About
The Music of the United States of America (MUSA) is a series of more than forty scholarly editions of musical works of exceptional artistic quality and historical significance. This series, conceived and begun in 1987, is designed to reflect the richness of America’s musical heritage and is for use by scholars, performers, students, and the general public. MUSA is devoted to presenting and preserving the legacy of American music in a way that encompasses the wide array of American musical styles, including jazz, psalmody, popular song, opera, twentieth-century chamber music, art song, Native American ceremony, experimental music, film music, and Broadway shows.
An essential focus of MUSA is to expand the art of critical editing. Each MUSA volume includes a substantial peer-reviewed explanatory essay, elegant musical notation, and a detailed editorial apparatus. By integrating musical notation and scholarly interpretation together in each volume, MUSA seeks to contextualize the sounds of American music within the broader cultural landscape of the nation.
Since its establishment in 1993, MUSA has published thirty-three editions (including five multi-volume sets) and twenty-one sets of associated performance parts. These editions are accessible internationally for both study and performance, making MUSA unique as the only publication series on American music that combines extensive scholarly writing with complete musical notation.
MUSA operates under the auspices of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the preeminent organization in the United States devoted to music scholarship. Its editorial board is the Committee on the Publication of American Music (COPAM). Each MUSA edition undergoes exhaustive research by expert volume editors and is typically newly engraved by the award-winning music publisher A-R Editions. The Society for American Music (SAM) contributes financially to MUSA and is represented in COPAM. MUSA is grateful for the support provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and hosted by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance.
History
MUSA’s roots can be traced back to the early 1980s when AMS President Howard Smither established the Committee on the Publication of American Music (COPAM). Lawrence Gushee served as chair, with Cynthia Adams Hoover, H. Wiley Hitchcock, James Haar, and Richard Crawford as members. In the mid-1980s, COPAM recommended that the AMS sponsor a national series of critical editions, aiming to secure funding through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). AMS President Lewis Lockwood invited the Sonneck Society for American Music (now the Society for American Music, SAM) to appoint a representative to COPAM.
In September 1987, the NEH sponsored a conference at Squam Lake, New Hampshire, where COPAM and over twenty interested parties convened to refine the plan for MUSA. At Squam Lake, COPAM outlined MUSA’s vision of forty volumes, with specific criteria for content: (1) that the series as a whole reflect breadth and balance among eras, genres, composers, and performance media; (2) that it avoid duplication of music already available through other channels, reproducing only where new editions are deemed essential; and (3) that works in the series be representative, reflecting particular excellence or notable achievements in the diverse history of American music.
In July 1988, thanks to a three-year NEH grant, COPAM established MUSA headquarters at Brown University’s music department. COPAM appointed the first Executive Editor of MUSA and began work in partnership with A-R Editions of Madison, Wisconsin. The inaugural MUSA volume was published in 1993. Since then, MUSA work has been based at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance in Ann Arbor. The NEH has consistently renewed grants to fund MUSA and, as of 2025, thirty-three volumes have been published.
Executive Editors of MUSA
The current Executive Editor of MUSA is Andrew Kuster. Previous MUSA Executive Editors: Wayne Schneider (1988–1993), Jeffrey Magee (1993–97), Mark Clague (1997–2003), Marcello Piras (interim 2001–2), James Wierzbicki (2003–9), Dorothea Gail (2009–12), Dexter Edge (2013–14)
Editorial Team
Andrew Kuster, Executive Editor
Siovahn Walker, Financial Officer
Amy Beal, co-Editor-in-Chief
Mark Clague, co-Editor-in-Chief
Angelina Gibson, Editorial Assistant
Guiying Liao, Editorial Assistant
Jose Melendez, Editorial Assistant
Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3
The nineteenth volume of the MUSA series features Florence Price’s first and third symphonies. Edited by Rae Linda Brown and Wayne Shirley, this volume is a standard-setting critical edition of scores from the most widely known African American woman composer of the 1930s and 1940s.

MUSA Titles
Published
Edited by Judith Tick and Wayne Schneider
By the late 1920s, before composing her landmark String Quartet 1931, Ruth Crawford had already found a strong and individual voice as an American modernist. This edition presents two important unpublished compositions from that period: Music for Small Orchestra (1926) and Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano (1929).
Edited by Charles Hamm
Containing 214 songs by one of the most prominent of all American songwriters, this three-part collection illuminates the early career of Irving Berlin with unprecedented completeness and accuracy, from the well-known “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to a number of songs published here for the first time.
Edited by Adrienne Fried Block
Recognized as the US’s leading woman composer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amy Beach (1867–1944) belonged to the Second New England School of composers. Her one-movement quartet, a lean yet lyrical work of great originality, incorporates Alaskan Inuit melodies as thematic material. This edition, which includes a facsimile of the 1921 draft score, makes the work available for the first time.
