Historic Deerfield’s hybrid 2025 museum course, “One Hundred Years of Song: Singing Early New England Music for Science, Memory, and Abolitionism, 1770–1870,” will be held on Wednesdays March 12, 19, and 26, 2025 virtually and in person.
The Revolutionary and early Federal period saw a great outpouring of new choral music by local and regional composers who worked in a lively vernacular style still familiar to many from its place in the “shape-note” tradition. In this course, students will engage with the exciting sounds of this early New England music through singing, listening, and lectures on three historical sites of imagination and musical practice: singing as cutting edge “science,” singing as local history, and singing as social justice work in the 19th-century Abolitionist movement.