Historic Deerfield Museum Course, 2025: "One Hundred Years of Song"

Historic Deerfield’s 2025 museum course, “One Hundred Years of Song: Singing Early New England Music for Science, Memory, and Abolitionism, 1770–1870,” will be held on Wednesdays March 12, 19, and 26, 2025, with the option of it being virtual or in-person. The Revolutionary and early Federal period saw a great outpouring of new choral music by local and regional composers who worked in a lively vernacular style still familiar to many from its place in the “shape-note” tradition. In this course, students will engage with the exciting sounds of this early New England music through singing, listening, and lectures on three historical sites of imagination and musical practice: singing as cutting edge “science,” singing as local history, and singing as social justice work in the 19th-century Abolitionist movement.

Instructor: Dr. Tim Eriksen, Historic Deerfield Musician-in-Residence

Dr.Tim Eriksen’s work as an ethnomusicologist and teacher has included extensive research on shape-note music in New England and the venerable Sacred Harp four-part harmony tradition. He is a founder of what is currently the world’s largest Sacred Harp singing convention in Northampton, MA. Eriksen has taught college courses including American Balladry, Global Sounds, Film Music from Hollywood to Bollywood, American Music, and Songwriting at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, Smith College, the University of Minnesota, Hampshire College, and Wesleyan University. In addition, he has taught hundreds of hour-to week-long workshops and seminars in shape-note harmony singing, American music history, and ballad singing. His students have ranged from kindergarteners to Nicole Kidman, Elvis Costello, Sting, extras in the film Cold Mountain, and the senior citizen members of the now legendary Young at Heart Chorus. Tim currently serves as Historic Deerfield’s Musician-in-Residence.