Like the other arts in the colonies, music before the Revolution had a limited institutional base: there was almost no opportunity for the professional training and performance of musicians and composers. For this reason Americans acquired their taste for music through amateur performance, which relied almost entirely on the importation of sheet music of European composers such as Antonio Lucio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel and instruments such as the spinet and harpsichord. Emulating the habits of the British gentry, fashionable men and women on this side of the Atlantic used their leisure time to practice "accomplishments" that they could share with other members of respectable "society." Most musical activity centered around concerts in the home, where genteel women sang and played guitar, for example, while men played violin and flute. The most accomplished musicians of the day were some of the wealthy Southerners—Thomas...