Please join the Reece Museum on Thursday, October 15 from 5 to 7 p.m. for an evening of history and performance presented by Dr. Loren Ludwig. "Frontiers of Song: Amzi Chapin’s Journey to the Ohio River Valley" explores the travel chronicles of Amzi Chapin (1768-1835), a composer, instrument maker, and singing schoolteacher whose diary documented his Frontier Era travels between his family home in Massachusetts and the Ohio Valley. "Frontiers of Song" explores how Chapin's New England music and instruments took root among the other European, African, and Indigenous musical traditions that would flow south from the Ohio River Valley to shape later styles like dance music for string bands and Shape Note singing in East Tennessee. The presentation will be enlivened by performances of music by Chapin and those he met on his travels, and will feature New England musical selections for viols, melodeon, and other instruments that traveled to the Frontier alongside a people in flux.

About the presenter:
Loren Ludwig is a musician and scholar specializing in the history and performance of early American music, with a particular focus on historical stringed instruments and their surprising life in colonial and early republic New England. He holds a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia and trained as a string player at Oberlin Conservatory and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Ludwig is the founder and director of LeStrange Viols and Science Ficta, and a founding member of the Baroque ensemble ACRONYM, with whom he has recorded and performed widely. His research on New England viols and vernacular instrument-making has appeared in the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America and EMAg, and he is currently completing a monograph on the subject. Loren currently teaches historical performance and musicology at Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Institute, and coordinates programming for the Smithsonian's Music250 initiative, marking the nation's semiquincentennial.