The early editions (ca. 1841) of Augusta Browne’s American Bouquet bore a dedication to “Miss Sarah E. Wise of Virginia.” Although this flourish disappeared in subsequent imprints by Lee and Walker, the dedication to Sarah Wise presents an interesting connection from composer to consumer. The trajectories of these women’s lives raise questions about their respective actions during the Civil War some two decades later.
Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–82) was one of the professional women musicians most active in publishing sheet music in nineteenth-century America. Her lively songs and piano solos, prose, and music journalism present an engaging period voice neglected for too long.
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The 2021 H. Robert Cohen/RIPM committee of the American Musicological Society expressed “high respect” for the “superlative quality of Bonny Miller’s work” and awarded Honorable Mention as a “mark of distinction” for Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America. The H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award is awarded by the AMS each year for outstanding work based on the musical press.
“Bonny H. Miller’s Augusta Browne is a superb piece of musicological scholarship. Every chapter reveals methodological mastery, nuanced analysis, engaging writing, and contagious enthusiasm for restoring a historical figure who has been undeservedly neglected.” [Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music]
“The author deftly sets up the forces in Browne’s life, both from her family, training, and social class, and from the wider cultural world surrounding her.” “engagingly written” “richly contextualized” [Journal of Musicological Research]
“This biography is an inspiration and should be included in any graduate-level research methods class for future scholars to learn from Miller’s methodologies.” [Music Library Association Notes]
ISBN: 9781580469722; 480 pp., 20 b/w & 50 line illus., Eastman Studies in Music
Library ebook ISBN: 9781787448834
The opening pages of the Iris Souvenir for 1851 glow with golds, reds, and greens. The hues of the new gift book competed with the flower that gave the volume its name, asserted the editor, John S. Hart, in the preface to the volume. Gift books were anthologies of light fiction, poems, and essays for the Victorian-era home. Elegant illustrations and bindings made these gift books the equivalent of modern coffee table books. The Iris made a splash by including scenes produced with an early color printing process: chromolithography.
Title page of The Iris: An Illuminated Souvenir for MDCCCLI (Philadelphia: Lipincott, Grambo, 1851)
Eight of the Iris illustrations were line engravings in black and white, but Hart declared, “the four illuminated pages are printed each with ten different colors, and with a degree of brilliancy and finish certainly not heretofore surpassed.” The title page of the volume (ab0ve) is a riot of colors, flowers, and cherubs at play beneath a rainbow. Deep purple-blue is reserved for the sprigs of iris on the title page and again adorning the music for “The Iris Waltz Composed by Miss Augusta Browne” (below).
When I attend concerts at the Church of the Epiphany in Washington, DC, I feel that I have entered Augusta Browne’s world. She would have known the church well, and its organist, Mrs. Q. A. Pearson. This profile of Kate Pearson focuses on a lesser known but significant player in the musical life of Washington, DC, during the Reconstruction era and her connections to Augusta Browne.
Kate Quail was just twenty when she assumed the post of organist at DC’s Church of the Epiphany (Episcopal). Barely three years later, the Washington Evening Star paid a handsome compliment to the young woman in its preview of music planned for Easter morning, April 7, 1871, noting that her “ability as a musician is well known.”
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