Harnessing Harmony: The Book Soundtrack
What could early American music sound like if it was written and performed today? Can a sense of its appeal translate across time? We challenged ourselves to find out and are excited to present this album, which completely re-imagines historical music for the 21st-century.
Composed by Running Notch and produced as an accompaniment to Billy Coleman’s award-winning book, Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), each track takes a song discussed in Harnessing Harmony and reinterprets it in an entirely new way. We do not attempt to recreate what these songs sounded like before 1865 (in an era before sound recording technology existed). But we do try to translate these “historic” tunes into pieces that make musical sense to modern ears. We hope that these tracks convey a certain essence of what might have made this music appealing to early Americans. It is also meant to be plenty of fun!
The soundtrack can be enjoyed in combination with the book or on its own. Either way, we hope it offers readers and listeners with an innovative connection to the past. It is free to stream or download from this website (it is also available via major streaming services like Spotify).
Explore the rest of this site to find out more about our approach to each track, to read more about us, and to digest a quick “historiography” of work that inspired the project.
About Us
Billy Coleman…
…is an Assistant Teaching Professor in History with the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and the Honors College at the University of Missouri. He completed a PhD in American History at University College London (UCL) and is the author of the award-winning book Harnessing Harmony: Music, Politics, and Power in the United States, 1788-1865 (UNC Press, 2020). His research articles have appeared in the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of the Early Republic, among other venues. He was previously a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and was the North American-based Book Reviews Editor for American Nineteenth Century History.
