Department of English

• Monday, December 1, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome Emily Green (George Mason University) for a talk titled for a talk titled "Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770."

Professor Green writes:

“This talk examines the external and internal factors that could have distracted musicians - professional, amateur, and enslaved - across many performance contexts in the Atlantic world in the 1770s, leading to error. These potential hindrances included bad candles, poorly “corrective” glasses, bells, earthquakes, and various kinds of serious ailments and losses. The goals of this talk are to encourage us to consider music reading and music making as activities that happen in concert with many particular states of mind, body, and environment, and to acknowledge that error may be a part of rather than anathema to expression."

Emily H. Green is Associate Professor of Music at George Mason University. She is interested in work that expands her own and her students’ understanding of who participated in music making—and how—in the eighteenth century. She has edited, with Mary Caton Lingold and Maria Ryan, a forthcoming volume of musical sources from early Black Atlantic musicians (pre-1830), and has created a web-based resource for music educators, Early Black Music in Performance. Her current project, Making Mistakes in Eighteenth-Century Music, explores the pressures and problems of musical performance in its various social contexts across Northern Europe, the Caribbean, and Colonial United States. She is also author of the book Dedicating Music, 1785-1850 and articles in scholarly journals and outlets for wider audiences, and is coeditor (with Catherine Mayes) of Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730-1830.