History & Philosophy

History

MUSA traces its origins to the early 1980s when, at the prompting of several members of the American Musicological Society, President Howard Smither formed the Committee on the Publication of American Music (COPAM), with Lawrence Gushee as chair and Cynthia Adams Hoover, H. Wiley Hitchcock, James Haar, and Richard Crawford as members. By the mid-1980s the committee had decided that the AMS should sponsor a national series of critical editions, and that the National Endowment for the Humanities ought to fund it. The AMS soon agreed, but it took longer to gain NEH support. In September 1987 the Endowment sponsored a conference at Squam Lake, New Hampshire, at which more than twenty interested parties came together to refine a plan for the series. In the same year, AMS president Lewis Lockwood invited the Sonneck Society for American Music (now the Society for American Music) to choose a representative to COPAM. In July 1988, thanks to a three-year NEH grant, project headquarters were established at Brown University's music department in Providence, Rhode Island. Wayne Schneider was hired as the first executive editor of the MUSA project.

Once funding had been secured, COPAM set about soliciting edition proposals, commissioning editions, and setting up editorial procedures with the series publisher, A-R Editions, Inc., of Madison, Wisconsin. The first MUSA volume appeared in print in the autumn of 1993: Ruth Crawford's Music for Small Orchestra (1926) and Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano (1929), edited by Judith Tick and Wayne Schneider. At the AMS's annual meeting in Montreal in November 1993, the occasion was marked by a performance of the Suite by the Charleston Quartet and pianist Virginia Eskin. By that time MUSA headquarters had moved to the University of Michigan's School of Music in Ann Arbor, and Schneider, who had taken a teaching job, was replaced as executive editor by Jeffrey Magee, who served in that post until 1997. Mark Clague served as executive editor of MUSA from 1997 to 2003, with Marcello Piras serving as interim executive editor from 2001 to 2002.

As of January 2004, eleven volumes of the projected forty-volume MUSA series have been published, including collected works of New England psalmodists Daniel Read and Timothy Swan, a string quartet by Amy Beach, the music and scripts of the African-American show In Dahomey, songs of Edward Harrigan and David Braham, the early songs of Irving Berlin, and a selection of chamber music by Lou Harrison. Another fourteen volumes have been commissioned, with eighteen more to go. Focused on music of outstanding quality that is otherwise unavailable, MUSA aims to bring state-of-the-art editions to performers and scholars in a series that represents American musical achievement as a whole. The MUSA Conference is intended as a way to bring the project's agents together in a collaborative event that we hope will assist and expedite the work of the volume editors and lead to commissioning of more series volumes.

Richard Crawford, editor-in-chief
James Wierzbicki, executive editor

Philosophy

Music of the United States of America (MUSA), a national series of scholarly editions, was established by the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 1988. In a world where many nations have gathered their proudest musical achievements in published scholarly form, the United States has been conspicuous by its lack of a national series. Now, with the help of collaborators, the AMS presents a series that seeks to reflect the character and shape of American music making.

MUSA, planned to encompass forty volumes, is designed and overseen by the AMS Committee on the Publication of American Music (COPAM), an arm of the society's Publication's Committee. The criteria foremost in determining its contents have been: (1) that the series as a whole reflect breadth and balance among eras, genres, composers, and performance media; (2) that it avoid music already available through other channels, duplicating only where new editions of available music seem essential; and (3) that works in the series be representative, chosen to reflect particular excellence or to represent notable achievements in this country's highly varied music history.

The American Musicological Society's collaborators in the national effort that has brought MUSA to fruition include the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C., which has funded MUSA from its inception; Brown University's Music Department in Providence, Rhode Island, which provided the project's original headquarters; the University of Michigan School of Music, where, since 1993, MUSA has made its home; A-R Editions, Inc., the publisher of the MUSA series; and the Society for American Music which, through its representative to COPAM, has provided advice on the contents of MUSA.

Richard Crawford, editor-in-chief 
James Wierzbicki, executive editor