Moravians, Manuscripts, and Musical Pedagogical Practices
For my research, I worked with faculty advisor Dr. Ryan Malone of the music department in order to investigate the history of Moravian music education in American communities during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My intention was to explore Moravian copybooks within the Bethlehem Moravian archives that students and teachers would’ve used in Moravian classrooms in order to discover what Moravian communities valued in their music and specifically their music pedagogy. I spent the first weeks of this project reading scholarship and literature related to Moravian music, history, and education. I then prepared a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the works I read, before spending one week at the Moravian archives in Bethlehem, PA. My time there was devoted to working with and taking high resolution photographs of manuscript books from both Bethlehem and Lititz, specifically with respect to how the music represents the community’s values. I devoted the remaining weeks to synthesizing my findings while drafting and revising my paper. I learned that the Moravians valued a comprehensive and musically diverse set of repertoire to study, that included everything from eighteenth century European classical music to American folk and patriotic music. I also found that Moravian classrooms worked to facilitate complex collaboration between the teachers and students who they took lessons from and copied music from. All of this led me to believe and validate my original argument that Moravian educators worked to provide a well rounded and fulfilling pedagogical experience that allowed for many perspectives to shine.