American Music Institute
Founded in 1988 by Dean Paul Boylan with a donation from the Katherine Tuck Foundation, the American Music Institute (AMI) strives to foster collaborative investigation of musical life in the United States, drawing from resources at SMTD, across the University of Michigan campus, and throughout the nation. AMI serves as a project incubator and innovation center for the study of music of all kinds in the United States of America and indeed throughout the Americas. U-M Musicology Professors Mark Clague and Charles Garrett serve as co-directors of the Institute.
Music of the United States of America (MUSA)
Music of the United States of America (MUSA) is a series of scholarly editions of music that aims to represent the depth and diversity of our nation’s heritage by publishing musical works of exemplary artistic quality and historical significance, targeting scholars, performers, students, and the general public.
MUSA is devoted to showcasing the legacy of American music available for performance and study by publishing a forty-volume series of scholarly editions of music that addresses the wide variety of American musical styles, including jazz, psalmody, popular song, opera, twentieth-century chamber music, art song, Native American ceremony, experimental music, film music, and the Broadway show. MUSA seeks to expand the art of critical editing beyond classical concert music to include new genres and styles previously unaddressed by the discipline, including music created by women and minorities, and other composers historically excluded from academic research. Each MUSA volume includes a substantial peer-reviewed explanatory essay, elegant musical notation, and a detailed editorial apparatus. By bringing musical notation and scholarly interpretation together in each volume, MUSA endeavors to place the sounds of American music in the context of the nation’s cultural life.
MUSA is a project of the American Musicological Society with contributions from the Society for American Music. MUSA is also supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance. The project’s founding editor was SMTD Professor Emeritus Richard Crawford.
The current co-Editors-in-Chief are Amy Beal (University of California-Santa Cruz) and Mark Clague (University of Michigan). The executive editor of MUSA is Andrew Kuster, faculty member in Entrepreneurship and Leadership at SMTD.
U-M Gershwin Initiative
About
SMTD holds a long-term partnership with the Gershwin family on a two-part initiative that brings the music of George and Ira Gershwin to students, scholars, performers and audiences across campus and worldwide. The Gershwin Initiative includes 1) a new scholarly edition of George and Ira’s creative work, plus 2) educational opportunities for U-M students to perform and learn about the Gershwins’ art.
Above: Playlist from the “Gershwin Centennial Celebration: Rhapsody in Blue at 100” held on February 11, 2024 at the Michigan Theater
Gershwin Initiative News
Past Projects
The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition
Spangled Banner 200
The American Music Institute in partnership with the Star Spangled Music Foundation, the University of Michigan Marching Band, University Libraries, the Reno Philharmonic, the U.S. Library of Congress, the Grammy Museum, and other collaborators, celebrated the bicentennial of the United States National Anthem — Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” See starspangledmusic.org for more details and teacher resources, as well as our YouTube channel of Star-Spangled Banner performances.
Living Music
Living Music is an online oral-history database project developed by AMI Co-Director and Professor Mark Clague. Begun in 2003, the project features over 1000 interviews done by University of Michigan musicology students to investigate the full range of the American musical “art world” in the United States and beyond.