NEH Fellowship Supports Bucknell Professor's Research on Early American Moravian Music

Bucknell Professor Ryan Malone, music, has received a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support his research on Moravian music in early America.

This year-long fellowship for the 26–27 academic year will allow Malone to complete a critical edition of 18th-century Moravian choral music and begin work on a monograph exploring the musical life of the Moravian communities in colonial America.

Malone's project, A Missing Voice in Early American Music: The Choral Music of Johann Friedrich Peter, focuses on the work of composer Johann Friedrich Peter, a Moravian musician who lived from 1746 to 1813 and worked in Moravian communities, including Nazareth and Bethlehem, Pa., and Salem, N.C.

The Moravian Church is a Protestant denomination founded in the 18th century that established settlements throughout Europe and the Americas. In colonial America, Moravian communities became important cultural centers for the performance and preservation of European classical music.

"Moravian musicians gave voice to European music on this side of the Atlantic," Malone says. "Moravian musicians also wrote hundreds of original compositions that form an important thread in the weave of American music."

The NEH-supported project centers on Peter's approximately 100 choral anthems, sacred works written for mixed chorus and chamber orchestra that are intended for performance in Moravian worship services.

Malone hopes the research will broaden the understanding of early American music, a field that has historically emphasized other religious traditions while often overlooking Moravian contributions.

An organist and choral director, Malone first encountered Moravian music while pursuing his doctorate at Duke University and serving as a church musician in a Moravian congregation.

At Bucknell, Malone says his scholarship informs his teaching by encouraging students to think critically about how music is edited, interpreted and performed. 

"A lot of musicians innocently pick up a score and assume the notes and symbols that ended up on a page represent the composer's intentions," he says. "Critical editing really seeks to ask a lot of questions before populating that page, so performers and scholars can think carefully about what the composer intended and make decisions for themselves."

For Malone, projects rooted in the humanities offer an important lens into both history and identity.

"It's integral to understanding who we are and where we have come from," he says. "These Moravian composers were writing and performing European music, but they were also carving out the very first course for something more American."