Colonial music was not so much music written in America before the Revolution as it was music that was brought here and helped define the people who were to make a new country.

There were bands in early America, but they did not have the same instrumentation as marching or concert bands of today.

Yes, George Washington attended assemblies, balls with friends, parties with fellow officers and their ladies, and dances with the French allies. 

The Bull-Finch is a songster or a bound collection of lyrics to songs without musical notation of their melodies. Mount Vernon's copy is inscribed "Martha Washington 1759" on the title page in George Washington's handwriting.

Eighteenth-century social dance is a complex topic. Every occasion where dancing occurred looked different from most others.

The dance techniques throughout the period changed frequently as new fashions and fads swept across the land. The dances most frequently performed in 18th-century America were the country dance, the cotillion, the minuet, and the reel. 

A lawyer, statesman, judge, scientist, and inventor, Francis Hopkinson was intimately involved in shaping and reporting upon the 18th century. He was also a poet, performer, arranger, and composer of music. Additionally, Hopkinson corresponded with George Washington about music.

The lyrics that George Washington probably heard sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" are not the words now known around the world.

The words to our national anthem have nothing to do with the consumption of alcohol, but the melody that Francis Scott Key had in mind when he wrote those words did originate decades earlier as the melody for a song in praise of wine.

Clothing and instruction on how to move in them helped create visible and portable signs of personal and commercial achievement. 

The first edition of The Dancing Master appeared in 1651 with 105 dances. Succeeding volumes show the editor’s desire to gratify his customers’ desires as various dances were dropped or added, and the whole was rearranged and modernized.

George Bush recorded a lively and personal glimpse into the leisure times of the officers of George Washington's army during and immediately after the Revolutionary War.

"Ancient" fifers and drummers are not re-enactors but are traditional musicians whose music, dress, and drill retain vestiges of their eighteenth-century military heritage.

Levi Lovering left a small handwritten collection of drum beatings dating from the mid-to-late 1790s that culminated in the publication of The Drummers’ Assistant or the Art of Drumming Made Easy.

Music was part of life in early Virginia--we just do not know what music.

Since 1881, a story has circulated among some Americans that the British played a march called “The World Turned Upside Down” during their surrender at Yorktown in October 1781. Is there any truth in this story?

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a historic choreographer for a movie?