The AMS Name Quilt
From 2014 to 2018 I served as chair of the Committee on Women and Gender (CWG) of the American Musicological Society (AMS). The first thing I did as chair was to ask the committee what they most wanted to accomplish. Their response: find some way to honor exemplary scholarship on women and gender. The plan approved by the AMS Board of Directors was to create an endowed lecture to be given by a leading scholar during the annual AMS meeting. This was great news, leaving only the minor detail of raising the $25,000 necessary for an endowed lecture.
How in the world were we going to do that? Asking people for money is not one of my strengths. Then, one day while I was working on a quilt for my older brother (flying geese, in case you were wondering), I thought of the AMS Feminist Quilting Quartet (FQQ)—see below; from left to right Mary Natvig, me, Lydia Hamessley, Annegret Fauser.
I had gathered these fellow AMS quilters together some years previously in order to raise money for the AMS’s Opus Campaign. We had made a beautiful quilt that was raffled in 2009 in Philadelphia in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the AMS. The quilt, made with the appropriately named “Philadelphia” block, raised more than $1,000 for the campaign.
My idea this time was for another raffle quilt, but one of a different nature. What if donors “purchased” a block on the quilt that would be embroidered (by the FQQ) with their name? They could also purchase blocks to honor an individual of their choice. If we made a quilt with 12 rows of ten blocks each, and each block required a $200 donation, the quilt would generate $24,000 before we sold a single raffle ticket. Four cornerstone blocks would hold the names of the FQQ—$800 more. That meant we needed to sell only 20 raffle tickets (at $10/ticket) to reach our goal, and I was confident we would sell far more than that. My beloved fellow members in the FQQ jumped at the chance to make another quilt. Thus was born the AMS Name Quilt.
The quilt (built of the “Economy” block) ended up with 13 rather than 12 rows, for a total of 134 blocks. Names on the quilt included those of composers from Hildegard of Bingen to Libby Larsen, authors and editors of classic texts in feminist music scholarship, every female AMS president, every chair of the CWG and its predecessor back to Jane Bernstein, and many other individuals. Understandably, people went crazy at the 2017 annual meeting (in Rochester, the home of Susan B. Anthony, and mine as well) in their hopes of acquiring this historic object. Two well-known scholars (including a former AMS president), each of whom was honored on the quilt, purchased 50 raffle tickets each (thus $1,000 more between the two of them), and a well-known feminist musicologist, also honored on the quilt, purchased 100 tickets by herself—another $1,000 raised. Our final tally was around $30,000. In the end, the winner was someone who purchased two tickets—Abigail Shupe, who had served on the Committee of the Status of Women of the Society for Music Theory. Had she purchased only one ticket, she might not have won, and it is fitting that she purchased the second ticket for her mother.
One pdf below lists the 134 names on the quilt in alphabetical order, including the name of the donor if the block is an honor block. The other pdf lists the order of the blocks on the quilt, from top to bottom and left to right.
- Names by alphabetical order (PDF)
- Names by order of blocks (PDF)
Quilts are magic—cloth, thread, and time generate beauty and meaning and exemplify love. Annegret, Lydia, Mary, and I have all made numerous contributions to the AMS in our scholarship and our service. But this is very special.
