audiences.1 Porter’s work proves useful because Goodman found many song and dance tunes in her archives that were by the English theatrical composers Porter examines, such as William Shield. Yet Goodman is not greatly concerned with measuring to what degree galant music—the jaunty, danceable, sentimental music of the pleasure gardens and stage—enabled her subjects to perform gentility or stylishness in public spaces. What Goodman finds powerful is how the time and effort of copying a galant piece made a personal claim to the music. Handwritten music, in this view, becomes a deposit of sensibility, or even personhood.2