Edited by Karl Kroeger
Composer, singing master, and merchant Daniel Read is today considered second in importance only to William Billings among early American psalmodists. This edition centers on the ninety-five compositions that Read published between 1785 to 1810; it also includes an appendix comprising pieces from the 1770s that were later published and pieces from a manuscript collection of the 1830s in which Read repudiated the style of his earlier works.
Edited by Thomas L. Riis
With more than 1,100 performances in the United States and England between 1902 and 1905, In Dahomey became a landmark of American musical theater. This edition presents the surviving musical and textual materials of In Dahomey in a comprehensive piano-vocal score.
Edited by Nym Cooke
Hat-maker and composer Timothy Swan (1758–1842) was arguably the most stylistically original composer working in the eighteenth-century New England singing-school tradition. This comprehensive edition, based on a study of prints, manuscripts, sketches, and drafts, affords an unparalleled view of an eighteenth-century psalmodist at work.
Edited by Jon W. Finson
The plays of Edward Harrigan (1844–1911), and their attendant songs written with David Braham (1838–1905), reflect a turbulent era in New York City. This edition presents the collected Harrigan-Braham songs drawn from plays and skits depicting a variety of ethnic groups during the artists’ twenty-year reign over the New York stage.
Edited by Leta Miller
This volume features a collection of seven works for chamber ensemble or keyboard solo by Lou Silver Harrison spanning over fifty years. Harrison was a composer, music critic, painter, and creator of unique musical instruments, and was known for incorporating elements of non-Western music into his work.
Edited by Richard Kassel
Composer, theorist, instrument builder, and performer Harry Partch (1902–74) is a crucial figure in twentieth-century American music. Barstow, a watershed monophonic work, was based on “very unusual inscriptions on a highway railing” in that southern California town in 1940. This volume presents a facsimile of this version (long out of print), a new transcription into expanded standard notation, and an essay on Barstow‘s background and evolution.
Edited by Paul S. Machlin
The seventeen transcriptions in this volume reveal the compositional artistry and comic play of Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller (1904–43), virtuoso jazz pianist, organist, singer, bandleader, parodist, comedian, and composer in the Harlem stride tradition.
Edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine
This edition explores the history of musical contact, interaction, and exchange between American Indians and European Americans, as documented in musical transcriptions, notations, and arrangements. Culled from a published record of over 8,000 songs, this edition contains 116 musical examples reproduced in facsimile. These include the earliest attempts to represent tribal music in European notation.
Edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock
Ives is well known as a song composer, and probably no earlier American composer (except possibly Stephen Foster) is so universally identified as such. Yet, ironically, Ives’s songs have only rarely been edited in any way. The MUSA collection of 129 songs by Ives comprises such a critical edition.
Edited by Denise Von Glahn and Michael Broyles
Edited by N. Lee Orr
By the turn of the twentieth century, the choral music of Dudley Buck (1839–1909) had become virtually synonymous with Victorianism in this country. This volume is one of the first to rigorously study Victorian choral music in its aesthetic, nationalistic, and religious context.
Edited by Jeffrey Taylor
Winner of the 2007 Claude V. Palisca Award
Earl “Fatha” Hines (1903–83) revolutionized the role of the piano in jazz. This publication focuses on his solo artistry and includes complete transcriptions of fourteen solo recordings made by Hines between 1928 and 1941.
Edited by Nola Reed Knouse
David Moritz Michael (1751–1827) trained as a bandsman in Westphalia before he joined the Moravian Church and moved to the USA, where he spent most of life teaching in and composing music for various Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania. This volume includes sixteen multimovement works that are based on manuscript sources.
Edited by Joanne Swenson-Eldridge
Composer and musician Charles Hommann (1803–ca. 1872) was born in Philadelphia at a time when instrumental music—especially European classical music—was becoming increasingly prominent in the United States. This edition of Hommann’s three extant orchestral works brings renewed attention to the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, which encouraged Hommann’s work, and makes accessible the earliest-known products of an emerging tradition of notable orchestral works by American composers.
Edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Charles Fussell
With music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts was completed in 1928 but not performed until 1934 when, after some sixty performances in six weeks, it became the longest-running opera played on Broadway up to that time. This critical edition features the full score and the 32-measure orchestral prelude to the Act II “Dance of the Angels.”
Edited by Rae Linda Brown and Wayne Shirley
Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887–1953) was the most widely known African American woman composer from the 1930s until her death. This edition presents two important unpublished orchestral works: the Symphony No. 1 in E Minor (1932) and the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (1940).
Edited by Tara Browner
Along with an introductory essay and explanatory notes, this volume contains transcriptions by ethnomusicologist Tara Browner of thirteen songs performed in May 2001 by the Cedartree Singers (from Falls Church, Virginia) and Native Thunder (from Thunder Valley, South Dakota) at the sixteenth annual pow-wow sponsored by UCLA’s American Indian Student Association.
