Announcing our 2025-26 Silbiger Grant recipients

We are pleased to announce this year’s Silbiger Grant recipients! Loren Ludwig and colleagues will present music for voices and viols from c.1800 from the Northampton area, performed on New England viols built in the early 1800s.

The concert takes place October 18, 2025 at Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, 220 Main Street, Northampton, MA. Performers are Allison Monroe, Alice Robbins, Nate Steele, and Loren Ludwig, New England viols, and Tim Eriksen, voice.

More about the project:
This innovative project focuses on Loren Ludwig’s research into New England Viols at Historic Northampton, a museum and performance barn in the heart of the area where these viols were built in the early 1800’s. The music comes from various CT and MA sources circa 1800 including music published in Northampton by Uri K. Hill, works by Sawney Freeman, a formerly enslaved composer from Connecticut, and music by famed “Yankee tunesmith” William Billings of Boston. The program will showcase diverse music by a range of cultural actors of different ethnic backgrounds active in the Northampton area and Connecticut at the turn of the 19th century.

Psalmody in three and four parts was composed, published, and sung in great quantities throughout the period. New England-born composers and music teachers published and printed over 7,000 compositions between roughly 1770 and 1811. Northampton was home to some of the country’s earliest choral singing and to one of the most prolific music publishers in early New England. In fact, by the 1790s, the town had become a destination for local and regional composers and tunebook compilers. During the mid-19th century, local senior citizens revived this sacred music of their youth in public performances known as “Old Folks’ Concerts.”