The Journal of the Society for American Music is the official organ of the Society; as such, the articles published in its pages deal with a wide range of topics that both reflect its mission and illustrate the incredible diversity of music and musical styles composed, performed, and heard in the Americas. A glance at the tables of contents for issues published in the last three volumes of the journal (February 2011 through February 2014) provides an illuminating snapshot of the wondrous multiplicity that characterizes American music history. The thirteen issues published during that time include articles on popular music (hip hop, ragtime, swing, jazz, rock, country, soul), musical theatre, teachers, conductors, works by composers ranging from Ives and Copland to Feldman, Harrison, and Reich (and many in between), performers (Heifetz, Robeson, Zappa), jam sessions, ethnomusicological topics; in other words, the journal reflects in a truly impressive manner the rich and varied musical culture of the Americas. What is seriously underrepresented in this panoply of musical multiplicity, however, is the rich, diverse, and similarly wondrous American musical culture of any time before the twentieth century. Of the forty-two articles published over this three-year period, only two (5 percent) deal with American music or musical life before 1900, both of them on nineteenth-century topics.

The daily musical activities of poet Emily Dickinson (1830–86)—home performances at the piano, collecting sheet music, and attending concerts—provided a vital and necessary backdrop for her emerging artistic persona. Dickinson's active musical life reveals a great deal about the cultural offerings available to a woman of her time, place, and class. Moreover, her encounters with the music-making of the Dickinson family servants and the New England hymn tradition encouraged artistic borrowings and boundary crossings that had a deep and continuing influence on her writing. Through her engagement with music, Dickinson was able to fashion an identity served by musical longings, one that would ultimately serve a vital role in the formation of her unique poetic voice.

In an arduous, twenty-year international career, Dutch opera soprano Rosa de Vries née van Os (1824–89) performed both French and Italian opera repertory with leading companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Experiencing triumphs and disappointments while managing both career and family, de Vries represents a class of mid-century opera singers, celebrated in their time but little remembered today. This article tells the story of de Vries's life and career, and in doing so aims to contribute to an understanding of transatlantic operatic life at the time. This reconstruction of Rosa de Vries offers a gateway for further studies of the cultural heritage of an important period in the history of opera and the strenuous demands of an international operatic marketplace.

Augusta Browne Garrett composed at least two hundred piano pieces, songs, duets, hymns, and sacred settings between her birth in Dublin, Ireland, around 1820, and her death in Washington, D.C., in 1882. Judith Tick celebrated Browne as the “most prolific woman composer in America before 1870” in her landmark study American Women Composers before 1870. Browne, however, cast an enduring shadow as an author as well, publishing two books, a dozen poems, several Protestant morality tracts, and more than sixty music essays, nonfiction pieces, and short stories. By means of her prose publications, Augusta Browne “put herself into the text—as into the world, into history—by her own movement,” as feminist writer Hélène Cixous urged of women a century later. Browne maintained a presence in the periodical press for four decades in a literary career that spanned music journalism, memoir, humor, fiction, poetry, and Christian devotional literature, but one essay, “The Music of America” (1845), generated attention through the twentieth century. With much of her work now easily available in digitized sources, Browne's life can be recovered, her music experienced, and her prose reassessed, which taken together yield a rich picture of the struggles, successes, and opinions of a singular participant and witness in American music of her era.

Soprano Emma Juch (1860–1939), famous in the 1880s and 1890s, combined singing in concerts and festivals with a short English-language operatic career. Because Juch exemplifies a typical prima donna of the late nineteenth century, her life provides a perspective on the American cultural landscape that a focus on star performers cannot capture. Like all female singers, she had to negotiate between competing stereotypes about divas and the nineteenth-century distrust of women who led public lives. In response to these pressures, she constructed an image of a vigorous American singer who nevertheless understood her expected role in society. During the Gilded Age, opera's place in American culture was changing. Foreign-language opera became increasingly associated with wealth, the highest performance quality, and sometimes even cultural and moral uplift, whereas English-language opera suggested popular entertainment for the middle class and mediocre performance standards. The American Opera Company and Juch's own Emma Juch English Grand Opera Company attempted to fight against these assumptions and center opera in English performed by native singers as an important component of a distinctly American musical tradition. She was unsuccessful, however, and Juch's career, which began with great promise, lost momentum after her opera troupe folded and she slid into obscurity.