Esther M Morgan-Ellis Author & Editor

Esther M. Morgan-Ellis is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Georgia, where she also directs the orchestra and coaches the old-time string band. She studies participatory music-making traditions of the past and present, employing both historical and ethnographic methodologies. She has published on the American community singing movement, mediated sing-alongs, Sacred Harp singing, old-time string band music, and music history pedagogy, and is also active as a cellist, fiddler and fiddle teacher, and singer. Kay Norton is Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University. Her 2016 monograph, Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof (2016) incorporates threads from musicology, anthropology, philosophy, medical history, psychology of music, and neuroscience to argue the centrality of the melodious voice in human experience. Concurrently with that ongoing work, she presents and publishes on US American sacred music. She teaches research methodologies, gender in music, music in human experience, and nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, and is a lifelong community singer.