Work-in-Progress talk with Abigail Fine, Musicology, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

NOTE: this talk will take place in Collier House.

In nineteenth-century Europe, most middle-class people kept a friendship album: handwritten poems, drawings and musical snippets offered by loved ones. While the practice waned in the twentieth century, popular music magazines published hundreds of nostalgic musical works called ‘album leaf.’ Musicology has tended to dismiss these trinkets as “kitsch,” along with an ocean of music for amateurs by obscure composers. My project explores how parlor music fondly remembered nineteenth-century social life and material culture at the cusp of twentieth-century change.