Name: Made in the Valley: 19th-century Music for Viols and Voices from the Connecticut River Valley
Start: 2025-10-18T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

Made in the Valley: 19th-century Music for Viols and Voices from the Connecticut River Valley

Music was everywhere in New England during the decades following the American Revolution. By 1800, Northampton was a regional hub of music printing and instrument makers in communities up and down the Connecticut river worked to meet the new demand for musical instruments. There were few--if any!--full time professional musicians. Rather, nearly everyone (rich and poor, enslaved and free) learned to sing and many people to play New England viols (stringed instruments similar to modern cellos and violas), fiddles, flutes, 'clarionets,' bassoons and other locally-made wind instruments. European visitors and wealthy sophisticates from Boston thought the music from the Valley sounded wild and unkempt, but locals loved it and the opportunities it afforded to bring people together to sing or dance or listen. "Then as our hands in Friendship join, So let our social powers combine," as one line of the song "Friendship," published in Northampton in 1798, reads.
Historic Northampton presents a concert of music from the Valley from the decades after the Revolution, a forgotten "Golden Age" of New England music for voices and instruments. The music will be performed on newly-restored New England viols built in and around Northampton and will feature five eminent musicians including singer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Eriksen, New England viol virtuoso Loren Ludwig, Alice Robbins (Arcadia Players), Allison Monroe (Trobár, Director of the Five College Early Music Program), and Nate Steele (Museum of Fine Art, Boston). Supported in part by a Silbiger Grant from the Viola da Gamba Society of New England, the performance will feature dances, hymns, fiddle tunes and songs, many of which have waited for centuries in dusty silence.
Tim Eriksen, voice, Loren Ludwig, Alice Robbins, Allison Monroe, Nate Steele, New England viols
$15 discounted; for those on a limited income; $25 regular admission; $50 stretch ticket; for those who wish to support the arts and programs like this