CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Below you'll find the provisional program of events for the 2026 FAMI Conference. Scroll to view the pages or press the blue button to download a PDF of the program.
Forging an American Musical Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Conference Program (provisional)
Wednesday, 28 January
Sidewalk Studio, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
8:45-9:15 Registration & Coffee
9:15-9:30 Greetings
Katherine K. Preston (Bottoms Professor of Music Emerita, College of William & Mary; Chair, FAMI Committee)
9:30-11:00 Session 1. Developing an American Cultural Identity
Chair: Deane Root (Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh and Editor-in-Chief of the Grove Music Project, Oxford University Press)
Molly Barnes (Ph.D., Independent Scholar, Chapel Hill, NC): “A Great Revolution in the Musical Character of the American People”: Music as a Tool of Social Reform in the United States, 1830-1845
Marianne Betz (Professor of Musicology, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Leipzig): “Is it not the Music Teachers and Composers that Govern the Music of the People?”: George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931), Composer, Educator, Cultural Manager.
Matthew Reese (Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University): “We are not all of [Unmixed] English Blood”: Coleridge Taylor, Race, and American Self-Fashioning
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15- 12:15 Session 2. Music of Everyday Life
Chair: Maribeth Clark (Associate Professor, New College of Florida)
William Brooks (Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Illinois): “Irene, Good Night”: Gussie Davis and Middlebrow Parlor Songs
George Boziwick (Retired Chief, Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts): Henry Chadwick: A Life with Music and Baseball
12:15-1:15 Lunch break (Conferees on their own)
1:15-2:00 EXHIBITION: NYPL for the Performing Arts, Music Division, third floor
“A Life on the Ocean Wave”: George Bristow (1825-1898) American Composer,
Educator and Musician, with commentary by curator George Boziwick
Sidewalk Studio, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
2:15-3:45 Session 3. Music in the Political Arena
Chair: Neely Bruce (John Spencer Camp Professor, Wesleyan University; Co-Chair, FAMI Committee)
Bonny Miller (Independent Scholar, Columbia, SC): “The Nation Calls!” Augusta Browne and the 1876 Presidential Election Ellen Sauer Tanyeri (Ph.D., Candidate in Musicology, Case Western Reserve University): Vive le son: Songs of the French Revolution in Nineteenth-Century America
Gabryel Smith (Director, Archives and Exhibitions, New York Philharmonic): Whose Music? How World War I Transformed the Perception of German Music in the U.S.
3:45-4:00 Break
4:00-5:30 Session 4. Enterprising Women and the Musical Economy
Chair: Bill Faucett (Campaign Director, Tampa Museum of Art)
Whitney Henderson (Ph.D., Independent Scholar): Composing in the “Wild and Woolly”: The Seattle Ladies Musical Club’s Support of Local Composers, 1900-1914
Christopher Reynolds (Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, University of California, Davis): American Women Songwriters as Self-Publishers: Carrie Jacobs Bond and Her Entrepreneurial Predecessors
Petra Meyer-Frazier (Lamont School of Music, University of Denver): “Only Waiting”: Towards a Supply-Chain Model for Sheet Music and Bound Volumes in Mid 19th-Century America
5:30-6:30 Dinner break (Conferees on their own)
Evening Sessions at the Century Association, 7 West 43rd St, Manhattan
(For registered conference attendees only)
6:30-7:30 Light refreshments at the Century Association
7:30-9:15 Lecture-Recitals 1-2: Late-Century American Women Composers and Performers
Chair: Hilary Poriss (Professor and Chair, Department of Music, College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University)
Sarah Baer (Women's Philharmonic Advocacy and Moravian University);
Laurie Blunsom (Women's Philharmonic Advocacy);
Liane Curtis (Women's Philharmonic Advocacy);
Tammy Hensrud (mezzo-soprano, Hofstra University):
Marilyn J. Lehman (pianist, Hofstra University)
Uncovering Voices: The Songs of Margaret Ruthven Lang and Amy Beach in the Making of an American Art Song Tradition
Monika Herzig (Professor of Artistic Research, Jam Music Lab Private University, Vienna): The Hidden Figures of Ragtime: A Case Study of Culture and Society in Indianapolis, 1890-1920
Thursday, 29 January
Elebash Recital Hall, Graduate Center, City University of New York
8:30-9:00 Light breakfast (coffee/tea, fruit, pastries/bagels)
9:00-10:45 Session 5. New York Opera Houses and Reviving the Spirit of ’76: Operatic Settings of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy
Chair: Giuseppe Gerbino (Professor of Music, Columbia University)
William Hennessey (Art Director and President, Chrysler Museum of Art, retired): Building Valhalla: The Architecture of New York’s Early Opera Houses
Dr. Valeria Wenderoth (University of Hawai'i): Villanis’ La Spia in Italy: American Patriotism tra il buffo e il serio
Douglas Bomberger (Professor of Music, Emeritus, Elizabethtown College): Arditi’s La Spia in New York: Grand Opera in the Service of Patriotism
Respondent: Will Crutchfield (Artistic and General Director of Teatro Nuovo, New York)
10:45-11:00 Break
11:00-12:30 Session 6. Music Everywhere All at Once
Chair: Douglas Shadle (Associate Professor of Music, Vanderbilt University; member, FAMI Committee)
Warren Kimball (Louisiana State University): Examining the Louisiana Creole Songs in Slave Songs of the United States
Matt Marble (Ph.D., Princeton University): Strange Music: The Influence of Andrew Jackson Davis’s Harmonial Philosophy on 19th Century American Music Culture (and Why It Matters Today)
