"'Harnessing harmony' uses music to unravel the relationship between elite power and the people through their uses of culture in politics from the early national period to the Civil War. Coleman traces how understandings of musical power were used to shape the development of a popular American political culture. It explores primarily how elites, at a time of mass democratization and rapid social change, looked to music to persuade Americans to rise above political and partisan conflict to instead create a more unified, orderly, and deferential society. In doing so the work identifies a distinctively conservative strain of musical thought and action. As our readers point out, it impressively challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions about political music being more 'bottom up' than 'top down'"--.

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Chapter One: “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Development of a Federalist Musical Tradition
• Chapter Two: Musical Organizations and the Politics of American Civil Society
• Chapter Three: Music and Respectability in Antebellum Electoral Politics
• Chapter Four: Music and the Making of a Conservative Radical
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
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