Urban Virginians, Musical Citizens

Norfolk’s first Jewish family—Moses Myers, Eliza Myers, and their nine children—offers a dynamic tale of culture, citizenship, and music in Virginia’s largest city at the turn of the early nineteenth century. Drawing upon a rich array of sources that includes an unrivalled collection of sheet music, Urban Virginians, Musical Citizens: The Myers Family of Norfolk, 1787–1835, argues that citizenship in Norfolk was negotiated, multi-layered, and intertwined with musical innovation. Norfolk’s leaders developed a robust civic ethos as they guided the city to prosperity after its destruction during the American Revolution. Wealthy families like the Myerses believed that leadership required commitment to the arts. They became musical patrons and amateurs, creating and commissioning repertoire that this monograph introduces to the scholarly world for the first time. Norfolk’s expanding musical economy brought new musical institutions that appealed to citizens of all ranks as well as foreign visitors, refugees, and enslaved residents. An urban, mercantile, society like Norfolk’s was at odds with agrarian visions of Virginia and the geopolitics of a country that believed in the inevitability of Virginian decline. At the forefront of musical refinement and advancement in the Old Dominion, Norfolk demonstrates the possibilities and liabilities for musical citizenship in effecting political transformation.

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