A Social and Cultural History of the Making of the American Piano

FAIN: FEL-262127-19

Rebecca Tinio McKenna Lundberg
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

Research and writing leading to the publication of a book about the manufacture and marketing of the piano in 19th and early 20th America.

This project is a social and cultural history of the making of the American piano. Where existing histories tend to focus on its technical developments, its white, middle-class consumers, or on the piano industry as a case study in business history, my study foregrounds often unnamed workers, especially the Africans and African Americans whose physical and cultural labor lay behind that symbol of bourgeois arrival and its dominance in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In linking the piano to work and workers, my project explores the historical relationship between liberalism and global systems of exploitation. It also shows that the iconic sign of bourgeois respectability could become an instrument for challenging that social order and for African Americans’ participation in a national, popular culture.