Maeve Nagel-Frazel (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): A Lottery by Any Other Name: The New York Gift Concert Mania of 1851
12:30-1:30 Lunch break (Conferees on their own)
1:30-2:30 Session 7. Navigating the Racial Divide after the Civil War
Chair: Colin Roust (Professor and Associate Dean, University of Kansas)
Candace Bailey (Neville Distinguished Professor, North Carolina Central University): A US-American Identity, But Not For All: The Case of Edmond Dédé
Christopher Brellochs (SUNY Schenectady, Dean of the School of Music): Forging an American Musical Identity: Gilded Age Black Musicians William James Knapp (1843–1885) and Ulysses J. Alsdorf (1872–1952)
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-4:00 Session 8. The Music of Moravian Life
Chair: Katherine K. Preston (Bottoms Professor of Music Emerita, College of William & Mary, Chair, FAMI Committee)
Christopher Ogburn (Executive Director, Moravian Music Foundation): Finding a Voice and a Place: The Americanization of the Moravian Church and Its Music in the 19th Century
Lecture/Recital: Jewel Smith (College Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati) / Martha Schrempel (Moravian University, Bethlehem, PA): The Kummer Sisters’ Binder’s Volumes and Manuscript Books: A Testament of Cultural Significance
4:00-4:15 Break
4:15-6:15 Panel Discussion: The World and Music of George Frederick Bristow
Chair: Kyle Gann (Composer and Hawver Professor of Music, Bard College)
Leon Botstein (Conductor and President, Bard College)
John Graziano (Director, Music in Gotham; Professor of Music Emeritus, CUNY, FAMI Committee)
Barbara Haws (Archivist and Historian Emerita, New York Philharmonic; FAMI Committee)
Eduardo Montes-Bradley (Independent Documentary Filmmaker, Charlottesville, VA and Founding Partner of the Heritage Film Project)
Katherine K. Preston (Bottoms Professor of Music Emerita, College of William & Mary; Chair, FAMI Committee)
Douglas Shadle (Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University; FAMI Committee)
6:15-7:45 Dinner break (Conferees on their own)
8:00-9:30 Concert
Concert introduction: John Graziano (Director, Music in Gotham; Professor of Music Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center; Member, FAMI Committee)
Anthony Philip Heinrich, Sunset Chimes, song cycle. Steve Hoagland, tenor; Neely Bruce, pianist.
William Henry Fry, String Quartet no. 11 in A minor. Graduate Center String Quartet
FRIDAY, 30 January
Segal Hall, Graduate Center, City University of New York
8:30-9:00 Light breakfast (coffee/tea, fruit, pastries/bagels)
9:00-10:00 Session 9. Black Identities
Chair: Sandra Graham (Professor of Music Emerita, Babson College)
Kristen Turner (Independent Scholar, Cary, NC): The Afterlives of Stephen Foster’s Minstrel Songs and the Lost Cause
Lynne Foote (Post Doctoral Fellow, University of Oxford): The Effect of German Bildung on Shaping Harry T. Burleigh’s Art Song Career
10:00-10:15 Break
10:15-12:15 Session 10. Beyond the Score
Chair: Barbara Haws (Archivist and Historian Emerita, New York Philharmonic; FAMI Committee)
Hilary Poriss (Professor and Chair, Department of Music, College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University): Companion to a Diva: Ada Wallace Baldwin
Lindsey Jones Zagorodnev (Ph.D., Candidate, Musicology, Rutgers University): Marion Bauer’s Early Works as a Composer and Critic in American Music
Joyce Li Yue (Ph.D., student in Music Theory, Yale University): The Musical Salon of John Singer Sargent: Fauré, Loeffler, and the American Imagination
Marion Casey (Professor of Irish Studies and History, New York University): Natoma: Opera as American History
12:15-1:15 Lunch break (Conferees on their own)
1:15-2:45 Session 11. Planting Musical Ideas
Chair: Davide Ceriani (Professor, Rowan University)
Sean Curtice (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis): Phil. Trajetta and the American Conservatorio: Neapolitan Musical Traditions in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Bradley Hoover (D.Phil. in Music, University of Oxford): Delsartemania: How Americans Transformed a French Operatic Training System into Modernist Performance Practice
Sarah Cox (Ph.D., student, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK): Teaching America to Sing: Carlo Bassini and the Dissemination of “Voice Culture” at the Geneseo Normal Musical Academy, 1859–1865
2:45-3:00 Break
3:00-4:30 Session 12. An American Kaleidoscope
Chair: John Graziano (Director, Music in Gotham; Professor of Music Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center; FAMI Committee)
John Koegel (Professor of Music, California State University, Fullerton): A MUSA Anthology of Mexican American Music: Editing the Lummis Wax Cylinder Collection (Los Angeles, ca. 1904-1905) and Other U.S. Sources
Nancy Rao (Board of Governors Professor of Music, Rutgers University): The Transpacific World in Early American Music History
Heather Platt (Ball State University): Does a Preposition Matter? Folksong in America or American Folksong
4:30-5:15 Wrap Up and Discussion
Dean Root (Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh and Editor-in-Chief of the Grove Music Project, Oxford University Press)
5:30-7:45 Dinner break. (Conferees on their own)
7:00-7:45 Pre-concert lecture (optional), Carnegie Hall
8:00-10:00 Carnegie Hall Concert – Forging an American Musical Identity
American Symphony Orchestra/Bard Festival Chorale, Leon Botstein, Conductor.
BUCK Festival Overture on the American National Air "The Star-Spangled Banner" TRAD. "Go Down Moses" (arr. Burleigh)
TRAD. "Behold the Star" (arr. Burleigh)
TRAD. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" (arr. Burleigh)
WAGNER Großer Festmarsch (American Centennial March)
and
BRISTOW Symphony No. 5, Niagara (not heard since 1898!)