Yankee Singing Schools

With this book, future generations will have Alan C. Buechner’s superb study of the beginnings of music education in our country in their hands: to read, to study, and to build on. Buechner’s career was devoted to musical scholarship and to teacher education in music. His doctoral dissertation, which is comprised in this book, was completed at Harvard University in 1960. Because of institutional restrictions, it was made available only at Harvard. Scholars wishing to make use of Buechner’s carefully researched and felicitously written work had to come to Cambridge to do so. And come they did, carrying away much information and new interpretations available nowhere else. Footnotes in myriad studies of the beginnings of music in America bear testimony to the debt owed to Alan Buechner’s groundwork.