Bonny Miller is a pianist, musicologist, independent scholar, and author. Her papers and lecture-recitals at national and international meetings address topics from Mozart to American popular music. Her research specialties include women composers and music published in magazines from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Miller’s new biography, Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America (2020) explores the life and works of a Victorian-era musician who successfully negotiated gendered codes for women as she pursued music composition and authorship in the periodical press. Her investigation into Augusta Browne grew out of Miller’s study of sheet music published in nineteenth-century American magazines and literary journals. Miller scoured libraries and archives in the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland for 25 years to uncover Browne’s writing, music, and elusive life story.
I never met a library I didn’t like.
Miller has performed widely as a pianist and accompanist. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Pomona College, Miller earned M.M. and Ph.D. degrees at Washington University in St. Louis with a prestigious Olin Fellowship for Women. She has taught for colleges and universities in Missouri, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Louisiana. She is a recipient of the Janet Levy Award for Independent Scholars from the American Musicological Society. Her research has been published in such venues as Journal of the Society for American Music, Notes, Piano Quarterly, Journal of Singing, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, and several essay collections. Her 2020 book, Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America, is the first comprehensive biography of any American woman musician born before the Civil War. Miller’s interest in music editions has grown as she studied and performed music by Augusta Browne from rare nineteenth-century sheet music. She began to include music by Browne in her lecture-recitals in 1985.
Bonny Hough Miller is a native of Los Angeles, but life in a military family left her without fixed roots. She has lived coast to coast, in the Midwest, in England, and currently in Columbia, South Carolina. But wherever she resided, Miller found a second home at the public library. Among her earliest favorite reads were biographies in the Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans Series. She continues to rely on and celebrate the services and holdings of libraries everywhere, whether academic, public, or national libraries. Call her a “biblioholic.”