About this project
This project is funded by a 2023 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This Foundations project addresses the needs of the growing area of research in music binders volumes. These volumes contain published sheet music that people (primarily women) across the U.S. compiled according to their preferences. They attract multidisciplinary research on the intersecting musical, social, and cultural contexts present in a given volume. This research also challenges second-hand narratives of American music in the 1800s via actual artifacts of social participation in music, restoring the perspectives of women to an often male-dominated discourse and enriching the re-evaluation of conventional narratives. Many "lost" works also await discovery, as volumes often contain rare or unique titles. This important and growing area of scholarly work finds roadblocks in discoverability, physical and digital preservation, and access. This proposal thus envisions a pilot project for a cross-institutional, extensible digital collection linked to a searchable database.
This site is currently under construction with ongoing updates.
Project personnel
Maristella Feustle, University of North Texas Music Library, project director
Dr. Candace Bailey, North Carolina Central University, project co-director
Dr. Brian Anderson