Edited by Patrick Warfield
The marches of John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) remain staples of the band repertoire. This volume contains full band scores for six Sousa marches, each prepared from the first printing of the band parts and informed by Sousa’s holograph and the original performance materials. Also included in the volume is an essay reexamining Sousa’s biography, source materials, performance practice, and place in American culture.
Edited by Dale Cockrell
Edited by Katherine K. Preston
Edited by John J. Joyce Jr., Bruce Boyd Raeburn, and Anthony M. Cummings
This edition consists of musical transcriptions of all eight recordings of Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band, made in New Orleans in 1927. These are among the first recordings of Black New Orleans jazz bands made in their home city. The band consisted of musicians who stayed on in New Orleans after the Great Exodus to Chicago and New York in the early 1920s.
Edited by Theodore E. Buehrer
Edited by Paul Austerlitz and Jere Laukkanen
Machito (Francisco Raúl Grillo, 1909–84) was born into a musical family in Havana, Cuba, and was already an experienced vocalist when he arrived in New York City in 1937. In 1940, he teamed up with his brother-in-law, the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauzá (1911–93). Together, Machito and Bauzá formed Machito and his Afro-Cubans. This volume presents transcriptions from Machito’s recordings which meticulously illustrate the improvised as well as scored vocal, reed, brass, and percussion parts of the music.
Edited by Michael Ochs
Winner of the 2018 Claude V. Palisca Award
Edited by Marianne Betz
George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931) was a Massachusetts native identified with the so-called Second New England School of composers. His opera, The Padrone, set to a libretto by David K. Stevens, was composed in 1912 and is the subject of this MUSA volume. The story, a tragic tale in two acts with an orchestral interlude, revolves around a ruthless member of the Italian community (“the padrone”) and his exploitation of more recently arrived immigrants.
Edited by Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck
Winner of the 2019 Claude V. Palisca Award
Edited by John Holzaepfel
The legendary collaboration of Cage and Tudor reached an apex in the Solo for Piano from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58). None of Cage’s previous works had employed more than a single type of notation. In contrast, the Solo for Piano consists of eighty-four notational types, ranging from standard line-and-staff notation to extravagant musical graphics.
Edited by Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber
Edited by Norm Cohen, Carson Cohen, and Anne Dhu McLucas
Winner of the 2022 Claude V. Palisca Award
MUSA 33. Early Published Blues and Proto-Blues (1850–1915)
Edited by Peter C. Muir
This critical edition of early blues-related sheet music includes all known blues songs and instrumental compositions (forty-three total) from the first four years of the blues industry, 1912–15, and twenty-four pre-1912 proto-blues, that is, published works stylistically related to the emerging blues style (for instance, using a twelve-bar blues sequence) from 1850–1912.
Forthcoming
MUSA 34. Stephen Sondheim: Follies, Orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick
Edited by Jon Alan Conrad
This volume publishes the full score of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies, set in 1971, the year of its creation, at a reunion of the (fictional) “Weismann Follies” on the eve of their theater’s destruction.
Edited by Renee Norris
During the American antebellum period, minstrelsy was a ubiquitous form of theatrical entertainment. The thirty-eight pieces of this edition survive as complete, discrete songs published as musical sources. The songs are rare and specific examples of the widespread practice of inter-genre borrowing and musical arrangement that was fundamental to minstrelsy.
Edited by Gillian Anderson
This volume provides a critical edition of the music of Way Down East, the 1920 film directed by D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), with a score by Louis Silvers (1889–1954) and William Frederick Peters (1871–1938).
Edited by Sandra Jean Graham
Spirituals are sacred African American folk songs that originated in the early nineteenth century, songs of bondage that resonated among all Blacks, whether “free” or enslaved. This volume will contain solo and choral vocal arrangements of approximately eighty songs.
Edited by Laura Moore Pruett
Gottschalk (1829–69), the nineteenth-century American composer best known for his solo piano works, wrote his first symphony, Symphonie romantique: La nuit des tropiques during 1859 in Matouba. The MUSA edition will fill a scholarly lacuna and also serve as an informed, rigorous performance score of music that brings Latin American percussion into American classical music almost a century earlier than previously known.
Edited by John Koegel
In 1884, Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928), a Massachusetts-born journalist, walked across the continent. During that journey he encountered the United States’ rich Spanish, Mexican, and Indian musical heritage and began recording the music he encountered on cylinders. Lummis’s collection of over 300 Spanish-language cylinders (and many recordings of Indian music) is presented in this MUSA edition, along with sample songs from other collections of local Mexican and Mexican American music for comparative purposes.
Edited by Amy Stillman
The MUSA 40 volume will offer the first comprehensive overview of visual representations of “Hawaiian music.” It will include fifty songs that span thirteen named genres from the pre-European and westernized traditions.
Edited by R. Allen Lott
This volume will document America’s new and original contribution during the nineteenth century to the ongoing hymnic tradition by presenting a breadth and balance among genres. The most frequently printed hymn texts in nineteenth-century hymnals will be presented alongside the nineteenth-century American tunes most often paired with those texts.
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